I watched him, and nodded as he continued.
“You must keep in mind that we knew Adam was our heir. He showed promise from the beginning when he began bursts of controlled, deliberate magic at seven months of age; anything from materializing toys to summoning his mother if he was peckish.” The Dark King chuckled at the memory, and Adam looked slightly embarrassed. “I knew he'd become a familiar to one of the children in attendance at the Harvest Festival about twenty one of your human years ago, but it would have been impossible to pinpoint which one with the hundreds of children that are brought to the Harvest.”
“Fae like to fuck each other over, so I'm going to take a gander, and say that this festival is more a look-see to figure out who they wanted to dish out trickery the most to that year.” He smiled as a sparkle similar to one Adam often had lit in his eyes.
“That would be spot on my dear. We do love to play games. As it was, after Adam disappeared, we searched, but we just couldn’t find him. I never stopped looking for him because the chances that he'd sustained injury from sifting at such a young age were very high, and we refused to believe that it killed him. He was so small when he disappeared, almost ten in human years when he went missing, and I knew it had to be one of the other heirs who had claimed him. We kept it very quiet, only family and trusted servants who were sworn to secrecy knew he was gone. The last thing we wanted was to jeopardize his safety by announcing that my heir was somewhere out there unprotected. The Blood King was in attendance that year, as was your mother. Light was the most sensible option, since the Blood King is alpha, only surpassed in strength by the Horde King who normally chooses to skip the Harvest,” he said, watching my face.
“Why would the Horde not attend when they have more strength than the other castes? It would stand to reason he'd want to get in on the games that would be played.”
“The Horde doesn't need to play games. The Horde is more inclined to stand back and watch as we destroy ourselves. He knows he can take any caste down, so no reason to see who is coming up when he knows he can easily tear them down.”
“Why couldn’t I be Horde? I’d take them any day over the Light Fae,” I asked, striking one caste off the list. Out of the castes I had to choose from, the Horde was the only one that accepted everyone. Ryder had said as much anyway, and, right now, they were looking like the one in which I’d fit in best.
“You have a remarkable resemblance to the Light Queen, but not the Horde. The other option was that you could be from the Blood Fae, but the only female infant of royal birth born around that time died. She was given funeral rites at the second Harvest of her life. Her parents would not speak to anyone that year and handled everything through emissaries. I did, in fact, see the small darling before she was given funeral rites and entombed.”
“So, not only is it a celebration, but they also bury their dead at the Harvest?” I asked, letting the curious little monster inside of me out to play.
“Sometimes, we struggle to keep children alive inside of Faery. It has become much worse and far more dire over the last thirty or so years. In short, Faery is dying.” My heart must have stopped at that moment.
“That’s around the time that the Fae made their big announcement that they were in charge of the Otherworld creatures and that the humans were no longer alone,” I said, remembering back to what we had been taught.
“Otherworld is just another name for Faery,” he mused with a small smile. “It was easier to encourage the humans to believe that there was a world other than Faery that Shifters, and other creatures, were coming from, rather than one world. Feeling that you are under attack from one front is less intimidating than feeling like you are being overwhelmed from multiple fronts. We knew there would be fear; however, we wanted to avoid the whole Inquisition or Salem Witch Trials type of backlash if we could.”
“But Ryder told me that the ruling castes were against interfering with humans—it’s like one of the number one rules.”
“That was my doing. I forced the other castes hands in this matter, as we no longer had any choice but to become more active in human affairs. Synthia, Faery is at least triple the size of this world. Many of Faery’s denizens are very hazardous to this world. If Faery dies, where do you think all of the inhabitants of that world are going to go?”