No, the castle is near the center but not the exact center. This happened at the exact center.
“The Imleag,” Arach whispered.
Yes, that place, Faerie confirmed distractedly.
I hadn't realized that she'd been speaking to my husband as well but I was glad she had because I had no idea what they were talking about.
“The Emma lack?” I asked.
“Imleag: im-ma-lack,” Arach repeated it, then sounded it out for me. “It's the navel of our world. It's very center. The hub of our wheel-shaped realm.”
“Makes sense that the explosion would happen there,” I murmured. Then, to Faerie, I said, “Okay, you can go back to being a peeping Faerie.”
Thank you, she said without any embarrassment.
I rolled my eyes. “All right, let's go visit Faerie's belly button and see how badly it exploded.” I grimaced. “And may I never say those words again.”
Chapter Twelve
There was no time to waste. Arach and I disrobed and shifted into our half-dragon forms—humanoid bodies covered in dragon scales, with claw-tipped hands and feet, horns, a barb-tipped tail, and leathery wings. It was the wings we needed most. We could have gone full dragon but Arach advised against it. He wasn't sure if there would be enough room for two dragons to land in the Imleag.
Our scales covered all of the bits that needed covering so we didn't bother with clothes, simply launched ourselves out of our bedroom window and headed over the Forgetful Forest. My dragon roared inside me and I couldn't help releasing an echo of its cry. I may not have been wearing the full dragon form she would have preferred but it was close enough to make her happy. And when Mama Dragon is happy, everyone's happy.
Our wings beat the air as Arach and I headed across the treetops, the leafy canopy swaying not only with the breeze but also with the movements of the tree limbs that were, in turn, moved ever so slightly by the breathing trunks. Exotic birds scattered out of our path and, below us, fey creatures roamed the forest. None of them looked affected by the magic. I hadn't thought of it before, but shouldn't the animals have been feeling the mating urge as well? Perhaps it had something to do with the elements. Fey animals do have a touch of elemental magic in them, but it's far less than the amount found in faeries.
We flew on, two Dragon-Sidhe—one the color of freshly spilled blood and the other a gleaming metallic gold—shooting across the fey sky. My dragon's joy had diminished as my urgency sank through to her. There weren't a lot of things that she considered worthy of worrying about but the Realm of Faerie was one of them. She went still inside me to allow me to focus.
“There!” Arach shouted over the clap of our wings and the rush of the air as he pointed down into the forest.
A clearing that would have been barely visible under normal circumstances, stood out sharply, highlighted by the glow that emanated from it. We circled down to it, pulling our wings in to drop past the stretching tree branches. I fell a little faster than I anticipated due to that maneuver and my momentum sent me down onto one knee.
“A Thaisce?” Arach hurried over to me.
“I'm fine,” I assured him as he helped me up. “Just not used to landing that way.”
My stare went to the center of the clearing and his followed.
“By the flame,” Arach whispered in wonder. “What is that?”
“That's not the Imleag?” I asked even though I knew the answer.
“No, the Imleag is this place—the clearing itself. I don't know what that is.”
“If it's not the Imleag, it must be the origin point.”
The origin of Faerie's magical explosion hovered a few feet above the ground—a cloud of light churning with energy and sparking with colors. Every color imaginable glinted inside it, shifting so often that it was impossible to catch the various shades. They sort of blended into an opalescent, golden amoeba. A stormy amoeba. Not only did it glint but it also crackled like lightning.
I hadn't really expected to find something so... visible. I thought the Imleag itself would be, well, a rock or something like that but there was nothing tangible in the clearing to point at and say, “There is the Imleag.” If not for the glowing thing that hovered above the grass, I wouldn't have known this place was special at all. It really was just the center of the realm. I shouldn't say “just” though. It must have also been a place of power—physical landmarks or not—or the magic wouldn't have accumulated there.
“Al said something about magical sparks,” I murmured. “But I didn't think they'd literally be sparks.”
“If there was an explosion, why do these sparks remain?” Arach asked—his voice deeper in his half-dragon form, as if his vocal cords had shifted as well.
“Maybe it's gathering itself for another go,” I whispered with worry.
“Then we must stop it before it does,” Arach said simply.
“Sure,” I huffed. Then I went on flippantly, “I'll just make a wish. Trinity Star, would you mind diffusing this magical bomb for us? Maybe you could calm the magic or send it into Faerie or whatever you think is safest. Just handle that, please.” I waved my hand and twirled my fingers as if I were the Fairy Godmother from Cinderella. “Bibbity bobbity boo!”
Then I gasped as the Trinity Star suddenly came to life inside my chest, glowing so bright, so quickly, that I was blinded in a second. I heard Arach shout but it came from far away. I was lost to the light, suspended in space, my body left behind. My consciousness surged with the starlight, flowing into the Imleag which wasn't merely the center of the realm but also the place where magic was the strongest in Faerie.
The Faerie Realm is forged of elements. When it was first created, there were only four kingdoms: Water, Earth, Air, and Fire. Even though it had a king, Spirit was not a kingdom but rather a mediator between kingdoms—a unifier. The pie-shaped kingdoms laid around the hub of the Forgetful Forest where Spirit bonded them by their tips. The land of each kingdom was dominated by its element but also touched the other three elements. This contact was imperative to the harmony of the realm.
Every kingdom needed to be bordered by the other elements. To either side, there laid other kingdoms, to the center was Spirit, and at their backs was the final element in its physical form. At the far end of the Fire Kingdom laid the Tine—an immense body of water, at the back of Air stood the Mountains of Serenity, behind Water was a volcano that constantly erupts, and Earth ends in mist.
These elements not only backed the kingdoms and fence them in but they also crossed below and above the realm, blending with each other. The Tine is fed by the ocean of the Kingdom of Water via an underground river that then cycles back through the Kingdom of Fire. The river got heated by its journey through Fire and provided hot water to our entire kingdom before crossing beneath the Forgetful Forest and the Water Kingdom to surface near the volcano at the edge of the ocean of its origin. The warmed river then flowed back into the ocean, supplying the Kingdom of Water with warm currents.