Chapter 13 - The Great Fairy

Harmony followed Rhapsody into the tree slowly, trying to take in everything. The walls and ceiling were rounded and wide enough for all of them to walk side by side if they wanted. The material that made up the walls reminded Harmony of fiber optic cables. Iridescent light streamed through tiny strands of braided roots, lighting the long hallway with a slowly pulsing warm light.

Taxti was the only one to accompany their group into the tree. She was talking with Harmony’s mother quietly from where they followed Harmony and Rhapsody. Aurora and Serentiy were studying the unusual walls with interest, entranced by the pulsing lights.

As soon as she had entered the tree a feeling of relaxation had fallen over her, almost like the effects of the Yuccas Fitter. There was something oddly familiar about the presence she felt from the tree. Watching Rhapsody as she led them deeper inside, Harmony had a sudden suspicion.

“Rhapsody,” Harmony spoke quietly so that only the fairy heard her. “The day that David broke into my house, I could feel your presence when you were there. It was more of a sense of warmth when you were in my house, which vanished when you would leave the area. I’m feeling something very similar in Yggdrasil. Am I imagining it?”

Rhapsody moved over so that she was next to Harmony before she spoke. “What do you think it means?” she asked, watching Harmony with a calculating gaze.

“You already know what I’m thinking, don’t you?” Harmony asked accusingly.

“No, I have to actively look at your thoughts to hear what you are thinking,” Rhapsody assured her. “I just want to know what you have come up with.”

“I was thinking that you and Yggdrasil aren’t separate beings,” Harmony said hesitantly. “That you are a projection of Yggdrasil.”

Rhapsody smiled triumphantly, grabbing Harmony’s hand in her excitement. “I knew you would figure it out,” Rhapsody declared proudly. “You write too much fiction to not make a connection like this.”

“So, I’m right?” Harmony asked with a raised eyebrow. She felt tingles shoot up her arm and down her spine as she felt Rhapsody’s hand in hers. She longed to be alone with her beautiful fairy and let her fantasies take over. As she realized what she was thinking, her face flushed scarlet, and she quickly looked at Rhapsody. The fairy showed no evidence that she had heard Harmony’s thoughts. Maybe she did have to focus on listening to hear her thoughts after all.

“You are one hundred percent right,” Rhapsody confirmed, squeezing her hand. “Remember when we talked about what spirits were, when we were discussing Azeban?”

Harmony nodded slowly. “You said that he was some kind of structured energy matrix who could influence human perception, or something like that.”

“Very good, Harmony,” Rhapsody congratulated her proudly. “Fairies are unique from other magical entities, because we are more advanced in our ability to manipulate our own energy matrices. We don’t just manipulate your perception to make you think you are talking to a physical person. We are able to actually create a physical form that we can inhabit. Fauns and elves are also capable of creating physical forms, but they have a hardcoded template they must use. Fairies are unrestricted in what physical form we choose.”

“So, you‘re shapeshifters,” Harmony noted wryly.

“The ultimate shape shifters,” Rhapsody agreed. “But our true form is the tree you are walking inside of.”

Harmony stopped dead, her eyes wide. “Wow. Doesn’t that feel weird, having us little peons walking around inside of you like ants? Or violating?”

Rhapsody snorted, pulling Harmony’s hand to get her moving again. “No, it’s not violating, you ninny. I swear, your mind goes to the weirdest places. And peons? Seriously?”

Harmony blushed furiously but couldn’t help laughing at the truth of the statement. “I’m an author, what can I say? We have wild imaginations.”

“That imagination is one of the things that fascinates me the most,” Rhapsody told her seriously. “Sometimes magical creatures’ imaginations can go stale, and life can get bland. When you live as long as we do you need to have imaginative companions to keep life interesting.”

“You mentioned that you are the fairy for all of the world trees,” Harmony commented, tilting her head curiously. “How does that work? Are you separate iterations of consciousness, or does the trees being physically separated not affect these kinds of things?”

“You really are as sharp as a tack, Harmony,” Rhapsody said admiringly. “In reality, there is only one tree. The root system goes all the way through the planet and connects us together.”

“So, I’m smaller than a microbe to you, aren’t I?” Harmony said musingly. “You span the entire planet and stretch out into space. My mind is hiding in a corner right now from the immensity of the thought.”

“One thing you will learn in the magical world is that physical size is completely irrelevant,” Rhapsody told her reassuringly. “Just imagine how big a video game world must look to the character inside it, and yet it is nothing but ones and zeros to you and fits in a box the size of a toaster. The physical world you see is no different. If you could step outside of it you would realize how miniscule something like a planet really is. Consciousness is where you will truly find the infinite.”

Harmony nodded slowly as she thought about it. Even so, it still weirded her out that she was talking to Rhapsody while simultaneously walking inside of her. She suddenly burst out laughing as a thought occurred to her.

“What?” Rhapsody asked, her lips curving in anticipation.

“I just realized that I really am a tree-hugger,” Harmony told her between giggles.

Rhapsody threw her head back and laughed golden peals of laughter. She floated up into the air and wrapped her arms around Harmony. “My beautiful tree-hugger.”

Harmony felt heat flush up from down below as she felt Rhapsody’s body pressed tightly to her own, amplified by her synesthesia.

“I’m still surprised at how sensitive you are,” Rhapsody murmured in her ear in a seductive tone. “We’re going to explore that sometime very soon.”

Harmony let out a small whimper as she felt tingles ripple out from embarrassing places. Her imagination started running wild as the press of Rhapsody’s body started a feedback loop that began to escalate her heightened state of arousal.

Rhapsody regretfully released her with a frustrated sigh. “I hate waiting, and I’m a tree.”

Harmony felt a stab of disappointment as Rhapsody floated out of her embrace. “You really are a shameless tease.”

“I’ve been waiting for this a lot longer than you have,” Rhapsody retorted playfully. “We’ll get there. We just have one more hurdle to get past.”

“Do you feel what I’m feeling when you hear my thoughts?” Harmony asked tentatively. The strange feedback loop she felt when her synesthesia kicked in made her suspect that it was a circular exchange of sensations.

“Yeah,” Rhapsody nodded, the ever-present blush on her cheeks flushing out to the rest of her face. “The synesthesia you feel floods back into me when I’m experiencing your thoughts. Telepathy isn’t accurately portrayed when people call it mind-reading. Thoughts aren’t like the pages of a book. They are the act of experiencing reality through your body. So, when I’m experiencing your thoughts, it includes those extra sensations. The first time it happened I was really shocked. It just added more mystery to the puzzle called Harmony.”

Harmony smiled in satisfaction, happy that she could inspire mystery in the fairy that she’d always found so mysterious.

They reached the end of the long hallway and entered an enormous room shaped like a cylinder. The center of the room opened into a giant chasm that must have been close to a thousand feet across. The root structure in the ceiling above it pointed down like a diamond and a brilliant white light was beaming down into the center of the chasm.

“Wow,” Mystery said in awe as they walked up to the edge of the chasm. Harmony agreed wholeheartedly.

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There was not a handrail, but when they got within a few feet of the edge they felt an invisible pressure holding them back. You could push into the strange barrier, but the further you pushed, the stronger the field pushed back. Aurora was the first one to decide it would make a great trampoline wall.

Harmony nearly called out for Aurora to stop running at the barrier full speed to get bounced back, but with a glance at Rhapsody she closed her mouth. Their host wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her nieces. She was finally learning to trust Rhapsody with their safety.

“What is this place?” her mother asked in fascination as she stared down into the seemingly bottomless chasm where the beam of light was travelling.

“This is a node,” Rhapsody explained as she stood watching them with barely concealed eagerness. “Every circle of dominion had a node in its world tree. They are connected at geometrical points throughout the world and create a web of energy that humans call ley lines. Most of the nodes are inactive since their tree was lost. However, the node still exists; it just has no power source.”

“What do these nodes and ley lines actually do?” Harmony’s mother asked in fascination.

“They bind the physical world to the magical world,” Rhapsody expounded. “Think of it like the frame of a house, or the skeleton of a creature. It is the anchor that binds the world in place so that it has form and dimension. Without it, the world would collapse in on itself.”

“Aren’t the missing world trees a big problem?” her mother asked with a frown. “I mean, if the world used to have a skeleton with dozens of bones, but only has a few now, wouldn’t that make it extremely unstable?”

Taxti let out a disgruntled sigh as she stared at Harmony’s mother with a hungry gleam in her eyes. Harmony could tell she wanted to say something, but that it would probably get her in trouble with Rhapsody again.

“Think of them more like broken bones,” Rhapsody replied, glancing at Taxti with a raised eyebrow before continuing. “The node sockets remain, but they are only receiving a trickle of power from the remaining working nodes. The magic field diminishes the further away you get from working nodes. There is a small trickle that keeps the flora alive in most places, but it doesn’t thrive. You could locate the working nodes on a satellite map easily by looking for the green areas of the world. Even with the lower magic levels, plants have adapted and learned to thrive in the arid zones. However, you are correct about it becoming unstable. We’ve made it work for the last eight hundred years, but it is getting more difficult each year. I use my power to keep the world in sync with the magic realm, but the arid zones, which is how I refer to the treeless nodes, are trying to evolve in a manner that is out of sync with the rest of the world. It is like a pressure that builds each year as it attempts to break free of my influence.”

“What will happen if it does break free?” Harmony asked warily.

“First, there will be a massive earthquake that cracks the land free of the root system,” Rhapsody replied, her tone clinical. “It would be felt as a 10.0 everywhere on earth, leveling every city and structure. The oceans would drain into the vacuum left behind, leaving nothing but large salt lakes behind. That would result in runaway thermal expansion as the world no longer had the oceans to cool the planet. The rain would all but disappear and there would be frequent electrical storms that would scour the surface of the earth with lightning bolts of immense power. The magnetic field would no longer be balanced, so the sun’s electromagnetic radiation would cook the earth. The planet would also stop spinning and the moon would almost certainly crash into it. There are a lot of other domino effects, but I think you get the gist of it.”

Everyone was staring at Rhapsody in horror as she casually described the end of the world.

“Will you be able to prevent that?” Mystery asked nervously. “Or is this inevitable?”

“I’ve been working on a plan to deal with it for a few hundred years now,” Rhapsody replied reassuringly. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

Mystery didn’t look reassured. Nobody used the phrase I’m sure it will be fine unless they wanted to doom themselves.

“How much longer do you think it would take to break away based on its current evolution?” Harmony’s mother asked with a troubled frown.

“Anywhere from twenty years to as many as two hundred,” Rhapsody answered with a small shrug. “It isn’t very easy to model, so I’m erring on the side of caution.”

“What’s your plan?” Serenity asked in a tremulous voice. Aurora looked as unnerved as Serenity sounded.

“Well…I have more than one plan,” Rhapsody said slowly. “The first one depends on other people, so it isn’t as concrete as I would like. My backup plan would work, but it will have its own drastic consequences.”

“Okay, I’m liking the sound of the first plan better,” Serenity said fervently. “What is it?”

Rhapsody looked at them with a searching gaze. She pursed her lips as she studied them for a moment before finally responding.

“Um, actually, I was kind of hoping for help from the five of you,” Rhapsody said tentatively.

They all stared back at her blankly. Harmony was the first to break the silence. She let out a relieved sigh, surprising the others.

“Sign me up,” Harmony said with an eager smile.

“Wait, what?” Mystery stared at Harmony and Rhapsody in confusion. “Sign you up for what? We’re just humans. What the hell could we possibly do to help you with a problem of this magnitude?”

Rhapsody smiled back at Harmony, a twinkle of mischief in her large eyes. “You’re right, Mystery. You are just humans. We need a lot more than a human to help with this plan.”

Harmony’s mother was the second person to understand. Her eyes went wide and she suddenly grinned. “I wasn’t all that attached to my current life anyway.”

Mystery stared at the three of them uncomprehendingly. Harmony gave her some slack though; the former pilot had not been hanging around Rhapsody as long as the others.

“Let me start with a little bit of history,” Rhapsody told Mystery gently. “My sisters and I had been on this world for hundreds of thousands of years. We kept everything in balance, ensuring that the magical plane remained firmly affixed and attuned to the physical plane. Eight hundred years ago that all changed. Humans had progressed technologically well beyond where you are today. That is mainly due to the ambient magic field being much higher in those days, when all the world trees were still alive. Humans used a mixture of magic and technology to build a thriving world-wide civilization. We fairies were very social and had regular interactions with the humans throughout the world. In order for a fairy to have a child, she must find a human companion. When they had a child it would become the new vessel of the world tree, the new fairy. The old fairy would age and eventually die.“

Rhapsody paused for a moment to make sure that Mystery was keeping up. Mystery nodded and Rhapsody continued.

“While world trees are sentient, they struggle to engage with the local inhabitants of a world due to the difference in size and lifespan. In order to better understand the world that they protected and maintained, the world trees would project an avatar into the physical world. That is what a fairy is. One effect of projecting an avatar is that it begins to shape the way that you think. An entity that would normally have been impervious to anything humans or magical creatures could do to it, now had a vulnerability. In this case, a group of greedy humans were approached by a spirit walker. A spirit walker is a magical creature that is able to travel to other worlds. This particular spirit walker had discovered a way to rob world trees of their magical power. It required a level of duplicity, using humans to secure relationships with the fairies. This spirit walker offered knowledge and power to a group of humans who formed a cult. This cult infiltrated the governments of the world in order to manipulate who would be chosen as the fairies’ companions, which was a great honor in their society. When the time was right, and all the fairies had been wed to companions and conceived a child, the cult took their lives. It involved a magic ritual that channeled the magic that would normally flow from mother to child to instead flow into the cultists. Unbeknownst to the cultists, they had been duped by the spirit walker. When they completed their ritual, all the power was channeled into the spirit walker. He knew this would result in the destruction of the world, but since he could move to other worlds he did not care.”

“But the world is still here,” Mystery noted with a frown. “How did you survive if he killed all of the fairies?”

“I was the eldest of the fairies on this world and was against the idea of becoming a companion to a human,” Rhapsody explained darkly. “I warned the others that it would make them vulnerable, but they had been changed by their avatars. They failed to see the dangers that indulging in physical relationships would pose to their roles as world trees. When they had children and their power and memories were passed on to their offspring, they believed they were safe from any magical backlash.”

“Let’s be honest here,” Taxti drawled with a smirk. “The Great Fairy didn’t join the others because she didn’t like the idea of being with a man, which is just plain weird.”

Rhapsody glared at Taxti, her face shaming a sunset. “That had nothing to do with it,” Rhapsody denied adamantly. “It was common sense.”

“You survived because you didn’t end up with a companion,” Mystery noted thoughtfully. “And that’s why the world didn’t end?”

“It almost ended,” Rhapsody answered grimly. “I spent the next century doing everything I could to stem the damage and keep the world from imploding. While humans don’t have much in the way of history from that long ago, some of your religions still have records of the fallout in their holy books. Worldwide floods, volcanoes erupting everywhere, earthquakes displacing entire nations like Atlantis, and a near miss with a gamma ray emission that would have been easy to deal with normally but required the help of other species to barely survive. It took me centuries to balance everything enough for humans to be able to start building civilization again.”

Mystery stared off into the distance as her mind tried to keep up with all the new details.

“So that’s your history lesson,” Rhapsody told her with a sudden smile, incongruous with the mood in the room.

“You said eight hundred years ago,” Harmony’s mother noted with a frown. “But those biblical events you are talking about happened thousands of years ago.”

“No, it was definitely eight hundred years ago,” Rhapsody declared firmly. “There are just too many secret societies among humans who have tampered with both your history and chronology for their own ends.”

“You sound like a conspiracy theorist,” Harmony told her with a smirk.

“Well, they aren’t theories to me,” Rhapsody replied dryly. “It’s just the way complex societies work. Hidden factions pulling the strings from behind the scenes is just a byproduct of human nature.”

“Okay, sure,” Mystery interjected with a frown, “but I still don’t understand what you think we can do about this imminent calamity.”

“Well, we have lots of dead nodes with no tree or fairy to maintain them,” Rhapsody said carefully. “So, we need some new fairies to take their places.”

“You want us to become fairies?” Serenity gasped in astonishment.

“Yep,” Rhapsody replied simply.