When Celestia finished the last of her Moonbloom, her grandmother set down her plate and dabbed the corner of her mouth delicately with a handkerchief.
"Co," Lady Bailey said, rising from her seat with the practiced grace of a woman who had never once forgotten how to carry herself. "Let us go to my room. There is much I still want to tell you."
Angelina and Jake, who were still eating, pushed back their chairs imdiately.
"No need," Lady Bailey said, without even looking at them. "We are inside the mansion. If your Lady requires you, she will send for you. Sit — finish your al."
"Yes, my Lady." They bowed and settled back.
Celestia fell into step beside her grandmother, and they walked — through one corridor and then another, past tall windows and walls lined with portraits that seed to watch them pass. The mansion settled quietly around them, the way old houses do. Like it had been waiting for soone to co ho for a very long ti.
Her grandmother stopped and opened a door.
"This is my room."
Celestia stepped inside and looked around slowly. "It is so pretty. Very different from what I rember."
"I did a little renovation when I returned." Lady Bailey smiled.
But Celestia had already stopped listening.
The incense hit her the mont she crossed the threshold: thick, earthy, unmistakably dicinal. Not decorative. Not ambiance. The kind burned deliberately, carefully, in sickrooms and apothecaries.
She is ill, Celestia thought. And she is trying very hard to hide it.
She turned slowly, letting her eyes move across the space. The renovation was beautiful — different from what she rembered, more refined — but the sll told a story the décor was trying to conceal.
"I love the scent of your room," Celestia said pleasantly.
Lady Bailey glanced at her. "The incense? I am only a little unwell. I thought it might help."
This does not look like a little unwell, Celestia thought. But if she says so.
Lady Bailey settled onto the edge of the bed and patted the space beside her. Celestia sat, folding her hands in her lap, and watched her grandmother’s face shift, the way it always did when a story was coming. Eyes distant. Lips curved just slightly, as if already stepping sowhere else.
"You want to know where I have been."
It was not a question. She folded her weathered hands together and exhaled, slow and deliberate, like soone choosing their first word with care.
"It started with a letter," she began. "A very old friend of mine, a Fairy elder from the Eastern Mountains, a woman nad Seraphel, she wrote to in the middle of the night.
Frantic. Barely coherent. I almost dismissed it as the ramblings of an old woman, but sothing in my gut told otherwise. So I packed a single bag and left before sunrise."
She paused, her lips pressing thin.
"What I found when I arrived was nothing short of catastrophic. Creatures from the Infernal Realm had been bleeding through the boundary cracks for months. Small ones at first, nuisances, really. But by the ti I arrived, they had grown bold.
The Eastern Mountain fairies are ancient and powerful in their own right, but their magic is tied to Nature. These creatures were the opposite of everything they knew how to fight." Her voice lowered. "Their streams had turned black. Their sacred groves were rotting from the roots up. Fairy children were being born already touched by sothing dark, wings coming in wrong, magic unstable before it had even taken shape."
Sothing genuine flickered behind her eyes then. Not performance. Sothing real.
"I could not leave. You have to understand that, Celestia. I looked at those children and I simply could not turn my back and walk away."
She shook her head slowly.
"The first year was containnt alone. Seraphel and I worked through the night, mapping every crack, every breach point. There were dozens. So so deep in the mountain caves that we had to crawl on our hands and knees through complete darkness just to seal them. I lost count of how many tis I nearly did not make it back out."
A dry, self-deprecating laugh escaped her.
"Your grandmother, on her hands and knees in a cave at my age. Undignified does not begin to cover it."
She reached over and patted Celestia’s hand, then continued.
"The creatures were not mindless, that was the terrifying part. They were organized. Sothing was guiding them through those cracks deliberately. We spent nearly two years trying to understand why the Eastern Mountains specifically. Why the fairies. What was being targeted."
Her eyes grew distant again.
"Eventually, we discovered that the fairy elders possessed sothing, an ancient relic, a stone of sorts that predated most kingdoms. Whatever was sending those creatures through wanted that stone. We could not allow it. So we moved it. Relocated it sowhere so hidden that even I do not know its final resting place, Seraphel made sure of that. Safer that way."
She smoothed an invisible crease from her sleeve.
"After that ca the rebuilding. The settlents had been devastated. Their groves needed replanting, their streams needed purifying, their young ones needed healers who understood corrupted magic. I stayed because leaving felt like abandonnt. Every season I told myself — next season, I will go. And then next season would arrive, and there would be sothing else. Another child. Another elder too exhausted to continue. Another crack we had not found yet."
Silence settled between them.
When Lady Bailey finally looked at Celestia, her eyes were warm and unbearably fond.
"Years have a way of becoming other years when you are not paying attention, my darling. That is the honest truth of it. I was not lost. I was not forgotten. I simply kept being needed, and I kept saying yes, because that is the terrible curse of people like us. We cannot walk past suffering and pretend we did not see it."
She reached up and touched Celestia’s cheek.
"But I am here now. And this — right here — is where I should have been all along."
"She is not telling the whole truth".
The thought arrived quietly, with the certainty of sothing Celestia had always known. She could not explain it, could not point to a single word or gesture that gave it away. She simply felt it, the way you feel a door that has been left slightly ajar in a room that is supposed to be locked.
The story was real. She was sure of that. Every detail of it rang with the texture of lived experience. But it was not the reason. It was not the main reason.
Her grandmother was hiding sothing larger. Sothing that frightened her. Sothing that made her heart — which Celestia could feel beating rapidly beneath the thin fabric of her sleeve — race even now, in the quiet of a room that slled of healing incense and carefully kept secrets.
Celestia had been planning to ask her Grandmother about the marks on her wrists, but she decided, sitting there in the warm glow of her grandmother’s careful story, that she would not ask. Not yet.
If her grandmother could not speak the whole truth, then speaking her own concerns to her would do little good either. She would have to find answers another way.
The library, she thought. Books. That is where I will start. Books do not lie, and they do not protect you from the truth out of love.
"Is that where you got your illness from?" she asked instead, keeping her voice light. "The Eastern Mountains? The corrupted magic?"
Her grandmother hesitated, just a fraction of a second, just long enough for Celestia to notice.
"Yes," Lady Bailey said finally. "Yes, exactly. A small infection. Nothing serious. Seraphel gave sothing to treat it."
Another lie.
But Celestia smiled anyway, soft and unhurried, and reached out to take her grandmother’s hands in both of her own.
"I hope you recover soon," she said.
"Of course I will, child."
They held each other then, longer than either of them expected, neither quite willing to be the first to let go.
Celestia pressed her cheek to her grandmother’s shoulder and closed her eyes, breathing in the incense and the herbs and the warmth of the only person in the world who had ever looked at her like she was sothing worth keeping, apart from her dear late mother of course.
"I do not know what you are hiding, Grandma, she thought. But whatever it is — it scares you. And your heart is beating far too fast for soone who claims to be fine".
"Now then," Lady Bailey said at last, pulling back with a bright smile that did not quite reach her eyes. "The gifts I promised you."
Celestia sat up straight imdiately. "Oh — yes! I nearly forgot."
"I know you did."
Lady Bailey rose from the bed, crossed to a standing cupboard, and lifted a small cup from it. She drank whatever was inside in one practiced motion. Her hand trembled faintly afterward — just once — and then stilled. She turned back to Celestia as though nothing had happened.
"Co. Let us go."
Celestia took her grandmother’s hand, and they walked.
And walked.
And walked so more.
"Grandmother," Celestia said after what felt like a very unreasonable amount of ti, "how much further?"
"We are almost there."
"You said that 30 minutes ago."
"And it is still true."
Celestia exhaled through her nose. She had endured far worse than a long walk, and she knew it. But her feet ached, and the dungeon corridor seed to have no end, and she was beginning to suspect her grandmother had hidden these gifts in the most deliberately inconvenient location in the entire mansion out of so quiet, personal amusent.
"We are here," Lady Bailey announced at last.
The door before them was old — ancient, even — but elegant in the way that very old things sotis are, when ti has worn away everything unnecessary and left only the bones of sothing that was once magnificent. Lady Bailey produced a key from her pocket and turned it in the lock.
"So—" she began.
The cough ca without warning.
It tore through her without rcy, doubling her forward, one hand braced against the doorfra.
Celestia reached for her imdiately, alard — but her grandmother held up a hand, sharp and firm. "Do not touch ".
Celestia stopped. Her brow furrowed.
Weird, she thought.
"I will be right back," Lady Bailey said, voice rough but composed, already straightening herself. "Go inside. Do not touch anything. Sit in that chair and wait for . All right?"
"Yes, Grandmother."
The door swung open. Celestia stepped inside.
The room was dim and hushed, the kind of quiet that felt deliberate, like sothing in it had been waiting.
She found the chair her grandmother had ntioned, an absurdly comfortable thing upholstered in deep velvet, and sank into it with a quiet sigh. The food she had eaten, the long walk, the warmth of the room, all of it pressed against her eyelids like a gentle hand.
Just a mont, she told herself. I will just rest my eyes for a mont.
But then she saw it.
It sat on a shelf across the room, half-hidden by shadow, small and unassuming and wrong in a way she could not imdiately na. She was on her feet before she had made the conscious decision to stand.
The lamp was small. Old. Made of dark, tarnished tal that sat sowhere between bronze and silver, its surface uneven, as though it had been shaped by hands that cared more about function than beauty.
Faint markings covered it, etched deep into the tal in a script she did not recognize, curling and angular at once, like a language that had stopped being spoken long before anyone alive could rember.
The spout was sealed. The handle smooth and worn from — what? Use? Ti? Sothing else entirely?
It did not belong here. She was certain of that. It did not belong anywhere, really. It sat in the world the way a held breath sits in a chest — present, pressurized, waiting.
She felt the darkness radiating from it before she was close enough to touch it. A deep, ancient darkness — not malevolent, not exactly, but vast in the way that very old and very powerful things tend to be vast. It should have made her stop.
It didn’t.
She reached for the base of it, aning only to tilt it slightly, to read whatever inscription was carved along the underside—
The door moved.
The sound of it — just the faint shift of old hinges — sent a bolt of panic straight through her. She flinched, her elbow catching the edge of the shelf.
The lamp fell.
Her hand shot out on instinct — pure reflex, nothing more — and caught it cleanly before it could hit the ground.
The tal was warm against her palm.
And then sothing shifted. Sothing old and enormous and tightly coiled exhaled — as if it had been holding its breath for centuries and had finally, finally been given permission to breathe.
Celestia stood very still.
She did not yet understand what she had done.
She did not yet know that in catching that lamp — in the simple, unthinking act of keeping it from breaking — she had bound herself to sothing that had not had a Master in longer than most kingdoms had existed.
She had unbroken the seal that bounded the, Ancient Genie, King of the Infernal Realm.
Drazeilvion.
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