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Bones.

An enormous skull lay discarded on the earth, weeds curling around it and flowers poking out from its eye sockets. It was bigger than anything I had ever seen before, most certainly not belonging to any creature that existed in the human world.

“Dinosauria,” Morgoya said, gesturing to the skeletal remains strewn across the land with a flippant wave of her slim-fingered hand.

From a distance, I had assumed the rock formations had been small and plentiful, and I was horribly wrong. There were actually very few bones, but each of them were impossibly huge. One in particular caught my attention—an enormous spine, half sunken into the soil, with a wide tailbone and broken ribs.

“Dinosaurs?” I repeated incredulously.

“Whatever you want to call them. We called them land-dragons.”

My breath thinned in my lungs. “So they were…real? And they’re extinct here, too?”

“Everything is real, Aura.” She gave me a sharp look. “People don’t just make things up. The sky-dragons hunted them into extinction.”

Land-dragons.

Sky-dragons.

Dinosaurs.

It would have sent me into a panic if I hadn’t already seen stranger things.

Morgoya continued down to the sand, making her way precariously close to the water as I paused at the edge of the grass, studying the remains of a skeleton almost as large as a car. It had horns and an enormous plate of bone fanning out around its skull, and I was mesmerised by—

“Do you want to hear about the Gift War, or do you have an interest in palaeontology that takes precedence over current affairs?” the High Lady sang out to me, her voice as sweet as the wind.

Rolling my eyes, I gave the dinosaur bones another moment of awe before I turned and trudged down the slope towards the small beach.

The sand was as soft as silk, giving out beneath my weight, working its way into my shoes and between my toes before I’d even caught up to Morgoya. She removed her heels and sat down with her hands buried in the sand behind her.

“Aren’t you worried about the Merfolk?”

She squinted up at me, though the sky was still a melancholy grey. It made the beach look as white as death, and the ocean almost as deadly as a black hole. The air was warm, however. As warm as the High King of Faerie, and carrying his wild scent of burning pyres and grass fires.

“They don’t come into the lochs,” she assured me, pulling a hand back to pat the space beside her. “We have iron nets to keep them out.”

Lowering myself to sit, I made sure to tuck the skirt of my dress in tightly and keep my legs straight and flat against the sand. “That’s a little barbaric, isn’t it?”

The High Lady snickered. “We learned from the Dragon War not to engage in futile territory battles with others of our kind. The Queen of the Underworld granted us permission to put up iron nets in two inlets—one north and one south—to give us free and safe use of them, in exchange for allowing her people an unrivalled claim to the ocean. That means that any creature who goes out there, beyond the nets, is fair game. And our people can come here, or travel north, if they wish to reacquaint themselves with the sea.”

I picked up a handful of sand and let it fall through my fingers. “Underworld?”

“Under our world,” she clarified simply.

My eyes travelled upwards to the gloomy skies. “Is there an Aboveworld?”

Morgoya followed my gaze. “There was.” Her tone became sad. “We don’t think that it survived the Dragon War.”

Stiffening against a shudder, I looked back towards the loch. The mountainsides were bathed in shadows and fog, with deep purple and green smeared over the ridges like an oil painting. If I squinted into the distance, I could just make out two low-lying ledges on either side of the bend, where it was likely that the nets had been lowered into the ocean.

“You wanted to know about the Gift War,” Morgoya reminded me. “You won’t remember it this way, but it was the birth of your world.”

My world is the human world, I thought, and gave her a snide look.

“It happened about three hundred years ago,” she went on heedlessly. “Faerie had been living in an era of peace and prosperity after the end of the Dragon War, which we’d stayed out of by order of the last High King, and the High King we know now had only recently been crowned. The death of land-dragons weighed heavily on him, and he made an overnight decision within the first year of his reign to outlaw slavery.

“It wasn’t the wrong decision,” she added quickly, “but he went about it the wrong way. He gave no warning and he wasn’t delicate about it either, so many of our kind were quick to anger. They were forced to obey by his power, and the faeries were freed. The term we used—the one starting with the letter L—was then abolished. He hexed it, so even trying to say it scalds our tongues. It left many people disgruntled with him, so when strange things started happening, it didn’t take much for the hysteria to build and blame to be laid.”