"Why do you ask?"

"Because I don't know what it is. I don't know what souls are either, that was going to be my next question."

"Holy water is water that has undergone certain rituals conducted by a properly authorized individual. A soul is a metaphysical property of humans and if you take it away, significant pieces of their personality go missing, usually the nice bits."

"Why are their - personalities detachable...?"

"The going theory is that the soul is somehow a prerequisite for having moral feelings, which seems stupid, but I don't have a strong competing hypothesis."

"I'm not a human and have moral feelings. Should I worry about my personality detaching?"

"I'd be surprised if there wasn't some way to tell if you have a soul, but I don't know it offhand and I'm not sure where I'd start looking. At a guess I suspect you're safe, at least from that particular hazard; the commonest way to detach a soul is turning someone into a vampire and that only works on humans and part-humans."

"Has it been tried on fairies?"

"I expect you'd have trouble with the middle bits even if for some insane reason you qualified as human for the purpose."

"Middle bits?"

"Dying. Drink some vampire blood, become drained of all one's own blood, die, wait: this is how one becomes a vampire."

"Oh. Yeah, I can't do that part."

"And if you're not human enough to eat you're definitely not human enough to turn."

"I'm not sure how that part follows, but if you say so."

"I don't know everything about being a vampire but I do know that."

"Are there less common ways to detach souls that I should maybe be on the lookout for?"

"I'm sure it's possible to do it. I can't think of a reason why someone would try that in particular on you as opposed to some more straightforward magical attack if they were interested in attacking you in the first place."

"If they found out how immortal I am," she suggests.

"Unquenchable flames. Petrification. Turning you into a rat. Turning you into an unquenchably burning stone rat. Locking you in a box and dropping you in the ocean, that wouldn't even require magic. Summoning an appropriate variety of demon or spirit to possess your body. No one's going to look at you and think you're especially likely to have a soul they might want to rip out, unless they miss the wings somehow."

"Ah. ...I have no idea what unquenchable flames would do to me. I've never actually been burned down to nothing before and don't know what would happen except that if killing a fairy were that easy we wouldn't consider ourselves immortal."

"If you ended up on fire for the rest of eternity this would probably still be very inconvenient even, perhaps especially, if it didn't kill you."

"Well, maybe I could figure out how to make the uncursing potion even if I was on fire at the time."

"But probably not if you were also a stone rat."

"That would admittedly present more of an obstacle."