The weave was fresh out of the loom and Clelia was already about to use it. She had spent the whole afternoon working on the cloth she held in her hands. All that work, she thought, for such a simple spell. No wonder she was the black sheep of the family: any of her sisters and cousins would have been able to do much better in much less time. No matter, though, she was now on her own and there were no other fairies around to be compared to.

She carefully placed the weave inside of a wooden frame she had hung to the wall for that purpose. She summoned her wand, then she pulled a small portion of a thread from the weave she just had completed, and finally she embedded the thread inside the wand with a simple "push". After making sure there was no sound coming from outside, she sneaked out of the room her husband had dedicated to her, right next to his study.

She shuffled her feet through the corridor, making sure not to hit any obstacles on her way. Despite the fact that the environment was completely new to her, she moved in the darkness with ease. She even avoided one squeaky step on the staircase while on her way down.

As she raised her hand to grab on the door handle, a familiar voice hissed, "Where are you going so late at night?"

"Horatius!" gasped she, "What are you doing here?"

"It is my task to watch over you, so that's what I intend to do. Be grateful for the honour of having such a majestic guardian! Still, you haven't answered my question yet."

Massaging the back of her neck, Clelia whispered back, "It's an old habit of mine: I like to wander around at night."

"It is dangerous for a young girl like you to go gallivanting all about the place all alone, you know? You could meet all sorts of dangers, especially at night."

Impassive, she pressed on. "Like?"

"Like thieves, and all other sorts of wrongdoers and ne'er-do-wells."

"Please," she dismissed him, "I'm a fairy. I have my wand and my magic, I doubt any human could pose a serious threat to me. If you're so worried, why don't you come with me? I enjoyed your presence earlier."

I have just the right spell ready, she thought, in case there's any danger, fresh from the loom too. It took her a while to prepare a spell, longer than it probably should, but, once it was ready, casting it was just a matter of waving her wand while spouting some intimidating jibber-jabber, and that's something even a weakling like her could easily pull off.

Grumbling to himself, Horatius slithered towards her. "Fine, your magnificent guardian accepts to come with you. Do you still have that comfy palanquin you carried me around in earlier? It was quite the regal ride."

She softly chuckled. "I'm sorry, no palanquin this time. You can wrap yourself around my neck and shoulders, if you promise not to choke me."

Despite the late hour, the light from the stars in the sky, together with the pale lines connecting them together in an elegant celestial tapestry of constellations, made it easier than expected to meander through the village. Clelia's new glasses helped more than she imagined too.

Horatius had been quiet for most of the time of their aimless stroll, which Clelia was grateful for. Not that she didn't enjoy the conversation with him, but she had an ulterior motive, aside from just old habits, to be wandering around at night, and chit-chatting would distract her from it. For that night, her most important objective was to familiarise with the layout of the village, including the smaller alleys and lanes.

When the clock tower stroke the first hour past midnight, Clelia decided it was time to finally call it a night. She was in no hurry, after all: she didn't imagine that her plan to run away would come to fruition before she had a few weeks to get fully accustomed to her surroundings.

A quiet crash caught her attention while she was on the verge of reaching the entrance to her new house.

"Did you hear that?" she whispered.

The little snake nodded. "It came from the back. You don't worry about it, I'll go and take a look myself."

Horatius uncoiled from around her neck and shoulders and slithered inside the grass of the small garden.

She entered the house while summoning her wand. It's not like the space inside was huge, so, even if she didn't go out of her way to find a potential intruder, if an intruder was even there to begin with, she was likely to meet them. Under the cover of darkness, she smirked mischievously. If some creature of the night really did break in, perhaps she could have a little fun at their expenses.

Silence. People tended to associate it with quiet, and most of the time it would be considered soothing. However, when suspecting the presence of malicious or threatening actors, like a predator, or wicked faerie, like dark dwarves, and gremlins, and ghosts, silence could be scary.

Darkness. Most people tended to avoid darkness, many even feared it. Clelia understood why that would be the case, as it shut off most people's primary sense, that of sight. She, however, could never be reliant on it, because of her poor eyesight, so she had always been strangely comfortable in the shadows.

The unmistakeable creak of rusty hinges opening broke the silence. With the lightness of a prowling owl, Clelia traversed the dining room and approached the pantry, where the sound had come from. She stopped just short of entering the kitchen, listening to what was happening from a closer position. A subdued rustling, sometimes interrupted by louder but still tiny noises, like the clink of a glass jar or the shuffling of some small wooden container, came from inside.

The fairy didn't have many spells ready to use, but she figured that two of them would be enough. The first one would probably give a good fright to the burglar anyway, possibly leading them to run away with no further conflict, but even in a worst case scenario she still had the second one, the one she had finished weaving right before leaving the house. But, seeing the kind of effect she had on the lutin, she fully expected whatever sprite had made the poor choice of breaking into her house to not put up any serious fight.

Clelia stepped into the kitchen, taking slow and deep breaths to wipe the giddy smile of anticipation from her face.

"Halt!" she ordered, right as her spell activated with a flash, causing a powerful light to shine from behind her.

"Who dares to break into my home?" she continued, trying to ape the authoritative voice she knew her sisters would have used in that same circumstance.

The intruder froze, shielding their eyes from the sudden light with a hand. Clelia hesitated for a moment, since the intruder was larger than she expected. It appeared to be a human girl, roughly the same age as her, dressed in overalls, with messy short brown hair and dirt smeared on her face and hands.

A glass jar hit Clelia on the forehead with astounding precision, and the girl who had thrown it escaped before the fairy's hat, knocked over by the whole ordeal, had time to hit the ground. A blinding pulsating pain caused Clelia to stumble backwards and hit the door frame with her back, almost making her lose balance, but she managed to stay on her feet by leaning against the wall with her shoulder. Raising her left hand to massage the sore spot on her forehead, she accidentally touched a crack in the lens of her glasses. Her breath, already broken by groans of pain, became even more laboured as she clenched her fist around her wand and heat rushed through her face.

She let go on the wand, which merged back into her dress, and, with trembling fingers, she carefully took off her glasses. She couldn't see the extent of the damage, and not just because of her natural eyesight, mostly because her light spell was already fading away. She gently caressed the lenses with her thumbs: one was intact, the other had several cracks in it.

"Aha! You intruded upon the wrong dwelling, mortal, for I am… uh, where did the interloper go?" blustered Horatius, slithering into the kitchen.

Clelia sighed.

A knock on the door interrupted her line of thought as she dispassionately worked on her loom, but her hands and feet never stopped moving.

"Clelia?" called Damian's voice, "Is everything alright? I haven't seen you come out or eat all day."

She stayed silent, but shot a glance towards the small plate with still a few crumbs from when one of the lutin, she didn't bother to remember which, brought her some food, around the time the clock tower struck midday. That, unfortunately, caused her eyes to wander onto a pile of ripped silky rags. She sighed and, controlling her breath, tried to go back to a state of complete focus.

The knocking on the door became more insistent. "Clelia? We need to leave soon. Remember? I told you yesterday at dinner and then tried to remind you all day. Is something wrong?"

She finally stopped the loom. "I'm fine, I just… wanted to catch up on some work I've been skipping during the preparations for the wedding. Can't you… tell them I'm sick?"

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

The very idea of admitting to her human husband that she had been assaulted by another human made her shoulders cramp up. To cover up the event, she had to use up on the broken window the only repairing spell she had (thankfully, the jar that hit her on the head didn't break), meaning she had been unable to repair the glasses he had gifted her. The ever growing pile of failed attempts to make a new repairing spell only solidified her unwillingness to exit the room and speak to him. And the pile of failures wasn't the only thing that didn't show any intention to stop growing: the red and purple bump above her left eye was something she was currently unable to address.

"Come on, Clelia. I know she didn't exactly leave a… great impression on you, but aunt Lucia's pre-dinner sundowners are important because all sorts of business partners show up to them, and it will be weird if I make an appearance without my newly-wed wife right after our wedding. You're weaving something, right? You can take a pause, your work will be there waiting for you when we come back."

Without moving from her seat, she grabbed and squeezed the hem of her skirt. What to do? She knew that, for Damian and his family, that whole marriage thing had been done for business, so business-related events weren't something she could afford to take lightly. Keeping up appearances, at least until she had worked out a plan to run away, was paramount. But, on the other hand, going with him created a bunch of issues too. For one, the bump on her forehead was not an easy thing to hide. More importantly, she wasn't sure what Damian's reaction would be if she showed up without her glasses, his wedding present to her, or, even worse, if he discovered she had allowed them to break so soon after he gifted them to her. No matter how she looked at it, she couldn't see a way to save face in that situation.

"…So? Can you come out please?" Damian urged from the other side of the door.

Frantically scanning the room around her for any solution, she stammered, "Uuuh… give me a minute, please."

Seeing a dark blur in one corner, Clelia remembered there still was one bag that she had yet to unpack. She sprung on her feet, grabbed it, and opened it with the intention of rifling through it, in the off-chance that she might find something useful.

Inside, there was a whole mound of pieces of cloth she didn't recognise. That was supposed to be full to the brim with previous failed attempts at making spells, which she could dismantle and recycle, but what she found instead were well crafted and fully realised spells. The quality of the weave was impressive, it was above average craftsmanship even for the standards of the Arania gens. She took one out and unfolded it on the ground. It was a beautiful piece of weaved geometries with the colours of a peaceful summer night. That definitely was not her work. She took another one, which looked like a tapestry of red skies with black stars and constellations. It took her a few moments to identify them, but eventually she recognised the former as an illusion spell and the latter as some kind of curse, probably one that doomed the unfortunate target to a life of misfortune and failure.

Conscious of the fact that Damian was waiting for her, she knew she did not have the time to search those spells one by one to see what each of them did, so instead she embedded a tiny thread of both weaves into her wand and immediately used one.

Even through the nasty Y shaped crack in her left lens, Clelia couldn't help but be impressed by the magnificent red and pink colours the sky was assuming as the sun approached the distant mountaintops that covered the horizon. The illusion spell she used covered up the crack, as well as the bump on her forehead, for any external observer, but it did nothing from her own perspective. The bump still pulsated with pain too. At least she still was able to clearly see from the right eye, she tried to console herself.

Walking towards a sizeable farmhouse complex just outside the village, Clelia alternated gawking at the pretty sky above and staring down at her own feet, sometimes glancing at Damian's fashionable leather boots. A certain tightness in her chest made her a little nauseous as she paced forwards, her right arm linked together with Damian's left. She wished he would say something, anything, to distract her from the awkward sensation of the inside of her elbow becoming slightly sweaty beneath the sleeve due to her body heat and his meeting and intensifying each other. But he marched on in silence.

Clelia concealed a sigh by slowly breathing out of her nose. Even though her mind had been occupied by other things in the past two days, she had noticed how different he had been acting after the wedding day was over. Before and during the reception, he had been kind and gallant, if a little detached, which was understandable given the fact that they barely knew each other. But, from the very first conversation they had at breakfast the day prior, she had felt more and more some kind of wall building up between them. The fact that she had been actively avoiding him for the entire day certainly didn't help, but even before that he had been acting weird. It stung a little.

The main building of the complex resembled more a mansion than a farmhouse, but a lot lower than the tall walls and towers that she was used to. Several black carriages carried by beautiful horses waited near the entrance while elegant people came out from them. Clelia tried her best not to laugh at the ridiculously tall cylindrical hats that some of the men wore. The men, she noticed, all wore fairly similar dark getups, while no two women had the same outfit. In hindsight, the same could have been said about the guests at their wedding reception, but she hadn't paid attention back then. How odd. She knew that, unlike in fairy society, males were the dominant sex, so she expected them to have the same variety in expression as female fairies. Instead, they all dressed similar.

Some servants led them inside, but, before she even got a good look at the interior, they made them exit again in the inner courtyard, where small tables with no chairs around them sat in the shadow of fancy pavilions. On top of the tables lay plates with small snacks and tiny drinks. Everyone seemed to be free to help themselves to whatever they found on those tables.

"Look closely," Damian finally said to her, "this is the kind of environment where human high society gathers. Making a good impression here can make or break someone's career."

Before she could answer, Clelia spotted aunt Lucia, wearing a different dress than she had at the wedding reception, but still in red. The hat, too, was different, but still sported extremely long plumage. The fairy hoped that their host would be too busy to pay a lot of attention to her.

"Well," she finally responded, "I… uh… I hope I can help you make a good impression, then."

"Yeah," he dryly acknowledged her. He then shook his head, cleared his throat, and relaxed his gaze somewhat, finally meeting her eyes. "I'm sure you'll be fine. Just try not to get bored to death: I'm pretty sure that nobody really enjoys these events, they only participate because not doing so may mean getting left behind."

In the past two days, he had seemed like a completely different person from the handsome young man that had danced with her in her wedding gown, but the rough smile he gave her in that moment reminded her of that kind stranger she had married. It wasn't quite enough to make her heart skip a beat, but it did make him look a lot cuter.

Damian's warning proved to be prophetic. By Clelia's estimation, only about one word every hundred that was spoken in that place was more than meaningless pleasantries exchanged with hollow politeness. For the most part, she just needed to smile, introduce herself to people whose name's memory lasted in her mind about as long as the next word they spoke to her, and avoid showing the utter depth of her boredom. The topic of her being a fairy came up quite often, but it never got past the surface level.

Eventually, she excused herself for a moment with the pretext of getting something to drink and booked it towards the tables. She grabbed a glass of something that smelled like oranges and downed it with no hesitation. When she loudly gasped after finishing her drink, the thought of her tutor, back home, scolding her for her inelegance, caused her to shrink.

When she left the empty glass on the table, a servant scooped it up and carried it away. That's when she noticed that a significant number of servants had been deployed for the event, all of them dressed elegantly, but in such a way that they wouldn't stand out when compared to the guests. Watching them in motion, gathering empty plates and glasses, carrying new ones from the kitchens, cleaning up if some of the guests accidentally dropped something, all of it was way more interesting than the actual event.

After she ate the last canapé from one of the plates on the nearest table, a scrawny olive-skinned servant with short brown hair approached her to take the now empty plate. When their eyes met, both of them froze.

"You!" Clelia scowled.

The thief from the prior night squeaked, "I, uh… whatever do you need from me, Milady?"

The fairy didn't answer immediately. If she was to uphold the teachings of her family, what she had gone through that night was to be considered a major offence, especially coming from a lowly human. Letting such offence go unpunished would tarnish their name and make them look weak in front of all other faerie. Not even thinking about it, she controlled her breath, causing it to become calm and regular. The principle of the "tide". Breathe in, she "pulled". Breathe out, she "pushed". The air visibly trembled around her. The human girl in front of her staggered backwards, as if hit by a modest push, her eyes open wide with fear.

The wand had appeared in her hand, but she didn't raise it. If Lausenna the fay, famously powerful fairy, head of a family notorious for their proficiency with terrible curses, and also Clelia's mother, had been in Clelia's spot, she would have raised her wand to the heavens, delivered a scalding speech about needing to correct disrespect and putting the one responsible in their place, then she would have cast the nastiest curse she currently had embedded in her wand, nipping any doubt of her weakness before it could even become a bud. Clelia too now had a curse embedded in her wand, and her hand itched with the temptation to use it.

Before she took any noticeable action, however, she thought of the kind of scene she would be causing by casting a curse on that servant girl. For one, she would have to admit to having been assaulted, which nobody, aside from her and her assaulter, knew about. More importantly, though…

"Clelia, so good to see you here!" A familiar voice singsonged.

The fairy put on the best smile she could muster in those circumstances. "Aunt Lucia, such a pleasure."

The towering woman approached the two girls from the side, in such a way that, if she wanted to, she could embrace both with her ashen arms. "My dearest niece-in-law, why ever would you need to entertain yourself with this little monkey here instead of our eminent guests? Is she causing you some trouble?"

Behind that sickly sweet smile, Clelia perceived a kind of threat not unlike that of her own mother. From how pale her face had become, she could see that the other girl was painfully aware of that threat too.

Clelia deliberately widened her smile, dismissing her wand while concealing it from Aunt Lucia's sharp eyes. "On the contrary, I was complimenting her on the celerity of her service. I'm very impressed with the efficiency of your servitude. I'm sure my mother would be as well, and trust me, that's no small thing."

The servant girl's mouth went agape with a silent gasp. She quickly shook her head, as if to recover from being hit on the nose. "Thank you, Milady, I don't deserve such praise."

Aunt Lucia gave the little servant a clip behind the ear. "You're right, you certainly don't. And don't speak unless requested to. Go back to the kitchen immediately!"

The thief girl bowed to both of them, quickly mouthed a "thank you" to Clelia, then scurried off to the kitchen.

"Dear, sweetie, don't encourage her," piped Aunt Lucia, "she's a bit of a problem child and still needs to be properly whipped into shape. More importantly, where is my dearest nephew? I'm sure you came with him."

While dealing with the imposing woman, Clelia felt somewhat relieved. It was as if a weight she had been carrying around all day had been lifted all of a sudden, the weight of what had happened that previous night. Why, though, would she feel relieved? Her forehead still hurt a little, her glasses were still broken, and the one responsible for it had gotten away with it. Why when she had been on the verge of delivering her punishment the weight had felt even stronger, and why renouncing her revenge made it go away? That went against everything she had ever been taught.