The sporadic July breeze was infused with melodious tinkling. The notes emanated from a fair-haired, pale-skinned girl in a knee-length dress, a delicate crown of pansies around her head, wind teasing the fine hairs of her spindly arms like a tender kiss and the midday sun bathing her in a pulsing orange glow–the softest of auras–like the best kind of promise.

That particular summer day was balmy and guileless. Rosalie Ainsworth was on her knees in the grass, staring at a garden fairy with amused curiosity and when she laughed out loud it was a happy, spontaneous sound. The fairy stared back at her with wide violet irises, unblinking and unchallenging. It was the size of her palm, sculpted with porcelain-delicate features: soft pointed ears, red-tinged gold hair, webbed silver wings and a smooth, pale face.

When Rosalie unfurled a palmful of white milk for feeding, the creature tipped in deliberately, wings flitting in pleasure–just brushing the edge of her hand like a quivering feather, coating the delicate ridge of its pale nose in a thin ivory film. Rosalie couldn’t help it: she laughed aloud again and the fairy’s neutral expression crossed into something else. In the warbling language of the fey it twittered defiantly before flitting off abruptly in a silvery stream of motion. But she didn’t stop watching it, not until the diamond dust flickered, shimmered once, then disappeared; then a creeping, satisfied smile found its way onto Rosalie’s lips.

Rosalie climbed over the elephant hedge and stepped into her garden. With a rustle of pine needles and the fleeting scent of dulled evergreen, she was through, alighting gracefully on the bare soles of her feet over the milchy dirt.

The charming sliver of refuge lay nestled between acres of sprawling rose garden, just around the manor’s corner yet tucked just far and discreetly enough for her to feel worlds away. Everything grew–or rather outgrew in her garden: a bursting, budding conglomeration of erupting lavender and sprouting magentas layered among hues of cyan pansies, giant lilacs, miniature tea roses and climbing trumpet vines.

She exhaled a small, bouffant puff of content and imagined it aloft like weightless magic. She let her eyes wander and observed the subtle changes: a new indigo floret there, a scatter of satin petals at her feet. Abruptly, she descended to her knees beneath a wide brambling bush to release a miniscule cerulean fairy entangled in a sprig. When all this was done, she untied the mint ribbon in her hair–an uncharacteristic gift from her father from many seasons ago–and embarked on a search for her quiet friend Alice. 

Rosalie set out for Mirror Lake, the lake so pristine and unsettled she liked to watch her blue irises stare back at herself and conjure the impossible: that the reflection in the water might change one day. (She imagined that at night, the water turned into a vast pool of starlight: that if she submerged her hand at just the right moment she might spool out a wilted, fallen star and the lambent, pale filament would scintillate brightly in her palm.)

She stepped between the silver firs and entered the small clearing where Mirror Lake glimmered–a chilled, hushed area where majestic shadows reigned. Waiting there was Alice, who turned to face her then: her lithe, sage complexion coated with miniature seagreen scales, complete with elvish features and a shy smile Rosalie cherished.

Alice’s sister, Sylvia, lived in the lake and shared Alice’s fine-etched features but with a slick ivory body that swished and undulated in water, coupled with thick nymph hair flowing down her back in careless waves–floating airily on the lake surface like a weightless halo.

She surfaced silently from still blue depths and pushed herself onto the ruddy bank in one fluid, languid motion. She lay sprawled in the sun, hair splayed out in a golden fan, and Rosalie smiled at the contented expression of her graceful water friend. She’d say a silent goodbye soon, when that supple body slipped back under the blue and withdrew from sight without the slightest ripple like an evasive silverfish.

But at that moment, Alice brought an elegant finger to her lips and motioned soundlessly for her. With a wide smile, Rosalie took a final fleeting glance at the lazing nymph before skipping over to her vibrant forest friend; she slowed her pace, took care to deliberately change her manner and then padded happily beside Alice.

Together, they maneuvered to the nearby Green Grove which had become their favorite sitting spot in recent months. Soaring oaks surrounded the sunny clearing with sweeping majesty, their dark, leafy eaves forever shifting. Today, they were woven into a grand, sprawling canopy.

They sat upon felled stumps on the forest floor, bare soles grazing dirt, and in the shelter of the forest, they talked. Or rather Rosalie talked, and Alice mostly listened as Rosalie shared all kinds of stories with her: the ones she’d made up that day, the older ones that had drifted back into her head, inspiring retelling and finally the daily sizzle reel of events.

That morning she’d woken up particularly troubled; this she confessed to Alice. For as long as she could remember, Rosalie had always been overcome by a harsh, confined feeling when waking in the manor–as if its walls were a prison from which she had to flee to her garden each day to escape. Yet today, it had felt as though she were unbiddenly sinking with some grotesque weight she could neither understand nor shed, anchored against her will; it had been as though something light and airy and vital was dissipating, yet in the throes of recapture, there had remained nothing. 

Before going down to breakfast, she had taken a silent survey of her room to take note of anything different but found nothing: only the four-post bed in which she dreamed at night with the pleated bedskirt and gauzy coverlet and the small oak nightstand upon which perched the brass-stand candle and weathered leather-bound volume that she always kept.

She’d crossed over to the mahogany dresser and exchanged her muslin nightgown for a cornflower day dress, pausing to study her reflection in the copper-speckled mirror–in which, too, she’d found nothing unusual, but her own wispy sandalwood hair, cerulean eyes and angular knees.

As she’d descended the long winding stairs to meet Father in the dining room, he’d been sitting in his familiar habit, with an oversized mug of tea and thick ream of printed papers. She’d noticed things she had never observed before, and they’d surprised her: silvery strands threaded among dark hair, crease lines on his forehead and faltering shadows under indigo eyes. She’d supposed that she’d never really looked closely at Father before, not for a long time at least; perhaps she’d been reliant on a static mirage of him from years past, never quite sharpened at the edges with time.

As Father and Rosalie ate in carefully crafted silence, she’d imagined the beginnings of a story set in a cosmopolitan city called Morva inhabited by people who looked just like Father, and the curious absence of fairies. For a time, the story making had distracted her as it always did when her thoughts wandered to worlds far away and to stories of people she’d never meet. But no sooner had Rosalie drained her tea and finished the last of the elderberry jam biscuit from the sheeny platter than she’d been plagued again by that terrible, unsettled feeling of loss. So to distract herself she’d made her way to the Old Library, where she’d buried herself in the ancient volumes for the rest of the morning.

All this Rosalie told Alice, who listened attentively but said nothing. In the aftermath, the two sat in silence although it was a companionable one, and Rosalie let the silence wrap around her and spooled woolen comfort from it. After a while, they rose and meandered back to the forest edge at which point it was time to part–Alice to Mirror Lake, Rosalie to the manor. Dusk had fallen by then, and the last light was seeping out of the day when Rosalie burrowed under lacy covers. She shivered and slipped into a dreamless sleep.

When Rosalie woke the next day–wane sunlight filtering through pockets of a foggy, washed-out sky–she returned to Mirror Lake. Although it was still as ever, Sylvia was nowhere to be seen. Rosalie stood by the water’s edge, waiting for her nymph friend to emerge and was just a little disappointed when she never did. Rosalie caught sight of Alice by the trees and smiled at her, but Alice wore a troubled look and failed to reciprocate.

It began to rain then–a light, airy drizzle that moistened the soil and obscured the forest in a cloak of grey. The two tread across the gardens to a secluded shelter and huddled together among the blurry bushes. Rosalie tried to ask Alice what was wrong, but Alice only responded with a somber smile and delicate swish of her sage-colored head.

The first day of the new week, Rosalie rose early to admire the sunrise for a few fleeting moments, then rushed through breakfast so that she could seek out Alice. But when she arrived at the forest’s edge, Alice was not there waiting. When Rosalie did spot Alice–her camouflaged body pressed against the moss-blanketed bark of a towering oak–she lifted an urgent finger to her lips with wild, pleading eyes. It made Rosalie still, for she knew for sure that this wasn’t one of their games.

Not daring to move, Rosalie watched as her friend silently slinked into violet shadows and disappeared wordlessly between the trees. Something inside her dislodged. All the days after, Alice ceased to appear.

Rosalie found she couldn’t understand anything anymore–not even the smallest things–like how, in her attempt to feed the fairies, white milk spilled right through her fingers and the creatures pecked anxiously at an empty palm. Once, Rosalie thought she caught a flash of green among the trees, but then it disappeared just as quickly as it had come.

That night, Rosalie slept fitfully. Tossing in the blurred state between consciousness and dream, she dreamt of her mother. She saw Violette exactly as she remembered: willowy and long-legged, with nebulous blonde-hair like her own where her father was ebony-haired and a vivacious, bubbling laugh where her father was quiet and composed. They’d juxtaposed each other in a way that only the effervescent sun and whispering moon could, Rosalie thought, and the memory brought a rueful smile to her lips. She remembered when Father, too, used to smile around Violette–when the lines on his face were handsome laugh lines and his dark eyes twinkled some and he didn’t read his papers half as much. 

The neighbors used to call her mother eccentric, the meaning of which eluded Rosalie back then. They were whispered fragments and stolen phrases in time–picked up by the summer wind, carried around the forest and absorbed into the dewy air. Still, she had a vague memory of floating faces and detached syllables like Joe and Lila and Marie. Sometimes, she’d glimpsed the outsiders lurking around the hedges and made a game of peeking through the leaves at them, eavesdropping on their hushed stories. Marie had a lamb and Joe was a fairy-keeper.

Currently, Rosalie couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a neighbor and Father certainly never had any guests. The stone manor and surrounding gardens had been left all to Rosalie and in them she’d fabricated her perfect story.

But even from when there had been neighbors, Violette Laureate had always been a bit of an enigma: they’d gossiped about her in low, muted voices that had caught in the wind and floated. If asked, many of them could recall the elongated elegance of the fair, wispy-haired woman who had been their neighbor–with a tenuous grace and washed-out, otherworldly beauty as if she’d belonged to some distant fairyland.

Nevertheless, all of them would be able to speak of the unmistakable “eccentricity” that blazed within Violette, apparent to anyone who’d seen her: in those shining blue eyes and mellifluous laugh. She’d acted and spoken and carried herself in a way that had made them always suspect she knew something more than them, and could see something they could not. 

What they had been able to see was that she’d always felt right at home in the sprawling gardens among the bustle of flora and fauna–not doing anything in particular but standing barefoot in the grass tufts and studying the knitting of rabbit clouds in an ever-blue sky, a wistful smile strung on her lips.

Also evident was that Violette had won the deep, loyal affection of her daughter. She’d told lavish, wild stories to Rosalie in the lush setting of the shaded cherry grove and taught her how to feed fairies and find them, and together they’d picked satin flowers to twine into fanciful hair wreaths and bracelets. It was at times like those that the magic in the air had thrummed–like a vital, tangible force.

Rosalie could recall her mother’s bright laugh like brass chimes in the breeze, the loving embraces into which she’d fold Rosalie, and the perfumed rosy smell of her when she’d buried her nose into her mother’s fair hair. The fairies had loved Violette, and there were times when she’d regarded the creatures clinging to her slender arms and golden hair and billowing dress as Violette had laughed and laughed with a twinge of youthful jealousy; now, it was something she missed most about summer days.

Violette used to call her “my little changeling”, and Rosalie had thought it was wonderful because she’d imagined herself as just that: a fey child, swapped from the fairyland in exchange for a human one. She’d secretly awaited her glimpse of the fairyland and the moment of her return when she’d stumble through a clearing to find herself in a place she’d never before been, and realize at once that she’d crossed the divide.

On several days before Violette’s death, the dark lady had come around: swathed in black, carrying herself with the air of a queen while parading the manor’s dimly-lit corridors like an arrogant sorceress. Rosalie had never been able to tell if Father noticed she was there because he hadn’t done anything different, anyway, and never left his study when she had come. And she hadn’t thought that Violette noticed, either, because when she’d mustered the courage to tell her mother about her, Violette had only laughed out loud and said not to be silly–that there were no such things as dark ladies–though when Rosalie had peeked back at her mother’s face a moment later, for a split second she’d worn a different expression. (Of course, when her mother had looked back at her and smiled, any trace of it was gone, her eyes having regained their usual luster.)

Rosalie was fairly certain that there was a name for the dark lady and that it was Miss Morose, but ever since that first day Rosalie had come to think of her only as the dark lady. The dark lady had thought herself free to enter the stone manor at will and sail down its hallways and peruse the rooms. Rosalie had not seen anything to do about this, really, but locked herself away in her garden for hours and sometimes failed to return until well after sundown.

Shorter than her mother, the dark lady had donned short black hair, a pale complexion and dark rouge lips. She’d often clad in all-black, loose sateen garments. The first time she’d arrived, Rosalie had shivered in her cotton nightdress and bare feet on the mahogany and it had had nothing to do with the cold.

It was her face, truly, that had terrified her. When Miss Morose had turned, the first thing Rosalie had noticed were her gleaming, catlike eyes. They’d been a penetrating green: bright and nearly sea-colored. Yet Rosalie had hated the way they looked at her, in a way she couldn’t understand, as if beneath that scintillating emerald gaze had been a magnificent cruelty and a cold calculation–masterfully disguised, the fairest deception, yet Rosalie had thought that she could see right through it. 

When the dark lady had spoken, her voice had been like seamless silk–dangerously so. She’d tried to make Rosalie drink a placid, hibiscus tea. But Rosalie had fled on her feet and huddled in the rose hedges for hours, filled with wild premonitions of extravagant midnight wings protruding from her back, curdled ink in her veins and innocent words wound in her tongue. The dark lady hadn’t followed.

The dark lady did not come back for some time. Rosalie resumed feeding the fairies and playing with them but never quite forgetting the dark lady and her terrible gaze. And then the dark lady returned.

That time, the dark lady hadn’t tried to make her drink tea. But to Rosalie’s dismay, she’d made her way to the Old Library and swept inside as if it was her own, floating down the velvet aisles with unnatural grace as Rosalie had watched with increasing helplessness.

Terrified to follow, Rosalie had fled to her room. But when the dark lady had left at last–and Rosalie had felt it like a shadow lifting–she’d been compelled to enter the library herself to see if anything was missing, or different, or if the dark lady had performed any enchantment on the books. But when she’d checked, and checked again, hands trembling of their own accord, she’d found nothing.

But just then, right before leaving the room she’d spotted a lone fairy in the biography section–hovering against a black volume with fine gold lettering, but undoubtedly a fairy. Then it had whisked away like a flighty wisp of smoke, but not before Rosalie could see that it was utterly black.

When Violette had fallen ill, Rosalie had had the horrible feeling that she knew why: that it was the dark lady at work and the black fairies who worked with her… the dark lady, who seemed to routinely surpass notice, and yet, if there was anything Rosalie had felt convinced of, it was that that woman was full of only evil intent.

In that nebulous, confused time Rosalie had remained utterly in fear of the dark lady, and hadn’t dared seek her out on any day. Instead, she’d spent more and more time in the gardens; she’d made friends with Alice, the quiet forest creature who was a wonderful listener, although not quite as wonderful as her mother. Every day she’d run back to Violette’s side, blindly believing that she would wake one day with the color back in her face and life in her eyes–revived from the dark enchantment that had been plaguing her for so many months. She’d clung to that belief with floundering desperation.

From the time of Violette’s illness, Rosalie recalled the whole manor becoming somber: the orange embers in the hearth dancing well into the night; shadows lurking in the corridors longer and more plentiful; the skies grayer outside and the fairies less spirited.

She remembered sorrow-shrouded days–when the gloom hung thick and low like an unliftable fog–of lingering at her mother’s bedside in her spacious old room and staring into the ghost of her once-lively face: gaunt and sunken features, plaster-pale skin and thin, colorless lips that carved an empty void inside her.

After a time she’d not been allowed to get close to Violette, but she’d broken that rule often when she’d wiggled her body close up against her mother in the indigo gloom of night, who in turn pressed feverish lips to Rosalie’s temple. All that time, Violette never quite lost her smile or the loving affection she’d held for her daughter; even on her worst days, she’d smile up at Rosalie and it would seem that a hopeful spark had rekindled in her irises.

The illness had come rather suddenly. It had begun when Violette’s laugh became hoarse and small and continued until she’d no longer had the strength to stand. Through that mournful time, the doctors had come and gone–bringing more herbs, dark brewed concoctions and amber syrups and somber conversations with Father in the sitting room. Each of the doctors had brought his own diagnoses, all of them speculative and none of them with certainty: as vague as “natural degrading causes” or “weak bone structure”. 

Yet one of the doctors, a thin elderly man who had had many grey hairs to count on his head then and whose name Rosalie’s father would later never recall hearing, had stood apart from the other doctors and peered down at the sleeping Violette with unmistakable sadness. (This Rosalie’s father had noticed right away, so different had it been from the calculating stoicness or among the more feeling ones, the pity with which they had looked at her.) The nameless doctor had written nothing down, brought no medication, and instead muttered two quiet, peculiar words under his breath: something sounding like “fairy sickness”.

After Violette had passed, Rosalie had first cried and cried and unleashed a relentless torrent of sorrow deep from her young soul, throwing her arms around her mother’s still body and trying vainly to inhale the fading perfume of roses and lilacs.

But as grief often does, hers occurred in phases, and Rosalie’s anguish had given way to rage–because she’d been utterly convinced that it had been Miss Morose’s doing. That night, her father had dragged her from the room by shaking pale arms, bleary-eyed and splotchy-faced in a state of wild hysteria, screaming about an evil “Miss Morose” and her midnight fairies.

In the time that had passed since Violette’s death, Rosalie had learned not to mention fairies to Father. When she was younger and her mother had still been alive, fairies had been their secret to share–although Rosalie had never thought of it as a secret then. For as far back as she could remember, Father had never stepped out of the manor save for rare business ventures, but then he never entered the gardens, anyway.

Violette had split her time between the two–between her father and her, she supposed–whereas Rosalie had never been able to stand the manor which generally made her itch, so besides all the time she spent in the main library, she could always be found wandering somewhere outside.

Some time after Violette’s death, Rosalie had been compelled to tell her father about the blue-winged and white-skinned juvenile she’d found in the rose hedge that day: the fairy she’d named Violet, after her violet eyes and Rosalie’s mother.

For a fleeting moment, her father had stopped shuffling papers and then a dark look had passed over him that had made Rosalie shudder inside. She’d later come to the conclusion that her father disliked looking at her closely, for reasons she herself could not understand. But she’d left him alone  regardless, keeping to herself on balmy summer days. She’d had the freedom to do as she willed and spent her days in the library and in the blooming garden when not obliged to supp with Father.

As it occurred, the dark lady never returned. Rosalie distracted herself endlessly, until Miss Morose seemed only a figment of her imagination. And yet, never quite forgotten, within the stone manor she’d felt evermore uneasy and moved about with extra caution.

Now, Rosalie was reminded once again of Miss Morose, the treacherous dark lady who stalked the stone manor, and on her arms under satin sheets glistened an unwelcome sheen of sweat. For one horrible moment, she believed Miss Morose to be stealing Alice away from her and all of her friends–just as she had done to Rosalie before with Violette.

Rosalie threw off her covers and bounded down the stairs. She unlatched the great stone door and started running, not bothering to acknowledge Father in the sitting room. Her head was a combustible vessel of thick, swirling steam. In bare feet and her thin nightgown she raced deftly across the rose gardens, through dense, leafy forest until reaching the Mirror Lake clearing for what would be, unbeknownst to Rosalie, her final time.

The morning was young–honey-colored sunlight peered through the trees–and the forest was quiet. Rosalie’s head span and the ragged sound of her breaths rang loudly in her ears. She was about to turn away with a ponderous heart when she suddenly glimpsed an unmistakable flash of pale limbs underwater–which could only be the nymph Sylvia. Startled, Rosalie called out to her in a voice so distressed she hardly recognized it. “Sylvia! Please wait!”

Sylvia must have heard the despair in her voice, for she shifted her body to peer up through the still surface at Rosalie’s flushed face and wild eyes, with a solemn expression that Rosalie had difficulty reading.

Her voice broke. “Where are you going? Why are you going? Please answer me.” Rosalie held her breath as if scared of the answer. She started to reach out with her hand as if to pull Sylvia to her, but then stopped abruptly. 

The nymph’s face was grave, her words fragile. “We must go. It is time for us to leave.” Sylvia glanced up at the sky anxiously as though expecting a thunderstorm. A slight pause passed. More gently, she said, “Goodbye, Rosalie”.

Rosalie felt the tears coming before they did. They shone in her eyes like stars, or tiny prisms reflecting white light. The ‘goodbye’ was too much; she felt overwhelmed and slightly dizzy, as if important things were happening too fast but she couldn’t catch on to anything as they came at her.

Sylvia twisted away from Rosalie once more and prepared to succumb to the beckoning blue. But right before she could relinquish herself to the water forever, she tilted her head back towards her friend on the bank for a final time and added like an afterthought, a line that would ring in Rosalie’s head for many a day after: “It was your mother’s wish. Her last one.” And then she was lost to Rosalie forever.

Yet for a split second, after Sylvia had disappeared and Rosalie was left regarding her wavering reflection in the eternal blue, she saw her mother’s face staring back at her–whose shining eyes were smiling. Rosalie made her way back to the gardens, numbness diluting her senses. She thought of what Sylvia had said:  “It was your mother’s wish.” It didn’t make much sense to her, but she turned it over and over in her head anyway and it comforted her.

Back in the rose gardens, she searched instinctively for fairies. But over the past few days their numbers had dwindled significantly, and at that particular moment she could see none. The air was unnaturally still. Just then, a flash of silver caught her eye. Rosalie caught her breath.

It was the fairy she had fed last week: the one with pointed ears and reddish hair and silver wings, who had tittered when Rosalie had laughed at its nose. It occurred to her then that she would call it Silvenna, after the color of its wings and her lost friend Sylvia. Rosalie studied the tiny creature as it flitted to her and about her head before landing abruptly on her outstretched palm. 

“I’m sorry. I have no milk”, Rosalie apologized softly.

But the fairy twittered rapidly in response and seemed to shake its head, tugging once at the delicate fabric of her dress. Before Rosalie could ask the fairy what it wanted, it zipped away in a sudden torrent of movement and when it returned, hovering inches from Rosalie’s nose, it held a tiny sprig in its delicate fingers: a lone rose petal attached to one end.

“It’s lovely,” breathed Rosalie. “I mean, thank you”.

The fairy beamed once, brilliantly, opal eyes shining. Then its expression grew somber, and in an instant it flew off like a dandelion wisp, disappearing into the blue until it was no more but a shimmering diamond speck. There were no more fairies after that.

Rosalie crossed the garden and tread back to the stone manor, feeling inexplicably, strangely lighter than she had in months. The sun was just setting–splashing soft pink across the horizon, casting the entire estate in a wistful, golden hue. Somewhere along the way, Rosalie’s pansy crown had come undone, and her hair now hovered (not, alas, tumbled) freely behind her.

There was a vague breeze–the prevailing summer breeze–and the fabric of her dress rippled slightly as she walked. She was an infinitesimal figure in a watercolor landscape amidst a vast stretch of rolling jade against the backdrop of misty mountains and the star-studded horizon. When she entered the house, the sun flared orange.

On her way up the winding, velvet-lined stairs, Rosalie passed by her father. He appeared to her only as a dark smudge against the glass. Back in her room, she settled upon gauzy sheets and sank into her soft mattress.

She opened the dusted cover of the weathered, leather-bound volume–the one that had sat upon her nightstand forever–and with care, pressed the sprig-and-petal firmly between the first two pages. Then she folded it closed, crawled under her covers, and stared at the cream ceiling for a while.

As all this was happening, roughly five hundred feet away from Rosalie, a strange procession was occurring outside. If she were to have lingered just a few moments longer, she would have noticed the queer outlines in the distance of a slender green figure; a short-haired woman in black; a shimmering mass of fairies and a long-haired nymph trailing nearby along a clear, azure river–all led by a single man, with many a grey hair on his head and a jagged mahogany stick and a truly kind smile who went by Joe in one lifetime.

Rosalie Ainsworth could have watched such a procession for a very long time as it tread slowly into the horizon–a myriad of sapphire hues and ruddy golds and shining silvers and dusty roses all at once–until each of their silhouettes were dotted by inky indigo stars, reflected backwards onto a quiet mirror lake and then spooled out again by a curious girl in cornflower. These events will happen over and over until the end of time, in hidden pockets of the world, far past the end of this story… long after the searing white sun ignites the dusky shadows like the best kind of promise. 

                  ~

The End.