Writings Found In An Envelope on Green Street

I need a title for this. Title this for me; do my job. This was going to be a Changeling game I was going to run, but it never happened and so I made it into a story.

 

            I have no idea why I’m writing this.  ‘Sides the fact that I don’t know if anyone’ll even find it to read it, there’s always the question of authorship: I can’t think of a single soul who’s got cause to believe me.

            If you know me, you’ll maybe chuckle to yourself and say, “Oh, it’s Old Lexy, the Pooka, out to play another joke.  He’s just pullin' my leg,” then set yerself up for a nice nap or something’. And if you don’t know me, well…. then you’re probably a mortal and got no cause to believe any of this.

            But I tell you now, and I’m not repeating it in case it jinxes me: what I’m writing is true.  Or as true as I can make it, anyway.

 

My best friend’s a Satyr.  Oh, sure, to mortals he’s just a freckle-faced teenager, kinda skinny and a bit hyper. But that’s the thing: we fairies don’t look like ourselves to mortals.  That’s why we’re called changelings.  Some of us even take on mortal identities; have human friends who never suspect a thing.  We get jobs, because we like to eat and food doesn’t tend to buy itself, and no one leaves wheat cakes and beer on their doorsteps for us anymore.  You see us every day, and you very probably can’t tell us for what we are.

Myself, I’m a cat Pooka. But you don’t see my cat ears or eyes, or my tail; I just look like a very tidy man with eyes that are just a flicker too green.  Or, if I’m in full cat-form, you see a black cat with a bit of white on his chest, walkin’ a bit more dignified than he should.

Heck, my kind hasn’t looked like ourselves since we were still in Arcadia, and there was no need to camouflage ourselves, to fit in in a mortal world where we were lost and abandoned—

I’m losing ya, probably.  I got to start writing with the assumption that you are a human, and don’t know nothin’ ‘bout fae history.  Don’t know how much time I got, so I might leave some stuff out, but I can’t help it.  And if what I don’t want to happen does end up happening, well, then one way or another you’re getting a crash course.

Not sure where to start, I guess; every beginning’s got its own beginning somewhere further back.  Good for philosophy, bad for storytelling.

Some facts first, then.  I live (lived, maybe?) in Berkeley Springs, Town of Bath, West Virginia.  It’s not really well-known among mortals,  but the place is world-famous to fae.

See, the story goes, before the Schism, when humans believed in us and my kind could pass back and forth between Earth and Arcadia free as breathin', Lord Oberon brought Lady Titania here.  Wasn’t any springs here, then, just forested mountains and a valley sitting in the middle of it like a deep bowl.

Or an amphitheatre, which I guess is how Oberon saw it.  All the citizens of Arcadia were there on the mountains, in the trees, looking down at the valley.  And I do mean all: both courts, Seelie and Unseelie.  I don’t know what kinda strings the old king pulled to get them to be peaceable-like; I got my theories, mind you, but that’s another story.

Right. So there’s Oberon and Titania, and all around them was every kind of fae imaginable: Pookas, Satyrs, Nymphs, Sluagh, Eshu, Redcaps even, Trolls and Boggins and Nockers and of course Sidhe.  And, right at sunset, when the sun was dipping off the rim of the mountain bowl, Oberon pledged his love to Titania, proposed to her.

Well, she was so happy, she couldn’t stop crying!  She laughed and smiled and embraced him, crying all the while. And then she said something really really stupid (she wasn’t Queen, yet, so I can call it stupid without it being treason). She said, “Oh, I swear I’ll never stop crying these happy tears!” or something like that.

And when you swear something, even joking, with every fairy in Arcadia watching you, it just has to come true. That’s how it works.

So all the fae, see, they come out of the woodwork then, cheering and yelling and bringing out the feast for the surprise wedding.  Moldy bread and sour milk for the Sluagh, flower petals for the Sidhe, lots of wine for the Satyrs and, well, frankly, pretty much anything for the Redcaps.  And the Nockers were arguing over what kind of ceremony it should be, and the Eshu were telling stories, the Trolls were standing guard and saluting and whatever it is they do, I suppose.  The Sidhe were probably sitting there and looking pretty, not doin’ much.  And even though Titania and Oberon were very happy, after a while, they realized that she really couldn’t stop crying.

Well, who wants to have your wedding night ruined by tears, happy or otherwise?  But since no fae magic can ever reverse the promise of a bride witnessed by every fairy in the kingdom, there wasn’t any way to get her to stop.  Eventually, Oberon asked for a little bit of magic from each of the fairies, as a wedding gift.  And he took all that magic, and a tear from each eye of his lovely bride, and he made those tears into seeds.  He planted them in the ground, and they became the springs, weeping joyous tears forever in Titania’s stead.

Which is why she never could cry after that.

So that’s how the springs got here, but what they are is a different matter entirely.  The springs are…well, they’re glamour.  Glamour is the stuff that, to quote the bard, dreams are made on.  All fairy magic comes from glamour; it’s belief in something that can’t possibly be real.  It’s an escape from banality; it’s serendipity; it’s one coincidence too many; it’s magic.

And the springs’ magic is so strong that even mortals can feel it, a little.  They say the waters have healing powers, that they rejuvenate and invigorate and all that lot.  And then, when the humans leave the town, they talk about the water, and other people believe it, and it spreads more glamour that way.  ‘Cause there’s two types of glamour.  There’s the kind that comes from natural things, from the springs, or places like Stonehenge, or just a tree whose bark looks like a face.  And then there’s the kind that comes from mortals: believing in magic, that anything is possible; having an imaginary friend or checking for monsters under the bed.

And, while glamour has an effect on humans, it’s the fae that really need it.  Without belief, without magic, we stop being who we are.  We become humans, if it gets bad enough.  That’s why cold iron hurts us: cold iron isn’t forged with heat and fire—the magic of blacksmiths—but raw and cold.  It’s practical and mundane, a metal made without mystery.  And it hurts.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s usually enough belief that we do okay; there will always be children, and thank goodness for that!  But at the same time, there are places most fae can’t go; places where banality and the mundane are tearing at every seam, hurting us and making us weaker and threatening to trap us in mortal minds and human lives, leaving the fae soul forgotten and decaying, like a butterfly dead inside a chrysalis.

So.  Springs are important.  Check.

My Satyr friend, DJ, the one I mentioned earlier, he used to try to stop the humans coming from all over to sample our magic waters.  Said they left their mundane lives for a little while, leaving banality and harsh prosaic feelings to be washed away with the springs.  He said it left traces in the waters, that if too many people did it, or if they came to the springs and didn’t believe in their magic, then the glamour of the springs would fade.  He’s right, you see, but it would take a lot of people with very boring lives to make any kind of change at all.  ‘Sides, as I see it, the tourists are a good thing: they tell other people about the magical waters that cured their arthritis or whatever it is you mortals get, and then, bang! More people believing in unlikely things.  Self-replenishing, right?

Well, it wasn’t me that convinced DJ—there’s no convincing a Satyr of anything—but eventually he did stop yelling at the tourists, or trying to convince people he’d peed in the springs (he never did; performance anxiety!  Isn’t that the funniest thing?). But he always worried a bit; that the glamour would run out, that someone would break the fae truce surrounding the town; that maybe living in a place of so much power wasn’t such a good thing after all.

Boy, was he ever right.

“Alex,” he whispered to me one night, pretending to be drunk (drunker than he was, anyway)  so’s we’d have a chat unnoticed. (DJ was the only one who ever called me Alex; to everyone else I’m just Lexy)  “Alex.  Bad news.”

“Out of wine?”

He shook me.  “This is serious.”

I sighed.  “Then don’t say it.  This is no time for seriousness.” I swept my arms wide, indicating all the revelers, fae and mortal alike, celebrating All Fool’s Day.

“The Duke’s got the egg.” He said it very slowly, pronouncing each syllable.  I thought at first it was some kind of code.  I mean, sure, the Duke’s Unseelie, an unpleasant guy all around, but what do I care if he had an egg?  He can have the whole chicken, for all I care, and I can show him where to put it.

You do know the difference between Seelie and Unseelie, right?  Well…. okay, it’s like this.  Glamour, belief, magic, whatnot: that’s how we get our power, right?  Well, there’s a couple of ways of going about getting someone to believe the impossible. 

A Seelie chap, for instance, he might go ‘round putting quarters into everyone’s parking meters.  A bit of not-too-common courtesy, to brighten some mortal’s day and make ‘em believe in the fiction of getting something for nothing.  Or maybe a Sidhe woman—Sidhe are beyond beautiful, did I mention that?—maybe she comes up to some schlep in a bar, starts flirting with him and he realizes that this incredible woman is intelligent and funny and likes the same things he does.  Too wonderful to believe.  But believe he does, and that’s the point.  Or maybe you’re at the store, and you realize you left your wallet at home. You reach into your pocket, even though you know all that’s in there is lint, just to show the cashier and the patrons that, yes, you really did intend to pay.  And you reach in, and you pull out…a crisp $20 bill!  It’s a sure sign some Boggin did your laundry and figured you needed a little serendipity.

Seelie fae foster belief in everyday miracles.

Now an Unseelie fae, well, that’s another kettle of fish entirely.  Unseelie fae usually force belief out of people, ravaging them instead of nurturing.  They are nightmare-makers.  They are the monsters under your bed and boogeymen in your closet.  They are noises in the wind and things that go bump in the night.  Unseelie fae know—and use—the fact that fear is a type of belief.  They’re the skulking figures in alleys and heavy breathing on the other end of the phone.  They’re the terror you can’t explain, the completely illogical and nameless dread you tell yourself is just your nerves.  They’re the shrieking wails in the distance that, if you live in the country you pretend is a bobcat, and if you live in the city, you pretend you just didn’t hear.

The Duke’s an Unseelie Sidhe.  The less said about him the better, even if you’ve got the sort of stomach to hear such things.

The thing is, though, there’s been a truce among Seelie and Unseelie fae in Berkeley Springs for…well, for as far back as even the oldest Eshu can remember; and elephants envy Eshu their long memories.

There’s enough raw power in the town, enough art, enough magic, that nobody even really needs to go the Unseelie route.  That’s the thing.  Plus, I’d imagine it’d be harder these days, to be Unseelie.  Mortals now, they can have the smallest good thing happen, and just think, “I don’t believe it!”  But bad things, they’re almost expected.  The things you folk do to each other on the day-to-day, the things you get used to…well, it’s no wonder the Unseelie have to do such terrible things, really, to get a reaction out of you.  Most of you could see a Sluagh in full fae form and barely bat an eye, thinking she’s just some Goth chick with bad breath.  Or, heck, watch a video of a Redcap eating someone whole in one gulp, and you’d just think to yourselves, “Those are some nice special effects.”

So the truth is, I really didn’t care what DJ had to say about the Duke and his egg; and I said as much.

“You don’t understand,” he said.3. “The Duke and the whole Unseelie Court, Alex.  They’re unified, and—”

I shrugged.  “One, truce is truce, DJ.  Two, even if it comes to that, we’ve got them outnumbered.  And three, what egg?”

He looked at me like I’d just asked him, “What sky?”

“You mean you don’t know?  The Other Egg of the Phoenix!”

Satyrs always hear the best stories; drinking songs around the fires; bawdy stories usually, and ballads and odes-to-whatevers.  Eshu know more of them, of course; they use them like currency, trading tales for company and a place to spend the night on their travels. But Satyr stories tend to have more oomph, I guess because if you can remember something you heard in a haze of drinking, it’s worth remembering.

I waited.

DJ sighed.  “Okay, so you know there’s no such thing as ‘Phoenixes,’ right?  ‘Cuz there’s only one Phoenix.  So the Phoenix, when he or she or it was…. created, or thought up, or believed into existence, or however it is you get yourself born when you don’t have any parents…the Phoenix, right…. All its life, it searched for more like itself, but never found any.  And on the day it knew it was to die it cried and wailed that it would be the last of its kind.  And then the Great Whoever-Whatever took pity on this poor beautiful bird, and…well, zapped it with lightning or something.”

I rolled my eyes.  “Because clearly that’s how you comfort something.”

He pretended he didn’t hear me. He stared off into the middle distance, getting into the flow of the story. “It was special lightning, and the Phoenix didn’t feel any pain, just watched in interest as fire engulfed it, turning its feathers from pure white to the red and orange and yellow of the tongues of flame.  Eventually, the feathers turned charred black, and then white again, though they weren’t feathers any more of course, they were ash.  And there, in the pile of ash, were two eggs: a black one and a white one.  The white one hatched into a Phoenix, the same one that had just died, with all the same memories and everything, only its feathers were the colors of the fire. 

“And the black one…didn’t hatch.  The Phoenix took it to its rookery, to keep an eye on it and wonder what it was periodically, but mostly it forgot about it.  But every time the Phoenix took its fiery turn to birth itself upon its death, it only laid one egg, the one that hatches into a Phoenix.  Never again was there a second, black egg.”

 “And the black one never hatched?” I asked.

DJ shook his head.  “No one can even guess as to what it will hatch into.  An anti-Phoenix, maybe, though I don’t know what that would be.  Some people say it’s a back-up Phoenix, that it’ll hatch when the first one has grown tired of being immortal.  Still others say it’ll be Loki’s wolf that eats the sun and ends the world, or that it’ll be a new world, a realm like Arcadia.” He shrugged, raised his voice a little since he’d noticed he’d been whispering. “The point is, nobody knows.”

I was shaken.  That meant that the black egg was a primordial symbol of potential: it could contain anything.  People believed it was this, it was that… And with that kind of power… “And the Duke has it?!”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

This throws the truce thing way out of whack.  “Any idea what he’s going to do with it?”

DJ took a long pull from his wineskin.  “Something horrible, no doubt.  I mean really horrible.” A stern grin slid across his face. “Let’s find out what.”

 

Fairies trade in favors.  We take “IOU’s” very seriously, and I had to cash in quite a few to get the help I needed.  Ole Meggs owed me a favor, and little Ginny Greengrin owed her, and Ginny pulled a string with Kinoa Tim-Tom and he called in a favor with Moira, who’s who we ended up working with. 

Moira’s a Sluagh, a natural spy.  Sluaghs can hear everything, and, even though they whisper all the time, normal speaking tones don’t hurt their ears.

So me and DJ let her in on the doomsday-potential the Duke had, and she set off to figure out what kind of havoc, exactly, he was planning on wrecking.

The Duke lives under the castle in town.  I hear a couple of mortals live in the castle itself, but sneaking past humans is nothing.  When we got to the lowest level, DJ traced a pattern in the mortar between a few stones, which obediently turned to jelly.

Through the long tunnel beneath the castle, beneath the earth, beneath any hope of open sky, I could barely breathe.  Claustrophobia is a dumb, dumb thing, but very real and terrible.  I kept glancing up at the…“ceiling” for lack of a better word to describe earth and roots and stone, and feeling like I was being buried alive.

More than once, Moira had to hold my hand.

There were a few more blocked entrances, all of which DJ’s tracing pattern seemed to nullify.  Finally, we came to an enormous clearing, so big you could forget we were underground (which we weren’t, really; physics and occupation of space don’t really apply here).  And there, in the center of a beautiful hedge labyrinth, surrounded by glistening waterfalls, was Duke Annonsill’s Upside-Down Keep.

It stood out like a black boil amidst the scenery.  Don’t get me wrong—I don’t go all weak in the knees over fluffy-puff bunnies and grass and wildflowers; heck, I prefer alleys and litter, signs of people; but even I couldn’t stand to look at that cancerous inkblot of architecture.

It wasn’t just the vertigo, but that certainly was a factor.

When I say, “Upside-Down Keep” I don’t mean it looked kinda upside-down or off-kilter, and I’m not being metaphorical.  I mean it really was.  The very bottom of the castle, or rather, the part that was touching the ground, was the bronze head of a Griffin.  It was about half the size of my thumb.  The Griffin was one of those…. those dealies, you know, they put them on top of flagpoles.  Or in this case, put flagpoles on top of them.  It was dizzying: an enormous castle, completely supported by a flagpole.

I was glad I wouldn’t have to look at it for long.

“What?” DJ whispered to Moira.  I squinted hard trying to make out her response, expecting to have to read her lips.  But I guess maybe she can speak louder than most of her kind, or maybe I can listen better than mine.

She said, “Wait here for me; I’ll be right back.”

And then she seemed to collapse in on herself.  She drew her left leg up, behind her back, and hooked it around her right shoulder.  She twisted her arms around her torso six times.  She brought her right leg over her head in front, and entangled that into the knot somehow.  She did this all very smoothly, and I knew she wasn’t it any pain, but gods.  No matter how many times I watch that, it’s still every time unsettling.

When she was nothing more than a contorted ball of flesh, limbs intertwined—and heck outertwined, too—Moira vanished.

That’s how Sluaghs disappear.  I always like to think they sorta pop back into existence, in their normal shape but invisible.  Mostly because it’s easier than trying to imagine how they can move all twisted up like that.

I spent the first ten minutes trying to be quiet and not look at the castle; looking at it too hard felt kinda like a toothache in my eyes.  I spent the next five minutes guessing what Moira meant by “right back.”  I spent the next five trying not to worry about her, and failing.

Finally, she emerged. Or unfurled.  Or whatever.

Never in my life had I seen anyone so stricken.  Moira’s milk-pale anyway, but she looked translucent.  Her black eyes wouldn’t focus on anything, and she was trembling.  Her lip was bleeding; she had bitten through it.

“Quickly,” is too light a word.  “Lightning-swift” is closer to the truth, but even that, I’d say, is too slow.  We fled, flying at the speed of impossibility, through the tunnel, past the barriers, out of the castle and into the safety of open sky, which seemed a bit too open to really be safe, anyway.  I think my feet touched ground maybe twice on the whole run back.  Anything that could scare Moira that much….

DJ had some stale bread in his apartment.  “I don’t have any sour milk,” he grinned by way of apology, “but I have lots of flat soda.  Will that do?”

Moira nodded.  She’d been too scared to speak for a while, but she seemed calmer now.  Her skin was opaque, anyway.

She gulped a glass of warm, flat soda which seemed to have dust in it.  She drew a shaky breath.  I listened.  With every inch of me I listened, because a Sluagh who’s going out of her way to be quiet is like Diet Water.  Redundancies stack.

“The Duke…and the whole Unseelie Court…. they’re opening the ley lines on Beltaine Eve.  They’re…they’re going to throw the Egg into the springs, call on it to open a gate into Arcadia Under.”   She stopped, gasping and choking back tears.  “The things there…. they’re going to…and they—” she collapsed against DJ’s shoulder. “It’s all over,” she sobbed, “everything.”

I went to the window, stared across Fairfax Street to the park.  It was only a few short weeks ‘til Beltaine.  I tried not to say anything.  Heck, I tried not to think.  The…. things…in Arcadia Under…

Arcadia is where all fae come from; not just changeling types like me and DJ and Moira and even the Duke, but all sorts.  Dragons, the Phoenix, unicorns and griffins and werewolves and Gorgons and pegususes and elves and goblins and boogeymen and vampires and gnomes and those little pink elephants you see when you’re drunk.  Everything you mortals’ve got stories about, they come from Arcadia.  It’s the land of dreams and nightmares.

Arcadia Under, now…. that’s a bit more complicated.  That’s where there’s things there aren’t even words for.  You’ve got no stories to prepare yourselves for those.  Some folk say Arcadia Under is where the fear begins.  Redcaps, who are scary enough themselves, are the nice, fluffy descendants of killing winds and moonless nights in mankind’s distant past; the reason to stay inside your caves, the reason to be afraid of the dark.  The wind that tears the flesh from your bones, the ever-hungry cold…that is the nice, fluffy descendant of the things in Arcadia Under.

And if the Duke and his cadre can somehow bring them here…

There’s power in fear, he knows that.  There’s belief in it, and glamour.  But to unleash that kind of raw, primal terror on simple mortals…Even if the humans lived through it, there’d be no survivors.  Their minds would crack, collapse in on themselves and shut down from fear.  It would be a town of madmen.  Madmen, and the Unseelie Court, grown much, much more powerful.  And it would spread.  Soon, there’d be so much blind fear in the world, so much belief, that the Gates to Arcadia—and Arcadia Under—long since closed, would be flung open wide.

And sure, we’ve all thought about it; going home, ending our exile here on the mortal world.  But at that cost?  It’s insanity.  Bedlam.  Suicide.

I cursed. “We have to go back to the Keep.”

DJ glared at me, still holding Moira.  “You can’t expect us to just—”

“We’re not going to “just” anything.  I didn’t say it would be simple.  I didn’t say it would be painless.  Hell, DJ, I didn’t even say we could live through it.  I just said it has to be done.”

He started to protest, but Moira, still shaking, interrupted him. “Lexy’s right.”

I’d like to say this is the part where, if they were ever going to make a movie about it, there’d be a musical montage of the three of us getting ready; preparing day and night for a battle at the Keep; telling every Seelie Fae we knew about what was going on, enlisting their help.  Brushing up on ancient lore to see if there’s anything we could do to stop it.  Flexing our magical muscles. Girding our loins, whatever that means.

Truth is, we didn’t tell anyone.  The Duke had spies everywhere, and we couldn’t be seen doing anything we normally wouldn’t be doing.  For fae, April’s the start of the season, the party season that doesn’t really end until Hallow’s Eve, and even after that, there’s mortal parties to go to.  We went to our day jobs, we went to the weekend parties. Maybe it’s that if you pretend to have fun, you eventually don’t have to pretend anymore; or maybe it’s that we’re just not wired right to stay worried for very long, but things got a little easier. 

Don’t get me wrong, we still planned, the three of us; and I think all of us were still scared.  I know I was.

Beltaine Eve eve came.  We each had a black jumpsuit, a bag of tricks, and half a hope among us.  DJ nulled the barriers through the castle and the tunnel.  Moira had drawn us a floor plan of the Keep.  The Egg would be in the conference chamber.  Unfortunately, so would everyone else in the Unseelie Court.

The plan was probably stupid, but it was the best we had.  Moira—braver than I am, braver than I thought was possible—would make a play for the Egg.  She’s good as invisible, so getting in’s no trouble.  But she’d have to untangle herself to grab it, and be fully visible the whole time she’s running with it.  But that’s the thing.  She won’t be holding the Egg; she’d be holding a replica.  They’d chase her, but you can’t catch a Sluagh; there’s nothing to hold on to.

And while Moira’s playing decoy, me and DJ would grab the real Egg, shadow-step out, and meet Moira outside.  The only thing that could keep her was cold iron: she wouldn’t be able to muster enough glamour to twist.  But she assured me that since Sidhe were even more sensitive to banality than any other kind of fae, the Duke wouldn’t be touching it, and no one who was with him in the conference chamber would have it on their person in his presence.

I didn’t ask her if she could twist her way out if a Redcap swallowed her.  I hoped she could, and more so, I hoped she wouldn’t tell me the details if she did.

            Truth is, I really don’t need to be here for this. DJ can shadow-step, and take me with him if he’s touching me; and Moira’s a given for this sneaking stuff.  But me?  Sure, I’m soft-footed, but mostly my talents are talking myself out of trouble, and talking other people into it.  And something tells me the Duke won’t be feeling very chatty.

I didn’t mention any of this, of course.  It was me who first said we needed to steal the Egg, and though they agreed with me, I still felt like it’d be my fault if everything goes south. So the least I could do is go south right along with it.

The thing about the Upside-Down Keep is, it doesn’t stay upside-down, not once you’re in it.  Or on it.  Whatever.

See, I didn’t know that, so when we reached the flagpole, and started to climb up it, and that became climbing down it, I had to hold still for a little while with my eyes closed.  It beat the alternative, which was vomiting, and I had no idea what direction that would go.

Once on the bottom (top?) of the flagpole, it took some mind-over-matter thinking to get me to let go of it.  Oh, I’m pretty sure I’d land on my feet, but the question was where. 

We got to the conference chamber; we had an aerial view of the proceedings, crouched where we were on the buttresses or rafters or whatever those things are called.  Tapestries and shadows, and the fact that, even in an upside-down keep with subjective gravity, people just plain don’t look up, concealed us.  The Egg was about fifty paces away, on a platform lit by four balefires.

It was glowing with glamour.

We’d been prepared for that.  Our replica egg didn’t glow; it was just a large obsidian egg from some new-age shop or another.  But we had enough glamour-inducing items to get it to glow, for a short time, at least.

I put a fortune’s worth of favors on our egg before we Moira started down from the rafters: the breath of a fish, the roots of a mountain, a slice of the moon, teeth of a snap dragon, the echo of silence, the toe of a snake, the hope of the damned.  With our now-radiant egg concealed on her somewhere, Moira made her way down a tapestry, perfectly obscured.

DJ held my arm and we both held our breath.  She got to the balefire platform of the Egg, unnoticed, and swept her hand through it, in one motion knocking over the Egg, which fell behind the platform while revealing the replica in her hand.  She bolted for the archway amidst screeching Bean Sidhe wails from the balefires.  The crowd was up from their seats and chasing her the instant she became visible.

We didn’t have much time.  I scrambled down the tapestry first, ran over to the platform.  I grabbed the Egg and looked for DJ.

He hadn’t budged from the rafters.

“What are you doing?!” I hissed from the tapestry.  I could climb back up, Egg and all, but I just didn’t know how much time I had before they came back.

He was just staring, I turned to see what he was looking at, and then everything went black.

I’m in a cell.  My aches aren’t bruises yet, so I know I couldn’t have been out for very long.  Still some time to save the world, I guess.  Unless Duke Annonsill decided to go through with it early, to make sure his plan went off without a hitch.

Seriously, in a cell.  Naked.  Chained with cold iron, so I can’t even shift into a cat to escape.  Or if I could somehow manage it, I’d likely get stuck that way.  Wouldn’t do me any good, anyway; not enough space between the bars on the window for even a hamster.

I already yelled myself hoarse, trying to find out what happened to DJ and Moira.  My wrists and ankles are red lines of welts and blisters from the manacles.  My fingernails are cracked and bleeding; I guess I’d tried to claw my way out, or away from my captors or something.  I don’t really remember.

I spit.  It was a nasty, nasty Sidhe trick.  The Duke, I guess, had been the first to return to the chamber.  Sidhe are the crème de la crème of fae society (yeah, rich and dense); they’re the fairy-est fairies, more sensitive to glamour and banality.  So he was the first to see through our shine-job on the replica egg, saw the trap and sprung it.  With me and DJ in it. 

He’d transfixed DJ. You know the old fairy tales: music only you can hear, beautiful sights only you can see, a magical world unfolding, taking away your every worry and thought and blahdy blahdy blah.  Et cetera et cetera ad nauseum.

I spit again.  Blood in it this time.  I’m not making a play for pity, just assessing my situation.

I look around me.  No help at all.  Small room, cramped and bare, not even some straw for bedding. 

It was too much to hope that they’d leave my bag of tricks, but they’d taken everything.  My clothes, my earring, my necklace satchel—now that would have been handy!  I’d at least be able to chew nutmeg seeds until I was out of my gourd, ready to face the end of everything with a nice dopey grin on my face.

So.  Nothing but me and my favorite skin, and no way to save it.

There aren’t any real shadows in the room, too well-lit by balefire.  No slats in the door, so there goes hope of a rescue by Moira.

There’s paper at my feet, and a pen.  They want me to write my confession to treason and name my co-conspirators.

DJ!  The thought drives home that I will never see him again this side of night.  It’s true that fae are immortal, but we changelings, we’re trapped in human bodies.  The human body will age and die, leaving the fae soul untouched, to be born into another mortal body, some other time later down the road.  It’s a bit confusing for a little while; we go from a normal little human kid with an over-active imagination, to having all these memories, all this knowledge, and this whole other self.

But even the fairy soul can die.  With enough mundane cruelty, with enough banality.  Or, what’s likely in my case, with enough imaginative tortures and cold iron from the Duke.

I realize, choking, that I don’t even know if DJ’s alive or dead.  DJ!  My drinking buddy, my playmate, the guy who taught me to play drums.  The guy who kept a spare change of clothes for me at his apartment, in case I showed up there in cat-form one night.  I’ll miss our rants, our psuedo-intellectual conversations, our late-night poker games, our—

Poker!  Of course!  Frantically, I start scratching at my left arm.  I’ve got a scar there from when I was hit by a car (life number three, I used to joke); no feeling at all for about a one-by-three inch patch of skin. I’d used it as a hiding place for something I’d won from Kinoa Tim-Tom in a poker game.

Wincing against the strain of touching the iron, I bite at my flesh, tearing at the scar until I get it: a silver sewing needle.

A Name Seed.

They’re incredibly illegal.  The worst kind of weapon; you prick someone’s temples, left first, then right; and a Name Eater will come and make them never have been.

Some folks say Name Eaters are what keeps civilization from collapsing under the weight of racial history; they’re a check-and-balance system to make sure there’s always mystery in the world.  They say Name Eaters ate the ancient knowledge of Atlantis, of Stonehenge, that they ate their fill of King Arthur until nobody’s sure if he ever existed or not. 

Kinoa Tim-Tom, always one for a stranger version of the truth than most, told me Name Eaters are actually very old vampires.  I mean very old.  They can’t survive on blood anymore, not even vampire blood.  They eat histories down into legends, legends into stories, stories into, “my, that’s an odd word, I wonder how it came into the language?”  They eat the words into nothing.  They eat your memory, they eat your past, they eat every recollection anyone ever had that you’d even existed.  And, in the case of fae, they eat your fairy self, leaving you mortal and mundane.

Great.  Now, if only I could get the Duke to come in here and gloat, and if he wouldn’t mind holding still while I poked him in his temples….

“But this is a special Name Seed, effendi,” Kinoa had said, trying to convince me to let him use it to double-or-nothing a really sweet pot I’d won.  “I traded my whistle to a mockingbird in exchange for it.  And the story behind it, of course.”

He never did tell me the story, but the difference in this Name Seed was clear.  It was a bargaining chip.  It calls not a Name Eater—whatever they may be—but Time itself.  And in return for giving yourself back to the ether, to the cutting room floor of the Reel of History, you get to make one alteration.  It’s a sewing needle.  Where do you think they got the term “a stitch in time”?

Don’t get me wrong; it’s Time, not a Djinn with chaser: I don’t get a wish or anything.  Basically, I can alter someone or something’s timeline, infinitely into the future or the past.  I could make it so the Duke was never born, or age him to death, while it’d still be good old April 29^th here.  But that wouldn’t solve anything.  Any number of his cohorts could just go ahead with the plan.

I pick up the pen and paper, not to write a confession, but to write everything.  To tell my story, and DJ’s and Moira’s.  To let someone know that, in Berkeley Springs, we really did try to keep the whole thing from going down the tubes.  Maybe you’d’ve had better plans.  Maybe yours would’ve worked.

And, while I’m writing everything down, it hits me, what I need to do.  I make a guess that it’s almost Beltaine Eve.  They were probably going to do it at nightfall, when the festivities begin, but you can’t be too sure.  I finished this as quickly as I could, may someone find it.

I also decided that, when Time comes to eat my name, my past and my memories, I’m going out as a cat.  It’s an easier world for amnesiatac cats than humans, I suppose.  Besides, I am already naked.  So when you see a black and white cat hanging around in Berkeley Springs, walking around like he owns the place, his name is Lexy.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s the honest truth.  This may either be the most brilliant or the most disastrously stupid thing I’ve ever done.  ‘Cause when it’s time for me to strike a deal with Time, I’m going to age the Other Egg of the Phoenix.

Until it hatches.

Good-bye, friends, and hello!

Lexy

 

Author's Note

I'm always up for help on dialogue and pacing.
Also, concerned I hit people over the head too much with kiths and seelie versus unseelie. Thoughts?

Reviews

[Roberta Weth]

Wow, awesome story!
Thank you for entering my happily ever after contest :)
~Bobbi

[Dj Golden]

Very in depth, but you have so much build up without enough ending. You never explain why "DJ" was staring, you don't explain what happens when the egg hatches, and, much like bad alien movies, you never show us the evil doer. You need to expand this story more. You've already got the events down, just need some filler and explanation.

Other then that it is very good. You draw people in with all the different creature types (though you need some description of them) and the legend behind all of this is extremely interesting. Keep working on it and I'll keep reading it.

P.S. Break it up a little into chapters...That's a lot of reading.