The Project Prince

1

Trot hovered over the thick foliage, a light gentle wind sweeping her purple hair. She’d been flying as far and as high as her purple wings could go. One thing she loved about having wings was exactly this.

The wind, she thought as she fluttered lower. The freedom, no borders, unfringed.

She was mulling this over, nonchalant, when she realized where her wings had taken her. Okay, the freedom had borders, after all. In this case, it was in the form of this massive darkness gaping at her like a black hole of dead trees, except they seemed to be breathing, whispering confidentialities among themselves.

She was hovering in the air a few feet from the mouth of the Black Forest, one of the most isolated parts of their fairy kingdom. Stories had been passed through generations about hostile dryads or tree spirits that lived in this dreaded forest, unfounded tales and perhaps created only to scare off wayward fairy kids. Trot was an aspirant hobhound and hobhounding was a job that required skill and daring — and charm in some special cases, but that’s another story — so Black Forest wasn’t something that made her hackles rise. She didn’t believe in any of the crappy tales concocted to give the Black Forest a bad rep, but she rarely came here and never alone. And she had yet to flap her wings further into the cavernous entrance of this mysterious forest.

Silent save the ghostly whispers, pitch-dark and downright creepy, there wasn’t much to do here except maybe tempt Providence. Devoid of sunlight, not even the hardiest varieties of faeberries could survive in this forest. But sometimes Trot did wonder what lurked in here. When she thought about how crazy serious the League of Fairies was with trying to ward off nosy wings, whatever it was they were protecting must be something really big, but then the forbidden forest was so bleak no one was really interested in breaking and entering so somebody had yet to face the direst consequences. She heard something like capital punishment, or worse — banishment. For a Bloomfae, death was better than getting your ass kicked out of your birth bud.

She flapped her wings hurriedly and was turning to leave when something shining, shimmering, splendid past the forest entrance caught her purple eye.

(chapter continued)