Vocaloid Tales: The Nutcracker

Chapter 7: The Fairy Tale

The stars twinkled around her, their unshifting locations forming into a great massive map. For thousands of years, these stars were her home, their presence an unchanging comfort to her. Yet now they were simply an impediment to her – an unreadable enigma keeping the secrets she needed to return to the world below again.

The difficulty of her task was trying to use that map to determine the most likely fate of one specific person. Fate was not as unchangeable as these stars, but it had paths of probability she could work with. Divining down to a single soul amongst the multitudes of others was the hard part.

She walked along the starry road in white dancing slippers, her short, soft dress and sheer knee-length tutu so similar to the one she wore in her brief time pretending to be a mortal and a ballerina... how she longed for the freedom of her stage again...

She'd been warned before about trying to use the stars in such a manner. One person's fate could not be seen so easily, not when so many other fates intersected it. She'd made this mistake once already – in scrying the fate of a princess, she'd failed to foresee consequences for the one who tried to save her.

Now it was this poor soul she tried to find answers for. There was no magic she knew of that could be permanent. There was simply a serious of steps she needed to search for that lead to him being freed of it. The direction of his fate was not fixed, but a curse's solution was – even if it was nearly unreachable.

"Luka..."

She turned her head to see a woman with blue hair, a white corset and short skirt, white gloves, and long white boots. "You still haven't given up on saving the Nutcracker?"

The faerie's eyes turned back to the stars. "No."

She saw no need to explain herself. Besides, she couldn't exactly answer why she had such an obsession in the first place.

The white diamond in the other girl's hair sparkled much like the stars above them. "You shouldn't blame yourself for what happens to the mortals. We aren't meant to be like them. That's why we live here."

"The actions of mortals have consequences... as does our refusal to take responsibility."

She had brought them both to this world, and in spite of so many happy times, they'd also suffered immeasurable pain.

"That man is my responsibility."

"I thought we were simply meant to guide them..." the other fairy said, "Give them a path to this world and let them sort out what they'll do."

Certainly that was her philosophy as well... in the past. Her emotions cloaked, her face a stoic mask. But after all that she had seen... she couldn't keep simply observing the world as if it wasn't part of her. As if she bore no responsibility for the actions of others.

"Why do you so favor that toymaker anyway?"

She remained silent. She still didn't understand how to explain these emotions she felt around him. Why he made her act so peculiar, why she so eagerly engaged in physical intimacy with him, and why their separation made her feel so empty. She'd never experienced it before, and sometimes it frightened her as much as it thrilled her. None of her kin had experienced this... as far as she knew.

This was something he would understand.

But her last failure had hurt him beyond imagination.