I nod, following along. Sort of.
“They needed a way to keep their race safe,” Carrick explains. “They needed a better way than just glamours and minor powers to stay secret. They needed someplace to go where humans could not find them.”
My eyebrows knit together. “You mean like a secret hideout?”
“No, not like a secret hideout. A new realm to live in.”
“Realm? What does that even—”
Carrick holds a hand up, and I snap my mouth shut. “I realize this is a lot of information, but it would help if you stop interrupting and let me tell you the full story. Okay?”
“Okay,” I promise, thinking I might need to keep a hard bite on my tongue to keep from blurting out my incredulities. As it stands, I’m probably awfully close to Carrick pulling out some duct tape to seal my mouth for me.
Carrick waits to let his point sink in before continuing. “The Light Fae needed somewhere they could be safe. Earth was no longer theirs. Now, some say perhaps it was divine intervention—God throwing a bone to his cast-out angels—but help did indeed come their way. It arrived in the form of a meteor plummeting to earth a few thousand years before Christ was allegedly born—”
“Allegedly?” I can’t help but blurt the interruption, the fact a meteor hit earth being nowhere near as important. “You don’t know if it’s true that Christ was born?”
“Again, that’s a matter of faith and something that’s irrelevant to this conversation. You asked to know about daemons, and I’m getting there, Miss Porter.”
“Sorry,” I murmur. With a hand, I motion for him to continue, but I feel very compelled to add, “But it’s Finley, not Miss Porter.”
Carrick clears his throat, ignoring my last statement. “The meteor struck the earth in ancient Egypt in the time of the Pharaoh Khufu. Except it didn’t quite strike the way one thinks of meteors speeding to earth. In those cases, the impacts can be catastrophic, but yet when the meteor was found, it was sitting gently in the sands with no crater around it. It was as if it had rather floated down to earth. Legend says it was quickly discovered the meteor had strong magical properties and to hide it away from the world to keep it solely for himself, he built one of the Giza pyramids over it. But it wasn’t a secret that could be kept and the pyramid was ransacked over and over again, pieces of the meteor being chipped away and stolen for the magic within it.”
I’m dying to ask a question. Like what kind of magic? What could it do? Is the meteor still there?
I hold my tongue, but I can’t stop from shifting restlessly in my seat. He probably thinks I need to pee, but I just need the rest of this crazy, bizarre, and yet, I’m finding, completely believable story.
“Eventually, the entire meteor was demolished, leaving nothing behind. Stolen away by ancient priests who tried to figure out how to harness the power. Some of those who were lucky enough to grab onto pieces of that rock from space were Light Fae. Because they already had inherent powers and divine knowledge, they used the power of those stones to rip into the veil that covers reality. It was what they needed to escape.”
Can’t stop it from coming out. “The veil that covers reality?”
“The reality we have right here—you and I sitting in my office—is but a dimension, and there are thousands, maybe millions, of dimensions layered upon one another. The Light Fae learned how to use the magic of the stone to create a new reality for them. They created an entirely new world, right in this one, just in another dimension. They ripped the fabric of that veil and moved into that new dimension, creating a new place for themselves to live peacefully away from humans.”
“You’re kidding?” I gasp.
“I’m not,” he assures me. “It’s known as the land of Faere.”
His cultivated accent, which is nice to listen to, pronounced it as “fare”.
“Can you spell it?” I ask politely.
He does, and I pronounce it myself. “Faere.”
My mind is spinning at this point, and I need to make sure I’m tracking. “So bottom line… unbelievably bad angels sent to Hell and evolved into Dark Fae, trapped in the Underworld. Not-so-bad angels sent to earth are known as Light Fae. Light Fae didn’t like earth and created their own world with a magical stone.”
“In its most base format,” Carrick replies blandly.
“So, there aren’t any Light Fae on earth anymore?”
“There are,” he replies casually. “They have the power to cross back and forth through the veil. Most choose to stay in Faere.”
“And the Dark Fae are still tucked away in Hell?” I press. Because while he hasn’t said much about them, the thought of them scare me.