It’s all just a matter of water and dry land: Are you under the wave or over it? How about the Earth?
That’s all there is, really. The shore can teach you that, but beaches have a slow way of talking, and people like to march along with the fanfare of progress. So the ocean often finds itself without listeners.

The daughter of a coral quarrier, Seagull grew disenchanted with the Grand Parade rather young. She watched the sun and long hours take their toll on her father, saw where the hard, dead polyps cut his body, and watched the merry cavalcade carry on without him. He was too proud and too loyal to acknowledge that he had been left behind, but Seagull watched the flags and trumpeters pass by, listened to him hum along, and in the privacy of her own thoughts told herself, 'no way.'

This is not to say that Seagull was wise. In fact, she was too gifted with a knack for telling near-futures, and this made her complacent, over-confident in her estimations about the world, and she, too, disregarded the lessons of the shore.

More pleasing than the ballyhoo or the solemn tide, Seagull passed her youth in the company of fairies: Splendid, sparkling creatures of all variety and strangeness who pranced in the gossamer veil between the real world and Deep Magic. She made friends with Pease Blossom and the Jaybird and the Sugarcane Master and the Cunning Boar, and all the singers and shadow-folk who danced and played there in there slurred periphery of the world. In time, she even did that most-cliche of mortal-strayed-in-Faerie things: Fall in love. Each bit of it she got to glimpse just before it happened, savoring it all like the smell before the bite.

There was shame, of course, in being a mortal among the fae. So surrounded by brilliant and beautiful creatures, all bigger and brighter and seemingly more alive than she, it was hard not to notice the mundanity of the self: Her pale and muted colors, her oafish gait. An overall “dimness.” But she liked the faeries more than she disliked comparing herself to them. And for their part, though they would eventually outgrow her—all but the Jaybird—they were kind always, and for all her petty woes it could never be said that Faerie did not treat her well.

It was in her return to the world that it all fell apart, really. She felt it coming, of course. That stale sour static on the air, almost mistakable for nostalgia: Denouement.

Seeing something coming isn’t the same as knowing how to avoid it, though. Neither, she would learn, does it mean knowing how to see what’s coming down on its heels.

Steadily it came that her fair friends moved on, chasing new songs and ideas deeper into the magic lands where Seagull could not follow. And eventually, inevitably, the faerie who had been her lover left for Deep Magic, too.

He was a tall, warm, sturdy sort of fae named Lightbuilder. Enduringly kind and clever in ways both men and spirits could admire. It was natural that he would outgrow this place on the shallow edge of magic and the real, and with it the stray mortal he had found there, though he did not mean to hurt her as he went.

“I have a friend in the mortal North; the bookbinder Peony. I will send for him to call on you. I think that you would make good friends.”

Then he was gone into Deep Magic.

Her sorry fortune fulfilled, Seagull closed in on herself. Diminished by shame and sorrow and narcissistic self-loathing, her impulse for comparison flared, and Seagull felt herself duller and paler than likely even the fae had thought. Her eyes slid over the world and off of it, casting about in the middle distance, catching only on the sight of herself. She was bodily present in the world, but her attention lived there only as far as was strictly necessary to get by.

Weepy and lonesome, she did not want to look at the world or the futures she might see in it. She kept her eyes low, did what was asked or expected of her. She thanked the stranger who held open the door, asked the waitress for her bill. She ate her meals at the witching hour and did not read fortunes. She said ‘yes’ as a matter of habit and accepted drinks from the hands of acquaintances.

Reckless, reckless, reckless.

Amicable and asleep at the switch, she thanked him and drank down fizzy poison.

Lightbuilder had broken her heart, but this was the first true harm that had ever been done to her.

It struck her between the eyes. A silver bar through the skull, wrenching and taut, leeching heavy metals. Body swaying lax beneath, all the world spinning ‘round.

Four hours, maybe five.

On the other side poison and poisoner, Seagull watched the sun come up over the palms and pink houses, felt the churning of her ruined gut, and understood that she was going to die.

“It wasn’t just poison,” she told the pink and pale yellow light. “It was a potion; a curse, laid in my stomach. There’s nothing I can do. I’m going to die,” she told the ocean, and did not hear its reply. “I can’t see the future anymore,” she said, weeping. “Not even seconds and minutes. It’s gone.”

And this was true: The fortune-teller’s talent was gone.

From there, Seagull wandered and wondered through the city and the days, unsure quite where to go. The certainty of death churned in her belly, almost a whisper in her ear.

She was looking for a place to die. A place with some kind of peace to offer when she lay down her head and let go.

The warm sand called in welcome, but she could not bear to lay a poisoned body among the mangroves and the sea turtle nests. She did not want to litter.

There was Faerie, she supposed, but even against poison beating in her blood, the broken heart still ached in its way. She did not want to lay down alone in the meadow she had once shared with friends. She may die alone, but was a solitude she could not bear.

She thought vaguely of joining the Grand Parade, of laying down in the street and letting the marchers trample over her. Even in her sorry state, though, she could hardly entertain the notion. The last sound she ever hears, those manic brass horns? She’d sooner take the meadow.

She was some days into this dilemma when a knock came at her door, and on the other side of it, a man.

“Peony Pekoe,” said the man whom Seagull did not know. “Apologies for the long delay. Terrible winds here by the ocean; couldn’t land nearer than the Peach Groves, and what a trot from there!”

He was a cheerful-looking fellow, with a smartly patterned brown tie and lavender sweater-vest, and slacks and oxfords. Face pink beneath some tidy scruff, and small, quick eyes that were dark in color but shiny with reflected light. All round, friendly shapes. He seemed nonthreatening enough, but Seagull had seen enough of the seemingly non-threatening.

“I’m afraid you have the wrong person,” she said, already closing the door when the man said, oh, are you not the friend of Lightbuilder? and she stopped. For all the ache his name summoned in her, she was loyal as her father, and would not to deny her bonds when they are named to her. She reopened the door a hair, eyeing the man—Peony—for the first time with interest. “I am.”

He smiled, giving his name again and extending a hand to shake. She took it, the edge of appraisal still apparent somewhere in her expression or uncertain grip, and he added, “the bookbinder.”

Memory dawned.

“Right,” Seagull said, suddenly awake. “Right, I remember now. Sorry.” She introduced herself in turn, then hesitated. Regarded the stranger carefully one more time, she wished for her talent back, that she might know what would come of inviting him in.

She noticed the luggage at his side then, and the sweat beading on his brow, and the slight weariness beneath his open expression, and she thought of Lightbender, and manners ultimately won out over fear, and she invited the man inside.

Cagey with the apprehension of what she could not fathom was about to happen—something, definitely something—she sat Peony in her kitchen and did not permit him to fix even his own cup of tea. He did not seem to mind surrendering this bit control, seemingly glad to be out of the sun with a place to rest his feet. Looking at him, Seagull thought, Lightbuilder, you take to fools, but said only, “you mentioned you came here by dirigible?”

“Yes! Tried to, at least. I’m on a bit of a world tour before my doctorate starts up, and I’ve been trying to vary my modes of transport to keep all the to and fro from getting stale. Clearly I should have just taken the train.”

“A doctorate in bookbinding?”

“A doctorate in magic.”

Seagull sat up, narrowing her eyes at the man, inspecting him anew. “You’re not a fairy,” she said, all but certain.

“I’m not,” he agreed. “But that doesn’t stop me studying it, now does it?”

“I suppose not,” she ceded.

Peony continued, “I chart graphs and assemble diagrams exploring the patterns and subtle intricacies of magical workings. Occasionally someone will come wanting a given spell or phenomenon explained, and I assemble a book of relevant charts for them.”

“Hence the profession.”

“Hence the profession! But that’s soon behind me. Come spring, it will be all research all the time.” He said, somewhere between hunger and satisfiaction, like a man two bites into a long-awaited meal.

Seagull smiled. He was not much old her, this Peony, but he had settled into the tweedy professor archetype like a dove to its nest. And though she could not see the future anymore, her eyes were back on the world, on the faces of men; scrying for intentions in their teeth and the arch of their brows. She would not accept a drink from his hand—she would not accept one, she suspected, even from Lightbuilder now—but she saw no danger in the shiny dark river stones behind Peony’s glasses. I think that you would make good friends, Lightbuilder had said.

“Where does one go to do research like that?” Seagull asked, sipping her tea.

“I’ll be studying the merry dancers for my thesis, so far into the North for me!” He gave a theatrical little shudder then, rubbing his arms in mock chill, but he smiled as he did so, as if to say he was as keen on the cold as he was to sit himself behind his desk.

“The North…” Seagull echoed, voice trailing off and her thoughts along with it.

She thought of snow. Numbing pristine cold sprawled out in all directions, raining down in slow-motion from the dark vault of the sky. She imagined waiting for a clear night: Walking out into it, laying down, under the stars and the aurora.

“Say, Peony" she began. "Would you like some company?”

WIP
WIP WIP.