Chioniphobia

Motion

Mordice has always been in motion, even before she gained the consciousness she possesses to this day.

She doesn't remember her time before she was a fairy, but she's familiar enough with hummingbirds to know that they're never still. They're always hovering, darting, flitting from flower to flower, constantly searching for fuel to power their ever-fluttering wings. It's not much of a leap to assume that she must've been so, when she was just a bird.

When Mordice was first given form as a fairy, she was never given opportunity to be still. Always training to fight, swinging her own blades while dodging others, and then flying into battle. After battle, she'd tend to the wounds of her girls and have her own hurts attended. Once they'd all healed enough, training would begin again, and the cycle repeated.

When she led the rebellion against their masters, there was never an option to be still, not if you wanted to live. Fight, fight for your freedom, then run and duck and hide so the masters wouldn't catch you. Lick your wounds, count the troops remaining, sort those who needed rest from those ready to fight again, then fight. Over and over and over, breaking one cycle only to fall into another, until the day where the last of her girls lay dying on the battlefield and Mordice stood alone, about to fall back into the grasp of the masters she'd struggled to escape for so long.

The moon shone bright that night, and as she remained still for the first time in her long, long life, she heard the moon speak.

"I can save them," he told her, "but there will be a price to pay."

Mordice hadn't known he intended to rescue her as well. In the moment, all she knew was that there might be one more chance, the ghost of an opportunity for her girls to escape.

"Anything. Anything to save them," she said.

Her troops arose, shining in the moonlight. They shrank, their armor melting into their bodies, and for a moment she thought he'd transformed them back into nectar-drinking birds. But no- their eyes were the same. Not black like birds' eyes, without awareness or conscience, but bright rings of color circling pupils, as they have been from the day they were given form as fairies.

Her troops flew away, and Mordice readied herself to be caught, to be beaten down and tortured until the day her masters revert her to an unquestioning soldier, or kill her. She hoped she could hold out until the latter option.

Then her troops gathered and swarmed the masters, and she nearly screamed.

No, she wanted to cry, no, no, don't fight, fly, fly away, escape while you can-

The cloud of her troops collided with the forms of their masters.

She couldn't bear to see them slaughtered again. She closed her eyes.

"No," the moon said.

The moonlight bled through her eyelids.

"Look," the Man in the Moon commanded.

Mordice wasn't inclined to obey orders, not anymore. She covered her face with her hands.

"Please."

Her masters had never said please.

She dropped her hands and opened her eyes.

The masters all lay dead or dying, their eyes pecked to bloody pulp, their skin marred with a thousand scratches like scrapes from a thorn bush. Her girls hovered proudly in front of her. Mordice examined them all, calling them forward to check for battle wounds, but not a single drop of the blood staining their feathers was their own.

Mordice looked up at the moon.

"What was the price?" she asked.

"Listen to my offer," was his reply.

She listened.

Mordice had spent many years considering his offer before she took it.

Now few know her old name, and even fewer know what she was before she was a Guardian. Nowadays, even her girls don't call her Mordice, but Tooth.

Tooth continues to stay in motion, as she always has.