3: Induction
“It is peaceful,” she said, “There, there isn’t any corruption here, is there? It feels like our world…”
The Queen walked to where some birds were nested in a stone crevice and caressed the heads of the youngest. “Humans have no need of this place in their new world. Perhaps that is for the best, or perhaps not?” She moved over to a dried up fountain and ran her hand over it. “In fact, only three have been here recently, and all for your own benefit.”
Phantasia noticed the Queen smile, and followed her gaze towards the entrance of the human holy shrine. Standing to its side, adjusting the minute details of his clothing, was a solitary human. He wore a smart suit, and had short, foppish hair with a tint of grey. Phantasia felt a memory twitching at the back of her mind as she examined his features.
“Rembrandt Payne,” said the Queen as she glided over to him, “I believe it has been fourteen years since we last met face to face. Do you remember Princess Phantasia?”
The man looked towards Phantasia through small spectacles, “Why, she hasn’t changed at all, Your Majesty,” he said.
“You have grown wiser, though,” said the Queen as she stood next to the man. Though he was taller, her radiance overwhelmed him, his dull colours blending into the wall next to her ocean blues. “I trust she will be safe under your jurisdiction?”
Phantasia traced the lines in the man’s face with her eyes. Unlike faeries, humans had a strange way of ageing. They didn’t retain their youthful beauty, and their growth happened over time, rather than through metamorphosis. Rembrandt Payne was not the young, vibrant man whose face was etched in her most distant memories.
“Everything has been prepared for her enrolment,” he said, “It’s going to be quite a strange thing, having a faerie mingling with humans. Of course no one will know of her true identity, but this sort of thing is rather…unprecedented.”
The Queen looked over towards Phantasia and smiled. “Everything about Phantasia Celeste is unprecedented,”
***
Phantasia made her way down from the ruined shrine – called a ‘church’ by Rembrandt Payne. Queen Thetis stood atop the hill, watching as her princess was guided into her new world. Mr Payne had provided her with a selection of human goods that she would need, and the Queen had helped her adapt to a physical world, such as showing her how to read ‘books’, wear clothes that weren’t mental projections, and emulate the human consumption of material sustenance. All through that, Phantasia still struggled to recall her earliest memories, when she had met a young Rembrandt Payne.
Phantasia was living in a town known as Torsten, which had been salvaged from a settlement abandoned during the Great Cataclysm. In some areas the houses would be bright and stable, while a few streets away the roads would still be parched and cracked, and the buildings husks of overheated stone.
