AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“After all that swimming around in my head? Seems like I’d have no secrets left.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“What surprises me is that we’re going back to our rooms. Aren’t we going on the field trip?”
“Yes. You’ll see.”
I’d been privately betting on some form of astral travel, but once in the rooms, he guided me to the magic elevator. The bathing chamber? Sure enough, down we went to the warm, humid rooms, with the black pool of water that seemed to go on forever.
“We could have bathed here.” I mentally sighed for my hair, which would need to be combed and let dry again. Maybe I should start taking the magical shortcuts on that.
Rogue gave me a mysterious smile and took my hands. “Do you trust me?”
Jeez. Every day was going to be an exercise in that. “More walking on water?”
He narrowed his eyes at me in playful menace and didn’t reply.
“Yes, I trust you.”
“Hold still.”
His magic traveled over me, a miasma that flowed over my skin, then sank inside my body, enveloping me in a cloud of black with blue lightning flashes. The sensation reminded me of the sparking buzz of his hands when he chose to touch me that way, and my desire roused to it. But the buzzing faded as it went deeper. I could have resisted it, but through dint of will, I let it infiltrate through me, Rogue’s appreciation for my trust brushing through me with a surge of tenderness.
He tugged me toward the water and I went, not objecting that we both remained fully dressed. We stepped in, the water rising to envelop us as we advanced, but not wetly. It felt almost more like a slightly thicker, warm cushion of air. It closed over my head and I panicked, just a little, as the stuff flowed in my nose.
Then I breathed through it. Miraculous. The water buoyed me up and we swam through it now, breathing it in as a fish might. I grinned at Rogue in pure delight and he smiled back, looking as he had running on that beach as a boy.
We swam onward, never hitting any wall. Exactly as I’d imagined—or somehow intuited—the pool had no far barrier. Gradually, the clear black lightened to deep ocean-blue, then to lighter marine colors. The water became shallower, the floor below a bed of white sand with remarkable shapes that could be the Faerie version of coral.
Fish appeared, large and small, all of them bizarre to my eye—some tumbling in tangles of iridescent tentacles, others nearly transparent, except for the shimmer of inherent magic. One creature, reminiscent of a shark but covered in unearthly violet feathers, swished past, baring scarlet teeth at me.
I expected we’d eventually surface onto some shore and go from there. Instead, Rogue led me to a great reef, with tunnels here and there. We passed through a narrow underwater channel, a magical barrier briefly prickling my skin, and then we emerged into an enclosure made by curved walls. Above the surface, the cavern arched into shadow. Beneath, it shimmered with rose light, like the inside of a heart. Or a womb. The walls glittered with refracted light, possibly crystalline.
But no, as we drifted closer, it became clearer that the crystals were bubbles. Thousands of bubbles, great and small, clinging to the walls, immersed in the blood-warm water.
Not bubbles. Egg sacs.
Moving as close as I dared to one, I peered at it. I half expected Rogue to stop or caution me, but he simply followed behind, interested in my acute curiosity. A thick translucent shell anchored deeply in the wall encased some sort of clear amniotic fluid, and a small shape floated within, its heartbeat flickering at hummingbird speed. Close to fully developed, the inhabitant of this one very much resembled a fairy of Athena’s ilk.
The fae didn’t fruit on the vine, they hatched from eggs.
Though it wasn’t my field, I’d seen this sort of thing before, at an aquarium I visited for a reception at a professional conference. One of the exhibits had the collagen-shelled shark eggs attached to the viewing window, so visitors could see the developing occupant. These looked much the same.
But instead of staying an amphibious or aquatic creature, the fae that hatched from these eggs ended up on land.
I’d thought it before—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Somehow the developmental cycle of the fae carried them along in a greater arc than the creatures of my world experienced. In my paradigm, a creature born to a particular species would recapitulate phylogeny to a certain point. A fish then might start as a single cell and grow more complex until it fit the definition ofOsteichthyesand hatched. Likewise a human fetus started as a single cell, grew more complex, for a time resembled a fish, but matchedHomo erectus, more or less, by birth.
If the theory I was rapidly assembling was correct, the fae continued to develop well after hatching. And possibly throughout their life spans.
It wasn’t unprecedented for a species to continue to change after birth. A human infant required an extensive juvenile period before becoming a sexually mature individual. Many of the more complex mammals did.
Somehow, in Faerie—and true to type—the fae, especially the immortal variety, continued to evolve into different species even after reaching maturity. Or wasthatthe key? Perhaps younger fae nobles were essentially juveniles for hundreds of years or longer, and only later matured into being capable of mammalian-style reproduction. After all, the reproductive organs of a fish were not so different from a mammal’s—a few developmental tweaks could get you there, with the proper stimulating agent.
Magic definitely could serve that purpose.
Rogue paced me, a steady presence in the back of my mind, as I studied the groupings of the egg clusters, able to identify some species of fae, while others remained a mystery. I itched to draw them, to take notes. More, I longed for the textbooks that would provide me with the references I needed. Not that they would havethisin them, but how long had it been since I read D’Arcy Thompson’sOn Growth and Form?Grad school, easily.
Principles were principles. If gravity applied here, so did basic laws of biology and form. If Rogue and I were similar enough physiologically that we could interbreed, then the rules I understood had to apply. The answer to all of it lay here. I just knew it.
