It was looking more and more like her soulmate wouldn’t be a fairy. Joy shoved another giant leaf out of her way as she clambered over the roots of the massive tree and tried not to get her sword caught on anything. As far as she knew, there weren’t any fairies living in the deep jungle.

So probably a human then.

Her father was going to throw a fit.

If he didn’t lock in her room for ditching her imperial guard by ‘accidentally’ slipping one of Du’s fire-breathing salamanders into DaeHo’s bag.

Shoving aside yet another leafy fern, Joy glanced down at the back of her sword hand and grinned when she realized that the soulmate compass was brighter than she’d ever seen it. Soul compasses were a coveted gift. Most people never got one. Those who did were marked from birth with four small marks on their hand to mark the four directions. More interesting was the addition of a large compass at age thirteen. Double ended, the compass needle tattoo was red on one end and black on the other.

The red end pointed to your soulmate. Wherever you were and wherever they went, your compass would always help you find them. This made things easy when trying to figure out who to spend the rest of your life with.

Unless you were a Fairy Princess with an overprotective father.

And your soulmate apparently lived in the middle of the jungle full of manticores and sphinxes and all kind of unfortunate things.

As soon as her father had realized that her soulmate didn’t live in the borders of his kingdom or her mother’s, she’d been on lockdown until she was nineteen.

Joy huffed under her breath, absently smacking a vine with her sword, “It’s too dangerous, Joy. There are dangerous things out there, Joy. Soulmates are just a trick of magic,Joy.” Something loud made a noise off to her left and Joy’s head whipped towards it.

She froze until it disappeared. There were worse things than fairies in this jungle.

The tattoo pulsed under her skin, the arrow shifting slightly as her soulmate moved and Joy’s eyes widened, “Fish fingers and custards,” she muttered, adjusting to a course that would require her to fight her way through a prickly hedge, “I don’t suppose,” she said to the hedge, “that you could just open up for a sec?”

The hedge didn’t move.

It wouldn’t even be a problem if she actually had her magic.

So it was back to the sword hacking.

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Read the rest on my BlackVelvet Tumblr blog! It's called BlackVelvetShipShots. Here is the url: https://blackvelvetshipshots.tumblr.com/. Enjoy!