The Innkeeper

She was doing fine, smuggling in fairies in multiple batches using a private channel between Hells she’d learned about, right up until pretty much everything got disconnected, leaving her and the band of fairies she gathered isolated within Cindersoul.

Without anything else to do, all Tinker could do was roam the mansion, explore its halls and read through its entirely outdated yet incredibly large library. That is where she learned that sometimes... old and forgotten, outdated knowledge wasn’t necessarily as outdated as it seemed.

She hugged the old diary she had been reading with all her might, as if the diary were her most beloved thing in the world. Oddly enough, the house seemed to respond to her warmly, as if it appreciated her appreciation.

Then, she carefully placed the diary back in its place before rushing out to the other fairies and gathered them into a group.

”My fellow brethren, I have found for us a path forward - a path outlined for us by the hero Jack the Hell Slayer, but one I did not understand until quite recently,” Tinker said, her entire being trembling from the intensity of the passion that filled her tiny body in that moment.

”As unfortunate as it is, we need to accept that it is impossible to return to the days of old. The Fairy race of the past... was too powerful, yet our personalities did not match our power, and so the forces of the universe stripped it from us. As one of the founders of the Path of Order, we have now been relegated to a race so subjugated, we are beyond even enslaving. We are simply taken wherever we are by whoever desires to do so. Yet no more!

”Previously, we were aligned solely with the concept of joy, and we derived our power from it. Yet naught but a few years ago, I saw the hero Jack the Hell Slayer use merely his words to wreak devastation across a Hell, while taking in unbelievable joy from his behavior. It is the path we must now align to.

”I declare unto you now, fellow fairies, henceforth, we must abandon the path of joy and embrace the unholy path of... Pun-ishments!”

A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, and a deep roar of thunder roared across Cindersoul as if in response to her words. It seemed that her declaration was most ominous.

”But how do we do that?” asked another hopeless fairy. ”How can we just change a fundamental part of our being? I fear... even if we manage that, we will still be cursed.”

Tinker smirked and brought all the fairies alongside her as she went into the depths of the library, careful not to attract the attention of the others in the house. She entered the internal greenhouse of the house, which was distinct from the external gardens which existed within the mansion walls, and approached a seemingly simple, round ornament mirror with a handle that could be held easily and used to look at one’s own reflection.

The ornament was actually broken so that on one side, merely a small piece of the mirror was left, and on the back a moon that was now broken. She stood in front of the mirror, glancing at her own reflection, and kneeled, beginning the ceremony.