"I love you." she said after we hadn't spoken in over five minutes. Just out of the blue. It was the intonation, the singularity of it - different than the platonic version. I stared, trying to recall how it felt. Strange, I guess I've never really felt loved by one such as her. I looked further into my memories and saw why, I was never into women before, all my travels across Edward's Land had me playing my midnight seronades to beautiful young men instead. So this was love, and all of that - well, I was a poet, I knew more than one kind of love.

"Dad, what are you doing in there? Jesus?" Penelope interrupted my studies. Circe had left her collection of broken men, trapped in cracks within the emerald to keep her amused while she was imprisoned eternally. I'd given up wishing I had a magazine and just started listening to their stories. Some of them were actually quite interesting. Listening - I mean it is like virtual reality, and with such deep dives, you can forget yourself in the lives of these poor young men that Circe chose from all the others, each of them a genius in art and in love. I shed my ego and took the opportunity to learn from the best.

"I'm learning about Circe." I coughed and gestured that she had my attention.

"Circe says I will become a woman very soon, probably next month at the same time she menstruates. She is weirdly eager and I am not sure I like this." Penelope reported.

"Tell your Grandma you are looking forward to it - and worried. She'll reveal details when she tries to get you focused on the positivity of it. Just let her feel your worries, and don't know too much. I will keep the wisdom of our resistance to her while you play along." I said to her carefully. Penelope nodded and blinked, cat-like. She also glanced up at Cory, who she trusted with her secrets.

Penelope returned later after I had the scope on Pippin's real adventures in Edward's Land. I knew how to arouse men by singing in soprano, not the martial arts skills I'd have liked to learn, and not sure if I ever found it useful, but I knew how it went, really this constitutes a form of grievance against Circe, whose tastes in entertainment served to nullify me instead of thrill me. Penelope asked me that age old question you might hear sometimes after you've indulged an article in a magazine whose theme is entirely alien to you, and learned of things too deep for the uninitiated. She said:

"What's that look all about?"

to which there is only one response:

"Nothing - nevermind. Is there something you need?"

"Sure. Circe wants my blood. She's some kind of evil Grandmother vampire, and I feel kinda sick learning about it." Penelope looked nauseated.

"It's like the weirdest medical check-up. Would a stool sample be less gross?" I asked her.

Penelope then threw up and I regretted my effort to help her out.

"I wish I could talk to Mom about this stuff, like Persephone got to. It's not fair, Dad. Why'd you give me magic? It's so gross!" Penelope smeared something onto the emerald and I wished I could throw up too, but the stasis of the emerald made me feel like I would be turned inside out if I did.

"Sorry, I ruined your childhood. I wish there was some way I could go back and make it all fun and sweet and all that. Wish I knew how that would even go." I said slowly, with sincerity.

"It's fine. I just hate being, I don't know, everything feels gross and awkward. I hate it." Penelope's seeming maturity and wisdom was gone while she threw her little tantrum. I just observed, secretly enjoying watching my child act like a child for a change.

When she was done, half her notebooks and her book of shadows were shreds being bundled together into a smoldering wastebasket. Her mother burst into the room dramatically and I loved how it went down. Heidi straight up grabbed her teenage daughter and shook her like she was a possessed toddler that had just started a trash fire in her bedroom.

I loved every second of it- and if you know of so many of my adventures and compare that moment to the horrors I've witnessed far from home - you realize why I'd appreciate some home-brewed trouble. Just good wholesome family stuff.

It ended with the fire extinguisher and mother and daughter shrieking every cuss word they could think of at each other at point-blank range. And then they were holding each other and sobbing in the hallway, foam and burnt paper in their hair. Good times.

When Penelope finally picked me up from the glare of Circe's star, I was actually relieved.

"Have you learned anything useful about Grandma? I miss having you in my pocket." Penelope whispered to the emerald when she was supposed to be studying.

"Not really." I stated blankly, shoving the memories of so many of Circe's beautiful male lovers from my mind.

"I have learned of a creature named Khurl, kept prisoner in a hut in the woods by an evil woman named Beatrice Monica. Circe has charged me with setting Khurl free, this very night, to prove my valor to the creatures of these woods, and to inflict the lightest justice by the warrant of freedom." Penelope told me.

"Sounds about right. We need someone who is willing to die. Don't ask me how it works, but this a magical adventure, and in this magic, there is a story unfolding, a tragic story. Khurl can only be set free by her Martyr. Someone must go with her, hand in hand, to whatever freedom Circe has in mind. Daughter, I urge you to find a way out that does not follow this path. You will be involved in destroying the last of a magical species. There will be consequences, and you will be the target of those consequences." I said.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Is there something else you'd like to mention?" Penelope asked me.

"I once murdered a man to protect Khurl."

"Would you murder me?" Penelope asked.

"No."

"So, this man you murdered, he gets to die, but I get to live. Father, you are not fair." Penelope's eyes watered a little.

"He was long gone already when I killed him. Khurl had fed on him more-than-once." I objected. "And I have paid for what I did to him. Since that day I have not known any kind of peace or contentment, always I am called upon for the most terrible tasks, the worst things to see and to know about. I have not gone my way unpunished - and murdering him was a mistake. I should have found another way. I am sorry."

"I forgive you." Penelope cried. She then covered up the emerald and I sat there for a long time in the darkness. When she unveiled me she stared down at me for a long time. I saw some grey in her hair, a disturbing shade to see in the hair of a child. She looked a little older, perhaps a few weeks or months had gone by. I'd lost all sense of time, as I sat in the echo of that conversation.

"Have you forgiven me?" I asked weakly.

"Sure." Penelope nodded. "I just want to tell you that Samual Monica is dead. He was a very brave man, a very good father, a noble husband to Beatrice. In some ways, Dad, he was a better man than you. I just want you to know that about him. You took his son, and he's a better man than you are."

Then back to darkness for a long time.

It is then that Cory would land on the emerald and speak in our hybrid tongue, between Corvin and the words of mine. He'd start by saying "These words are my own:" - and then he'd tell me the headlines, or tell me a story. He'd gotten good at telling stories, and kept me sane, or content, in those moments when his one-sided dialogue kept me company.

Penelope had many adventures. She battled a poison-throwing witch in the form of Beatrice Monica, getting a tiny scar on her cheek in the shape of a star from glass shrapnel. She freed Khurl from imprisonment, and from life, by joining her hand to that of Samual Monica, who volunteered to play the role of the Martyr. Apparently, I was chosen for this role and failed to meet her at the altar. When this was all done, Penelope returned many sacred jewels to their sockets, all ones I had stolen. The cats gave her their eyes as a reward, and she was taught Felidaen the old-fashioned way, by a cat that could speak Spanish, so she first had to learn Spanish, and then Felidaen - one word at a time. She made a skeleton key of green gold, melting her mother's silverware into the electrum. She named it after me, but not in a nice way.

This she offered as a gift to Prince Savriel of the Folk of the Shaded places, in exchange for her soul's song. Prince Savriel copied her key and returned it and instead asked her if she would consider his service to her in the next life, as a soulmate. I had never imagined the Folk of the Shaded places were so sentimental, but I should have, having seen their model of God's Will. The place Detective Winters and I had intruded on, that beautiful resonance, it was the sweetest sound kept as an eternal flame, a reminder that God is good. Those demons were not the sort that disobeyed their Creator willfully, they were simply ugly.

My daughter did not care how ugly they were. She accepted the betrothal to Prince Savriel, promising she would give him a new name by the end of our aeon. This alliance came with the condition that the Folk of the Shaded Places would not harm humans, although they would still be allowed to eat them. Prince Savriel asked if it was permissible for his people to cocoon humans, if there was war, and to this my daughter said it would be okay to cocoon humans if there was a war.

Then the Fen and the Fell, fearing that an alliance between Circe and the Folk of the Shaded places, and cats and fey folk, and the Choir, did sue for a contract of peace. They brought ten thousand sunflowers and planted them in the forest to wilt. My daughter went out to them and declared herself their queen. Without the termagant to challenge her, the Fen and the Fell bowed down. Her first order was that the sunflowers would be returned to their home, in the lands of the Fen and the Fell. She then told them to bring to her the stone of foxfire, for apparently she had an exchange for their jewel, to one I had stolen. With her own gemstone from them, she returned theirs and told them to sleep for a while. The Fen and the Fell obeyed, learning how to slumber in long hibernations while their gardens began to look beautiful.

Stormcrow had brought his people there and they had taught the scarecrows how to while away the hours. They sang a long and complicated song. The queen of the Fen and the Fell was very young and bright and she danced along the flowery bowers, singing rain to that dry old dustbowl. When the clouds the color of every paint mixed together separated, those clouds became all the colors of the rainbow, clean again.

Then, the furthest miracle yet. Where that old field I'd stared at from my wheelchair for so long stood, now a meadow. A sort of Glade on earth, where rusted hulk of motor vehicles and burnt corpses of blasted apart mech armor lay slain, now green. A verdant ruins, a sort of Second Dawn.

And why a miracle, not just an image of nature triumphantly returning in that certain shade of green? This language - I am talking about the color light green and subract ten to the left of that. Not the green you are thinking yet, lower it by three from there, that's the exact shade. It's not green anymore, not green the way pink is not 'light red'. It is a living color now. That is the color Green. Once you've seen it you'll know what I mean. Spring Green I've heard it called. I like that name, and a name I mean, for this color is an intelligence, a lifeform, a chemical, a memory. It is the color of the Fourth Day - Dawn.

I had a lot of time to realize the significance of all these adventures, even if they were all just fictions invented by my consulate crow.

When I was again free from solitude Penelope had changed yet again. At least a year older, although it was difficult to be sure, because she was aging quickly as she grew in both mind and body at once. There was coldness between us, a distance.

At first it was almost worse than being alone for so long in the emerald, but I eventually grew accustomed to how she treated me from then on. I was a source of knowledge, I was a confessional, I was an image of her father. Aside from that, I was merely an emerald in her pocket, and somehow she kept me as her keeper, a solid impression of the mission we had started, for far did we go, from the days when we thought we could defeat Circe.

None of it pained me or Penelope, for we both remembered when we had known that ancient kind of love. It's not a love Circe comprehended, she couldn't know that beneath all the suffering she caused us, there was a layer of family-bond that she knew nothing about.

No matter what we said to each other, it always meant:

"I love you."