Amoiraishe turned to face me. “I guess that it is time that you see what’s behind the curtain, little rose, but first I believe that you have one last skill download available. Narek has asked that he be allowed to use it to complete your sword training.”

“You never know when you might need it,” my Pájar said uncertainly as he turned to face me as well and then quickly cast his eyes away. I wondered again what it was that he could have done to me that was so bad that he would need my forgiveness, and what it had to do with him being my Fae father. “It doesn’t mean that you get to stop practicing though, like your swords your skills must be kept sharp.”

“Yeah, sure you might as well. I can’t think of anything else to spend the skill point on at the moment,” I replied watching them both through narrowed eyes. I just wanted my damned answers. Almost as soon as I answered a pop-up notice appeared.

I quickly tapped the Y button floating in the air in front of me and felt my brain once again flooded with new knowledge. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to that sensation, but then it would probably be the last time that I felt it anyway so I guessed that didn’t matter much. “Thank you,” I managed, trying not to sound as impatient as I felt. “Now about those answers.”

“Yes,” Amoiraishe said with a nod. “It’s time that I told you the truth, all of it. Goddess knows you have the right to know and you would find out most of it soon regardless. I think that we should step outside for this though.”

I was confused for a moment by her last words. “Aren’t we already outside?” I thought as I looked up at the night sky. That was when more pop-ups appeared in front of my eyes one after another.

Everything went dark and once again I found myself floating in the unsettling absence of my senses. It seemed like I was in there an eternity and I was starting to panic when I felt a hand wrap around mine, pulling me into a sitting position. It took a few minutes, but all of my various monitors, patches, and other paraphernalia were removed, or at least that was what my sense of touch was telling me. The attendant had saved the sensory deprivation helmet/breathing apparatus for last and I found myself squinting against the bright lights in the room as my other senses seemed to go into overdrive.

It wasn’t too bad though, only a little more sensitive than my senses had been in the game. I took a deep breath of the slightly stale air in the room and once I could see properly again I found myself staring, not at the apparently Nyiir'dhraí attendant, but at the long, copper-hued hair cascading down my head and partially obscuring my vision, most of it soaking wet from the green goo I’d been laying in. I reached up to experimentally touch my ears and finding them still long and pointed I looked downward at my lithe and feminine body with a pair of breasts pushing out the fabric of the F.I.T suit and showing some cleavage.

I just sat there for several minutes, stunned and trying to process this. I had suspected that I might wake up from the game as Taelya, there had been enough clues for me to suspect as much. I had thought that idea crazy though because it would have meant that magic, the Fae, and a bunch of other stuff in the game were real. But I think that waking up like this was possibly the most important answer of all. Though now I couldn’t decide if I had more or fewer questions than I had had before. “Your Highness, are you alright?” the attendant asked in concern.

“I… I’m just processing this,” I replied uncertainly. Was I alright? How did I even feel about this? Why wasn’t I weirded out when she addressed me as ‘Your Highness’? The answers surprised me once I managed to figure them out. Yes, I was alright. I was comfortable as Taelya, it was who I was now and it felt right. I liked being her and at some level, I had been fearing returning to being Caleb. I feared that I had grown too accustomed to being my new self and that I would have to go through the dysphoria again. I had feared the loss of my magick and that my friends would suffer upon returning to the real world. I had feared that we would never be able to return to being the people that we enjoyed being.

I took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m fine, I think. I would like to see my Mahair though.”

“Sure, let’s get you cleaned up, and then I will take you to her. She and Sir Narek will meet us in the conference room when you are all ready. I’m Alysse, and I will be attending you until your regular Attendant and the others join us here in the real world.”

Alysse took me to a really big locker/shower room where she began an exercise in precision cleaning before getting me dressed in a crimson silk bra and panty set followed by a simple satin dress and slippers of the same color that she had pulled from a locker labeled ‘Taelya’. To my surprise, she also extracted very convincing replicas of the choker that I wore as a spell focus and my nature’s crown as well and I could feel the magick of them both as she put them on me.

Once she was finished dressing me she quickly arranged my hair in its usual style and put just a little makeup on me. All the while she chattered away, explaining that she and the other attendants had started taking measurements once our transformations were complete, which would have been around the time when our dysphoria disappeared in-game. She had been the same tech who had helped me into my F.I.T in the first place, though she had been under a glamour at the time, and she had been checking on me several times a day since. They had been carefully monitoring our ‘rebirths’ and our attached medical equipment, especially with those of us going through major physiological changes. She seemed in a rush to get me ready though and I found myself sorely missing Daenyss’s pampering.

Once Alysse was finished with me we left the high-security area, and as she was walking me to the elevator she checked her watch and said apologetically, “I am sorry for having to rush things, Your Highness. I know that inside the simulation they still had a full day before shutdown when you logged out, but now we have less than four hours out here to get everything ready to be moved to a secure location if we wish to coordinate with the other Courts.”

“I understand,” I replied simply. I was still a bit weirded out that I was out of the game and she was casually talking about the Courts and Fae and addressing me as ‘Your Highness’. As much as I had been dreading it to some degree I had thought I would be Caleb again when I got back to the real world. I’d had my suspicions of course, especially with some of the things Amoiraishe had said and done, but I’d never really expected them to be true. My suspicions had sounded crazy to me and I’d been having to dismiss them more and more as the picture that the clues painted seemed to point toward that unthinkable conclusion.

As soon as we had reached the fifteenth floor of the Pegasus Entertainment corporate headquarters building Alysse left me with Amoiraishe’s receptionist to return to preparing for the evacuation. She was a friendly Vietnamese woman named Sen and I realized that this was Tien’s aunt as she tried to keep a friendly conversation going about how hectic things were. She wasn’t sure how to address me, but apparently, this was all new to her so I really couldn’t fault her. If I was in her place and found out that most of the people I worked with were elves or other mythical creatures then I’d probably be a bit uncertain too. At least she and her other human employees seemed to have gotten an explanation from the sounds of it, I was still waiting for mine.

Sen left me at the door to the conference room and then excused herself to finish some last-minute tasks with all of the other employees preparing for the big move. I opened the door to find myself facing Amoiraishe and Narek, looking much as they had in the game. A clock on the wall said 5:22 and it was still light out, so a glance out the large windows showed a view of downtown Vancouver and Burrard Inlet. It wasn’t as pretty a picture as I could have hoped. I could see columns of smoke wafting up into the sky here and there and a flock of Griffins flew by.

I found myself staring at the latter for a long moment before turning my eyes back to my Fae parents. “This is really happening? We’re not still inside the game?”

My Mahair nodded slowly. “Hundreds of years ago the Gods grew weary of Man. They had forgotten their creators, abused their gifts, and showed only fear and hate toward those who were not like them. The Goddess Danu stripped the world of magic, sealing it and all magical creatures within the Veil, including the Gods themselves, until a time when Mankind could be redeemed.”

I recognized that, it was the first part of the summary of the plot for Apocalypse Dawn. “What? You’re saying that the game is based on real events?”

“I’m afraid that this is all too real, little rose,” Amoiraishe confirmed sadly. “This all began roughly four hundred years ago. Even then, Humans greatly outnumbered us and they had hunted us and all other magical or non-Human creatures relentlessly for over two centuries by that time. Even after we made allies among other non-Humans such as the Atlanteans and Beastkin our numbers slowly dwindled while Humans grew ever more populous. Rhaennan was the last straw.”

“Your daughter? The memories I’ve been seeing in my dreams, they’re hers aren’t they?” I rounded on Narek, casting a withering accusatory look his way. “You did this, didn’t you?! She left her Aen’kuorüis for you!”

Amoiraishe looked even less happy with him than I was as Narek shook his head. “Please, allow your Mahair to finish explaining. I will admit to my transgressions and my reasons for them when you know everything.”

I shrugged but continued to glower at the Winter Court Yseil'dhraí. Personally, I thought that he was just trying to put off the inevitable, but I did turn back to Amoiraishe as I took a firm grip on my temper. “Please continue, Mahair.”

“As the numbers of our people as a whole grew less and less, so too did the number of Yseil'dhraí, but the Autumn and Winter Courts suffered the worst losses,” my Mahair explained. “Rhaennan was a blessing at a time when I was the last Yseil'dhraí among the Autumn Court. She could have been the savior of our people but she was a problem child. She was a magical prodigy and yet had no wish to learn and she never really took her lessons in anything serious. Oh, she memorized them well enough, but she never really considered the deeper meanings of what she was learning and why. She was also compulsively curious about Humans and refused to listen to my warnings, and that was her downfall.”

“She ran away to live with Seamus,” I said, remembering that last dream.

Her eyes narrowed in anger at the name and she took a deep breath as she visibly attempted to control her fury. “Aye, she was too foolish to see how dangerous he was, how all… most humans can be. To be fair, he was just as much a fool as she was. He thought only of himself, of possessing my daughter as if she were some prize to be won, never once considering the consequences of his vanity.”

“What happened?” I asked, pretty certain from her words and the tone of her voice that they had not lived happily ever after once Rhaennan had eloped with Seamus.

“The inevitable,” the Queen of the Autumn Court spat bitterly. “The very night that she left he took her to the church in his village so they could be wed and I assume that they let it be discovered who and what my daughter was. I do not know all of the details but by the time we realized that she was gone and went to the village to find her the next morning, Rhaennan’s spirit was already gone beyond the reach of our Priests and Priestesses. All that was left where they had burned them both at the stake was a pair of cold iron manacles and the viyr’kuor that Narek made for her.”

Amoiraishe paused a moment in her telling, choking back tears before continuing. “I was furious. I burned the entire village to the ground and set the Wild Hunt upon its people. We allowed only the children and a few of the women to flee. They would remember what comes of crossing the Fae. When we returned to the Glade I called a Council of the Courts and we communed with Danu for guidance.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to react to her casual admission of butchering almost an entire village, but it was her only daughter and I figured that that kind of anguish could drive people to terrible things, humans would have done the same, or worse most likely, if the positions had been reversed. At least she had spared the children and some women to care for them. “So that was when Danu created the Veil and you all got sucked in?”

“Not all of us,” my Mahair said with a shake of her head. “One of us had to remain, to act as a focus for the Veil. I was elected and when Danu removed all magical creatures, artifacts, and even the ability to use magick from this world, I alone remained with my features altered to appear human.”

“Wait, so you’ve been… for four hundred years?” I sputtered, staring at her wide-eyed.

“Since late 1646,” she confirmed, “I have walked this Earth, moving from place to place and changing my identity every decade or two. At first, it was torture, living among the Humans I despised and feeling the mana all around me but being unable to actively use it. The only guidance I had were my visions. They kept me safe and helped me to generate great fortunes and plan for when the Veil would eventually fall. Over that time I discovered that not all Humans were as bad as I believed, some had good hearts and a sense of honor. They could be taught a better way. Then, after three hundred and twenty years, something surprising happened.”

I didn’t want to interrupt her. I was getting answers and frankly, it was really cool that she had lived through almost four hundred years of modern history. The stories she could probably tell. I shoved that thought aside as I endeavored to listen to the story she was telling now.

Amoiraishe smiled wistfully as she continued her tale. “It was the sixties, a good time for me with the peace movement and all the sex that a Fae could want at my fingertips. I got to know so many interesting people. And then I discovered that I was pregnant. I was going by the name Maria Sanders back then and gave birth to a son, who I named Geoffrey.”

My eyes snapped wide open and I could feel the anger build up that I had always associated with the name Geoffrey Sanders. “My father,” I spat. Wait, did that make her Karin’s and my grandmother?

“Yes,” she agreed simply. “Despite him being human while the Veil was still in place I raised him with the knowledge of his people and my secret.”

“Well that explains him sleeping around on my mom,” I snapped bitterly. Not that I thought being raised as a Fae excused that. He could have been honest and open about things like Rei and I were.

Amoiraishe stood up, her voice and stance both firm as she commanded. “Taelya nír Keshwaindyr! You will not speak of him like that! He loved your mother and both you and Karin dearly, and he was faithful! The other woman that he ‘left you’ for was me. We would meet for dinner sometimes so he could tell me stories about my grandchildren and your mother became suspicious and followed him a few times.”

Mahair sighed and shook her head morosely and I could see the same sense of loss written all over her face that had been there when she spoke of losing Rhaennan as she continued speaking. “Your mother confronted us one night while we were leaving a restaurant. She thought that we were having an affair but we certainly couldn’t tell her that I was his mother when I looked younger than he did, and we didn’t dare try to let her in on my secret when she was that angry. We tried to convince her that I was just a good friend, but she was jealous and nothing that either of us said could convince her to listen. She told him not to bother coming home and filed for divorce within days.”

I was stunned. Was everything that I knew about myself wrong? “He wasn’t cheating on her?”

“No, Geoffrey may have sown more than his share of wild oats before meeting your mother, but he loved her and he took his marriage vows seriously. She refused to even let him see you or try to explain further and filed for full custody.” She got a little choked up for a moment before adding, “It crushed him. I couldn’t console him and he started drinking until he died in a car accident when you were ten. I tried to keep tabs on you and your sister and I planned on having you both work for me but you found work too quickly and I had to recruit Karin right out of college. She accepted my job offer and we started building a relationship.”

“Why were you so eager to get us to work for you? Was it just because we were your grandkids, or something more?” I asked uncertainly.

“The Veil started to break down eight years ago on Christmas Eve, you were just starting college and Karin was still in high school and I knew that once the Veil was gone completely that your Fae heritage would begin to show itself. You were only a quarter Fae though, for all I knew you could have gotten all of the looks but none of the abilities making you easy prey for bigots. I wanted you to have every chance for survival so I convinced Karin to join the game and encouraged her to get you to as well.” Amoiraishe explained.

“Okay, but how did a game make me into this? And why a girl?” I queried.

Mahair glared at Narek and said, “I have my suspicions about the latter. As to your first question though, you did choose to play a Yseil'dhraí. But as to how it’s possible, fifteen years ago I had a vision of myself starting this company. With the advent of VR games and the Veil starting to break down, I saw what I needed to do.”

She went on to explain the whole Apocalypse Dawn project. She knew that the Fae and other Races that they were allied with would need to increase their numbers and ally themselves with Humans and they would all have to be properly trained to deal with monsters as quickly as possible. What better way than to make it into a game? And what better people than gamers, who want to live out a fantasy and be someone or something else?

With the Veil failing and her magick restored Amoiraishe began to pull allies from the Veil; the other Queens, Atlanteans who could create the artificed technology that would be needed, and a sampling of other people from the allied Races and various types of Fae to contribute work and genetic material for the project. She had all of the pieces, she just needed to put them together.

The first piece was the predecessor to Full Immersion Tubes. They were originally Atlantean technology that were used for Restoration. Grell and Ashura had both gone through that process in the game and being told how it worked explained one question that I had always had about the Atlanteans in the game. They were supposed to age like Humans, but many of them were said to be thousands of years old. The answer was that whenever they were close to dying, from either old age or injury, they went into a restoration chamber to have their body magically altered into a younger or healthier one. It was actually the same artificed technology that they used to alter their people for life underwater in the first place.

If the Atlantean is happy with their body they just use some of their own DNA in the gene sampler and do a genetic replication, which can take a few hours to a day depending on the damage or whether they’re going for a more youthful body. If they are bored of their body and want a change though they can customize a new body by providing one or more genetic samples, usually their own and a second one. Some Atlanteans were literally their own grandpas. When doing this, the person in the chamber could customize the body to their liking; gender height, weight, hair and eye color, and just about anything else that you could want based on the gene samples provided, though the process could take several days based on how much alteration was being made from the person’s original form.

Usually, the person being ‘Restored’ was kept in a sort of medical coma while they laid in the fluid that was designed to channel the transformation magick of the device. They quickly adapted that technology though, to interface sensory deprivation and virtual environments. The newly made F.I.Ts were intended to slowly transform the players inside to the form they chose in-game from the inside out, using DNA donated from people of their chosen race while their minds were trained.

Mahair explained that since she wanted Nishalle and me to remain related to her she had placed her Yseil'dhraí DNA in our samples along with a Tokh'dhraí sample for Nishalle’s to ensure an even mix of the two samples and set the default features to those of her chosen race. A Nyiir'dhraí male sample was provided for mine, but Amoiraishe’s sample would provide the default features. Each player had been similarly set up with samples collected from volunteers of their chosen Races or, in the case of Humans, from a variety of ‘acquired’ healthy samples.

There was a problem with body dysphoria during the first tests though, and that was where the second piece of the puzzle came in. That piece was the Aen’kuorüis. Roughly translated to English it would be called a ‘mind crystal’. They’re a type of magick crystal that acts as a sort of diary for the Fae, recording their thoughts and memories of the day so that those they leave behind if they die still have something of them.

They interfaced those crystals so that the players of non-Human characters could have donated memories of the formative years from someone of the same race and gender. Not all of their memories, just enough to build a framework of growing up as that gender and race and have the player’s mind fill in the blanks of that identity while they dreamt. That, in combination with mental conditioning and the players’ own transforming brain chemistry, would help the players to become gradually more comfortable with their new self-identity as their real-life bodies changed to match.

The Aen’kuorüis were needed for another reason as well. By transferring the memories related to skill learning, they had discovered that they could ‘teach’ people new skills that way through the interface of the simulation. So they got volunteers to offer those skills as well. In the case of more modern or Human-specific skill sets such as specialized military training, modern medicine, and such it was a little more difficult. Amoiraishe had learned a lot of skills over the last few hundred years, but there were some things that she just hadn’t been able to learn. Those more difficult to acquire skills they had to attain by more clandestine means. ‘Research studies’ were the most common method, but they had other sneakier methods as well. In the end, they created an entire database of skills for players to choose from.

“After getting all of that, programming the game was the easy part, by that time we had plenty of people with programming skills. It was never really a game though. It was meant from the beginning to be a training simulation, a worst-case scenario to prepare all of you for our new reality and to add to our dwindling populations,” Amoiraishe finished. Then she looked away guiltily. “I’m not going to apologize. I’ve done what I had to. We need to restore the balance and I tried to choose people whose lives this could improve.”

I stepped over to wrap her in a hug. I couldn’t be angry at her for doing what she had to, and she was only trying to make the world a better place. “I’m not angry Mahair, I understand why you’ve done all of this. I can’t speak for everyone else, some might be pissed with you, but I understand. I think I’m happier this way too, and as you said, Nishalle and I probably would have shown signs of being Fae anyway once the Veil broke. Let me guess, the power outage?”

She nodded as I released her from the embrace. “Yes, the breaking of the Veil caused some unforeseen electromagnetic storms and killed power in several cities. Now they’re trying to deal with that and all the monsters that are appearing. That’s why the Americans want our tech so badly. They want to train soldiers with it. They already dropped a nuke on St. Louis yesterday to contain a ni’shahnkiir outbreak that got out of control.”

“Holy shit, they nuked St. Louis?! Why not let them borrow the tech though?” I asked. I could understand not wanting them to essentially steal it, but why not help them out?

She nodded grimly before letting out a soft sigh. “Three reasons, little rose. First, what if they give dangerous skills to somebody who is mentally unstable just to get troops out there faster? They could harm as many innocents as enemies. Second, I don’t trust them not to use that training to try to hunt us down as well as the monsters, there are already religious groups hunting down newly emerged Beastkin, Witches, and anyone else who is not pure Human. Some governments are moving them to camps, ‘for their own safety’. The third reason is that we are going to need an entire hand full of trump cards when dealing with Human governments from now on until we can establish peaceful relations, and this is one of them.”

I hated to admit it but her arguments were pretty convincing. I wondered what other trump cards she had hidden. “Which of these things is not like the others,” I hummed thoughtfully, and then it hit me. “Lark! I mean Robyn! That’s why you asked her to keep her human appearance and just gave her a glamour! So she wouldn’t be physically changed like the rest of us, she’d still be recognizable to her fans.”

My Mahair smiled in approval. “Yes, I wanted some celebrities with a good public image who can go to bat for us when the time comes. They can go places and speak with people that we can’t. I’ve known her for a few years and I know that she’ll be loyal to us, she’s a good person and I’m glad that she was able to join us.”

Now that Mahair had answered most of my pressing questions I turned to Narek with a serious expression. “Get talking. Why the hell am I your daughter?”

Narek winced and looked apologetically at Mahair and me in turn. “The day before Christmas when I came to discuss business and the servers going active, do you remember what we discussed that first night?”

Mahair frowned and him, but nodded. “Well, other than you being angry with me about creating the Guardian class for Lissany, I was telling you how disappointed I was that I only had one player choose a Yseil'dhraí and that he would likely choose a male. And you went on to tell me how you had three Yseil'dhraí for your server, not including yourself. Despite that, you insisted that we needed more of our kind. I told you, in no uncertain terms, that I had placed the restrictions on Yseil'dhraí characters so we could get the right kind of people and not just those hungry for power.”

Narek looked toward me but quickly looked away again as he spoke, barely loud enough for me to hear and with my ears, that’s saying something. “You weren’t terribly upset about him being male, almost four hundred years and you still hadn’t got over Rhaennan. You were missing something important in your grief though. It was the most important part of your vision and you refused to see it. We needed Rhaennan or at the very least her DNA. So that night during my inspection I went to the F.I.T that you had assigned for Taelya and replaced the DNA samples that you had placed there for Rhaennan’s lock of hair from my viyr’kuor.”

It wasn’t hard for me to do the math. With only one sample there wasn’t much gene variance to choose from and since Rhaennan had been a female a Y chromosome wasn’t among the options, which was why it had given me an error message. I was pretty much her clone. “No wonder my character generation options were so limited. Did you know about this, Mahair?” I asked as I narrowed my eyes at Narek in anger.

“I figured it out after you told me about your problems choosing a male character. Between that and the fact that you looked so much like Rhaennan, I had someone look into it and there was only one sample so I figured that Narek had done something. That’s why I was so angry with him when he joined our server. I told you that it was a problem with the code.”

“Yeah, the genetic code!” I snapped while still glaring at Narek. “And why do I have Rhaennan’s memories?! Especially the ones about Seamus?! You replaced the Aen’kuorüis too didn’t you?! Did you want your daughter back that badly?!”

Narek paled, his face turning nearly as white as his hair as he shook his head sadly. “I did replace the Aen’kuorüis, but the last thing that I wanted was another Rhaennan. I loved her, but Amoiraishe and I were both well aware of her flaws. It’s why I tested you when I first arrived, I needed to know that you would be willing to stand up for yourself, for your people. I needed to know that you didn’t share those flaws.”

He was quiet for a moment before taking a deep breath and looking me straight in the eyes as he spoke again. “Rhaennan was a prodigy, but she wasted her potential. She was weak-willed, self-absorbed, and cared about Humans more than her own people or her duties. I needed to make sure that you weren’t going to be the same. You have her potential, your power proves that, but you are also your own person and a leader that our people can look to. I gave you her memories so you would remember her mistakes and not make them yourself. Both the Autumn Court and the Winter Court need you too much.”

I jabbed a finger toward my Mahair, trying to get a handle on my temper. “I get why she needs me, I’m her frickin’ heir, but why is the Winter Court so goddamned interested in me?!”

He stood up from his chair and walked over to put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Because we may need you soon. Even with four hundred years of catching up outside the Veil, Amoiraishe is still the youngest of the four Queens, but my Mahair, Queen Seshaire, is by far the oldest of them. She is the daughter of the original Winter, born before Humans even crawled out of their caves. She is ill and has been for some time now, we’ve been hiding it from the other Courts to not show weakness. There isn’t much the Priestesses can do for her, even if she wanted them to. She says this is no longer her time and you are a Yseil'dhraí with the blood of the Winter Court.”

“Yeah, but Mahair just said that you had three Yseil'dhraí join Winter Server,” I countered.

“Yes, but two of those are male and one is your half-sister, my daughter Tíana. She’s not even three yet, so if something happens to our Queen then the Winter Court would look to my eldest daughter until your sister is old enough to succeed you. You may not look like a Winter Court Yseil'dhraí but you are a Yseil'dhraí and you have the bloodline. This has never happened before and for all we know, Danu could just change your Danann’syr and features to mark you as the Queen if Mahair dies.”

Okay, this was a bit too much for me to handle. All of this was cool when it was just a game, and sure I liked being Taelya but finding out that I might end up acting as Queen of the Winter Court sometime in the foreseeable future on top of everything else that I had been told had me feeling a bit overwhelmed. I was close to a panic attack and I knew it. “I… I think I need to sit down.” I plopped down into one of the seats at the conference table and started my Fae mental exercises to get control of myself while I processed things.

“Vhisansh khuth!” Mahair’s cursing snapped me out of my reverie.