The Weaver's Grace: The Arrival of the Fairy Veils
The Fairy Tee — Hidden Mist Valley Series is a graphic tee from the Hidden Mist Valley — the forest below the waterfall, where the dryads tend the mist and Elderuth's roots reach the pure spring and the merpeople swim the deep channels of the river that flows from the hidden cave. This story is from a hundred years before the Attic existed. Ka-petal still stood. The dimensional veils were already falling. Luna already knew what they were, and she was the only one who knew what had to happen next — because she had overheard something she was not supposed to hear, and Elderuth had known she was listening, and that was the point.
The dimensional veils are not fog. They look like fog — a particular quality of mist that settles lower than the dryads' mist, heavier, with a stillness that the dryads' mist never has because the dryads' mist is alive and this is not. They are not portals. They do not open into another dimension. They do the opposite: they close the dimension that is already there. They fall where Ka-petal's poison reaches the valley's ley line convergence — where the south branch of the northern river, carrying a hundred years of Nyx Shadeborn's contempt for everything downstream, hits the magical ecosystem of the Hidden Mist Valley and does what contamination does when it meets something it does not understand. It suppresses it. It obscures it. Not sight. Magic. The veils fall and the magic in that area goes quiet, the way a voice goes quiet when something heavier is speaking over it.
The merpeople felt it first. They always feel it first — they live in the water, they are in the water, the water is the medium through which their magic moves and the medium through which Ka-petal's poison travels, and when the dimensional veils began falling in the deep channels of the river, the merpeople in those sections began gasping. Not for air. For magic. The sensation of a dimensional veil settling over a merperson in the water is the sensation of breathing in a room where someone has slowly been replacing the air with something that is almost air but is not, and you do not notice until you are already struggling, and by the time you notice you are already in the section of river where the veil has fallen and the magic is gone and your tail is just a tail and the water is just water and you are gasping for the thing that was always there and is not there now.
Then the trees. The veils settled into the canopy in the outer reaches of the valley — the sections closest to the waterfall, closest to where the polluted river entered the valley's air. The friendly animals of those trees — the ones who had lived in the high branches of the forest's oldest growth since before anyone was keeping track — woke one morning to find their homes withering. Not falling. Withering. Brown from the inside out, the way things go brown when the magic that was holding them in their particular quality of aliveness has been quietly removed. The animals came down from the brown trees and stood at the edge of the healthy forest and looked back at what their homes had become, and the dryads who tended those trees stood beside them and could not explain it because the dryads had never encountered something that suppressed magic before. Magic had always simply been there. The idea that something could make it not be there was not in their vocabulary.
Then the outer villages. The fairy settlements near Elderuth's eastern roots — the ones that had always been slightly more secluded, slightly further from the Silken Court's ceremonies and slightly closer to the valley's wild edges — began losing their magic one cluster at a time. Not gradually. Suddenly. A fairy would wake up and reach for her dust and find nothing. Reach for her wings and find them heavy, grounded, ornamental. Reach for her glow and find herself dim. The magic was not weakened. It was gone — suppressed by the dimensional veil that had settled over their village in the night, quiet as the dryads' mist and nothing like it, and they were standing in their homes that still looked like fairy homes and wearing their clothes that still looked like fairy clothes and they were ordinary. Grounded. Dim. Plaid brownies where fairies had been, blinking in the morning light of a forest that still had its magic and could not reach them through the veil.
Luna saw the first outer-village fairy come into the Silken Court's territory. She recognized immediately what she was looking at — not because she had seen it before, but because she had been watching the river for months and she had been watching the naiads retreat and she had been watching the color of the water coming over the falls and she had been building the picture piece by piece in the part of her mind that builds pictures from pieces and does not stop until the picture is complete. The picture was complete now. Ka-petal's poison was not just killing the river. It was falling through the valley's ley line convergence and suppressing the magic in everything it touched, and it was spreading, and the outer villages were the beginning, not the end.
She went to Elderuth.
She did not go to ask him. She went because she needed to think and Elderuth's roots were where she thought, and she was not quiet about it — she was never quiet about anything — and she was talking through the problem out loud the way she always talked through problems, which is loudly and with considerable profanity and without any expectation of being answered, because Elderuth was ancient and vast and did not answer every fairy who sat at his roots and thought out loud. He answered when he chose to. He was choosing now.
He did not speak to her. He spoke — she heard it, the low resonance of his voice moving through his roots into the ground beneath her, the way his voice always moved when he was speaking to the deep things rather than the surface things. He was speaking to someone else. About someone else. About a girl in the forest above — in the world above the waterfall, in the world where Ka-petal stood and Nyx Shadeborn ruled and the river ran poisoned through the desert farms and over the falls. A girl who could hear the earth. Who could feel the ley lines through the soles of her feet. Who had the frequency. Who was the one.
Luna went very still. She was not supposed to hear this. She understood, in the moment of going still, that Elderuth knew she was there. That he had always known she was there. That the conversation she was overhearing was not a conversation she had stumbled into. It was a conversation she had been positioned to overhear, by the oldest tree in the valley, who had been planning this for longer than Luna had been alive and who had chosen his instrument with the particular patience of something that has never needed to rush anything.
Because of what she had heard, she was the one who would have to go get the girl. Not a dryad — dryads could not leave the valley. Not a naiad — naiads could not leave the water. Not a centaur — centaurs did not go above the waterfall. Not a Silken Court weaver — the Court would send someone through proper channels at the appropriate time, which was not the appropriate time. Luna. The fairy who had been watching the river die for months. The fairy who had been building the picture. The fairy who was already furious and already ready and already, if she was honest with herself, already halfway to the waterfall in her mind.
She sat at Elderuth's roots for a long time after his voice went quiet. The clean water of the pure spring moved past her feet. Above, somewhere in the canopy, a dimensional veil was settling over another outer-village cluster. She could feel it — the particular quality of quiet that was not peace but absence.
"Fine," she said, to Elderuth, to the valley, to the plan she had not agreed to and was going to carry out anyway. "Fine."
She went above the waterfall. She found the girl. That is a different story, and it has already been told, and it ends with Ka-petal in a sinkhole and the pure river revealed and the valley beginning to heal. But it started here — at Elderuth's roots, with a fairy who overheard something she was not supposed to hear and understood immediately that she had been meant to hear it all along.
The tees are from the Hidden Mist Valley — from the fairies who lost their magic to the dimensional veils and got it back when the river ran clean again. From the merpeople who gasped in the suppressed sections of the river and swam back into the deep channels when the water cleared. From the outer-village fairies who woke up grounded and dim and ordinary and waited, in their plaid-brownie ordinariness, for the morning when the veil lifted and the dust came back and the wings remembered what they were for. They waited. The morning came. Luna made sure of it.
The dimensional veils are gone now. The river is clean. The outer villages have their magic back. The merpeople are in the deep channels. The friendly animals are back in the trees. Elderuth's roots are in the pure water. The valley is itself again. Luna has never told anyone that she overheard. Elderuth has never mentioned that he knew she was listening. Some things are kept the way the valley keeps its mist — not hidden, just tended, just present, just the way things are.
→ Fairy Tee — Hidden Mist Valley Series
More from the Hidden Mist Valley: Elderuth — The Earthsong and the Dark Fairy | The World Canon Map — Ley Lines & Living Geography | Earthsong Enchantress
What are the dimensional veils?
Not fog. Not portals. A magical suppression phenomenon — caused by Ka-petal's pollution hitting the Hidden Mist Valley's ley line convergence. They fall where the contamination reaches and suppress the magic in that area completely. Merpeople gasped for breath in the suppressed river sections. Friendly animals' tree homes withered brown. Outer-village fairies near Elderuth lost everything — dust, flight, glow, all magic gone — reduced to ordinary, grounded, dim. The veils lifted when the river ran clean. That took a hundred years and one girl above the waterfall and one fairy who overheard something she was not supposed to hear.
Who is Luna here?
Fully fairy — wings, dust, glow, the whole thing. Born in the Hidden Mist Valley. Already watching the river die before anyone admitted it was dying. She overheard Elderuth speaking about the girl above the waterfall. She understood immediately that she had been meant to hear it. She went above the waterfall. She found the girl. The rest is the Elderuth story.
What is Elderuth?
The last of the Firstborn Trees. His roots reach the pure spring. He speaks through the ground when he is speaking to the deep things. He knew Luna was at his roots. He knew she was listening. He planned it that way. He has never mentioned it. Neither has she.
What is the Hidden Mist Valley?
The mystical forest below the waterfall — where the dryads tend the mist, the merpeople swim the deep channels, the centaurs move through the tree line, and the fairies of the Silken Court and the outer villages have lived since before the forest had a name. The south branch of the northern river once ran polluted from Ka-petal over the falls into the valley. The valley felt it. The valley survived it. Luna made sure of it.
What will you find?: Fairy Tee — Hidden Mist Valley Series