The Queen's Gratitude

     “Is today full of Battledomers who want a Faerieland Battledome? I keep telling them that a Battledome is the last thing we need to work on right now. Are they really that impatient?” Fyora ranted aloud to Celandra.

     “Should I cancel your appointments today then?” Celandra asked.

     “No, no. I will face them head on.”

     The Faerie Queen then watched as the Battledomers arrived, a Jetsam and a Skeith. Fyora managed a warm smile for them as she greeted them. Fyora’s royal guards on the other hand, gripped their weapons tightly as they stood off on her side, two Faerie Kougras and two uniformed Light Faeries, one on each side of the throne room.

     “Hello there. How would you like me to address you?”

     “Uhhh. My name is Lang and this is Nate. We would like to petition once again for Faerieland to consider building a Battledome.”

     “Oh ok, jumping right to it, I guess. To be honest though, my stance has not changed. We have a lot of Faerieland left to rebuild first.” Fyora replied in a gentle, yet firm tone.

     “Isn’t it the perfect time to start building one though while we’re rebuilding every other thing here though?” Nate, the Red Skeith replied, rolling his eyes.

     “Hey! Show some respect!” snarled one of the Kougra guards.

     Fyora turned to her guard and offered a gentle rebuke. “Pipe down, it’s just an eyeroll. I’ve seen plenty of those.”

     She turned back to Nate.

     “I thank you for your suggestion. I would like to reiterate that we just simply don’t have the means to make this a priority right now. We need to rebuild existing buildings to restore Faerieland.”

     At this point, the two of them grew irate and started raising their voices.

     “Clearly you think Faerielanders should not be able to have any fun during this rebuild. Yeah, who would want to come to Faerieland? This city is destroyed and there’s nothing but junk here! All you’ve done is nothing!” Lang shouted. The guards began to close in on the two of them as Fyora stood up from her throne, distressed from the sudden escalation.

     One of the Light Faerie guards backed up towards Fyora while keeping an eye on the angry visitors.

     “Your majesty, how would you like us to handle them?”

     Fyora leaned over into her ear and whispered. “Gently and humanely please. Try not to use force. But please, remove them from my presence.”

     The guards moved toward the two of them as they continued to yell. The Light Faeries easily picked them up and the Kougra guards followed closely behind as they firmly gripped the two visitors and carried them out as they continued to yell.

     “You’ll be sorry about this!” one said.

     Fyora sat back down at her throne and her face remained expressionless as the guards removed the irate guests. She could still hear the insults they yelled, but tried her best to keep a straight face, not letting them faze her. However, as the castle doors closed after them, she picked up her gratitude journal and slammed it on the ground, weeping bitterly.

     “Nobody thinks I'm doing anything right these days!” she yelled into the air.

     “Am I nobody?” said one of the Light Faerie guards who returned.

     Fyora turned to her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean....”

     “It’s alright. I think you handled that well. Most royalty would be angry and yell back. But you didn’t escalate. You know why that’s why you have such a tremendous reputation.”

     Fyora wiped her tears with her hands as her guards handed her a small cloth.

     “Please realise that many staff members are here for you. Certainly, being employed has perks too, but many of us want to be here,” the Light Faerie continued.

     The other guards returned, and at least for the rest of the time, Fyora’s visitors came for some more mundane things like turning in quest items to receive her blessing or asking for a status update on the repairs around Faerieland. Some still had questions on whether Xandra could return, requiring some reassurance from the Queen. However, nothing escalated so by the end of it, Fyora was in higher spirits.

     Before bedtime, Aethia found Fyora with her gratitude journal out and a blank page. Not wanting to pry too deep, she stepped away to give Fyora some space.

     “It’s good that you’re taking the time to do that. I hope it helps you. Have a good night,” Aethia said.

     The Queen looked up from her journal. “Thanks for the encouragement, I shall write that down too. To be honest, I’m still skeptical… but I promised I’ll try it so here goes.”

     “You got this!” Aethia said, giving Fyora a chest bump.

     Queen Fyora thought about the positive things that happened during her day.

     “Guards protected me. They also appreciate me as their leader.”

     “Aethia encouraged me today, as she always does.”

     “My therapist and I came up with a plan.”

     “Celandra and Aethia made me breakfast.”

     Fyora continued to write until she ran out of ideas. With each word she scribbled, a weight came off her shoulders. She began to see that although there were things going wrong, there were also things that went well.

     She closed the gratitude journal with a smile, then stared at the pile of budget paperwork on her desk.

     “Well, this doesn’t have to be done right away so I think I’ll give myself some time off,” she thought.

     Instead of working well into the evening, Fyora headed off to sleep. The work could wait another day and perhaps she could get some help doing it.

     --

     Xandra appeared in front of Fyora again, this time in her garden. She showed no expression as she clutched a wand tightly in her left paw. However, she wasn’t aiming it at the Faerie Queen either. Fyora stepped forward and began to speak.

     “Look, I know that I wasn’t always around for you when you needed me the most. For that, I offer my deepest apologies. I was more concerned about your education, that I forgot about your personal well-being.”

     Xandra nodded slowly, but her face still showed her skepticism.

     “You were always so busy with many things. It’s like you wanted me to learn something, and then as soon as class ended, you went about your day and left me at the academy, where the faeries kept bullying me.”

     Fyora sighed, closing her eyes and bowing slightly.

     “I regret this every day, Xandra.”

     Xandra folded her arms and shook her head in dismay.

     “Well, it seems quite a bit overdue to tell me that, don’t you think?”

     “I can only hope we’ll have a second chance with each other in the future.”

     “I am not ready to forgive you Fyora. And I don’t think the rest of Neopia is ready to forgive me. Anyways, you ought to get some sleep.”

     --

     Queen Fyora woke up from her slumber but feeling a bit more at peace.

     “That wasn’t so bad,” she muttered to herself. “Perhaps one day I'll be able to say those words to her and get somewhere.”

     “Is everything alright?” Aethia said, poking her head in again.

     Fyora turned and faced the Battle Faerie. “You are a very light sleeper, aren’t you?”

     “Well, I’m the Battle Faerie. I’m always ready just in case.”

     “No, no everything is fine. You ought to get back to sleep. I might delegate some work to you tomorrow.”

     Aethia smiled at Fyora and gave a thumbs up. “That would be great.”

     The two faeries went back to sleep.

     Morning came and Fyora wrapped up her breakfast. She headed off to her usual council meeting. Once again, the topic was Neopet resettlement. To Fyora’s surprise, some of the faerie members of the council opened the meeting with an apology to her.

     “I think we got off on the wrong footing and I’d like to apologize,” Ingrid the Earth Faerie said.

     "Um, thanks for apologising. Everyone, I have something to say,” she said, raising her voice and causing everyone to quiet down.

     “Let’s ask ourselves this: Why did Faerieland fall?” she began. She paced around the room as everyone remained silent.

      “No, it’s not Xandra, although she did literally make it fall. No, Faerieland fell because we as faeries failed Neopia. We failed to show concern for our Neopet neighbors. We failed to intervene when they needed us most. This is a failure on my part. I should have been more aware of our surroundings. I failed at this on the most basic level. When I took Xandra in, I taught her magic. But I never considered her other thoughts or feelings. That is a failure. Faerieland has fallen as a result. However, we should not continue repeating our past failures. We must now constantly show love and concern to our new neighbors. And it starts by allowing them to settle in our city so that they can be our close friends. We cannot continue our old, reclusive ways, lest our neighbors resent us, and another Xandra comes along!”

     Fyora stopped speaking and allowed time for her message to sink in. Finally, someone broke the silence.

     “Just let them stay here!” Jhudora yelled, slamming her hands on the table. “I’m tired of all this arguing! This city is plenty big enough for Neopets and Faeries.”

     Ingrid opened her mouth and closed it.

     “Jhudora’s right,” Funah the Fire Faerie said. “I thought about it some more and realised how much more land we have now. This isn’t the old cramped Faerieland in the sky.”

     “That’s what we’ve been telling you,” the Pet members of council said in unison.

     Ingrid was clearly outnumbered this time in her thinking and the Earth Faerie finally relented.

     “It seems like the majority are alright with it. I concede…” Ingrid said.

     “Oh, so we’re all in agreement?” Fyora asked.

     “I didn’t say that. But I won’t be a roadblock,” Ingrid replied.

     “Florence? What about you?”

     “I run the furniture store as well. All these Pets are going to need some so, yeah, I’d like to help,” the Air Faerie said.

     “Are all the Pets fine with this?” Fyora asked and noted that every Neopet nodded.

     “Ordinance passes with no opposition then. I will create a plan to…”

     “Do you mind if we create that plan?” interrupted Terry. “I think it’s only appropriate that Pets be involved here.”

     Queen Fyora nodded slowly. “You’re right, I mustn't do this alone, lest we repeat the same mistake that Xandra warned us against.”

     Her Majesty scribbled the agreement they had come to down on a piece of parchment. She then passed it to each of them for signatures. After all the councilmembers signed, Fyora adjourned the meeting. She took her gratitude journal and flipped to an empty page.

     “It seems from today that the others still listen to me,” she wrote.

     She closed it up again and headed up to her office, wanting to catch up on some work she had been putting off. As she floated up the stairs, Aethia came down the other side.

     “Fyora, are you heading back to your office? Can I help you with something?”

     Fyora hesitated for a moment.

     “You can trust me, Fyora.”

     “Come with me to my office, I need some help,” Fyora replied.

     The Battle Faerie followed Fyora upstairs and into her office. Fyora looked at a large stack of papers before putting them neatly in a pile and handing them to Aethia.

     “This is a record of all quests given this week,” Fyora explained. “Here’s how I calculate the quotas for quests for the next day. I need help calculating those. Can you do that for me?”

     “Of course!” Aethia replied.

     Aethia took the stack of papers and floated over to her own office, down the hallway from Fyora’s office.

     Fyora headed to the living room of her chambers and sat down on a couch flanked by portraits of Jhudora and Illusen. Still, she could not help but think about her work and after five whole minutes, she got up and floated over into Aethia’s office. At first, Aethia didn’t mind. However, she then floated behind Aethia’s seat and peered over her shoulder.

     Aethia turned to her and glared.

     “Fyora dear, delegation means you let me do the work and check it afterwards.”

     “Oh, sorry. I guess I just wanted to see if you had questions.”

     Aethia narrowed her eyes. “You know that’s not what you came over here for, please don’t lie to me.”

     “Who said anyone was lying?” Fyora said, folding her arms.

     Aethia glared back at Fyora, her eyes piercing. “You’re here because you don’t trust me to do this!”

     “I can’t figure out how you’d come to such a conclusion!” Fyora responded loudly.

     The two of them glared at each other before Aethia reached over and gave Fyora a gentle pat on the back.

     “I don’t want to argue; I understand how difficult this must be for you.”

     Fyora patted Aethia on the back. “I’m sorry, I guess this is much harder when I’ve been doing this on my own for a while. I’ll leave you be for now. Please ask if you have any issues.” The Faerie Queen then left the office, settling back on the couch.

     A few minutes later, she heard Aethia call out to her.

     “Actually, I do need a little help here. It seems like the Fire Faeries didn’t give out their allotted quests for several days in a row. Could you um… come take a look?” Aethia said, putting her two index fingers together.

     “Sure, dear. Let’s see what happened here,” Fyora replied. The two of them could then be heard chatting for a bit of time as Fyora assisted Aethia.

     --

     The following day, Fyora had another appointment with Dr. Martritz. Grabbing her gratitude journal, she took another glance at all the things she felt grateful for. That said, she could not help but dwell on the few things that still did not go well that week… the argument with Aethia, the dream with Xandra, and perhaps being unable to convince Florence, despite Florence deferring to the majority.

     Perhaps it was just luck that things didn’t go badly this week. Fyora took a seat at her desk. She stared out of the window behind her. Faerie City gleamed in the sun as faeries and Neopets went about their day, even when Faerieland wasn’t fully repaired yet. Perhaps more things were indeed going right, but Queen Fyora still sat there with skepticism.

     “Ugh, I need to get these negative thoughts out of my head!” she sighed, absentmindedly thumbing through blank pages of her journal.

     Just then, a knock came at the door.

     “Come on in!” Fyora said after taking a deep breath. Dr. Martritz stepped into the office with a notebook and pen. She plopped herself down on a chair. She looked over at Fyora who was still fidgeting, thumbing through her journal.

     “How did your week go?” she began.

     “Better than last week, I suppose.”

     “How much better? I can see you have written some things down in that journal.”

     “Well, I got my council to agree on things, and I eventually delegated some tasks to Aethia after some struggles. However, I still can’t quite shake the Xandra dreams,” Fyora responded.

     The Striped Kyrii scribbled a few notes down in her notebook and then turned back to the Faerie Queen and nodded.

     “You’re making great progress for only a week,” she said with a gentle smile.

     Queen Fyora shook her head.

     “I felt like that was just a lucky situation.”

      “Whether it’s luck or not, something went right this week. You got your council to come to an agreement. You’re trying to avoid over-exerting yourself too. Those are good things,” Dr. Martritz said.

     Fyora hesitated, glancing at the Striped Kyrii. Dr. Martritz sat still at attention, unsure of what Queen Fyora would do next. She looked intently back into Fyora’s eyes. The Faerie Queen then stared down at her journal, thumbing through the pages before she set it back on her desk.

     “You’re right, things did go right this week. I should be glad that happened. I can only hope for more of the same next week though.”

     “Sometimes we must take these things a little bit at a time and not dwell too far into the future. That said, do keep up the gratitude journaling, and remember those around you who are willing to help you.”

     “Yes, I agree,” Fyora replied.

     “Now, is there anything else you’d like us to go over?”

     “No, not right now.”

     “Good, see you again next week.”

     “Let me walk you out,” Fyora said.

     The two of them strolled out a back entrance that opened into Fyora’s garden. Outside, a lone cloud racer floated slightly above ground with an Air Faerie sitting in the driver’s seat.

     Fyora waved as Dr. Martritz stepped into the racer. The racer then floated further up into the air and in a split second, they were gone. Fyora sighed and sat down on a bench next to some fully bloomed violets. After relaxing and not thinking about much of anything, she pulled out her journal and wrote “took a much-needed break from everything.”

     She smiled afterwards and continued staring at her flowers, relaxing in the peaceful serenity of her garden, finally able to enjoy it after so long.

      The End.