Another journal

You can find all the sections here.

They ended up staying a little over a week at what Emily insisted on calling “the monastery.” Unlike Dry-Eyes’ village—which was a pretty normal place once you disregarded the scale and everybody’s wings—the monastery reeked of magic and wonder. The percentage of human-shaped Folk was about equal to the chimeras, monsters and full-blooded animals, Emily quickly lost the last of her uneasiness about talking people who weren’t bipedal. After getting spectacularly lost one afternoon, she begged a ball of string from a horrifying but sweet spider with a woman’s face who lived down the hall.

Emily never got direct answers to anything she asked, she was still in the dark on who her parents were and if being in the Sidhe did anything for her beyond removing the necessity of eating and using the bathroom. She was getting good at weasling out information obliquely—her working theory was that it wasn’t so much that fairies wanted to confuse people, they were just locked by habit into an eternal cycle of being total dicks to each other.

The Polaroid camera was a general hit. While talking with the siren, who’d introduced herself as Devora by writing on a slate, Emily had shown her the photograph she’d taken of her room. At Devora’s insistence she took a picture of her that developed with a faint blue aura shining around the siren’s silent mouth. The two women decided that, obviously, the photos showed the true nature of things; the runes in Emily’s room were the protective spells built into the walls of the monastery, the aura was Devora’s muted siren song.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.