Our next class was Surviving Fairytales with Yuba.
"All aboard!" Yuba called.
Yuba handed me a Flowerground pass. I opened the top of an ordinary blue pumpkin like a teapot, revealing a thin caterpillar in a violet velvet tuxedo and matching top hat, floating in a swirl of pastel colours.
I slipped inside and I plunged through dazzling pinks, blues, yellow, as vines lashed and fastened around me like safety belts. The vines carried me into a blinding tunnel of mist and hooked me onto something that kept me moving while my feet dangled from the ivy harness. The mist slowly cleared and revealed an underground transport system, big as a whole village, made entirely of luminescent plants. Dangling passengers hung on to vine straps attached to glowing different-coloured tree trunks covered in matching flowers.
The vines sprouted us one by one in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was a graveyard, headstones swept over the hills. I wrapped my arms around myself to try and warm myself up, the air was humid and cold.
"In a few weeks you will each be unlocked to perform spells," said the gnome to excited titters. "But spells are no substitute for survival skills. Meerworms live near graves and can keep you alive when food is scarce. Today you'll be finding and eating them!"
"Off you go! Teams of two!" the gnome said. "Whichever team eats the most meerworms wins the challenge!"
Tedros came up next to me. "Want to be partners?" he smiled.
I nodded, still trembling from the cold.
"Here, take my jacket."
"Itsss okayyyy"
He shook his head and wrapped his jacket around me anyways.
We started looking for meerworms when I noticed a figure in the distance, silhouetted atop a hill. It was a massive giant, with a long black beard, thick dreadlocks, and midnight-blue skin. He wore only a small brown loincloth as he dug a row of graves.
"Does it all himself, the Crypt Keeper," I could hear Dot say to Sophie. "That's why there's such a backlog."
I followed my eyes to a two-mile line of bodies and coffins behind the Crypt Keeper, waiting for burial. Immediately I could see the difference between the Nevers' dark stone coffins and the Evers' coffins made of glass and gold. But there were also some bodies without caskets, just lying untended on the hill slope beneath circling vultures.
It was the same pattern on every hill and valley. Evers buried together with twin headstones- boy and girl, man and wife, prince and princess, together in life and in death. Nevers buried all alone.
"Hey, what's on your mind?" Tedros asked.
"Oh it's nothing."
"Didn't look like nothing, you were in your own little world for a second."
"I was just thinking, about something I read in a book. It's nothing really."
"Oh okay, if you say so."
While we were collecting and eating meerworms, which actually didn't taste that bad if you just imagined it was chocolate, I couldn't stop thinking of Professor Sader's book. I needed to read more.
As class ended, we were strapped in by vines once again in the Flowerground to get back to school. I handed Tredos' jacket back to him and dashed back to my room. Dumping all of my books on my bed, I dug through them to find his book.
I picked up the the silver silk lined book and flipped the pages to chapter 16. My fingers swept over the lifted dots, and the ghostly images appeared.
"Chapter Sixteen: The Lost Princess." Sader's voice boomed.
YOU ARE READING
Siren Song || Tedros x Reader
Fanfiction''Of all the tales in all the kingdoms in all the Woods, you had to walk into mine.'' -Tedros Every four years, two are taken. No one knows where they go, but some think it's to a magical school beyond the woods, where fairytale princes and princess...
