Peaceful Invasion

There are only four true castles in the universe. Each is halfway outside too: the first and only line of defence against an invasion from Outside, filled with weapons and warriors beyond any other ken. There are often small invasions: a world lost here, a dimension there. We cannot be everywhere and have only so many pressed into service beyond our fortresses.

There are three castles now.

Something happened. A debt was called in.

There are almost too many stories about the fae and debts. What they often forget is that we pay our debts back too.

“Starflower. You should not be here.”

The hole into the universe where the palace was has been sealed by glamour. It holds, but there are entities on the other side. Things seeking to enter the universe. I did not know I was staring at them until the voice pulls me free.

I turn. I freeze. “My Queen. You live?”

The Queen of Midnight smiles. She is the shadow of a shadow, and yet she is not gone.

“I do not understand?”

“Nor I,” the admission a whisper of crow wings. “Two queens and two kings: each the heart of their castle, the cornerstone on which all was made. That is lore as much as law. I should not remain yet something holds me to existence.”

I shudder within and without. “I am but a Keeper of Events. This is beyond me.”

The Queen laughs then. I had not known she could laugh. I mean, I knew it was possible. But no one had heard it. I will not recount it here. “And me as well, O Keeper. The Midnight Castle was the smallest of the castles, you know. Perhaps even the newest. Even we do not recall their making, nor what we did to be bound to them.”

The Queens and Kings cannot leave their kingdoms. Sometimes they have gone mad, and we have chained them with weapons and geases until they are sane again. Always they return to their duty. Always the castles of the fae stand, first and only bastion against the wild forces Outside the universe. But nothing is forever. Even the fae are not forever. We are the magic, perhaps, but even we cannot last. We are not enough, and sometimes – just sometimes – we barely hold our own. The universe is a small speck of stability against the impossible vastness of the Outside. And there are always too many things wanting in.

“My Queen.” I have no words.

The Castle is gone, but some of the old wards remain. There were protections here: pacts and deeds made even before the palaces were build. Dawn. Noon. Dusk. Midnight. Each containing powers enough to destroy the very universe we protect, hurled outward in constant battle against what seeks inside. There are other defenses. Magicians. Monsters. The Outsiders we have bound into our service. But we are the front line, ever and always, and the alarm that goes off reminds me.

I produce a blade, though I have not held one in over twelve million years. The threat comes from within the universe, but there are always those trying to let other entities within. I spin, moving, the blade a blaze of light as it flowers.

The eleven year old boy standing on the remains of the gloaming road grins. He is eleven, and – somehow he catches the blade and steps aside all at once. “Hi! I’m Jay and we’re not friends but I did an oops and I need to fix it.”

The Queen makes a sound. I can feel she is more real under the force of the grin. I can’t bear to bring my blade in for another strike against it. No one can glamour a fae. But this feels somehow like that, though not like it at all. “What are you?” I ask, and my voice sounds almost mortal in its terror.

“That is Jay, who is jaysome,” the Queen whispers.

I heard stories. Everyone has: of the power that walks with a magician, of a child that isn’t a child, of a creature never human who seeks only the best within others. Jay turns, stares past me at the glamour – so thin, the wall. It strengthens. Jay pulls energies, binds them into it and then says: “Shoo. Go away.”

And everything pressing against the wall retreats.

I would laugh, were it not so terrifyingly absurd. I would laugh, were I not certain that he has no grasp of just how deep his power goes.

“Uhm. I did an oops because I was part of the science side of tumblr,” he says to the Queen, as to a friend met in a coffee shop. “And Honcho had to fix it and he got really grouch-face about it and said I had to fix my own oopses so I’m totally here to fix this castle!”

“You cannot.”

“Huh?”

The boy does not move. I turn. The Queen of Midnight is old, even as fae count years. The cornerstone of the castle, a power half as old as time some said. I had not understood the extent of the Queen until she said no to such a force. “The Castles are walls. They are weapons, and contain many more. You are many things, Jay, but here and now you are not a one who can make the castle.”

“Oh,” Jay says in a small voice, and then grins again. “I can fix that,” he says, and his pride is so fiece I think it would crack the palace itself were it whole. He is gone a moment later.

He is back. He is back, but he is thirteen. And there is power and will in him enough that the palace is. Jay gestures, coldly casual at thirteen, and the Midnight Palace snaps into existence. Pulled. Built. Desired. I have no words for what he does. Jay is not even breathing hard as he nods to the Queen.

She says nothing at all. I turn. I should not have, but she is my Queen. She is solid again, real again, but for a moment not the Midnight Queen I know.

Until this moment, I had never seen her afraid.

I move between them. Jay’s smile is not jaysome. It is other things. “If you make it so I never was, there is a chance you might not be.” As threats go, it’s nothing.

Jay chuckles. The sound is, somehow, normal. “You tempt me. Unwise, little fae,” and then he is gone, and Jay is back. Jay who is eleven, with a huge, innocent grin of joy.

“I totally fixed it,” he says even as new alarms go off. It’s a tone I’ve never heard, at once wary and welcoming.

“My Queen?” I ask, even as I put my sword away.

“A warning for when Jay visits. So that we know to expect the next peaceful invasion,” she says dryly.

“I am really good at that,” Jay says, and then is gone a moment later.

The Queen looks at her castle, and then at me. “We had best see what has changed.”

“Changed?”

“Jay cannot help but change things, even when he is not eleven.”

And she says nothing else, and I do not ask. I never will.

I think I can be that jaysome in my own small, small way.