1

Every day is glorious and every morning a blessing on the Faerie Citadel. A rising sun beams through the uncurtained window; nearly a full wall of glass, through which one could enjoy a generous view of both parklands and skyline. The rays pour in full-spirited and square over the inhabitant in his bed. Precisely proportioned, steel framed and thinly sheeted, the thing catches and gives heat like an oven coil, ensuring Warden Varwolf does not overindulge his 8-hour rest period.

And why would he ever be inclined to do such a thing?

Wolf comes vaulting out of bed and his shadow flares across the wall opposite, a black swipe across the door in the corner, and across the lengthy shelf that consumes the rest of the wall. Shaken just slightly by his bounding about, the watery orbs of light that dapple the shelving shivers, glittering coldly. He doesn't look at them. The shelf is an indulgence too, and he does not indulge in the mornings.

Breakfast waiting outside the door. Still warm. The apartment service fae are systematic and as quiet as ants.

He breaks his cauliflower cake over a purposeful little table set at the foot of his bed and looks out upon the city; the towers of the city center glow lush violet; the Titania Fortress Prison Complex just beyond is a cube of brilliant tangerine threaded with silver. A wonderful day - not to be wasted. This is not to say lesser days did ought to be squandered, but the bright days were reminders, gifts of happiness to fortify oneself before days did show cold. Not that there was much of that on the Faerie Citadel.

Wolf believes this even before he sees the mail-in itinerary that calls for him to cancel all preexisting plans and embark on a trip to S___ City, on the mainland. Better and better!

2

He is able to keep his appointment with Muna before he is due at the airport. This does not count as a preexisting plan to be canceled. In fact, it is doubly convenient to make the visit as the hospital sits between his apartment and the offworld departure gate.

Muna's room is even brighter than Wolf's, with a wider window and a much larger bed to accommodate his needs. There are attendants, and unlike the apartment staff they must announce the meals and bring them to the bed because Muna's eyes recently underwent an operation and he isn't able to see the sidetable.

Wolf announces himself too, and is greeted with a What? What? likely because Muna's ears are also not what they used to be. There's also some beeping and whirring of machinery to get past, all very necessary.

It's a glorious day, Wolf tells him.

Hot one, Muna says after a time. He says some other things, but they're only out of frustration. If he were better, he'd be grinning and enjoying the views of the Faerie marsh graciously afforded by his window.

I have a mainland job today, Wolf says. Muna used to speak of traveling when he retired, but after an incident with the nerves in his legs, it didn't seem likely he'd get to do any. We'll be transporting one in from the coast. I'll get you something nice.

Don't bother.

It's never a bother to provide for one of our own.

Muna might have looked at him then, if it were possible. There had been swelling behind his eye sockets which caused the contents to burst out, and although the doctors did their best to keep everything attached an infection began around the exposed vessels and the whole thing had to be removed. The resulting scabs were itchy, but he didn't have anything left to scratch them. He had tried to rub his face on the bed frame so now he was strapped down.

Although he and Wolf had been quite close in their academy days, Wolf refused to scratch for him because it was a medical risk. Wolf was used to such requests now; Opal had been the same, and at least four others before her. But to be properly Faerie was to understand what was needed, not what was wanted. Of course, with all the medicines in him it might be hard for Muna to remember, which was why he needed someone looking out for him in other ways.

I don't need anymore junk. What I need now is for someone to close the window.

Wolf is sympathetic. The window isn't open.

No...? It's like an inferno in here.

Sweat pours around Muna's soaked bandages and makes jagged little ponds over his cheeks. He certainly smells hot. Leaning over him, an idea so fantastic occurs to Wolf, fits so well with the circumstances, slotting smooth as a newly integrated cell into Titania Fortress's lattice, that he almost dashes out the door without the courtesy of a goodbye. I know what I'm getting you on my trip!

No sound.

Just hang on, Wolf calls out, though later, briefly, he wonders if he shouldn't have said that.

As he leaves, a nurse swiftly takes his place in the room. One in and the other out, smooth as a brand new cell!

3

One of Wolf's favorite spots at S___ City airport, and indeed the first of his destinations when he and the convoy arrive on the mainland, is the vast car park across from the main terminal, a rental lot. Lined like obedient beetles between painted lines on the tarmac, its residents are attentive and expectant when nobody's in them.

Human cars are very large (to say nothing of their airplanes!) and thrilling in their potential danger, though these are tame enough. Their coats are heavy and insides chaotic and they are utterly unmagical, but they can easily outpace even the finest Fae limos and flatten them like empty cans. As for why they had evolved so aggressively, Wolf deduced, was to defend themselves mainly from each other. Life on the mainland could be brutal.

The first time Wolf visited, he took hundreds of photos and nearly forgot his appointment. Today he takes a dozen.

The sky hangs low over them all, the color of mercury. It's a rare sight. The citadel, though it's been sinking for a decade, still floats high enough to be over clouds of this level. He takes a picture of them, though it's hard to make out what exactly the subject is in the result.

Against a concrete wall at the end of the lot, a young man is covering the surface with posters. An accomplice sits at the end of the walk. Wolf regards the wall with interest. The young man removes a cigarette from his lips and says, with perfect human apathy even when asking such a question, You good, kid?

I am good. Wolf leads with enthusiasm then clicks the side of his mouth disapprovingly. But not a child.

The young man eyes him for a moment then makes a wheeze that reminds Wolf of Muna. I get it. Perfect. Then you should come.

With stained fingers the man hands him a poster. On it are a cluster of excited people between the ages of fifteen and twenty with their arms in the air and caked in glitter, two of them wearing fake wings that look a little like Wolf's own. Etched over their heads is the phrase Dance ‘til you drop.

He likes the sound of that, til you drop, til you drop, and repeats it in his various tones, flat to dramatic to singsong, before reaching the chain link gate at the front of the lot. It occurs to him that the ever-lowering sky indicates rain and begins to feel sorry for the wall of human dancers, so he goes back to warn the poster-stickers. But by the time he gets back to the wall they are gone.

4

Completely unlike Titania on the glorious citadel, the S___ City jailhouse is dimly lit and smells like musty underarm, but it's cool and dry, which is a fair trade in the summer.

The prisoner is a well-mannered older man who sits nicely on his cell's bench to take the weight off his broken leg. Wolf measures him up from outside the door, makes his incantation - a template of 6 planes and 5 edges - and snaps shut the translucent transportation cell around their waiting ward.

It's quick after that; Wolf's cells never need much refinement. The door is then opened and three other fae of the convoy connect and lift the prisoner out of his room.

Not a ring but a cube, eh? The prisoner says, knocking at the walls. Wolf feels the faint presence of magical energy in his knuckles. Well, I'll be. You all really do look like babies.

With magically enhanced musculature, this man had held captive and thrashed several young children for his own enjoyment. After being arrested, he had since thrashed several guards and fellow prisoners. His incantations were such that the brick walls and bars of a human prison wouldn't hold him long. But the faerie cell would. Fae limos were one thing, but their cells were another. A hundred human cars colliding at full speed could not break the cell Wolf had now fixed around him.

The cell, hovering overhead, keeps them all dry as they walk out into the rain. The prisoner thrusts his head up to the sky, pounding his magic-infused palms very hard against the walls of his cell to no effect. Wolf sees from below the man's gums has a few swollen toothless spots, a common symptom of scurvy. After a consideration, the prisoner sits, back against the cell wall.

Rain! Hah! A fitting goodbye. Finally getting away from this hellhole. Take me to the dancing! The ambrosia! The madness and mushrooms!

Humans have dance on their minds. Wolf wonders what the rest means. But he is not to talk to the prisoner until the convoy has landed back on the citadel and entered Titania Fortress. There, he can then only speak their registration number and instruct them to remove their clothing and put their hands behind their backs for inspection, before they and their cell are slotted into the wall where they will spend the rest of their existence.

The citadel's balanced diet will cure his scurvy and heal his leg in no time. And the sun - yes - certainly, something to dance about! Wolf smiles at the prisoner whose own smile is wiped off his face for a moment, before he manages to replace it.

5

It's the sight of you guys putting dance on their minds, Nix says. You didn't hear about that movie? No, you don't like that stuff. How about the book? No, nobody reads anything on the citadel but the manuals and reports.

Nix is a long-tailed, one-eyed faerie that lives on a hovel in a narrow, dark place called Oval Lane. Wolf's friend since preschool, he'd once lived on the citadel, even worked for Titania alongside Wolf. He was doing quite well until he decided to go to the mainland and do less well, on purpose. Wolf credits the decision to Nix's charitable nature.

Nix currently sits beside Wolf at a tiny sidestreet establishment with a corrugated metal canopy and brownish walls and meaty odor rising from the sewage grates that consume a third of the street space. Nix is further martyred with a bowl of near-fatally salted breadsticks and strong-smelling drink.

A big studio adapted an old book of human folk tales. Written when fae started visiting the mainland again, but hadn't yet formalized ambassadors to explain everything, Nix rambles, dashing crumbs to the floor. By countryside know-nothings who saw child-shaped strangers pop out of the blue - with the flabby wings and antennae our folks had before the surgeries got better - they assumed they'd discovered a species of hick forest entities. Unrelated things like mushroom rings got caught up in the mythos. Aesthetic and proximity, I suppose.

Mushroom rings are just result of a rainy season, aren't they? Wolf laughs.

Aren't they? Nix flips his palms up, beseeching. Rain and rot. But more than one rube in the olden days thought they were portals to some faerie dimension. So the story is, we'd lure in poor, stupid mortals and trap them with illusionary food and hypnotic songs and faerie dust, whatever that was meant to be, and make them dance in the circle - around the circle, under the circle - trapped in a loop until they went mad or starved.

Until they dropped, Wolf recites with a smile. To come to that out of dancing, of all things. These fictional faeries had a sense of fun.

How philosophical. Is a mind beaten into submission to believe it's having fun, truly having fun? Nix sniffs loudly. The air in this place can't be good for him. Well, as long as you're mortal, there's a way out of any trap. That's another funny thing: these folks thought we had time to waste on watching them dance - that we weren't mortal. Or, at least, that we were a lot less mortal than everyone else. Makes a sick kind of sense, considering everyone the citadel sent out were the freshest-faced, kiddy-looking specimens. See no obvious parents and people start to assume... Hey - guess how old the faerie queene is in the movie.

Faeries with a queen? The continent had already done away with queens before our Founders were even establed. How ridiculous!

Yeah, yeah, Nix says, a phrase that never quite feels right to hear from a fae's mouth, just take a guess. Here's a useless hint: she's played by a twelve year old human.

Wolf makes a guess and the truth is a hundred and fifty times that. They both have a good long laugh about it.

Where's my cup? Nix looks around and has to give up because Wolf has hidden the foul brew behind the counter. You know that all the old tales started because people started to go missing when faeries were seen in the area. They wanted to believe we were kidnapping the poor innocents and trapping them in some nonsense rituals, and that to save humanity against the fae threat you had to bash any small person you saw with an iron rod.

Wolf nods emphatically. That would stop a lot more than rogue fae, I think!

A way to scare the kids into staying at home! The rumors did double duty. Nix is filled with energy. Really, it was those fool writers who were captors to their children, more than fae ever were. As if nobody, least of all the young and adventurous, would ever want to leave their muddy old towns to live in a sparkling new city in the sky.

It's rare to hear Nix say something openly positive about the citadel and Wolf glows with pride. Unfortunately Nix sees him do it and drops the topic to wail to the server about a replacement drink. The man guffaws and jokes about kids-these-days and act-your-age. Nix does not correct him.

Looking at Nix from his right-hand side, Wolf thinks of Muna. Nix's right eye was also taken out in an operation, but it happened when he was a baby in the nursery facility, and he got better. In their academy days, Nix always said that he was born with one eye, which was somewhat true as the lost eye had never worked. But to humans, once they'd started having missions offworld, Nix would say he lost it while surfing, wrestling snakes, or fighting someone much larger.

Nix believes in suffering, which is likely why he goes to hurt his remaining eye at the movie theaters and why his mainland stay has not ended yet.

Humans just love a good story, Wolf says.

Bad stories sell just as well, if not better. That's why I'm shopping around an article I wrote, about the misconceptions propagated when we give so much attention to these outdated texts. Nix slings himself over the back of the chair. His long tail drops over the edge of the seat and coils around it twice. It's a miracle it had never needed amputation.

A new but not quite clean glass is slapped down in front of him.

You really should visit the citadel again for a checkup, Wolf says. We've all been waiting for you to come back. Your favorite places are all still there. You won't have to drink this gunk anymore.

Nix grows his hair long to hide his empty eye socket so it's hard to know what face he might be making. Still always grassy and sunny up there? Misty mornings and daily mail and meals at your doorstep? City colored like a sunset, everyone smiles and polished to perfection?

Of course.

All of you, really?

Without hesitation, Wolf replies, All of us.

Nix, undeterred by Wolf's assurance, does pause. He's acquired that human habit. The sewer line just outside is filling up and the smell is rising, brown water beginning to form a sticky puddle in the doorway. The rain hits the roof like a chaotic, deafening, continuous scream. The poorly connected lights flicker. As if all this relaxes him in his suffering, Nix murmurs, Still too depressing. No thanks.

6

Steam seems to be rising from the city in the early morning. At its edge, wet sand on the shoreline lies like an enormous slab of clay. Awake after his designated 8-hour resting period, Wolf walks a thin line of footprints across the soft surface.

The prisoner and convoy had slept well. After reinforcing the barriers of the transportation cell, Wolf is out to fulfill another of his duties.

He finds the store he's looking for at the west edge of the boardwalk, where all the biggest hotels are and there are always buses to the airport. The shop is brightly lit and largely made of glass. It reminds him just enough of home. It's always empty, too.

You here with family? is the shopkeeper's greeting.

A strange tone for a strange question. Not at all. I'm here for work.

Wolf peruses the selection of snowglobes and chooses the smallest piece available. It sits comfortably in the palm of his hand and features a daintily painted sculpture of the city, dusted in white.

Shirts are on sale, the shopkeeper says, and Wolf buys one of those too. The chipped image of a seagull has been ironed onto it; this an animal never seen on the citadel.

He asks to wrap the snowglobe. Make it really nice, it's a present for a friend. Wolf watches the little glass orb disappear behind a layer of colorful tissue paper, a flurry stirred up as the shopkeeper bundles it away, and he can't stop grinning. Do you ever think about living in one of those? Just imagine. It would be perfect. You get the city, but it's nice and safe inside the glass. Plus, you'd get snow every day and you can still see the sun. And it would be clean and cool because it's all underwater - well, assume we can breathe underwater for all this. But it would be perfect.

Does sound swell, the shopkeeper agrees. Though if I had to live in one, I think I'd want a little more space. You know, you get 33% off a second snowglobe if you buy two of any size...

It's all very true. But ever the diligent agent, in the interest of need over want, Wolf takes the shirt and singular snowglobe and goes to meet the convoy.

7

Faintly dazed by the great benevolent sun above the citadel, prisoner ___85 is deposited quietly into the Anti-Armament section of Titania Fortress. Checking the man's charts, Wolf asks for him to be given two salad cubes since he left his fruit packets untouched the night before.

A limousine then delivers Wolf to do his rounds at the hospital and at Muna's room he seats himself, gift bag full of tissue paper in his lap, across from Muna's bed, facing the ever-closed window. It is a beautiful day, warm and humid and perhaps even a little breezy in the right parts.

A familiar nurse comes by to say Muna will not be able to accept his gift.

They regard the empty bed as Wolf is informed that Muna suffered a catastrophic organ dysfunction not long after Wolf had departed a day earlier. Everybody had tried as hard as they could, including Muna himself, as he had done his whole life, but their honorable compatriot had breathed his last in the night. He was twenty-six - an exceptionally good age for one of his conditions. Decently above average for fae as a whole, too - not counting those who never left the walls of the nursery - to count those would rank Muna among those very fortunate indeed!

There is much to celebrate. Nix is quite wrong. Days on the citadel are filled with happiness.

Wolf rolls the string handle of the bag in his hand. Is there anybody else currently on the visitation roster?

We'll have another assigned to you soon. Thank you for your diligence and compassion, she says. Wolf rolls these words about like the string in his hand and knows he should be proud.

8

His apartment is full of thick, silent summer air. He changes out of his clothing, which still smells faintly of rainwater and sewage, and puts the folded squares into the laundry chute. Giving the seagull shirt a sniff-test, he decides it's best to drop that one down as well.

He unrolls the poster he was given for the faerie-themed dance party and reads it carefully for the first time. He realizes the venue is an outdoor park. Perhaps, after the rainfall they'd been having on the C-South, there would be mushrooms, real faerie rings. It wouldn't mean much, but it would line up, slide together, fit perfectly. Things rarely lined up well on the mainland, besides cars without people in them.

Next comes his gift, and a tiny indulgence. He tips the bag, unwraps the tissue paper and lets the tiny impression of the S___ City skyline bask for the first time in sunlight on the Fae Citadel. He shakes it and as the flakes whizz about in his hand, walks up to the shelf that consumes nearly all of his west-facing wall. He finds a space easily because this new addition is so small. It fits nicely between a slightly larger orb containing the Core Cities financial district and another containing the cliffside town of M______. He gives those a shake too, because it seems unfair for only the newcomer to be celebrating, and then shakes all the surrounding globes as well. All nineteen of them become their own little whirling planet.

Wolf is nothing if not practical, dutiful and compassionate. All faeries are.

Liquid light flickers behind them, the sun casting silhouettes of their respective landscapes against the wall in a blizzard of fast-moving shadows, magnified. If he squints, and squints very hard because his eyes are actually quite sharp, he can see Muna among the shapes, along with the other friends who were also his duties, nineteen who tied blind to a bed in a beautiful room cried of being too hot, or to close windows that were always already closed. Every single one being able to finally experience the embrace of winter, an icy breeze, crisp snowflakes softening and melting into their shoulders and hair.

And there they'd stay. Any tracks made, always covered by fresh snow. There would be no retracing of steps, and to follow against a wall (Wolf knows mazes as well as any Titania warden) would only bring one in a circle because he never bought a snowglobe with corners. Squares were for prison cells. In the circle they'd be safe, and eternal, with plenty of time to dance around in their perfect little rings, and the old human tales would be right then everyone could be happy. Even Nix, although he would have to rethink his article.

The snow settles. Wolf sees a notice in his mailbox and, with renewed pride in the Fae and their worldly standing, hopes - it's not something he really needs, after all - for perhaps some more time away.