Post by No Face on Mar 16, 2024 17:22:34 GMT -5
The Flynns had made a stab in the general direction of the very first step of reinforcing their path downward (then upward?) into the Fens. They had reason to be wary of creating an avenue by which folk from either side might accidentally find themselves where it was not fantastic for them to be. What that meant today was that they'd surrounded the area with signs of a sewage leak and a work tripod, and ordered some lumber. That was as far as they'd gotten just now.
In practical terms, a wily person, well-armed with some knowledge, perhaps some dynamite, and more importantly a good kit and a good head on their shoulders, could borrow a harness from them and a spotter and descend down down down, through the distance that was climbable, and down into the parts that were only fall-able. The harness was an anchor to the world above, of course, and no good if one wished to leave it, so there would come a point, far down in the dark where the dripping and trickling of water seemed to come and go, when the brave individual would swing to the wall, hook the harness to a slice of rock, and have to drop.
In terms of keeping the peace, and world-side folk world-side, and fae-side folk fae-side, for the most part this was the best possible way to keep the wingless from getting too curious about it all.
In terms of anyone actually hoping to crossover, it was bad enough, but there would be a fall, a hair-raising plummet, a goosebump-inducing, weak-bowel-tweaking, scream-tickling breakneck disagreement between one's mass and the air.
But the air would give in first.
A tumble would become something else, an inversion would dizzy the mind, and speeding closer ahead would be a speck of sky, growing growing growing, and the tattery end of the latter part of the Flynns' Stage One plan for getting better access here:
A net.
And the oddest of nets. Not flat. Not spread wide across the mouth of the chute or the geyser of however one would think of it.
More like a fish trap, it was conical, even more like a helix, and it would attract that which flew toward it, and give them a way to climb to the edge if they were still conscious by this time.
She was here because of a wild request. One that was raised with many doubts and concerns as to whether it would even work. But Adeline had asked. Of course she made sure to run the idea by Avery and Felix, to pick up any hints and tricks that would help her along the way, and to set a loose time for “how long” became “too long.” Then Aurelia strapped a harness to her body and made the slow descent until it was time to fall.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Knowing what to expect did not make it any easier. Her teeth clenched. Her breath held. Every bone in her body tensed and braced for an impact that would never come until something finally caught her. Something that flexed and bent to the weight of her body without the pain of a collision. Aurelia made a note to tell the Flynns the net was holding. Waiting long enough to catch her breath, to allow that human moment of relief to give life to her bones and muscles, the Eforie hoisted herself up and climbed up the cylinder like walls to reach the Fens.
The Fens breathed to the Eforie and perhaps took back her breath to itself in a way wordless, but somehow far more animate than the exchanges of air in the other world.
As soon as she crossed through, and caught herself, and held herself, and had a moment, that subtle energy was hers, and in some way she was its own, too.
The sky above was half-streaked with high, long, narrow stripes of cloud, white and lit up by an afternoon sun. Everywhere not clouded was a rich blue, inviting and very still and very eternal and yet the eye wanted to find things in it. The eye felt that it should find things in that vast emptiness, as if there must be things to see there.
Birdsong and chatter would greet her before she ever pulled herself up over the edge.
It was the same edge she'd leaped from, just a little overgrown with a new green-bud vine, but there were places where there could be no question: familiar boot prints, shoe prints, had pressed down just at the edge while many peered, and hesitated, leaped, or watched helpless.
This was the place.
It was shunned at its rim by the Fens itself, but all that chatter was just beyond, as if someone had known Aurelia's hand would grip the rope staked in near the edges and haul her up into view at any moment.
She had work to do, but an obligation to answer, first. The price of the agreement maintained was a visit to a nearby willow tree, an exchange of small gifts, perhaps a story or a song or a bit of news or a short dice game. It was almost childlike, this real price, and Felix told her that if she chose dice then to watch for the red-furred sprite that liked to cheat by switching dice for enchanted acorns, and Avery handed over two silver forks from their house tableware in case she needed something extra to offer up.
If all of that went well, then she would find the Willow only too happy to bid her back again, and the partially-built house would be waiting for her not far away--her house.
And she would learn that some dead bark was there with a rock on it for her, and that she should leave the messenger where it lay.
At the top of the edge, Aurelia stopped for a breath. The Fens looked like she remembered it to be and yet… there was something that felt different. Something that made her eye dart from one place to the next in an effort to discover the oddity. She was certain this was the place. A set of those footprints belonged to her. Making peace that this was the Fens and that sometimes strange things were just part of being within Faerie, Aurelia set off.
The willow was the first place she visited. An invisible set of scales required balancing. On this day she did not offer a dice game. Instead she offered a sea shanty song:
There’s tinkers and tailors and soldiers and all
Wey hey, blow the man down.
They all ship for sailors on board the Black Ball
Give me some time to blow the man down.
When the song was completed, Aurelia waited long enough to ensure the terms were satisfied, ready and willing to hand over one of the forks should more be required.
It was easy. Why was anyone worried about something so simple?
Today, it really was simple.
Aurelia's presence was one that the small fae, and the elder creatures, such as the Willow itself, warmed to readily. They wanted to follow her when the Willow thanked her and she was free to go, and she'd find herself going in a cloud of curious, buzzing tiny ones, some smaller than Indra's shipsprites and some the size of newborn humans. They wanted her to sing more, and begged, bargained, even threatened in tiny voices that they'd pull her hair--though this was not followed-through, as they took to fighting each other off in small whirlwinds of infantile displeasure between them. Some just wanted her to look at them--and this, too, in a very few of them took on a sinister edge as if they might force her to do it, trick her to do it, and again these petulant storms tended not to blow themselves out so much as be neutralized by other petulant storms, or by self-appointed haughty little peacekeepers that zoomed in to "take care of it."
The entire effect was a roiling, airy, half-playful, half-tantrum-like busy-ness.
It might have been the Flynns' agreement, and the Willow's potential displeasure, that ultimately kept it from turning into anything, but there was no obvious sign that stated that this was so.
At the house, not worked on since Aurelia had last known, the semi-living or fully-living parts of the house swayed a little as if every tiny breeze were the greatest pleasure and music. "Dead bark" was apparently paper, because back from the edge of the porch, near the door, was a folded, sealed bit of it under a white river rock. Clutching to the rock was a dried and curled up leaf--that upon closer inspection was no leaf, but a dead fairy that had shriveled and gone brown and crisp.
There was certainly a measure of blind trust that had to be given to the parameters that the Flynns set up with the Willow. Completing her part also meant that she needed to stay watchful and cool to the threats of pulling her hair, to their half tricks in getting her to look a them, in their hedged words that they could force her into doing what they wanted. Peace-keepers buzzed in and out to shoo them away or those tiny faeries fluttered off for some other shiny thing to capture their attention.
Aurelia stayed on the course until she reached the little house.
For a small time, she simply looked at the house and thought of the promises that it meant. A place of refuge for those who could find it. A place to be found.
“What are you?” She whispered first to the dead fairy while kneeling before its carcass. Gloved hands carefully picked it, the rock, and the “dead bark” that reminded her of paper to inspect.
It was light, the dead fairy. As light as the leaf it might have been mistaken for from a distance. It did not suddenly come to life when Aurelia picked it up. Its curled wings were stiff as twigs.
The paper, unfolded, was clearly recently made--or preserved. Someone had written in black ink, and the script was careful and medieval in form, the letters formed with the flat, slanting nib of either a fountain pen or a quill. The letter read:
I have a scar on my hand.
Indoors, find the bell to ring, that you may hear.
Find the walnut to crush, that you may feel.
Find the four-petal blossom and branch to burn, and see through the smoke the state of the hunt.
There was a little post-script, too, toward the bottom of the page, though it was not marked:
I have with me one who is interested in creating photographs. Please use the contents of the bag inside to acquire any and all materials relevant to this endeavor. If their value should prove insufficient, I will address any discrepancy as soon as I am able.
"Were you a sprite?" She whispered to the deceased before finding a temporary resting place for now. Unfolding the paper, Aurelia silently read the words.
I have a scar on my hand.
"What does that mean?" She asked aloud to herself.
Indoors, find the bell to ring, that you may hear.
Aurelia read the note three more times before moving into the front of the house in search for a bell, a walnut, and a four-petal blossom and branch to burn.
The house, incomplete as it was, had all sorts of caches of leaves that had blown in, the makings of birds' nests, and oddities that suggested that the living wood had resettled itself a few times. There were no obvious hidey-holes, but there did not have to be: Just inside, shielded from wind and rain, the items were all together, pinned down by more stones. A hand-beaten, slightly lopsided brass bell with a clapper in the shape of a housecat hung by its tail; a plump walnut that looked fresh and pristine; and a smooth-barked little branch nine inches long that was more slender than Aurelia's little finger all the way to the soft tip. A few leaves had survived the journey, only a little the worse for wear and still a dark, leathery, glossy green, and there was one small white flower near the tip with four petals. Grouped with them was a small leather pouch, cinched tight at the top with a simple drawstring, and a sense of small contents within.
The contents of the pouch were for photography equipment. Aurelia would look those over and see to gathering the materials.
One at a time, unsure of what was about to happen, the Eforie followed the instructions.
First she rang the bell.
It wasn't a very lovely sound, but the bell did vibrate its way through a few off-key clangings before the housecat came to rest.
Hearing nothing in its wake, the housecat bell was returned to the stones.
And with the heel of her boot, she crushed the walnut.
It crackled apart, some chunks staying strong and large and some going to powder under her heel.
Retrieving a lighter from her Flynn and Flynn kit, Aurelia set the four-petal blossom and branch on fire.
The branch did not want to catch. It would take some work, touching the flame to the sharp tips of the leaves and holding it under the thinnest edges of those stems that held them or the blossom. What did curl from the efforts was smoke, and a lot of it compared to how little seemed to actually be blackening along the branch for all this effort. There was simply too much life in the thing, too much moisture, for it to want to take the flame Aurelia offered.
But it was in the smoke, which curled in little blooms of its own before they drifted apart, that Aurelia would begin to see hints of forms--figures--an arm, reaching--
The hints gradually defined themselves the more she persisted with the lighter, and she would, too, begin to hear the tones of speech. These seemed at first to be part of the Fens' own chatter, its own lively whirlwind of life, but her ears would become more and more attuned to a low sweep of voices.
Two of them she might have found familiar.
And the smoke would be inhaled, even as it was so thin as to be invisible in the air, and Aurelia Dumitru would find before her all the highlights and shadows of someplace other than where she was, overlayed over this house, and not everyone who experienced this enchantment would have a choice, but she would feel one: let it take her, or draw back and flick off the lighter.
She didn't fight it. She leaned into the arms and let her eyes close as the scent of smoke surrounded her.
There were voice... that carried something familiar in the cadences. She knew them but couldn't identify them just yet.
Opening her eyes, she looked at the newness of where she now was. With a deep breath, she made the choice to let it take her.
The moment she made the conscious choice to go where the current flowed, the shapes in the smoke deepened, gaining dimension and solidity--but with a soft-edged cast, as if she were viewing everything through dusty window glass. Superimposed over the bare, unfinished frames of her house was a dark, luscious forest, all a-shadow beneath a dense canopy higher above than the vaults of a cathedral. Down here, the roots of trees curled and disappeared into moss-covered earth, and narrow streams criss-crossed everywhere, the birdsong motion of them coming full into her ears. Things shifted in all directions, sounding enormous, as if a single step snapped branches or dammed up those little brooks. They were, at least, farther from her than the speakers.
Aurelia would find herself behind the edge of a tree trunk that was larger than the entire first floor of the Knightsbridge House. Where the spell perched her was atop one of this massive tree's many roots. She'd find it slick with dew, all velvet with more moss, shimmering with moonlight flowers. She was exactly where she had to be to be hidden from view from those who were just around the far side.
One of them formed a face from many mobile branches that came together like shadowpuppets to form eyes, nose, a mouth that could shape words without being a single thing. The Dark Mother of the Woods was saying:
"... not long now. There are no other futures but this one. You need not fear, need not fidget."
A little indignant, a woman-form that extended like a branch from a section of stout white tree huffed: "I do not fidget, Blackthorn. I yet see more futures than thou dost. I do not like these crawling things. I do not like the bleeding."
"I like it no more than you, cousin, and yet I remember than even mortals bleed when they give birth. Some blood is to the good."
The Dark Mother
Was this what Cyrus had been up to since his return to Faerie. She looked down at the placement that the spell put her, how her feet were positioned and how she was in just the right spot to remain unseen. Was this the same place that Cyrus once stood? Was this his memory that he left behind for her to learn and pass on to the others in the mortal realm? If that were true....
Well, Aurelia couldn't hide how impressed she was even if she tried.
Some blood is for the good.
Aurelia refocused her attention and returned to listening.
The more she focused into the spell, the less she'd hear and see and feel the actual house where she burned the flowering branch.
The great wood around her breathed with ancient moisture and a gemlike shared beauty. It was impossible for her to see any sky if she looked up, but she might, here and there, see where in lightning-crack slivers some very distant light set layers and layers of vast leaves aglow as if they were the most vibrant of stained green glass. Down here where she was, the warm humidity made the air thick and promised life, and everything was painted in the tones of water, the tones of growth, the tones of shadow. Still her ears might track great motion out there, somewhere, perhaps avoiding this spot, and if she took any moment to study she would realize that the distant canopy and the far reaches of this great labyrinthine forest were full of movement not unlike the fashion of the Fens as she'd just seen it. Faerie was home to many beings with wings, and many beings that took to the air by other means.
The white tree with its suspended woman growing forth from it was upsidedown. Its branches reached down here; the woman's torso stretched downward, long white hair fanning out as if in water--or as if it were only more smoke. Under the Tor, Aurelia had glimpsed this woman... unless this was one of her sisters? Here, if roots her tree had, they were somewhere far above, for the great trunk of her tree disappeared among the cathredral roof of this place.
Incidentally, so did Blackthorn's.
Missus White said, "I could not reach the Alfar's dust."
"Perhaps Veleith can."
"Veleith." The white creature scoffed openly. "Useless. Worthless. Wrung out. Spent. He ignored my summons."
No.
Aurelia felt herself suspended in a state of shock at the recognition of Missus White. All the misgivings, the suspicions, and the doubts she felt about being back at the Tor came in full force.
Missus White who was so eager to awaken Arthur.
Arthur who the Alfar needed.
The sickening dip in her stomach almost made it impossible to breathe. And now, they were speaking of the ashes of the Alfar. They scattered the ashes in four different directions. Some were given to the mortal world. Some were taken to a place even she did not know of. And some were given to the Garden – by far the hardest location to reach. Except Veleith had already been given permission to enter the Garden, hadn’t he?
Holding her breath, Aurelia waited and watched.
"You're afraid."
Missus White--or was it one of her identical kin?--looked up with a face that looked like it had been carved from the white tree from which she suspended. That face peered up into a face only hinted at in the shapes of the purposefully overlapped and folded branches of the blackthorn tree. Their forms were very different, Missus White's and Mother Blackthorn's. "I believe that all of this will ebb, but so much is lost in the meantime... How can it ever be again what it was?"
Blackthorn's "face" was not as humanly mobile as Missus White's, but the eyes that were spaces between sticks narrowed, and with a creaking the branches made the head tilt, lean in, rustle gently toward the smaller figure. "It may not. But we will be the ones to shape it. How can they win? They have no love; only need. All their powers are kinds of feeding. All their language gives away this truth. It was not always such a crime; they seemed young, and we were patient. Yet they are weak as children still; they don't know how to speak to anything but each other. You know this. I've begun the work: they are bound now to it."
Missus White's face turned away. Whoever had witnessed this moment, whether it was Cyrus or a sprite, could not see it now. Her words, soft though they were, were audible yet: "Is it binding if they don't understand it?"
The laugh was like dry leaves in a sudden breeze. Mother Blackthorn said, "What does it truly matter? Who is left to adjudicate? There is no one, either, left to show them what's been done. They will fail in their duties, their heads as empty as their hearts, and by default, dear cousin, those duties will return to our keeping, and there will be no more of THIS."
"Is it binding if they don't understand it?"
Memories of the Garden flooded back. Her demands for more information - to wait just one minute to allow them to gather their bearings and find their center. Adeline's violent protest to allow Slake a seat at the table, regardless of what that table may be. Had the rush for an agreement been for something more than the restoration of the boarders?
Were they all tricked and, if so, for what?
"What are you planning?" She whispered to herself.
"--be no more of THIS."
Missus White's back arched, more like a serpent or even a worm in flexibility than like the human woman she resembled, with a Homo sapiens spine. She peered around. Upwards--above the watcher through whose eyes Aurelia now spied. Above even the manifestation of Mother Blackthorn. It was that high canopy, and all the inverted stairways of branches that traced the routes to it up every trunk. Her own tree, here, disappeared into those interlocking branches with their leaves. She eyed it with a clear longing. Whether she needed to or not, she seemed to draw in a deep breath. "There are those who have come to love 'this,' even as it decays us and all else."
Mother Blackthorn's face broke apart as branches released the hints of shapes and reached as if to embrace the smaller white figure. "I heard Veleith's cry once. Such grief. He loved them, you know. He truly loved those new little things. I think if need can be mistaken for love, then so can poison. I know no other course but this reclaiming. The world will bloom again one day, with new voices. We can but hope they are fertile with promise, and not disease."
"Cannot some old ones yet be saved?" Missus White's arms had spread wide, and the tree that resembled a woman in part, and the tree that only resembled the silhouette of one sometimes, were soon embracing with a scraping and rasping of wood and interlocking of leaves. "I have a king still in my keeping."
"Oh... how can they be old and young at the same time? --I do not know, cousin. We shall see. Even when your king was born it was moving to this choice. It may already have been too late. But we will choose mercy. We will choose care. We will choose what they cannot, and return them to the beasts they should ever have been."
In Aurelia's vision, a shimmer came to air, to moss, to tree trunks and high canopy, and it came not only to what was seen through the eyes, but a sort of static chime came to the edges of Blackthorn's voice, and to the vast hollow hush of the forest itself. Scents of rich life and cool water, of rock and magic both, took on a similar hazing, as if somehow aromas could begin to reflect one another the way crystals could refract light. This was magic moving through the cavernous underwood. Through her skin, Aurelia, as the sprite before her, would learn how even a sense of self and of outlines could be splintered gently into filaments and rays wherever true power passed by. Even thoughts.
But she was not there herself. This experience had been packaged for someone to witness. Ritualized. Made clean. Made safe.
A note came to the ear, like a ringing in the ear of one who is ill, but this one gentle enough. It did not stop, but softened and receded and hid at the back of a growing dimness.
Mother Blackthorn looked toward the hiding place, and then the dimness was everything.
For a time.
When there was something else, it came with a sense that time had passed, though for Aurelia it was as little as the time between the closing of the eyes and the opening of them in a blink. A face was before her, enormous and very close, with pale skin and blue eyes fuzzy with light and a shifting sense of that refraction that was even more pronounced than before.
"This one is spent," said Junachte in a low, rich hush, the softness and feeling in this voice now very like the sounds of the wood from before. Her face shrank as she leaned away or rose, but it remained like moonlight, bleeding into the world around it and into the blue that she wore.
And if warmth could be embodied, then it was in a brown hand that came around the one who had spied on Blackthorn and White. "It's all right," breathed Cyrus, close but unseen, low to the thing that listened, so close that the fractured warmth came from a sense of skin that was drifting apart, and also of breath that smelled a little of fading wine, and that had a heat too that was coming apart at the seams. "You're back with us now," came the whisper.
"I have seen...."
It was a dim space, it seemed, but this was a muffling blanket of sensations by now. Seconds, only, for Aurelia, as if these little senses were but tacked on, or dragged in by the spell, netted by accident. The heat of the hand remained, though it was losing all definition.
"You are forgiven."
Some sense of motion; of work being done. A taste of magic as more of this blending of the elements of being itself. Dim glows behind a dark figure; everything a kind of brushing heat. Unexpected comfort.
"I remember which one you are."
Some tattering of this spell; the voice sounded farther away, and smaller; but it was the listener who was shrinking.
"I remember your true name."
Just a hint of something that, in the primordial universe, could once have become Cyrus's voice.
"One more task only, and I release you, little one."
In this drifting fall, cradled in a hand, against a huge button made of bone, the other arm perhaps at work, the edges of all sensations bleeding freely into one another, a new, rushed voice said, "Captain!" and then the last whisper from the one who held it:
"Die well."
"Die well."
Aurelia Dumitru flinched back into her own body painless and safe. Those two factors made no impact on the reeling that she suffered. Her hand reached out to grasp the walls of the house. She gasped loudly as mind and body fought to reconnect.
Fingers flexed against the living wood.
"I could not reach the Alfar's dust."
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in-
"I've begun the work: they are bound now to it."
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
"Is it binding if they don't understand it?"
Breathe in... one... two... three.. breath out...
"I think if need can be mistaken for love, then so can poison. I know no other course but this reclaiming.
Toes flexed within boots. Boots that she loved. Boots that she always wore. Boots that took her from her home at the Knightsbridge to the man cover near the Flynns. Boots that brought her to the Fens -
"We will choose what they cannot, and return them to the beasts they should ever have been."
The Fens. She was here in the Fens for Adeline. Adeline who asked her to leave something for -
"I remember your true name."
Something for... something for... something for...
"One more task only, and I release you, little one."
SomethingforSomethingforSomethingfor--
"Captain!"
Cyrus.
"Die well."
Aurelia shuddered as at last the world returned to equilibrium.
Equilibrium meant the end of that sense of colors--not running together, like paint, but shining into and through each other like the light of many diamonds held in a single palm. The blending of sounds at the edges; the sensations of warmth that began to come from everywhere.
Aurelia Dumitru, in the Fens, had her own shape; and so did the air she breathed in and breathed out within her own throat and lungs. Even here in Faerie, there were some definitions, even if they were odd. Whatever the sprite had been experiencing, whatever had been bottled up by the spell and delivered, had been something else.
She took time to breathe. Within that time, Aurelia pressed the heels of her hands against closed eyelids and sighed. What she knew and what she learned were separated out like puzzle pieces that wouldn't fit. There would be talks with Avery and the others later. Perhaps one more visit to the Bells before they left for their holiday - because while this gave them a brighter light, there wasn't much left to be done on her side of the boarder.
Hopefully Cyrus and those at the Bells would know more when they returned.
"Thank you." She breathed to the living wood. "For protecting this message and keeping it safe for my arrival."
Then Aurelia went to retrieve the dead sprite.
A breeze could have blown the tiny husk away, had one caught anywhere in the curled, stiff little wings. Without the golden glow, it was nearly featureless, certainly sexless, and brown as the dried leaves it felt like in the hand. Tiny eyes were closed and dried that way; so too was the mouth.
"I have one more thing to ask of you."
One more task only, and I release you, little one.
Placing the dried husk on the ground of the Fens, Aurelia retrieved the lighter from her Flynn kit once more and lit its dried body on fire.
The little body burned and Aurelia whispered words over it's crisping corpse. Given how much of a husk it was, she didn't expect the fire to live long. When it met its eventual death, she gathered the ashes and moved into the partially built house where the little trinkets sat.
Ashes in one hand, Aurelia retrieved the folded envelope Adeline gave her and smeared the two together. More whispers to nothing but the air. But her fingertips tingled where she felt the magic meld the items into one. Then then ash covered envelope was placed beneath the housecat bell.
The next step was to write her own note for Cyrus and his sprites.
I have a lock of red hair and a book of Sanskirt.
A drop of blood and the item is yours.
Once satisfied with the note, there was only one thing left to do. Aurelia picked up the little bag of trinkets with the promise of photography equipment before she left the living house.
The bag wasn't all jingle. There was some dull metal in there--coin of some rough kind, by the feel and sound--but other things, too.
The Fens--all of it, even the obnoxious loudmouth fae that proclaimed love or begged Aurelia to stay--ultimately bowed to the agreement. Whether she returned to the Willow, crossed the marshes, or went to the side of the hole that led out (and upward?), the havoc of fairy whirlwinds did not grow so wild that she would feel herself forced to fight back--
She did what she came here to do. And after a brief goodbye to the Willow, Aurelia returned to the hole that would take her down and up leaving only a new set of foot prints behind.
In practical terms, a wily person, well-armed with some knowledge, perhaps some dynamite, and more importantly a good kit and a good head on their shoulders, could borrow a harness from them and a spotter and descend down down down, through the distance that was climbable, and down into the parts that were only fall-able. The harness was an anchor to the world above, of course, and no good if one wished to leave it, so there would come a point, far down in the dark where the dripping and trickling of water seemed to come and go, when the brave individual would swing to the wall, hook the harness to a slice of rock, and have to drop.
In terms of keeping the peace, and world-side folk world-side, and fae-side folk fae-side, for the most part this was the best possible way to keep the wingless from getting too curious about it all.
In terms of anyone actually hoping to crossover, it was bad enough, but there would be a fall, a hair-raising plummet, a goosebump-inducing, weak-bowel-tweaking, scream-tickling breakneck disagreement between one's mass and the air.
But the air would give in first.
A tumble would become something else, an inversion would dizzy the mind, and speeding closer ahead would be a speck of sky, growing growing growing, and the tattery end of the latter part of the Flynns' Stage One plan for getting better access here:
A net.
And the oddest of nets. Not flat. Not spread wide across the mouth of the chute or the geyser of however one would think of it.
More like a fish trap, it was conical, even more like a helix, and it would attract that which flew toward it, and give them a way to climb to the edge if they were still conscious by this time.
She was here because of a wild request. One that was raised with many doubts and concerns as to whether it would even work. But Adeline had asked. Of course she made sure to run the idea by Avery and Felix, to pick up any hints and tricks that would help her along the way, and to set a loose time for “how long” became “too long.” Then Aurelia strapped a harness to her body and made the slow descent until it was time to fall.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Knowing what to expect did not make it any easier. Her teeth clenched. Her breath held. Every bone in her body tensed and braced for an impact that would never come until something finally caught her. Something that flexed and bent to the weight of her body without the pain of a collision. Aurelia made a note to tell the Flynns the net was holding. Waiting long enough to catch her breath, to allow that human moment of relief to give life to her bones and muscles, the Eforie hoisted herself up and climbed up the cylinder like walls to reach the Fens.
The Fens breathed to the Eforie and perhaps took back her breath to itself in a way wordless, but somehow far more animate than the exchanges of air in the other world.
As soon as she crossed through, and caught herself, and held herself, and had a moment, that subtle energy was hers, and in some way she was its own, too.
The sky above was half-streaked with high, long, narrow stripes of cloud, white and lit up by an afternoon sun. Everywhere not clouded was a rich blue, inviting and very still and very eternal and yet the eye wanted to find things in it. The eye felt that it should find things in that vast emptiness, as if there must be things to see there.
Birdsong and chatter would greet her before she ever pulled herself up over the edge.
It was the same edge she'd leaped from, just a little overgrown with a new green-bud vine, but there were places where there could be no question: familiar boot prints, shoe prints, had pressed down just at the edge while many peered, and hesitated, leaped, or watched helpless.
This was the place.
It was shunned at its rim by the Fens itself, but all that chatter was just beyond, as if someone had known Aurelia's hand would grip the rope staked in near the edges and haul her up into view at any moment.
She had work to do, but an obligation to answer, first. The price of the agreement maintained was a visit to a nearby willow tree, an exchange of small gifts, perhaps a story or a song or a bit of news or a short dice game. It was almost childlike, this real price, and Felix told her that if she chose dice then to watch for the red-furred sprite that liked to cheat by switching dice for enchanted acorns, and Avery handed over two silver forks from their house tableware in case she needed something extra to offer up.
If all of that went well, then she would find the Willow only too happy to bid her back again, and the partially-built house would be waiting for her not far away--her house.
And she would learn that some dead bark was there with a rock on it for her, and that she should leave the messenger where it lay.
At the top of the edge, Aurelia stopped for a breath. The Fens looked like she remembered it to be and yet… there was something that felt different. Something that made her eye dart from one place to the next in an effort to discover the oddity. She was certain this was the place. A set of those footprints belonged to her. Making peace that this was the Fens and that sometimes strange things were just part of being within Faerie, Aurelia set off.
The willow was the first place she visited. An invisible set of scales required balancing. On this day she did not offer a dice game. Instead she offered a sea shanty song:
There’s tinkers and tailors and soldiers and all
Wey hey, blow the man down.
They all ship for sailors on board the Black Ball
Give me some time to blow the man down.
When the song was completed, Aurelia waited long enough to ensure the terms were satisfied, ready and willing to hand over one of the forks should more be required.
It was easy. Why was anyone worried about something so simple?
Today, it really was simple.
Aurelia's presence was one that the small fae, and the elder creatures, such as the Willow itself, warmed to readily. They wanted to follow her when the Willow thanked her and she was free to go, and she'd find herself going in a cloud of curious, buzzing tiny ones, some smaller than Indra's shipsprites and some the size of newborn humans. They wanted her to sing more, and begged, bargained, even threatened in tiny voices that they'd pull her hair--though this was not followed-through, as they took to fighting each other off in small whirlwinds of infantile displeasure between them. Some just wanted her to look at them--and this, too, in a very few of them took on a sinister edge as if they might force her to do it, trick her to do it, and again these petulant storms tended not to blow themselves out so much as be neutralized by other petulant storms, or by self-appointed haughty little peacekeepers that zoomed in to "take care of it."
The entire effect was a roiling, airy, half-playful, half-tantrum-like busy-ness.
It might have been the Flynns' agreement, and the Willow's potential displeasure, that ultimately kept it from turning into anything, but there was no obvious sign that stated that this was so.
At the house, not worked on since Aurelia had last known, the semi-living or fully-living parts of the house swayed a little as if every tiny breeze were the greatest pleasure and music. "Dead bark" was apparently paper, because back from the edge of the porch, near the door, was a folded, sealed bit of it under a white river rock. Clutching to the rock was a dried and curled up leaf--that upon closer inspection was no leaf, but a dead fairy that had shriveled and gone brown and crisp.
There was certainly a measure of blind trust that had to be given to the parameters that the Flynns set up with the Willow. Completing her part also meant that she needed to stay watchful and cool to the threats of pulling her hair, to their half tricks in getting her to look a them, in their hedged words that they could force her into doing what they wanted. Peace-keepers buzzed in and out to shoo them away or those tiny faeries fluttered off for some other shiny thing to capture their attention.
Aurelia stayed on the course until she reached the little house.
For a small time, she simply looked at the house and thought of the promises that it meant. A place of refuge for those who could find it. A place to be found.
“What are you?” She whispered first to the dead fairy while kneeling before its carcass. Gloved hands carefully picked it, the rock, and the “dead bark” that reminded her of paper to inspect.
It was light, the dead fairy. As light as the leaf it might have been mistaken for from a distance. It did not suddenly come to life when Aurelia picked it up. Its curled wings were stiff as twigs.
The paper, unfolded, was clearly recently made--or preserved. Someone had written in black ink, and the script was careful and medieval in form, the letters formed with the flat, slanting nib of either a fountain pen or a quill. The letter read:
I have a scar on my hand.
Indoors, find the bell to ring, that you may hear.
Find the walnut to crush, that you may feel.
Find the four-petal blossom and branch to burn, and see through the smoke the state of the hunt.
There was a little post-script, too, toward the bottom of the page, though it was not marked:
I have with me one who is interested in creating photographs. Please use the contents of the bag inside to acquire any and all materials relevant to this endeavor. If their value should prove insufficient, I will address any discrepancy as soon as I am able.
"Were you a sprite?" She whispered to the deceased before finding a temporary resting place for now. Unfolding the paper, Aurelia silently read the words.
I have a scar on my hand.
"What does that mean?" She asked aloud to herself.
Indoors, find the bell to ring, that you may hear.
Aurelia read the note three more times before moving into the front of the house in search for a bell, a walnut, and a four-petal blossom and branch to burn.
The house, incomplete as it was, had all sorts of caches of leaves that had blown in, the makings of birds' nests, and oddities that suggested that the living wood had resettled itself a few times. There were no obvious hidey-holes, but there did not have to be: Just inside, shielded from wind and rain, the items were all together, pinned down by more stones. A hand-beaten, slightly lopsided brass bell with a clapper in the shape of a housecat hung by its tail; a plump walnut that looked fresh and pristine; and a smooth-barked little branch nine inches long that was more slender than Aurelia's little finger all the way to the soft tip. A few leaves had survived the journey, only a little the worse for wear and still a dark, leathery, glossy green, and there was one small white flower near the tip with four petals. Grouped with them was a small leather pouch, cinched tight at the top with a simple drawstring, and a sense of small contents within.
The contents of the pouch were for photography equipment. Aurelia would look those over and see to gathering the materials.
One at a time, unsure of what was about to happen, the Eforie followed the instructions.
First she rang the bell.
It wasn't a very lovely sound, but the bell did vibrate its way through a few off-key clangings before the housecat came to rest.
Hearing nothing in its wake, the housecat bell was returned to the stones.
And with the heel of her boot, she crushed the walnut.
It crackled apart, some chunks staying strong and large and some going to powder under her heel.
Retrieving a lighter from her Flynn and Flynn kit, Aurelia set the four-petal blossom and branch on fire.
The branch did not want to catch. It would take some work, touching the flame to the sharp tips of the leaves and holding it under the thinnest edges of those stems that held them or the blossom. What did curl from the efforts was smoke, and a lot of it compared to how little seemed to actually be blackening along the branch for all this effort. There was simply too much life in the thing, too much moisture, for it to want to take the flame Aurelia offered.
But it was in the smoke, which curled in little blooms of its own before they drifted apart, that Aurelia would begin to see hints of forms--figures--an arm, reaching--
The hints gradually defined themselves the more she persisted with the lighter, and she would, too, begin to hear the tones of speech. These seemed at first to be part of the Fens' own chatter, its own lively whirlwind of life, but her ears would become more and more attuned to a low sweep of voices.
Two of them she might have found familiar.
And the smoke would be inhaled, even as it was so thin as to be invisible in the air, and Aurelia Dumitru would find before her all the highlights and shadows of someplace other than where she was, overlayed over this house, and not everyone who experienced this enchantment would have a choice, but she would feel one: let it take her, or draw back and flick off the lighter.
She didn't fight it. She leaned into the arms and let her eyes close as the scent of smoke surrounded her.
There were voice... that carried something familiar in the cadences. She knew them but couldn't identify them just yet.
Opening her eyes, she looked at the newness of where she now was. With a deep breath, she made the choice to let it take her.
The moment she made the conscious choice to go where the current flowed, the shapes in the smoke deepened, gaining dimension and solidity--but with a soft-edged cast, as if she were viewing everything through dusty window glass. Superimposed over the bare, unfinished frames of her house was a dark, luscious forest, all a-shadow beneath a dense canopy higher above than the vaults of a cathedral. Down here, the roots of trees curled and disappeared into moss-covered earth, and narrow streams criss-crossed everywhere, the birdsong motion of them coming full into her ears. Things shifted in all directions, sounding enormous, as if a single step snapped branches or dammed up those little brooks. They were, at least, farther from her than the speakers.
Aurelia would find herself behind the edge of a tree trunk that was larger than the entire first floor of the Knightsbridge House. Where the spell perched her was atop one of this massive tree's many roots. She'd find it slick with dew, all velvet with more moss, shimmering with moonlight flowers. She was exactly where she had to be to be hidden from view from those who were just around the far side.
One of them formed a face from many mobile branches that came together like shadowpuppets to form eyes, nose, a mouth that could shape words without being a single thing. The Dark Mother of the Woods was saying:
"... not long now. There are no other futures but this one. You need not fear, need not fidget."
A little indignant, a woman-form that extended like a branch from a section of stout white tree huffed: "I do not fidget, Blackthorn. I yet see more futures than thou dost. I do not like these crawling things. I do not like the bleeding."
"I like it no more than you, cousin, and yet I remember than even mortals bleed when they give birth. Some blood is to the good."
The Dark Mother
Was this what Cyrus had been up to since his return to Faerie. She looked down at the placement that the spell put her, how her feet were positioned and how she was in just the right spot to remain unseen. Was this the same place that Cyrus once stood? Was this his memory that he left behind for her to learn and pass on to the others in the mortal realm? If that were true....
Well, Aurelia couldn't hide how impressed she was even if she tried.
Some blood is for the good.
Aurelia refocused her attention and returned to listening.
The more she focused into the spell, the less she'd hear and see and feel the actual house where she burned the flowering branch.
The great wood around her breathed with ancient moisture and a gemlike shared beauty. It was impossible for her to see any sky if she looked up, but she might, here and there, see where in lightning-crack slivers some very distant light set layers and layers of vast leaves aglow as if they were the most vibrant of stained green glass. Down here where she was, the warm humidity made the air thick and promised life, and everything was painted in the tones of water, the tones of growth, the tones of shadow. Still her ears might track great motion out there, somewhere, perhaps avoiding this spot, and if she took any moment to study she would realize that the distant canopy and the far reaches of this great labyrinthine forest were full of movement not unlike the fashion of the Fens as she'd just seen it. Faerie was home to many beings with wings, and many beings that took to the air by other means.
The white tree with its suspended woman growing forth from it was upsidedown. Its branches reached down here; the woman's torso stretched downward, long white hair fanning out as if in water--or as if it were only more smoke. Under the Tor, Aurelia had glimpsed this woman... unless this was one of her sisters? Here, if roots her tree had, they were somewhere far above, for the great trunk of her tree disappeared among the cathredral roof of this place.
Incidentally, so did Blackthorn's.
Missus White said, "I could not reach the Alfar's dust."
"Perhaps Veleith can."
"Veleith." The white creature scoffed openly. "Useless. Worthless. Wrung out. Spent. He ignored my summons."
No.
Aurelia felt herself suspended in a state of shock at the recognition of Missus White. All the misgivings, the suspicions, and the doubts she felt about being back at the Tor came in full force.
Missus White who was so eager to awaken Arthur.
Arthur who the Alfar needed.
The sickening dip in her stomach almost made it impossible to breathe. And now, they were speaking of the ashes of the Alfar. They scattered the ashes in four different directions. Some were given to the mortal world. Some were taken to a place even she did not know of. And some were given to the Garden – by far the hardest location to reach. Except Veleith had already been given permission to enter the Garden, hadn’t he?
Holding her breath, Aurelia waited and watched.
"You're afraid."
Missus White--or was it one of her identical kin?--looked up with a face that looked like it had been carved from the white tree from which she suspended. That face peered up into a face only hinted at in the shapes of the purposefully overlapped and folded branches of the blackthorn tree. Their forms were very different, Missus White's and Mother Blackthorn's. "I believe that all of this will ebb, but so much is lost in the meantime... How can it ever be again what it was?"
Blackthorn's "face" was not as humanly mobile as Missus White's, but the eyes that were spaces between sticks narrowed, and with a creaking the branches made the head tilt, lean in, rustle gently toward the smaller figure. "It may not. But we will be the ones to shape it. How can they win? They have no love; only need. All their powers are kinds of feeding. All their language gives away this truth. It was not always such a crime; they seemed young, and we were patient. Yet they are weak as children still; they don't know how to speak to anything but each other. You know this. I've begun the work: they are bound now to it."
Missus White's face turned away. Whoever had witnessed this moment, whether it was Cyrus or a sprite, could not see it now. Her words, soft though they were, were audible yet: "Is it binding if they don't understand it?"
The laugh was like dry leaves in a sudden breeze. Mother Blackthorn said, "What does it truly matter? Who is left to adjudicate? There is no one, either, left to show them what's been done. They will fail in their duties, their heads as empty as their hearts, and by default, dear cousin, those duties will return to our keeping, and there will be no more of THIS."
"Is it binding if they don't understand it?"
Memories of the Garden flooded back. Her demands for more information - to wait just one minute to allow them to gather their bearings and find their center. Adeline's violent protest to allow Slake a seat at the table, regardless of what that table may be. Had the rush for an agreement been for something more than the restoration of the boarders?
Were they all tricked and, if so, for what?
"What are you planning?" She whispered to herself.
"--be no more of THIS."
Missus White's back arched, more like a serpent or even a worm in flexibility than like the human woman she resembled, with a Homo sapiens spine. She peered around. Upwards--above the watcher through whose eyes Aurelia now spied. Above even the manifestation of Mother Blackthorn. It was that high canopy, and all the inverted stairways of branches that traced the routes to it up every trunk. Her own tree, here, disappeared into those interlocking branches with their leaves. She eyed it with a clear longing. Whether she needed to or not, she seemed to draw in a deep breath. "There are those who have come to love 'this,' even as it decays us and all else."
Mother Blackthorn's face broke apart as branches released the hints of shapes and reached as if to embrace the smaller white figure. "I heard Veleith's cry once. Such grief. He loved them, you know. He truly loved those new little things. I think if need can be mistaken for love, then so can poison. I know no other course but this reclaiming. The world will bloom again one day, with new voices. We can but hope they are fertile with promise, and not disease."
"Cannot some old ones yet be saved?" Missus White's arms had spread wide, and the tree that resembled a woman in part, and the tree that only resembled the silhouette of one sometimes, were soon embracing with a scraping and rasping of wood and interlocking of leaves. "I have a king still in my keeping."
"Oh... how can they be old and young at the same time? --I do not know, cousin. We shall see. Even when your king was born it was moving to this choice. It may already have been too late. But we will choose mercy. We will choose care. We will choose what they cannot, and return them to the beasts they should ever have been."
In Aurelia's vision, a shimmer came to air, to moss, to tree trunks and high canopy, and it came not only to what was seen through the eyes, but a sort of static chime came to the edges of Blackthorn's voice, and to the vast hollow hush of the forest itself. Scents of rich life and cool water, of rock and magic both, took on a similar hazing, as if somehow aromas could begin to reflect one another the way crystals could refract light. This was magic moving through the cavernous underwood. Through her skin, Aurelia, as the sprite before her, would learn how even a sense of self and of outlines could be splintered gently into filaments and rays wherever true power passed by. Even thoughts.
But she was not there herself. This experience had been packaged for someone to witness. Ritualized. Made clean. Made safe.
A note came to the ear, like a ringing in the ear of one who is ill, but this one gentle enough. It did not stop, but softened and receded and hid at the back of a growing dimness.
Mother Blackthorn looked toward the hiding place, and then the dimness was everything.
For a time.
When there was something else, it came with a sense that time had passed, though for Aurelia it was as little as the time between the closing of the eyes and the opening of them in a blink. A face was before her, enormous and very close, with pale skin and blue eyes fuzzy with light and a shifting sense of that refraction that was even more pronounced than before.
"This one is spent," said Junachte in a low, rich hush, the softness and feeling in this voice now very like the sounds of the wood from before. Her face shrank as she leaned away or rose, but it remained like moonlight, bleeding into the world around it and into the blue that she wore.
And if warmth could be embodied, then it was in a brown hand that came around the one who had spied on Blackthorn and White. "It's all right," breathed Cyrus, close but unseen, low to the thing that listened, so close that the fractured warmth came from a sense of skin that was drifting apart, and also of breath that smelled a little of fading wine, and that had a heat too that was coming apart at the seams. "You're back with us now," came the whisper.
"I have seen...."
It was a dim space, it seemed, but this was a muffling blanket of sensations by now. Seconds, only, for Aurelia, as if these little senses were but tacked on, or dragged in by the spell, netted by accident. The heat of the hand remained, though it was losing all definition.
"You are forgiven."
Some sense of motion; of work being done. A taste of magic as more of this blending of the elements of being itself. Dim glows behind a dark figure; everything a kind of brushing heat. Unexpected comfort.
"I remember which one you are."
Some tattering of this spell; the voice sounded farther away, and smaller; but it was the listener who was shrinking.
"I remember your true name."
Just a hint of something that, in the primordial universe, could once have become Cyrus's voice.
"One more task only, and I release you, little one."
In this drifting fall, cradled in a hand, against a huge button made of bone, the other arm perhaps at work, the edges of all sensations bleeding freely into one another, a new, rushed voice said, "Captain!" and then the last whisper from the one who held it:
"Die well."
"Die well."
Aurelia Dumitru flinched back into her own body painless and safe. Those two factors made no impact on the reeling that she suffered. Her hand reached out to grasp the walls of the house. She gasped loudly as mind and body fought to reconnect.
Fingers flexed against the living wood.
"I could not reach the Alfar's dust."
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in-
"I've begun the work: they are bound now to it."
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
"Is it binding if they don't understand it?"
Breathe in... one... two... three.. breath out...
"I think if need can be mistaken for love, then so can poison. I know no other course but this reclaiming.
Toes flexed within boots. Boots that she loved. Boots that she always wore. Boots that took her from her home at the Knightsbridge to the man cover near the Flynns. Boots that brought her to the Fens -
"We will choose what they cannot, and return them to the beasts they should ever have been."
The Fens. She was here in the Fens for Adeline. Adeline who asked her to leave something for -
"I remember your true name."
Something for... something for... something for...
"One more task only, and I release you, little one."
SomethingforSomethingforSomethingfor--
"Captain!"
Cyrus.
"Die well."
Aurelia shuddered as at last the world returned to equilibrium.
Equilibrium meant the end of that sense of colors--not running together, like paint, but shining into and through each other like the light of many diamonds held in a single palm. The blending of sounds at the edges; the sensations of warmth that began to come from everywhere.
Aurelia Dumitru, in the Fens, had her own shape; and so did the air she breathed in and breathed out within her own throat and lungs. Even here in Faerie, there were some definitions, even if they were odd. Whatever the sprite had been experiencing, whatever had been bottled up by the spell and delivered, had been something else.
She took time to breathe. Within that time, Aurelia pressed the heels of her hands against closed eyelids and sighed. What she knew and what she learned were separated out like puzzle pieces that wouldn't fit. There would be talks with Avery and the others later. Perhaps one more visit to the Bells before they left for their holiday - because while this gave them a brighter light, there wasn't much left to be done on her side of the boarder.
Hopefully Cyrus and those at the Bells would know more when they returned.
"Thank you." She breathed to the living wood. "For protecting this message and keeping it safe for my arrival."
Then Aurelia went to retrieve the dead sprite.
A breeze could have blown the tiny husk away, had one caught anywhere in the curled, stiff little wings. Without the golden glow, it was nearly featureless, certainly sexless, and brown as the dried leaves it felt like in the hand. Tiny eyes were closed and dried that way; so too was the mouth.
"I have one more thing to ask of you."
One more task only, and I release you, little one.
Placing the dried husk on the ground of the Fens, Aurelia retrieved the lighter from her Flynn kit once more and lit its dried body on fire.
The little body burned and Aurelia whispered words over it's crisping corpse. Given how much of a husk it was, she didn't expect the fire to live long. When it met its eventual death, she gathered the ashes and moved into the partially built house where the little trinkets sat.
Ashes in one hand, Aurelia retrieved the folded envelope Adeline gave her and smeared the two together. More whispers to nothing but the air. But her fingertips tingled where she felt the magic meld the items into one. Then then ash covered envelope was placed beneath the housecat bell.
The next step was to write her own note for Cyrus and his sprites.
I have a lock of red hair and a book of Sanskirt.
A drop of blood and the item is yours.
Once satisfied with the note, there was only one thing left to do. Aurelia picked up the little bag of trinkets with the promise of photography equipment before she left the living house.
The bag wasn't all jingle. There was some dull metal in there--coin of some rough kind, by the feel and sound--but other things, too.
The Fens--all of it, even the obnoxious loudmouth fae that proclaimed love or begged Aurelia to stay--ultimately bowed to the agreement. Whether she returned to the Willow, crossed the marshes, or went to the side of the hole that led out (and upward?), the havoc of fairy whirlwinds did not grow so wild that she would feel herself forced to fight back--
She did what she came here to do. And after a brief goodbye to the Willow, Aurelia returned to the hole that would take her down and up leaving only a new set of foot prints behind.