Abigail listened to the sounds of her parents talking through their thin bedroom walls.

“I can not believe that they are gone,” her mother said in a numb voice. She had never heard her use that tone before. Abi knew something horrible had happened, but she had no clue what it was. She scrunched up her face in thought, when she heard her parent’s footsteps reverberating through the halls. She picked up her skirts and ran down the corridor, trying to muffle the loud clanking of her shoes against the floor. She went into her bedroom and held the door open slightly, just enough so that she could see her father rubbing her mother’s back, her tears leaving tracks down her face.

She could not watch anymore, so she closed her door as quietly as possible, and sat down on her bed. Abi looked across the room at her vanity mirror, and stared at her reflection. One eye of midnight blue, and one of emerald green. Her wavy, auburn hair that reached past her tailbone, and thin white lines tracing the left side of her face. She ran her index finger along the pattern, finding the shapes of small leaves and flowers joined together by a community of vines. Most children did not look like her, but she never really minded. It just meant that she and her family were unique.

Abigail assumed that there would be a ceremony tonight. The fairy populace celebrated almost everything. Life and death, the changing of seasons, and many other strange holiday-like things. Each type of ceremony was very different from the others, but all were happy and lively. Abi was only half fairy, but she still counted as one and was invited because she had fairy blood. Her father was only allowed because of his marriage to a fairy, also.

She was broken out of her reverie by a knock on her bedroom door.

“Come in,” she said, flattening her dress with the palms of her hands.

Her father cracked open the door and peeked his head inside.

“Abi,” he said, with a heavy-hearted expression plastered across his face, “Prepare your ceremony dress, it is starting in an hour.”

“Yes sir,” she answered, standing up and opening her closet to see the array of fabrics and tints.

He nodded, shut the door, and walked away as Abigail picked out her ceremony dress and put it on. The fairy women always wore light, easy-to-move-in dresses that represented their elements. The elements were nature, air, fire, and water. Because Abi and her mother’s element was nature, their dresses were light brown with hand sewn vines and flowers lining the entirety of the dress, bringing leaf greens and blood reds over the monotone shade. They were not as modest as the humans dresses, because they only reached their knees, but fairies did not care much about modesty.

Abigail left her room and started making her way downstairs, and then met her parents in the living area. They walked out of their house and went down to the riverbed where they always held the ceremonies. There were already a lot of fairies gathered under the canopy of trees. Abi had always loved the meeting place, especially in autumn, like it was now. She loved the crisp red, orange, and yellow leaves twisting through the air like flames. The small drops of water falling off of the branches from the rain early this morning. The flowers that lined the bottoms of the tree trunks, bringing an array of color to the autumnal chroma of the forest. You can tell that I am half nature fairy, she thought.

They started walking down to their table, her mother wiping her tearful eyes every now and then. They sat down and waited for Rune to begin the ceremony. Most fairies had very mystical names, at least according to the humans, but Abi had always thought they were normal, and that her name was strange. Her mother and father had agreed that if the child were a girl, he shall choose the name, and if it was to be a boy, she would decide. So, when the baby was born and was announced as a girl, she was named Abigail. And because her father had a human family, she became one of the only fairies, or half-fairy in her case, to have a human name.

Rune cleared his throat from his platform, and everyone’s head swiveled to face him as he spoke.

“As we all know, we lost Thalia and Oriel early this morning under some unfortunate and strange circumstances,” he announced, which caused many attendants to release sobs, most of them stifled by their hands.

“But, we all know that these inspirational and generous fairies would not want us to grieve over their passings, so we shall not. We-”, his sentence was cut off by an audience member coughing aggressively.

Everyone twisted in their seats to see Marevien on his knees, arms crossed across his stomach as if he’s trying to hold his body together. Everyone raced over to his side, asking what was wrong, but he could not speak, could not breathe. The coughs were shaking his entire self as if there was an earthquake only he could feel. Then, something strange, stranger than the coughing fit by far. A blue liquid came pouring out of his mouth. It looked like a puddle that held the sky in its arms.

But then, every fairy started coughing. The blue liquid pouring out of their throats. One by one, every fairy stopped coughing. When Abi finished, she felt different. She reached up to wipe her mouth, and froze. The pattern that used to be on her face was gone. She scrambled over to the river and stared at her reflection. Her eyes were both blue, neither of them green

She was human

They were all human.