Rebirth and Second Chances

Chapter 159: Cathair-bhaile

Saor still needed work. Positions filled and streamlined access for those lining up to enter. But I was becoming more concerned about Cedric, Lohne, Uron, and Irvin each day. I'd seen the System announcements with the penalties that would apply if my people weren't released and healed.

There had been no announcement letting the world know the Seelie had complied with the System demands, which only increased my fears. If Mab was willing to doom her entire court to a complete loss of fertility, what did that mean? I feared it meant that nothing was as important to her as her vengeance.

Why King Lugh or Consort Puck didn't act was as baffling to me as Mab's insanity. Her actions would destroy the Seelie unless something was done. But that was an outcome that someone else needed to worry about. I needed to get my people away from her.

I had sent a hive to find out as much information as possible. Lady Cnet of the Aziza and Knight Juisic of the Volar-Fey had used the portal once it was active, they had each taken dozens of trained people to help them spy and find out the truth. I was too impatient to give them much time for investigation.

A couple of days, and then I was coming through the portal myself.

Two days to the hour, and my patience had frayed, my decision to move immediately firmed. I wasn't idiotic enough to go by myself, but I would wait no longer.

The World City portal opened into a place of over-crowding and urban sprawl. Cathair-bhaile was located very near the northern icecaps, a place where the three continents joined. The city had been built on the edge of the glacial fields, so ice bridges had been constructed joining those continents permanently. Runic arrays etched into the bedrock beneath the glaciers to ensure their permanence.

The glaciers had been re-routed so that the area stabilized, the movement of ice and rock bifurcated so that the city was spared. The foundation for the buildings almost as durable as the bedrock the glaciers rested on. Because the city was built just outside the boundary of permafrost and forest, the trees were mostly coniferous.

Snow and rain were a way of life. The weather often bracing and summers short and intense. The area seemed more suited to the Unseelie Court as they claimed dominion over winter, the Seelie would be at a disadvantage in this locale. Queen Mab was often referred to as the Summer Queen, but summer was shortened and weakened at this latitude.

The solution was Sithern. It was the great equalizer between the Courts. Able to create both winter and summer environments, space had been created to embrace both equally.

The Seelie ruled from the Court of Light, an eternal summer that banished any vestige of winter's bite. So, to be located in what was essential a zone where Winter ruled for eight months of the year was only possible because of the concessions the Sithern allowed. Those concessions had given the Seelie an advantage during negotiations, one that they had milked extensively.

The city itself was nothing like the one Lord Kel had ruled. Since pines were the native tree for the area, the citizens were unable to train upper tree branches into paths for travel. Those trees that did have branches that could be shaped were hardy enough to survive, barely, and that was only with extensive support on the part of the Sidhe. The pines, on the other hand, could be encouraged to grow into towering behemoths.

Giant protrusions of greenery that dotted the landscape. Pines encouraged to grow so that the residents could use them as windbreaks, protection against the harsh winter winds, as well as home and business. The fierce winter winds impossible to protect against if homes were made in treetops resulted in strong and deep roots that the citizenry could tame, carefully nurtured so that they could be used as the framework for homes and business.

Pines were not prone to aerial root growth, so they had to be encouraged to spread feeler roots. Feelers that could be woven, hardened, and thickened into usable livable space. The effort and space required was exorbitant, and for the most part, only a few trees, claimed by the very powerful, had been encouraged and used in this manner. Instead, the Sidhe used harvested plant materials, metal, and wood, to build free-standing structures.

Without the inter-woven upper branching pathways, traffic had to rely on roads and sidewalks that were durable enough to survive the fluctuations in the soil as freezing and thawing occurred. Skimmers hovering above the ground minimized wear and tear of roads to almost nothing, which helped. The detritus from animal droppings was more of a maintenance concern than potholes since an amazing number of Seelie insisted on raising and riding mounts.

The air quality was naturally clear. There was none of the pollutants or miasma of smog that such a large community of people might expect. I theorized that the trees were used more like air filters to maintain that quality than for aesthetics. I already knew that water and sanitation were re-cycled using formation arrays. The efficacy of the technology was not only efficient but environmentally friendly. There was no by-product, no solvents or cleaners to despoil or poison the land when magic was used.

I did find the lack of guards or officials near the portal remarkable idiotic. There was no one verifying identity, no attempts to dispel illusions, and discover or hinder the efforts of Olympus and Asgard to infiltrate and evade discovery. It made no sense, especially when I knew Queen Mab had instituted a pogrom of discovery and destruction when it had been revealed that her son had been replaced by a spy from Olympus.

Why go to all the trouble of breaking the illusion and filtering out the doppelgngers if you were just going to then leave your door wide open and invite them to take up where they left off? You were just inviting the same type of invasion by not monitoring influx, and at least keeping track of who was entering the Capital.

The only explanation I could think of was that the Seelie still hadn't informed the Unseelie that a slow invasion had taken place and that key members of society were being kidnapped and exchanged with illusion. The contentious nature of the courts would mean that without a reason, the Unseelie would not agree to any changes in how the city or the portal were administered. The Unseelie efforts to stymie Queen Mab and the Seelie was almost ingrained by this point.

Queen Mab would have had to inform the Unseelie about CERN, the God Particles, and the illusions that resisted Seelie countermeasures. Even then, the Unseelie might not have agreed to the creation of a guard detail and debarkation station. Until it could be proven that the Unseelie had also been infiltrated by doppelgangers there was no reason to work together.

I had offered Earl Reil, the leader of the Aziza colony that had joined my House a position as one of the Twelve. He had refused, claiming that Aziza worked best in anonymity. He would prefer to create and head a network of spies in tandem with Prince Hawthorne. The combination of Volar-fey and Aziza would be brutally efficient. No ward could keep them out, and they resonated with the same energy signature as the world's background magic radiation so they would be almost impossible to detect.

He had been swift when forming and dispersing a rapid response team. His choice of Lady Cnet to lead inspired. She had a network of Aziza who lived in Cathair-bhaile that were willing to trade information. Lady Cnet had been tasked with discovering what if anything the Unseelie knew about the CERN developments, while Knight Juisic and the Volar-Fey searched for the location of my people.

I had been forced to wait, working on the details of city and Kingdom building while they squirreled into the cracks and crevices of Cathair-bhaile. The reports Cnet and Juisic had gathered about the condition of my people, as they filtered in, had been stark, the only comfort that they were still alive.

The Sithern gave them no challenge to entry, in fact, it was more interested in co-opting the Volar-Fey as part of the Sithern ecology. A life-form that had been thought extinct was hard to keep quiet, and it was only after Prince Hawthorne empowered Knight Juisic to bargain were promises made. He would direct one of the next swarms of his people to migrate to Cathair-bhaile, that offer opened paths and restricted areas in return as the Sithern expressed its appreciation.

It was strange knowing that the millions of Volar-fey, that had spawned and swarmed when Saor o Shlabhraidhean had grown to include the Valley, were my children by blood and magic. My decision to house and safeguard the Sithern kernel in my body, the only permission Prince Hawthorne and Lady Petal had needed to merge our magics and life-essence and give rise to an entirely new population of Volar-fey.

It also answered a question I'd been asked repeatedly. How was it my mother consented and permitted my birth? Why would she give the required essence needed, to birth the spark of life that allowed a hybrid to be born? I had always thought the chances of her giving birth to me as a child of her body were remote. I knew that she may have supplied the essence, but my actual birth was accomplished by some other means. It was more likely, I'd thought, that I was created by a confluence of energy and essence that bore little resemblance to pregnancy and childbirth.

The Sidhe were creatures of magic. Magic that was resplendent with fertility that closely aligned with nature. Fecundity was not the only way nature evolved. The gift of life was miraculous. And for the Sidhe the methodology was mutable. The creation of life and the birth of that life would find some way to manifest.

The millions of Volar-Fey were proof that conception and birth were possible even without a uterus. Even without the knowledge or active participation of one of the donors.