Faylon Reece

Short story about a changeling.

In a rural area stood a house with a garden. It overlooked fields and, further away, the woods.

 One day the happy couple living in the house left their baby in a stroller in the shade while the couple hung the laundry to dry in the sun and gentle breeze.

 They were never far away from the baby, just a few meters, and often they looked at their precious boy as he slept soundly.

 Yet there was a figure approaching the baby boy, invisible to his parents. Only the family dog stirred, but he merely wagged his tail happily as the figure came up and pet him on the head and on command he went back to sleep.

 If the parents could have seen this figure that would soon steal their son away they would have seen a pretty young woman with fragile looking wings and a crown of flowers and a flowing gown of an unknown fabric. She was a fae and queen of her kind.

 They would have also seen her weep as she placed her own baby boy in the place of the couple’s. As she let go of her baby, his wings withered away and by magic his face and body took the shape of the boy he would replace. His thieving mother planted a final kiss on his head and then she winked out of existence, along with the human boy she whisked away.

 The fae boy, distraught at his mother’s disappearance, started crying. It drew the attention of his new parents, who came over to see if his diapers needed changing or if he was hungry, completely unaware of what had just transpired in their own backyard.

 With the fae magic at work they could not see that this was not their baby boy, but slowly as time passed it seemed the boy’s personality had somewhat changed. But babies that age develop so quick and it was their first and only child, so what were they to expect?

 As a few years passed by the boy got old enough to play. He showed little interest in other children and was always caught up in his own games of fantasy, often talking seemingly to himself. It didn’t strike his parents as very odd though. Pretend play and invisible friends is so common among small children.

 But this was something different, though how were they to know?

 Though cut off from his own kind and the magic they possessed his eyes were still more attuned to the other worlds that lay parallel with what humans call reality and he could glimpse faires and other fae who sometimes came to visit and see how their prince they’d given up was doing.

 Eventually the boy grew old enough to be sent to pre-school. Now he’d have to interact with other children.

 For a while it was fine. As long as the other children played along with his fantasies he didn’t mind playing with them. Often times his tales and pretend play would capture his peers, if only they’d give him a chance, and for a spell they almost thought they could see fantastical fairies and otherworldly creatures in the playground.

 Sometimes they even felt as though they had little wings, even if just for a spell.

 But time did not stop and the kids grew older yet and they were all taught the boundaries of reality and fantasy. And some kids decided they wanted to be adults and pretend play belonged to a world for babies.

 Now they could no longer see what Faylon Reece saw, not even with his tales to aid them. The logic instilled in their mind killed the idea of all fantasies, rejecting any and all worlds beyond what they could easily perceive.

 It puzzled Faylon Reece, now ten years old, but the most important thing to him was that he could still sense his old friends.

 He continued to play. But with time the number of friends he had to join him dwindled rapidly and instead malicious whispering started to rise.

 That Faylon, he was so childish. Who would still play at ten years old? He was strange in the head. A freak.

 Once his number of friends had grown small enough the whispers turned into taunting and bullying, and whatever friends he had had soon disappeared, not wanting to endure the coming torment.

 For a while the words didn’t bother Faylon, but it’s in the nature of harsh and hateful words to need time and repetition to fully take effect and eventually, though Faylon could never remember when, they stole his world of fantasy away.

 The colourful fae with whom he’d always played had somehow faded away and now all that remained was a cold and cruel reality with not a friend for him to cherish.

 Faylon Reece, once so bright and cheerful, lost his energy and his will to do much of anything.

 His grades never dwindled, as he didn’t want to disappoint his parents, but he never told them about all the hateful words he’d receive in school.

 He silently endured and longed back to the days when he played in the woods, accompanied by a sense of wonder and beings not of this world, though he now knew, by logic beaten into him, that they had never been real.

 At the same time his daydreams were replaced by nighttime nightmares.

 Daemons whispering of death and destruction, tugging at his frustration and loneliness, urging him to strike back at the world which treated him so cruelly.

 Every night he had to fight them and every day their voices would echo in his mind.

A girl one day broke the chain of malice. Kelli was her name.

 They were seventeen and she was an old friend who’d shared in his fantasies.

 She asked him to have coffee with her and for hours they chatted, making up for lost time.

 As the evening came to a close, she asked him for forgiveness and he kissed her on the cheek.

 A small seed of love was planted between the two and they continued to spend time together and the seed grew until one day it was in full bloom. And this blossom stirred in Faylon Reece a world he had left behind so long ago.

 In his dreams he once again saw the land of faeries, his oldest friends resumed their play as though they had never left. Often he felt as though they had, indeed, been there, watching over him.

 Perhaps it was just his eyes that could not see them.

 But the voices of the daemons still haunted him, even in his waking moments, but he still bore this burden in his mind.

 Still, Kelli kept him company and he would tell him of his dreams, where the fae danced and flew.

 His recounting of these dream world adventures were so vivid he often kept her enthralled for hours at a time. What others thought weird and alien was exciting and wonderful to her and she would urge him to tell her more.

Years passed by, Kelli and Faylon graduated.

 Kelli wanted to attend a university and become an architect, which would bring her to move to the city.

 Meanwhile, Faylon lacked a sense of direction in his life.

 Kelli asked him to move with her and he agreed. She was the one who reignited the light in his life and he felt if they parted the daemons would surely overpower him.

 One evening, while lying in bed and telling Kelli a story, she suddenly looked up at him from resting her head on his chest.

 With sparkling eyes she said; “Why don’t you start writing? All these stories you tell me, you should share them with the world!”

 Faylon hesitated. He loved telling Kelli about his dreams and she was always eager to listen, but the rest of the world had already shunned him for his tales.

 Even so, there was a longing to share these wonders and before long he was putting his tales into words on paper.

 Yet, on the dark evenings when Kelli sometimes had to stay at the university for her schoolwork the daemons would claw their way back into his mind. They repeated every word all the bullies had ever said and tore down his work, twisted it and broke his confidence.

 Every time he had such an episode he would cry and despair and though he tried to hide it from Kelli, she could always tell.

 With soothing words and encouragement she tried to build him up again, but with every time it seemed the cracks in his mind grew deeper and deeper.

 His mood began to darken and he would sometimes lash out at Kelli, verbally. Though she forgave him every time and said that he was just depressed and needed help he could never forgive himself.

 It was a dark, downward spiral and his dreams of the fae became less and less frequent.

One day, Kelli left for university. Faylon had rested peacefully this night and he was once again writing with a smile on his face. It was the first time in over a month.

 She closed the door silently, careful not to disturb his concentration.

 When she came home she found him hanging in the livingroom, life long since gone from his eyes.

 The rest was hazy.

There had been a letter for Kelli.

 It was rare, the police had said, for people to leave suicide notes, but their investigation uncovered no foul play.

 When she replayed the scene of him writing happily as she left her mind told her that the paper he was writing on was not his usual notebook.

 It had been this letter.

 And guild was all that she felt.

 In his letter he told her of all the dark thoughts he had had, how they grew ever more frequent. How he was afraid one day he would hurt her with more than just words.

 He told her to be happy and that he had never belonged in this world.

The day Faylon Reece died was not remembered by anyone in this world other than his family and Kelli.

 The day that Faylon Reece died was remembered by all of fae-kind and he was celebrated as a hero.

 Long ago, the daemons surged into the world of fae, destroyed it and drove them away. Facing extinction the fae retreated into a world between worlds.

 A world of dreams.

 In order to sustain this realm a link between the old world of fae and the world of humans had to be established by bringing a human babe to the fae, and a fae babe to live among humans.

 But the fae in the human world would always be left vulnerable to daemon influence. They’d prey on the isolated mind which could never fit right in the world until it gave in and let them into the world of humans through its own body.

 Giving them a purchase in the human world, an opportunity to bring destruction in a realm otherwise out of reach.

 But Faylon Reece had rejected the daemons and, for a while at least, sealed them with his death.

 The day that Faylon Reece died, his mind was finally free from the torment of daemons.

Author's Note

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