Part 2: Untitled Novel, Day 19 - Words to Go: 10,085

Part II

Floyd stopped straightening up his fur and looked at Goldie intently. "You have to speak so I can hear you, but I need to talk to you first. You're not safe here. The only reason Kiffen hasn't killed you already is because of the fairy blessing you have on your person."

Goldie was about to stand up and dust off her pants. She'd gotten them pretty dirty, but she froze, stooped over to dust her knees, she looked at Floyd. "What?" she said, knowing full well she'd heard exactly what he'd said.

"You're holding a fairy blessing that is protecting you from harm."

"No. I know that. Why would Kiffen want to kill me?"

To any outsider, she was just a little girl, having an intense, one-sided, imaginary conversation with a small gray cat.
Suddenly, Goldie's brain was inundated with the knowledge of what was really happening inside of this world and what had been happening since she'd arrived in this place... the first time? Visions flashed before Goldie's eyes.
She saw herself enter the secret room, crawl on the desk, and look out the window. She knew now that Floyd had hopped into the window because he saw what was happening behind Goldie. Kiffen was setting up his very own fairy ring to capture her because Kiffen was a dark fairy. He wasn't a wyvern. He wasn't a snake. He was a fairy. An evil fairy. The bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty was probably based on a fairy like Kiffen. Kiffen set up his trap and it was Floyd's reaction to that that caused her to fall into the trap in the first place.
When Goldie hit the ground, she landed in the center of Kiffen's dark fairy circle, pulling her completely into the halfway world. As Goldie struggled to breathe, Kiffen's huge form came into focus. He really was used to being big because he was big. That's why he was so graceful.
She hadn't been able to see him before because she didn't enter the halfway world where Kiffen actually was until she was captured by his circle.
As soon as she saw him, she took off for the cupboard as fast as she could, she was moaning in fright both in the possibility that she was going to die by dragon and that she was dying because of knocking the air out of herself. Of course, at that point, she didn't know she'd just winded herself. She thought maybe she had broken her neck. She opened the outside doors of the cupboard and dived through to the inside doors. She expected them to swing wide as easily as the first set of doors had, but she slammed into them. They wouldn't budge. It was as if they were locked from the outside. Goldie found a staple in the carpet and started scratching on the cupboard wall.
Falling into the fairy ring meant that Goldie was bound to Kiffen for forever, or until someone could rescue her from his hold.

In the present, Floyd led Goldie into the forest as latent memories continued to well up before her eyes. It was flashes, like from a dream, but she knew it was real. She could feel the feelings that that Goldie felt, and yet, she wasn't the same Goldie. The Goldie from her visions was Goldie from another reality. That Goldie had not met Floyd until he jumped up into the window to try and save her from Kiffen. She had not played with him out in the yard. She had not seen him sunning himself on the roof. She'd found the secret room because she was bored and wanted to find a book to read and thought maybe there would be something better than the Encyclopedia Britannica in the cupboard doors below the bookshelf.
Goldie was able to focus on Floyd and on the memories at the same time. She knew the reason she was here now. She wasn't on a fairy hunt, she'd already encountered a lot of fairies. She was on a hunt for herself. Floyd had been a fairy once, but he'd done many bad things in the past and was cursed to be a cat for a thousand years before he was would be released from his punishment, but that didn't keep him from trying to fight against the actual evil fairies of this fairy world. Floyd followed Kiffen into the fairy world and knew where he was keeping Goldie. Floyd couldn't save her on his own, he no longer had his fairy magic, but he knew some people who would help if he asked. He had his fairy friends bless an object from Goldie's world, the jewel encrusted compact mirror, and send it and him into the past so he could keep Goldie from entering the room until later. Either way, the original Goldie was stuck in fairy world, it was the way the fairy world worked, but in Goldie's world, she'd never even entered fairy world until now.
Goldie was the only one who could save herself. Kiffen had cursed her dungeon cell so that only she could open it from the outside, since she was inside, it seemed like the perfect and most evil curse, and yet hilarious, because she would always be on the inside.
Goldie shuddered when she heard Kiffen growl. She knew it was only in her visions, but it scared her all the same. The prisoner Goldie had the same feeling when he'd growled through the bars of her dungeon cell.

"Welcome to my collection," he'd said and he laughed a scary, evil laugh. After Kiffen had told her that she would never escape because she was the only one who could open the cell and guess what? she was in the cell. He'd laughed another evil laugh and strode gracefully out of the dark place.

Across the hall of Kiffen's dungeon was another cell.

"Is someone there?" Captured Goldie had whispered.

She heard clanking from the other and an old toothless man had appeared at the barred door. Goldie screamed and hid in a corner. Was this what she was to become? Would she be here so long that her teeth would fall out of her head? She'd cried herself to sleep in the dank cell that night.

Kiffen had the sneaking suspicion that someone was trying to help Goldie and so he'd gone back to the room in the hopes of capturing whoever it was. The thing that dark fairies could not do, and this kept them from being too outrageously powerful, was set up their evil fairy rings in the same place twice, no matter what. So, in the room, all Kiffen could do was wait and see what came in through the door. Floyd had made friends with Kiffen and told him all about being kicked out of fairy life. He'd convinced Kiffen they were on the same side. When Goldie had come back into the room the second time... well, technically, the third time, since the first Goldie had entered once and the second Goldie had entered twice. Both Goldies fell off of the desk and were winded, but only one Goldie made it out of the room.
Kiffen made himself small to convince Goldie that he was no threat to her. He'd brought along a Lady Killer Butterfly in order to kill whoever was coming in after the Goldie he'd captured. Its poison was supposed to cause death within five minutes however Kiffen didn't know that Goldie had a fairy blessing.
The fairy blessing was not nearly as potent in the halfway world as it was in fairy world, but it still protected Goldie from the most harmful effects of the poison when she was bitten. The place where the fairy blessing was commixed with an object was the place where that object was the most powerful. Floyd needed Goldie's blessing to be the most powerful in fairy world, therefore it was weak in the halfway world, and had no power at all in the human world. The gift was full of surprises, though. She'd realized it was protecting her, but hadn't realized she'd be able to understand Floyd's language when she found him again.

Goldie was pretty sure she had most of the facts, now. She knew that nothing could hurt her with the fairy blessing in her pocket, but what about Floyd? She felt betrayed by both Floyd and Kiffen. By Floyd because he'd allowed her to again to be brought into the fairy world without knowing what she was getting into and by Kiffen because he'd convinced her he was a friend.

"What happens if Kiffen finds out you've been helping me the entire time?" asked Goldie as they trudged through the forest in the exact opposite direction that Kiffen had gone to look for Floyd in.

Floyd's answer was exactly what Goldie feared. "I guess he'll probably kill me," he said in a noncommital tone, if a thought could be uncaring, it was exactly what this one felt like.

"He can't do that. Plus, I can't let you do that for me, Floyd."

Floyd didn't respond.

"I'll do my best to protect you. You've done so much for me, it's the least I could do," she stated as she followed him along.

They'd been walking a couple of hours when Goldie and Floyd encountered another spring like the one that Kiffen had shown to Goldie earlier. Floyd tested the water and it was not bitter, so he and Goldie drank from it. Goldie had brought a few of the fruits that the fairies had given her earlier and she shared one those with Floyd, who was very grateful the food. When he'd been missing, he'd actually been tossed out of the esoteric door not very far from Kiffen, but he'd high tailed it away from him to try and find Goldie before he did.
Esoteric doors and halfway worlds were almost always made by dark fairies. The light sprites, of which Floyd was one, would never bring a human back into their world. The only way to get a human into fairy world was to create a fairy world inside of the human world, called a halfway world, and bring the human through in phases. Entering the halfway world was done through a fairy ring. Entering the fairy world was then successfully completed by stepping through an esoteric door. Esoteric doors were volatile and irregular, they were easily effected by the weather, by the number of objects coming through the door, and the amount of magic used to get through. Kiffen counted himself and Floyd as magical creatures, but he hadn't counted on Goldie's compact mirror. If Goldie hadn't had her fairy blessing with her, all three of them may have stepped into the fairy world in roughly the same place. The fairy blessing had caused more disturbance than Kiffen had calculated when he created it. Which caused the esoteric door to throw them all out miles and miles apart from each other. Kiffen had gone to find the fairies. He knew they'd be the only way that he would find her and Kiffen without seaching the entire land. He spoke to the sylphs who flew out as soon as they'd heard. The first sylph who encountered Goldie and the dark fairy, Kiffen, flew directly back to where Floyd was waiting for news.
Once he had a trajectory, with the sylphs help, Floyd was able to catch up with them before too long and follow them along to the campsite where they'd spent the night. From there, he watched until he was able to get to Goldie alone. Kiffen did not need to know he was close by.

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