The Lost Princess of Migdon

The full moon had always been Stacy’s favorite night. When she was little, she used to love learning about the history of the moon, the science of it, as much as a 6-year-old girl with a limited attention span loved learning about everything. She would keep track of the different phases in her notebook, and get mad when someone said that it was a full moon when it was technically one night before or one night afterward, even though you couldn’t tell. She wanted to be careful, precise.

And the night of the full moon, if it wasn’t cloudy or rainy, she would go out into the backyard and twirl around, giggling. She lived in a suburb near Boston, where the stars were visible, but difficult for her young eye to pick out, but the moon still shone above, always changing, but in a consistent, familiar pattern.

“It’s the full moon tonight,” she would tell Luke, the boy she had thought was her twin brother, as they cleared the table after dinner. “That means the fairies are going to come out.” Had she read that in a book, or come up with it herself? She couldn’t remember. “If I impress them with my dancing, they’ll come and take me away, and I won’t have to go to school anymore, or do the dishes.” Oh, she would think later, Imagine what Edward and Elizabeth Jordan must have thought when they heard that- for she did not dare call them her parents, even in the privacy of her mind.

And Luke would roll his eyes and call her silly, but he would sneak an extra cookie and bring it outside for her, to nibble on when she got tired, breathless, before returning to her dance, spinning and jumping and full of energy, eager to impress her silent and invisible audience. And the adults didn’t stop her, for what was the harm? Fairies weren’t real- Or maybe they are, maybe that’s what Migdon is, for in the older stories, she learns when she grows up, before Disney and the beautifully illustrated books for children, fairies were something else, something darker- but at any rate, no one was watching Stacy dance.

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On Migdon, the stars were always bright and clear, and it never rained or grew cloudy, but there was no moon. Still, Princess Vinia kept a notebook in her room, protected by the rudimentary magic Nalia and Reyla had taught her. She didn’t dare put her thoughts in it, or anything she didn’t want the other Dideans to read. But she did keep track of the phases of the moon on earth, writing down each day of the lunar cycle next to the date they would be using at home based on the Roman calender, next to the day it was on Migdon.

Opening a portal to earth- and Vinia always called it a portal, no matter how many times they tried to correct her- was a lot harder then opening up a portal from somewhere on Migdon to somewhere else on Migdon. Reyla, the sister who was both a prodigy and raised in Migdon, eternally leagues ahead of Vinia, could do it in about 3 hours. For Vinia it would take over a day. The whole time she couldn’t stop to sleep, or go and get something to eat, for if she took her attention away from her task for even a moment, the hole she was beginning to make in the universe would collapse, and she would have to start all over again.

Her cousin Nalia, who was kind for a princess raised in Migdon, knew what she was doing, and the day before, she would give her these quiet looks, pitying and sad. Her sister Reyla, who wanted to share her with no one or nothing, knew what she was doing, and would be more cutting and curt the day after she came back. Their grandfather must have known too, for nothing on Migdon escaped his notice. No doubt they watched her, through her mirrors, every time she came to earth. But they didn’t try to speak to her, or stop her, and she was careful not to push her luck. She wasn’t technically forbidden for visiting earth, after all.

When she came out, she would leave the portal open, for trying to open a portal to Migdon from earth was even harder than one to earth from Migdon. (She could still remember waiting, when Reyla had taken her prisoner, having to wait and wait for 7 hours, covered in blood and still not quite believing in magic, as Reyla opened up a portal to go back to Migdon for the first time since she had been in her mother’s womb.) That meant she didn’t dare leave the area she came to.

She’d step out through the portal, feel the constant rush of magic that was always present in Migdon fade to a tiny hum in the back of her mind. She knew it made her more vulnerable- here, she was just a strange girl, far from home, and she couldn’t even really us her power to defend herself- but she found she liked it better that way.

She was still young, only 18, but no longer had the boundless energy of a first grader, and she didn’t much feel like dancing. The weather wasn’t always good- she’d always try to look through her mirror before she came, but sometimes it would start to rain in the place she had chosen while she was making her portal. Sometimes, she couldn’t see the moon at all. She didn’t ever try to talk to any humans.

Usually she just sat on the ground, and took in the world around her, dirty and imperfect, a little greyer than she had grown used to, a little colder, a little more uneven. Sometimes she could see the stars. They were arranged differently than on Migdon, but she had never learned to recognize any constellations except for Orion’s belt. Sometimes she would find that one. Usually she would just look at the moon.

Every time Vinia opened up a portal to earth, she would pick a different place. Sometimes it would be some place Stacy had always wanted to go- Rome or Budapest, New York or Hawaii- even though she couldn’t really explore it. Every once in a while she’d be in a mood for somewhere extreme- Death Valley or Antarctica or the top of Mount Everest- though that meant she couldn’t stay for as long. Usually she’d just pick at random.

Her one rule was, she’d never pick anywhere in Massachusetts, even the parts of Western Mass that were a 2-hour drive from where she had grown up. She didn’t know if it was because she didn’t want to test her sister and grandfather, or because she didn’t want to allow herself the slightest temptation of trying to go back home, where she knew that Edward Jordan still tried to think of ways to find her, though he knew he was human and she was not, and kept careful watch over 13-year old Evan, his last child, as though he could protect him from Reyla or their grandfather if they really wanted to harm him. Promise me you won’t hurt them, and I will go with you, she had told Reyla, and she had watched through the mirror, making sure that Reyla kept her end of the bargain- and she had kept her end, and never did anything more than watch.

Time can be strange, in a way that has nothing to do with magic. Though Vinia would not really do anything, on that one night on earth, or think of anything, the hours would slip by quickly, and the sky would grow lower as the moon began to sink, and she would turn and walk back through the portal, closing it behind her. It would mean more work in a month, but leaving it open was asking for trouble. Her dress would inevitably be dirty and grass-stained, but she would clean it within seconds. She’d go get breakfast, and practice her magic, honing it for ages, so she could one day be good enough to best Reyla.