Treachery Queen (The Callistra Chronicles #1)

FOUR

Chapter Four

Pasiphae shuddered in cold. Sunrise had come and gone, then come and gone again. This time, Pasiphae suspected she was south enough on the planet's axis that the sky had dropped into perpetual darkness. The winter solstice was approaching, and Khotadi, at the south pole, would be in polar night for the next few months.

With no bright sun across the sky to track, time passed in a blur. The barest rays struggled to surface over the horizon, following the giant crescent moon's circular crawl across the sky and dragging along a hazy blue twilight. Pasiphae sniffled, and drunk water, and shivered, and sniffled some more.

"Stupid magic," she muttered. "Stupid fae and their stupid sickness. Stupid war."

Pasiphae had written more papers than she could count about the war: research projects and giant presentations emphasising the effects it still had, four hundred years later.

Once, the fae had lived on floating Courts at the poles of Earth: the Seelies up north and the Unseelies down south. Witches mingled across the globe pretending to be human, the undines were undiscovered in the sea, the jinn murdered people in the deserts, and the sylphs... well, they were still mythical creatures even today.

"Stupid species differentiation," Pasiphae muttered.

And then at the turn of the third millennium on the human calendar, while the humans were in their greatest boom yet—their cancer disease cured, poverty eradicated—the fae launched a legendary civil war. Seelie against Unseelie, they destroyed everything in their crossfire.

They killed off most of the human population before the fragile beings even knew what was happening, leaving only pockets of damaged survivors. Land broke apart. Seas roared to the sky. Countries were hurled and torn from the very foundation of the globe.

The battle raged for five hundred long years—one faery life span.

Earth fell into the dark ages. Only those with magic had the means to survive, and so Earth became Callistra, inhabited by creatures of myth that no longer had to hide from the humans.

Some time during the middle of the war, a ceasefire had been called. By a witch, of all people, who wanted the fighting to end.

Or so they said. That particular incident was always glossed over in school, but Pasiphae had dug deeper when the facts they were taught in class didn't make sense. She had rummaged through dozens of archives in their libraries, gingerly reading through papers that looked to be on the edge of collapse after surviving all those centuries. A witch had organised the ceasefire, that was true. The Seelie and Unseelie Kings and Queens had been called to meet on Calva, which had already formed by then, under the guise they were signing a peace treaty.

And then the Unseelie King was assassinated by the very witch.

Her name was Medea.

The witches were very fond of reusing ancient sorceress names.

So war raged again, stronger, with more fury than had even been present, even though it was a witch who had run sabotage. That was when Medeis truly locked together, a super-continent of all the land that had been wrecked.

It wasn't until new Kings and Queens rose in each Court, new heirs taking the thrones, that the fighting ceased for good. The world could rebuild.

But the fae would never forget the witch that stabbed them in the back: both figuratively and quite literally. The witches in return hated the fae for their destructive, all-consuming magic; their ability to take a witch's power; their intoxicating, careless nature. It was only pouring salt in the fae's wound when they named their super-continent Medeis, after Medea.