How Long Horizon

     Tareth paused and looked out of his study window. All he saw was blue. Blue wasn’t only for skies, but also for tears, for sadness, and for—

     Sander,

     I wish you could get this letter, but I don’t know how I would send it to you. I could throw it off the cloud, but that would be one of those reckless things you were always warning me about. Knowing my luck, it would hit some important ambassador from Maraqua on the head and start a major sea battle or something. Maybe it would be eaten by a flying Mallard, or freeze into a giant icicle above Terror Mountain. Whatever happened, the odds are really small that it would fall down to you, wherever you are. I don’t dare hope that you would be in the same place as three years ago, after all.

     Tareth sighed. Three years ago was the last time he had seen his best friend, Sander—the blue Bori rapidly turning into a speck on the ground as Tareth drifted higher and higher.

     I’m pretty reckless, aren’t I? See, I admitted it for once. Don’t keel over in a faint. Building that balloon was possibly the craziest thing I’ve ever done. After all, I had no guarantee how long the air potion would last to keep the balloon inflated. You were right, by the way. Not only did that red fabric completely clash with my fur (red balloon plus a green Gelert? Horrible!), but the wood I used for the basket wasn’t too great—it gave me splinters. At the time, I thought splinters, airsickness, dizziness and slight panic were a fair price to pay for what I found. It’s not every day one hits a gigantic floating cloud in the middle of the air. I knew right then that I had accomplished my dream, the one I told you about when we first met.

     That had been a long time ago, yet the memory was as clear as day in Tareth’s mind.

     “I want to go out there someday,” he had said, pointing up at the sky. He was sprawled on his back in the meadows near his home, eyes alight and face flushed with all the vigor of youth.

     “Out where?” Next to him, Sander quirked an eyebrow at his best friend.

     “Past the horizon,” Tareth answered. “Way out into the sky until I can barely see the ground anymore. I want to know what’s up there, past the clouds.”

     “Space, Tareth,” Sander answered in his ‘were-you-sleeping-in-class-again’ tone.

     “Between space and the clouds, then.” Tareth looked straight up. “I wonder if the sun gets so bright you can’t see anymore.”

     “Then why on earth would you want to go up there and go blind...?” Sander was acting like he disapproved, but Tareth knew better. For his birthday that year, Sander gave him a small, carved sun and brushed off all attempts at thanks.

     I’m wearing your sun, you know. I found it a month ago and the Faeries polished it up for me. The Faeries! I wish I could bring you up here and introduce you to them. You can imagine my surprise when I hit this cloud—they call it Faerieland, by the way. It’s enormous.

     Anyway, when the Faeries found me after I crash-landed, they took me to speak with their Queen, Fyora. She offered me a job helping them build their new city. Of course, I accepted... I got to plan out buildings, design the library, and even construct a fountain or two. It was just like doing geometry in school, except I was a lot better at this. Did you know I always loved playing with blocks? This was even more exciting.

     The work was hard, but I enjoyed it. There’s something about seeing a whole city come to life under your hands that’s simply amazing. It’s made even more surreal by the fact that you’re on some sort of strange, gigantic solid cloud floating around in the air. I wish I knew where the Faeries got their building material. I’ll ask them today, and I’ll tell you.

     We just finished the queen’s palace last week. It’s amazing. I wish you could see it someday... even though it’s purple, and I know you don’t like that color. It’s funny because I wished at the time that I could have made it blue and I remembering thinking ‘Sander doesn’t like purple’. Fyora said that painting it blue could be a hazard, though, because some petpets fly and they don’t have very good eyesight. Picture a few of them flying into the palace at top speed. I hope you get a laugh out of that.

     The library is pretty big, and there are a lot of books I’ve never heard of. A lot of them have wings. In fact, most of the stuff around here—not just the Faeries and the other Neopets—has wings, even the food. My first pancake up on this cloud smacked me in the face when I leaned too close. They need a sign to warn travelers about hazardous flying edibles. I even was asked to design some of the buildings with wings! Talk about a bit of an obsession. At least I don’t have wings yet, like all the other Neopets up here... stop snickering at that mental image. Stop, I know you are. Cease and desist!

     Besides, you would look a lot worse with wings. Pink and purple wings, Sander. I bet you aren’t laughing now (but I am).

     Tareth was not, in point of fact, laughing.

     What’s even more amazing is that there’s never any bad weather! There’s the occasional gust of bad wind and such, but it never snows and it doesn’t rain, either, except when a few light drizzles have been blown this way. I miss the snow.

     Tareth looked out the window again—with his eyes, at least—but his mind was looking back into the eve of Giving five years ago. Tareth and Sander had taken advantage of the time off from school, and the sizable snowstorm that had blanketed the town in tempting drifts of white, to play in the snow all day despite how old they were. In fact, they had discovered that snowball fights were even more fun when you got older because you could actually aim and hit a moving target.

     “I think my aim’s gotten worse,” Tareth murmured to himself, though his pen didn’t move across his paper. “I can’t exactly practice on the Faeries.” He looked back down. “There are a lot of things I miss,” he said aloud, as if dictating to himself, but he found that he couldn’t write that down. Slowly, he put his pen down and reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, pulling out a sheaf of papers that had been folded and refolded many times.

     They were all half-started letters, some of them on scraps of yellow construction plans, others on paper torn from the notebook he’d been carrying when he tossed away the ropes binding the balloon to the ground. Little by little, Tareth began to open the letters. Most of them had been tossed to the side and forgotten in the flurry of something to do.

     Others of them were full of inkblots and lines that he had scribbled through. These were more recent, and as he looked through them, he realized that he had most often crossed out his last few lines.

     ‘I’ll be seeing you soon’ had a line through it.

     ‘Goodbye and keep safe’ had a kind of double squiggly slash marking it as unsuitable. The cross-outs became more and more messy. In his last unfinished letter, the one written on the day the last stone had been set in place in the palace walls, he could barely see the last sentence through all the ink. It took him a good five minutes to decipher ‘I miss you. Yours truly, Tareth.’

     Tareth looked down at the letter he was still writing, another letter that would be tucked away into his drawer and forgotten until it came time to take down his thoughts again. Gently, he reached his free paw around the tiny wooden sun, hanging from a thin leather cord around his neck, and started writing again.

     There are a lot of things I miss.

     He dashed a paw across his eyes quickly. Sometimes, he thought wryly, in a sense there could be rain in Faerieland after all...

     I’ll see you soon. This time, the signature didn’t give him any trouble. Your friend, always, Tareth. He drew a line under the always, grabbed all of the unfinished letters, jammed them into his pocket and stood up. Upon leaving his tiny house, he made straight for the palace, and Fyora help any Faerie who meant to stop him.

     *****

     When Fyora’s transport spell ended, he was almost afraid to open his eyes, to be a stranger in a world he had once called his home. Three years was a long time.

     He had forgotten how you could taste the cut grass on the air some summer mornings. He had forgotten the shade cast by the clouds above, which promised perhaps rain. There was an element of discovery in the feel of packed dirt under his feet as he traversed the roads, a thrill in every sweetly scented blossom that tickled his fur as he passed. There was much he could not recall.

     Yet he had not forgotten the way through hills and meadows—grassy meadows where two children had raced and laughed and dreamed—to a small house on the edge of the town. His heart was pounding as he knocked on the door.

     “One moment, please!” Surely—that was the same—he sounded—! The door swung open, and Tareth knew that, with all he had forgotten, Sander’s face he knew. The Bori looked at him for one swift second and fell back, eyes going wide. “Tareth?”

     “Sander,” Tareth breathed, staring as though he’d been blind for years. “Hey.” He took a deep breath and clutched onto the doorframe, his legs suddenly too weak with relief to hold him steady. The story poured out of him in a few sentences, albeit broken ones. “I found it. And... for a while, I—I couldn’t see. But not because the sun was too bright.” He fumbled in his pocket for the letters, all of them, and shoved them into Sander’s hands. “Yours. And now,” he said, hoarsely, “I’m here.”

     “Well then,” Sander said softly, eyes shining as he opened the door wider, “welcome home.”

     Tareth had not forgotten, it seemed, how to laugh.

The End