It's all just a matter of water and dry land, whether you're over or under it. The shore can teach you that, but beaches have a slow and sonorous way of speaking, and people like to march with the fanfare of progress, a pace that seldom affords the time to take in wave-wisdom. So the ocean often finds itself without listeners.

The daughter of a coral quarrier, Seagull became 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 the brass music to acknowledge that he had been left behind.

Seagull watched the flags and trumpeters pass them by. She listened to her father hum along in devotion, and in the privacy of her own thoughts she told herself, 'no way.'

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

More pleasing than the ballyhoo or solemn tide, Seagull passed her youth in the company of fairies: Splendid, sparkling creatures of all variety of talent and strangeness. 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 city and beach. In time, she even did that most-cliche of mortal-strayed-in-Faerie things—fall in love.

There was shame, being 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. Her 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 petty woes it could never be said that Faerie did not treat her well.

It was in her return to the world that she stumbled.

Steadily it came that her faerie companions 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 warm, tall, 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 reality, and with it the stray mortal he had found, though he did not mean to hurt her as he went. So he lingered, and left her with best that he could think to offer.

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

Then he was gone into Deep Magic.

Among the ways shame and sorrow diminished her, Seagull had come not to trust her own instincts.

Even her strongest talent had paled among the vivid virtues and vices of the fae, such that invariably they grew bored of her (all but the jaybird, who flittered by on occasion to check on the heartbroken mortal). Weepy and lonesome, the impulse for comparison flared, and Seagull felt herself duller and paler than likely even the fae had thought, and she walked recklessly back into the world.

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