by Gavin Bennett (Changeling: The Dreaming | Fiction)
I
The sky was still indigo with night; still dark and starry, cold and clear over the dew covered grass, but dawn was not far away. Over the gentle hills close to the greying sky, she could hear the sea. A gentle west wind came in over those hills, a cold, fresh breeze that still carried a taint of winter. She drew her coat closer to her, leant on her stick and moved on, up that old path, past the well and to the trees. Even now, in that starlight, the Crown hill still seemed huge, terrible, a reminder of some lost forgotten age. On its bald head, no grass grew, leaving only rock and sheer, bare marble. Below its empty peak, she could see the trees, a ring of ancient oak and rowan that somehow managed to survive, cling on, and grow in the barren soil. Behind her, she could see the town, a tiny, sad thing now, a smattering of lights from old houses, dwelled in by old people. She was old too, seventy, crippled, alone, dying.
She was pretty once, clever and wild and young, but life took all that away. She had married young, pregnant and scared, married to a miner’s son, a boy who followed his father in all things, in madness, in drunkenness, in meanness, and then, at last, in death. She remembered his last days, thirty years ago, coughing up black bile, and foul blood, dying, his hateful eyes blaming her. For a little while, on that hilly path, tears came, but she pushed them away. The path was old and worn and overgrown. The twentieth century had no time for holy wells and ghosts and fairy rings, only for change, destruction and money. She had lost her daughter to that world; it had claimed her too, as surely as the mines had claimed her husband. Little Mary had died of cancer, a broken shell of a woman, skin and bone, hairless and sick. Mary’d had a child the year before, on a gentle spring day in 1979, but then in a routine check up after the birth, they had found that terrible growth, eating her away inside, and they said it was too late.
The old woman had never seen her granddaughter, but she imagined she was a young and beautiful woman now, and silently, she prayed for her. Her breath came faster now, harder. The air was thinner, she told herself, and she was tired.
At midnight, it came to her that she would not live to see another moonrise, and that had driven her from her bed, at first into the living room, to stay awhile among her memories, her old photos, the pictures she painted in her youth, the books she read. She had listened to her old radio for a little while, but all it offered her was hard, awful music and terrible news. There had been a bomb in London; there was new disease, there was a famine, and there was some tawdry affair between a politician and some showgirl. For a little while, she was angry: the world was sick, but then sad. For all its ills, for all the sorrows it had given her, she loved that world. She loved sunsets and starlight. She loved the silver path of moonlight across the sea. She loved watching children grow, and birds circle in the evening. From her living room window, she could see Crown hill, its bare edifice taunting her one last time. She had not climbed that hill since...oh lord...the day the war ended.
At last, she reached the treeline, walking slower now, picking her way past the thickets of dark brambles and blue-black pools of night that clung tight in the woods. The woods seemed larger, endless, bigger than she could remember, and darker. It was colder here, in the shelter of the lee and the trees, impossibly cold. Night birds fluttered in the branches, but no sound, no song came.
And then, like a dream they came, riding down amongst the shadows, on their white horses, with their tall spears, and robes of moonlight. Some strange music followed them, and light too. It seemed for a moment that the night was banished, and that she was young again, in those woods one August afternoon, holding Michael tight, feeling the breath of summer through the trees and the salt of his lips...
"Hello?" She called out, but no sound came from her mouth.
They passed her slowly, not heeding her, and inside she cried out, marching past like ghosts. She waved, trying to call out again. She closed her eyes, and the tears came.
"Hush, child," a voice behind her said. She looked up again. They had all stopped, dismounted from their unearthly horses, and stood around her, smiling. They were so impossibly beautiful, tall and wan and ice pale, their hair red and gold and silver, gleaming like angels. How very much like angels.
"What are you?" she whispered through sobbing breaths.
"We? We are the first ones to walk this good earth; we are the children of the shadows of the moon. We are the Danu and the Faeries and the wild ones." One walked forward, taller than the rest, his hair shimmering in the ghost - light. He bowed, a long, shimmering movement. He stood up again, tall and proud and alien, and smiled at her, a human smile on an ageless inhuman face.
"Come along now, Julia, we’ve come to take you home."
"Home?"
"You are our kin, and your mortal shell is fading. We have neglected you too long. Its time to come home." He motioned towards one of the horses, a wild, unsaddled beast, with glowing blue eyes and a mane of pure silver. "His name is Irhain, and we brought him from the dreaming country for you." The horse trotted towards her, then bowed its head. The tall figure, bound leaves into a saddle and branches into reins, and in a moment or unknowing dream, she found herself on the horses, and they were moving, up the hill, through the forest and out into the dawnlit crown. But in that dawn, the hill was not barren, or empty, but a dappled meadow, dew-sparkling in the new morning. The land beyond shone, a wild place made of memory and magic.
"Where are we?"
"We are still in the country of your birth, painted by our vision and magic. This is an aspect of your world as we see it. These are the fairylands, the dreaming places where we hid from mortal eyes, for a little while before we passed the western ocean, and the starry vault to the land east of the moon and west of the sun."
The horses thundered down the hillside, through a countryside not scarred by mining slag heaps and breathing air not fouled by poison. As they passed, mortals, dreaming in their time before waking, stirred and wept at the sound. The elder people were riding, a sound few had heard in this age of the world. As they rode, Julia felt youth come back into her old hands. She could feel fire dancing in her hair, and magic in her eyes. Her body was casting off its clay mortality, and letting all that was truly her free. Magic danced through her clothes, rethreading them with moonlight and spidersilk. And then, at last, a mist came down, hiding the dawn, and the fairylands, and the riders were lost from view and from dreams. The horses thundered on, through a blue grey land below the sky, and then though a gate of silver which opened on that other country, where the undying dwell, and it is forever summer’s twilight. II
Over London, the sky burned. A few cold stars winked through the dancing lights in the early spring sky. There were no clouds that night, no hanging grey canvas to blot city-orange. The city seemed quiet, awed by the sight. The sky was dancing, running through curtains of night and light, like watercolours in the rain, now a gentle dance of green and blue, now a tempest of red and yellow. Centre Point and the Telecom tower shone in that ghost light, their windows gleaming white and their stone and metal reflecting the sky. Farther away Westminster and The City, and the hulking South Bank seemed so true, so pretty, made anew under the new fire in that new sky. London was a fairy tale city that night, all light and magic, and dreams painted in the empty sky.
The boy on the tower saw all this, standing out on the gravelled roof, bathed in the red glow of the fog-light and staring skywards, watching the darkness dance. His brain told him that these were the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, but they were rare so far south. His heart told him there were omens in that Kaleidoscope sky, if only he had eyes to see them.
Had someone seen him then, alone under the fey sky, they would have remarked. He was a pretty thing, of emerald eyes and long night coloured hair, and a strange bearing. He was tall and slender and odd, his poise stiff and always cocked, always alert, watching for some new thing, some nuance none other had seen or heard. Had anyone seen him then, they would have seen the raw pain on his pretty face, the hollowness in his beautiful eyes.
At last the fire in the sky burned itself out, and he turned away, his slender hands in his jeans pockets, his white cotton shirt fluttering around him in a late winter breeze. If it chilled him, it didn’t show. There were colder things in his heart. The sky above was blue and cold now, spangled with hard bright stars, but even now, the sunset horizon was thick and clouded.
Elaine stared out from the dead waste of last night’s party, and watched the pale oily sun heave over the filthy horizon. She felt sick and old, and tired. She was nineteen now, past it, fading. She was too smart to be here, amongst these people, the vacuous, brainless, vain idiots she had known since she was fourteen, when everyone decided that was pretty and hence worth talking to. Her pretty blue dress was vomit stained and her hair was tangled and matted. The drugs had worn off again, leaving her hollow and empty. Something inside her had broken last night, and she could not place it. Some new feeling had hammered through the curtains she had drawn over her dreams so long ago.
She turned away from the window, looking again into the waste that was the room. A few last stragglers were talking, wearily, stoned. She listened for a moment, to the long, sonorous moans of nonsense they made. She caught her reflection in the stained antique mirror, seeing the black rings under her eyes, and the empty glaze to her pupils. Her skin was cold and dry and tired, and she wanted so much to sleep, but not here. She wanted to be free of all this, but she knew that wouldn’t last long. A few nights time, she would be here again, or somewhere like here, and just as stupid as she always was.
She stared into the mirror one last time, and saw.
She saw herself again through other eyes. Her hair was fire gold, her eyes a terrible indigo; she was tall and immortal and truly beautiful, a child of the stars and sunset.
And in that wonderful moment, she could here voices calling her.
Spring is a treacherous season, which lulls you with warmth, then shatters you with cold. February cold warms to almost summer, then freezes you with Siberian winds, and constant driving, hungry rain. The young man closed his eyes and listened to the wind in the trees, the birdsong, and let the sun shine on his face. There was music there, an ancient music of magic and dreams that had been made when the world was young. Sometimes he could hear it better, hear the fugues and the chords and the counterpoints, and the deep symphonic song of that older world. He had been sitting there hours, in the old field beyond the town. The day was long and warm and miraculous, and he was content. He was a strange looking creature, they remarked, tall and wan, and pale and distant, but he had a child’s smile. He wore tatty jeans and a cotton shirt, his sheepskin jacket thrown beside him on the dry green grass. He yawned then and stretched out his slender legs, smiling all the while. It was good to be alive.
He had been coming here a long time, ever since childhood, to the Old Oak Field, as it was called, just sitting, just thinking. It had been a cold, long heartless winter, and now he wished simply to be content. His hair and eyes were chestnut brown, and his skin was smooth and white, but it changed with the seasons, from snow pale to autumn brown. He was a scarecrow with wild, old eyes, and he seldom spoke. There was little remarkable about him, at least not to any of the farmers or townsfolk who knew him to see. He was, perhaps, handsome enough in his way, but he was careless to his looks; he had strong, long hands, rough and worked, but strangely, terminating in ivory, unblemished, fingernails.
At length, he stood up, alert, staring at some space close to the tree, his dark eyes flashing. In that moment his ragamuffin poise fell away, replaced with something else, dignity, perhaps. His face shone with some deep intelligence, and his eyes burned. The wind swirled about him, making the trees sing and the new leaves murmur, as if the earth itself had a voice.
And then he spoke. His accent was clear and crystalline, and spoke of education. It was an actor’s voice, a poet’s voice, or perhaps a priest’s.
"London?" he asked the wind.
"Yes," said the wind.
He stood there for a moment yet. Reaching into his little leather satchel, he pulled out a cloak of moonshadow black, and a puresilk shirt. Another man stood there, now, tall and strange and unearthly, with a wild madness in his eyes. Gone was the scarecrow, replaced by a fairytale aristocrat. His hands were still big and strong boned, but they shone with a vague pale light, and his fingernails shone like truesilver. Fire danced around him then, and he was gone.
Stepping through the mirror, she found herself in a garden of stone and roses, under a sky of early autumn. There was a woman there, waiting for her. She was beautiful, and alien, but somehow so familiar.
"Hello, Granddaughter," said the woman, and then Elaine knew.
"You’re Julia?"
"Yes, I am. I never met you, but when I saw you through the pool, I knew you were my blood."
"Where am I?" asked Elaine, but she knew the answer already.
"Home."
"Can I stay here?"
"No. I brought you here on the sufferance of my host, and all I can do is give you dreams, which will guide you here in the fullness of time. You are young yet, and human, and the world is sick. I gave it a mortal lifetime, but you, you can change it. The world is full of others like you, and of stranger things besides. I have taken the veil off your eyes. See well."
And then there was nothing but darkness.
She awoke at noon, in Hyde Park, and the early spring sun was on her face, and she saw.
There were spirits in the trees; and the earth sang to itself. Coloured light danced around the children and lovers and dreamers. The old tramp had another face inside his own, that of a wolf. She smiled at him, and he saluted her. The vile filthy face of London lifted for a while, and she saw the city as it dreamed of itself. Past the railings and through the trees, there were other worlds. Behind the thin silver of the moon still in the sky, there was a land of madness. Behind the world, there was magic, and it called out to her. III
It was raining in the city, in some horrible hour before dawn. The sky was clouded over and the sodium lights had painted the clouds a sick amber. A cold low hung mist had sunken down into the shadows of the night, grey haze whispering under the curtains of dark February rain. Only a deeper shadow and a quieter chill marked the darkest hour of the night. The city wore funereal masque, but its voice was rowdy and loud and lonely and pathetic. Beyond the silence of the darkened streets, the roar of the London night could still be heard. Somewhere in the city a group of children were murdering another because of the colour of his skin. Somewhere in the city a drug dealer was adding rat poison to tomorrow night’s batch. Somewhere in the city, the police had surrounded a Brixton flat wearing riot armour because they were bored. Somewhere in the city, old, cold things waited and planned, and cast greedy eyes across the sludgy river.
The Butterbox cafe was close to the docklands, a tangled place of Formica and fluorescent light, of cheap neon and plastic cutlery. The white tables were greasy and the air was stale from generations of late night cigarette ash. The place was young once, and modern, serving the dock workers as they worked and spent and dreamed in the post war boom, dropping into the pretty little place for espresso in the hours before dawn, brylcreem in their hair, and fire in their eyes, boasting about the slags they were screwing, and the pretty girls they were going to marry. The cafe was a refugee from another age that had somehow survived. The docks had closed and the workers moved away, moving to the suburbs with their pretty wives now grown slovenly and fat, and covered in greasepaint, watching their children grow strange, dressed in supermarket tracksuits. But still the old place lived, sick and tired and wasted, but alive. The area had lived again for a little while, as the dockers’ children, educated and rich and proud poured in, making flats in the warehouses, but now, even they had gone. Their time had passed too. The docklands were a place of ghosts now, ghosts and criminals, safe where the police would not dare go, living amongst the shell of yuppie gentrification, and the ruins of the old shipping warehouses. The pimps and the pushers who never quite made it came here, to live their grubby little lives, and preside over their filthy little empires of addiction and lust and cheap money. The place was dirty and cluttered: three generations of clever and useless mod cons sat together under the painful white light. An espresso machine, an alarmed coffee maker, a microwave oven, a flatscreen TV and a sullen yellow jukebox playing some mindless pop song. The only customers here were the sleepless, the thieves, and the rentboys too sick to go home.
Adam sat there in the corner, nursing his fifth coffee in its brown styrene cup, his hair greasy and lank, his skin tear stained, his emerald eyes now dull and blotted blood red. The dreams had come again, and driven him from sleep, from his flat and out here. This is the worst place on earth, he told himself, the very worst. He stared around the overlit plastic world, at the old tramp in his filthy coat and fingerless right hand, at the flabby prostitutes discussing the night’s horrors and the others, the lost people with bad skin and broken teeth and sore eyes.
When Adam was twelve, the dreams started again, dark, enchanted things that stirred him from sleep to pained wakefulness. In his dreams he saw the world burning, he saw a last final winter. In his dreams, he saw a beautiful and terrible people die by fire, their bodies impaled across a forest of stakes while hideous things ate of their still living flesh. They had haunted him through his remaining childhood, and followed him to this tenebrous adulthood, poisoning everything he touched, everything he loved.
Drugs helped. In the last few years he had injected, snorted, eaten and swallowed every stimulant, every placebo of forgetfulness he could find, legal and illegal, all to drive away those dreams, those visions. His mind was a mess, now, a cluttered mass of flashbacks and horrors and paranoia and true fear. Now, nothing worked. There was no more buzz, no more relief, no more pain or sickness. He may as well have been swallowing aspirin. And the dreams had come back with a dark and new vengeance. He was going mad, he thought then, following his mother down that long black path to oblivion. The new thought rose up in his mind, sick and real and huge: you are going mad. He tried to cry out, wordlessly, silently, as a terrible panic grew inside. NO! NO! NO! He fought to breathe, to keep calm, to keep normal. Desperately, he flailed around inside, trying to think of someone to turn to. A few faces shimmered in his mind, but faded away just as soon. He had nothing to offer them tonight, no drugs, no money, nothing. He was alone. He had always been alone. He would always be alone. His eyes wandered down to the white flesh of his wrist and to the blue swollen veins waiting there. Cut, he thought. Cut long and deep and true, and then there will be nothing, no life, no light, and no pain. He had some barbs and whiskey back home...take the lot. And then something inside him said STOP. He breathed, a long, halting breath, and closed his eyes. Just a panic attack. That’s all. Just a panic attack.
He turned around. Everyone was staring at him, their glassy eyes reflecting mixed concern and amusement and contempt. He bowed his head, reaching for his coffee. Time to go. Time to go.
"Is there anyone sitting here?"
Adam looked up, a curse on his lips, fuck off and mind your own business, and saw eyes so like his own, so deep and sad. A tall man stood there, long brown hair cast carelessly around his shoulders, wearing a beautiful black coat and a white shirt. The man’s face was long and haughty and handsome, framing his almond shaped brown eyes.
"Is anyone sitting here?" the man asked again.
"No," Adam whispered. The man sat down on the seat opposite. Adam stared at him, something inside singing out, willing the stranger to talk, to know him, to like him. The man returned his stare, smiled a little, and winked. "Ehm...what...uh...brings you here...on such a vile night." Adam said, trying to joke.
"Hmm," said the other. "That’s a good question. I am looking for someone."
"Anybody I might know?"
"Perhaps. My name is Lycidas," the stranger said, holding out his hand in greeting. Adam shook his hand, and then said, "What sort of name is that?"
"Not mine, now Adam, that’s for certain."
Adam stiffened. "Who the fuck are you?"
"...And what do I want? Hmm?"
"Uh…yeah."
"You."
"Why? I’m not a fucking rentboy...is that what you want? Or did old Jimmy send you. I don’t owe him anymore..."
"Old Jimmy, as you so affectionately called him, is now quite insane. I found him when I was looking for you. I stuffed him full of his wares that he was busily adding rat poison to and showed him the dark place behind the moon."
"What are you talking about...?"
Lycidas stood up, grabbing Adam’s collar, pulling him up too.
"Be quiet, we are going for a walk." IV
"In dreams, I see them still. They are so old, so very old, and beautiful, and wild. They are the true ones, the angel kin, the people. Sometimes, in dreams I call out to them, but they ignore me. What am I but a silly mortal with fatty mortal flesh, dull mortal eyes, clumsy mortal feet and a sluggish mortal mind? But even I can see them. When I aspire to poetry, I see them, feel their ageless eyes upon me, and I feel their truth, but I can never catch that essence, that warm autumnal feeling of their presence. Autumnal, that describes them well. This was their world once, and they were its gods, its magic people. They made the wildwoods their own; where the new upstart humanity would never dare dwell, for fear of the wolves and the mystery within. But the woods are gone, now, leaving nothing but scattered, sad echoes strewn willy-nilly over Europe and Russia. Four thousand years of man making his cities, of man making his cold iron, his wood fires, and his unwieldy, cheap magic. Two thousand years of Christianity and Islam with their cold rigid rules, and their wars of faith and bigotry, have driven the old ones way from us. The summer of the World is long over, and the green dream leaves of that old world have fallen and rotted on barren poisoned soil. They fear us, perhaps they hate us, but they smile on us in dreams. Sometimes, I even aspire to claiming them as my ancestors. That is a true thing, a thing that touches my heart with the glitter glow warmth of understanding. They are my kin, but I am not like them, no matter how much I desire it. I am of their people. When the night is dark, and the clock whispers to me of the hour of the wolf, I can look upon the Queen Moon and say that I am of her kin."
"Adam. Look harder. What are you? Tell me."
"I aspire to poetry, and music. I want to capture the beauty, the star song of our souls as they call to one another in rows of notes and semi-quavers, and speak the language of the angels with my words. One day, I want to write a song that has both, that will make the little spark hiding inside me into a fire and I call sing that hymn to the moon and call them to me. I want to hear their voices one time before the end, just once. I am young yet, but they are eternal, and my life is nothing more than a snuff life of a may fly.
When I was ten, I read the Lord of the Rings, a tale of a world that existed before this one where a dark lord ruled; it was the tale of a man who was a king and his companions as they stood against the Dark Lord to deny him the thing he desired most. The story is a true epic, unmatched in music, poetry and prose since, but its glowing heart is not the story, nor even the ancient echoes in its magical world, but in the ending. "And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain, Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air, and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And it seemed to him that as in the dream in the house of Bombadil, the Grey rain curtain all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores, and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise..."
I won’t recite it all now, but in those lines, my heart is caught. Reading them, tears come and my breath snags on the groundswell of a sob. In those lines I to see the land beyond sun-goes-down where the old ones departed to. In those lines I see the loss of magic from this sick old world, gone like a dream on waking, leaving nothing but cold hard reality in its wake. Reading those lines, I believe Tolkien saw it too, a little vision lingering in memory even in his waking life.
Beyond the closing of the day, east of the sun, west of the moon, my homeland lies, and each night I dream of it, I am sure, but some veil hides it from me in the hard morning"
The sun is setting over the wild surging Atlantic, catching the dark storm clouds in its final light. A chill north wind tears across the weeds and grass on this bald hillside. His coat is to thin for this, but he drives his hands deeper into his pockets and tries to hold a little more warmth in. There is salt on his skin and his ears ache from the howling wind, but he waits for night to come, so he can look on the pristine northern sky, and weep.
The blue fire has burned out of his veins, and he feels weak and tired, and sleepy. Nothing makes sense. A day has passed, perhaps two. The sky is clean and pure and free, and he feels, for perhaps the first time, real. Lycidas has left him alone for the most part. Lycidas did something to him, touched him some way, and burned the drugs and the pain out of him. Then he left him to dream, in that half world of twilight between tide and shore, and under the pale stars. He spoke again, to himself, or to the sky, or to Lycidas, his eyes running with tears.
"In the grey empty hour before dawn, I saw my father again, an unfamiliar spirit, happy, and content. I knew him, but I did not; he was a deeply unhappy man, lonely and as a result, terribly cynical and cantankerous. He was a teacher, a professor of Latin in an expensive public school. His pupils feared him, and fear led to mistrust, and from there to hate. They hated him, and as a result he hated himself more. His last years were unhappy, quiet things. A world lay beyond his window, but for him, and for me, it was not there. Life, an old man once told me, is not what you make of it, but rather what you get away with. It is a sad thing, a scary thing, but a true thing, I’m afraid. Slovenly, venal men have become millionaires while people who fight and try, and hope each day, die penniless. It is, I suppose, the way of the world. Life let my father away with nothing. Every happiness had to be paid for, every joy had to be compensated with some deep abiding sorrow. In his little world, his ancient study, he would look out on our garden, that old, forever wintered thing, with its bearded mosses and ancient hanging oak trees, and if you caught him at that moment, you would see that true sadness.
"He died last April, aged fifty two, a cancer eating what was left of him. Someone told me later that had he hoped, had he dreamed, he could have made himself better. Statistics prove this, I was told. I have a distrust of new age positivity manuals; I think that hoping is like asking the universe to kick you, but I know dreams. Dreams brought me here, to this place. But my father’s dreams had died a long, long time ago, when mother became ill, during the long years of asylums and hospitals, and endless vacant nights under fluorescent lights, which never dimmed. In those evil days, he stopped dreaming.
"I think he dreamed once, he was young too. He married my mother just out of college: they were in the same class for German, I was told. They lived together in the dire gentile, academic poverty that all scholars seem to accept, as he clawed his way up to a professorship, and fought to feed their newborn son.
"And then, and then what?" Adam asked aloud. He stood on the seashore, awake, now, fearing he had been dreaming, that everything was some terrible trick of an alcohol soaked mind. The air was still and clean and it was morning again. A warm spring wind drifted up from the South, and the sea was silver grey and calm. He stripped off his clothes and plunged into the icy water, allowing the lapping waves to wash everything away.
"Hey, Adam, you okay?"
Adam rose from the water. There was that stranger with the odd name. Lycidas, was it?
"Uh, yeah. Was I drugged?"
"No, Adam, you were not drugged." Lycidas said, far closer now than he should have been, the deep water barely lapping at his boot. "Now come along, I have a towel and a change of clothes here."
"Who the hell are you anyway. Where are we?"
"You are near Cape Wrath in the North of Scotland. It is the first of March. You have been under my protection for three days. You know all this, but you are simply not trusting your head." They were on dry land somehow, and Lycidas handed Adam a huge white towel.
"Breakfast, Adam?"
"Who are you, Lycidas, isn’t it?" Adam said, doubtfully, suspicious and trusting and wanting all at once. Lycidas smiled, a broad grin that sank into a nasty smirk.
"My name is actually Mark Boillot. My father was French. My mother, apparently, wasn’t human. I am named Lycidas, because I am a Magus of the Order of Hermes, and because of my blood and my father, I belong to a group known as the Circle of the Merinita."
"The what?"
"Ah, Adam, you have warranted many day’s explanation with that question. Suffice it for now to say that the world is bigger and scarier than you would have dreamed, even in your worst poetic or chemical stupor. My father was a magician, a wizard who was born in the middle ages, who named himself Magus Lysander. He was a member of House Merinita in the Hibernia and the Loch Leagan Tribunal. When the Order was almost destroyed, the Merinita, who were faerie blooded magi fled with their kin, the fae to Domdaniel, which is called Arcadia or fairyland, or Summer’s Twilight."
"I read a lot about the Middle Ages and I have never heard of the Order of Hermes..." Adam said, dully. He was still so distracted, gazing at the pure ice blue sky above, ruffled by a sweet, scented wind; he could smell heather and wildflowers on that wind, and he could taste salt at every breath. The other man had such a musical voice, so soft and gentle, so used to telling stories. At that moment he could smell the magic surrounding them.
"Well, we were essentially a secret society, one with almost as much influence as the church, composed of philosophers and occultists and warlocks who sought out secrets and read Aristotle and discussed democracy. We made hundreds of enemies, from the Pope to the dark things of Hell, to our own outcast groups. Between them, they destroyed the Order."
"People like Agrippa and Lully, then?"
"They were in our Order, yes. After the smoke had cleared, the world’s mages attempted to form another grand order or council to defend themselves, and the remnants of the Merinita joined them. The circle of the Merinita exists on this earth, and in the Land Beyond, and although horror and shadow lie between us, we have managed to communicate. They sent me to find you."
"Why me? Why any of this." Looking harder now, Adam could see the world as it dreamed of itself, as grasses and seaweed burned and crackled with old sunlight in their leaves, as the sea swirled a billion fractal colours, still storm tossed from the making of the world. In the earth lay dreaming wonder, and it sang to him.
"When the fae departed, they left pockets of their magic in the human worlds. There were the Sidhe mounds, which were worlds unto themselves where the Fae still dwelled. There were the fairylands, which were reflections and chimerical shadows of the mortal world where it was still safe for the fae to dwell, and the freeholds, which were the centre of the fairylands."
"My dreams...this...my lord, this..." Tears welled in Adam’s eyes. Lycidas smiled.
"Fae stilled dwelled in those places I mentioned, and there were occasionally Regios where the two worlds met, for a little time, but they were dangerous. Over time, they became fewer and fewer. The world became too dangerous for them. Magic was fading, becoming scarce. Mages known as Technomancers murdered anything magical they found...they seem to be in the service of some older, sick power." Lycidas smiled, and then frowned dubiously.
"The Archons, maybe...Anyway, I digress. A few fae still dwelled on this earth, yes. There were the Changelings, the most numerous, who somehow introduced themselves into humanity, where they hid, sleeping, waiting to be born in a better time. There were the mendicants of House Scathach, who hid themselves and their mortality, and wandered the world in their grey cloaks, travelling from Freehold to Freehold, fighting the wars of mortal men and werewolves and mages. And there were the others, like me. They were common enough, I suppose, people in whom fae blood still lingered, whose heritage would breed true..." Lycidas thought for a moment, then looked straight at Adam, looking deep inside him, under his skin. "Actually...the word Faerie describes them. To be "Fey" or "Faerie" in the old days meant to be a human with some old power in them. Witches were called faeries, way back when, see?"
Adam, rapt, said nothing. In his eyes Lycidas could see the depth of centuries, clear and old, full of dreams.
"You are a Changeling. It's such a poor term, I know. I am a half-breed. We are much alike. We have roughly the same potential, and roughly the same power. We are both humans who have the fire of summer stars in our veins. One or both of your parents probably had the gene, so here you are, a changeling...
"The Faerie "gene" is a rather strange "gene." It skips generations, disappears and reappears...it’s strange, but hey, its cool too. Now come on, let’s eat."
Lycidas strolled on up the beach, a little too far at a time, and Adam had to run to catch up. The mage stopped on the grassy bank above the beach and stared out at the land beyond the tarmacadam road ahead, dappled brown and gold in the morning light, fields of tossed, hardy heather and wilderness as far as the eye could see. At last, when Adam had caught up, a gentle light came down between them and bathed them in its ruby glow. There was a spark of flame for a little moment, then smoke, and then they were gone.
V
Hampstead Heath was so pretty at twilight, Elaine thought as she stretched out on the green hill and watched a gentle mist fall from the pale grey sky. The evening was warm, fanned by a soft southern wind. She half dozed, thinking of her grandmother behind the mirror and the world in which she dwelled. The dream, or vision, or whatever had changed her, leaving her vouchsafed tokens of her passage. Her hair was now an unruly red gold, her eyes deepened to sharpest indigo, her body a little taller and straighter, a hundred little mortal flaws having fallen away from her. For a wonderful little time, she felt beautiful and smart and happy. It was a dangerous concept, this happiness, and a fairy gold notion likely to be revealed as leaves in the fullness of morning, but a seductive one nonetheless.
Other things had changed too. Her clothes she found in cotton, and left them in the finest silk. Little magics followed her, little whims made real. Others would take that and be content, she knew, but something inside her warned her that this was all leading to something. But for now, she thought, to hell with it and enjoy it while it lasts. Little swirls of flame danced on her fingertips; she sent them soaring away, over the woodlands and the darkening sky.
"Second star to the right and straight on till morning..." she murmured as she watched the little sparks twist and glow and burn in the misty grey sky.
"Be careful of little games like that, mortal."
She jumped up, staring around, scared, harder magics burning in her hands. The voice had come from nowhere, and everywhere.
"No need for that," said the voice, this time, from right behind her.
"Shit!" She spun around, her eyes burning darkest blue.
Women stood there, tall, taller than her, with night-blue hair and skin the colour of pure silk. She wore a fashionable blue-black skirt, but that seemed to be an illusion, something created by the woman’s magic. The mist grew thicker, and in its grey haze, Elaine could see shapes moving, ghosts and darker things, reaching out towards her with cold, ancient hands.
"Bow, little thing," said the woman.
Elaine backed away, trying to move down the hill, away from the woman. The mist grew thicker and the shapes became more defined, gathering human form. A horrid, soft wailing grew up around her, and the ghosts chill hands grasped at her as she pushed away. She turned and bolted, running past the tightening circle of grey and out, down the hill, away. The ghosts followed her, moving slowly, catching her, slowing her. Still she ran, but the world seemed so strange, so slow. The ghosts came past her, softly, slowly, with dreamlike grace. Something black and oily reached out for her legs, bound them, and dragged her down. The ghosts had her now, their cold claws playing across her neck, and reaching inside her, into her heart, groping for her soul. She struggled for a little, but the formless oily mass only tightened, binding her arms now. The woman appeared out of the gloom and shooed the ghosts away.
The fog lifted for a moment, drawing away, haloing the woman with cool light.
"I said bow, child."
"Damn you." Elaine whispered. The ghosts huddled close to her again, playing their claws over her skin, and her soul. They made tiny little cuts, little paper cuts on her skin and inside, cuts, which burned with a horrible sick, cold pain. She could see their eyes, hungry for her light, her life and her heat. Their hideous, warped mouths drooled. Some sniffed closer running hungry tongues on her bloodied skin. Elaine closed her eyes, but even in the dark, she could see them, somehow, tasting her life, hungry for more.
"I am Lady Anathea of the Shadow Court. I am offering you service, willing service that is...you are smart and powerful and strong...we could use fae like you in our tasks ahead. Of course it is all up to you. You do, after all, have a choice. You can serve me, as my vassal, or you can serve me in other ways. We could present you as a tribute to the Duchy of Malfeas. That won’t be pleasant, I assure you, or, since you are such a pretty thing, you could be one of my pleasure slaves, where I eat your eyes and replace them with rubies, and I use you until you are all used up. Or you could satiate my servants hunger." The woman spoke like a child, chanting a singsong voice, lilting and playful.
Anathea reached down and pulled Elaine up. Elaine shirt was a mess of rags and tatters and clotted blood. Anathea wiped Elaine’s face and pushed the dirty hair away from her eyes.
"Now, little starflower, what do you say?"
Elaine reached down inside herself, calling up every piece of anger and strength and dreams inside her, letting it all grow, and burn and flicker into lambent flame. She smiled at Anathea, who smiled back, relaxing. The ghosts fell away and the mist lifted. It was almost dark, now, and the stars were coming out in laps above.
"Well, ma’am, with all due respect, I would say: Go to hell." said Elaine, quietly, as she let it all out, fire and magic ripping from her hands into the still night air. Anathea shrieked, thrown back, and the ghosts recoiled. Elaine ran, racing back up the hill, away from the roiling mist. Anathea screamed after her in some terrible language of ice and cruelty. The ghosts swirled out of the mist, racing after her, gaining all the time, the pain in her legs and head slowing her. She reached inside for some more magic, anything, but there was nothing there, only her own little fire. One more blast and she would die. She slowed, getting closer to the treeline, resigned and tired. One more little magic, and that was all, but she would be dead and her soul cast away to some other place where Anathea would not get her.
She stopped and turned, smiling grimly. My grandmother is watching me now, she thought, and I would not disappoint her. The ghosts slowed, inching closer.
"Kill her. Kill her slowly, and bring her eyes and her heart to me." Anathea called.
The ghost murmured and drooled and whispered obscenities at her. She reached down inside her heart once more....
Then she heard them.
There were voices coming down the wind, through the mist. One was soft, and deep and masculine, yet clear and educated; the other was oddly accented, boyish and strangely familiar.
"Adam?"
"Yeah?"
"Trouble."
The ghosts had stopped, now, listening, perhaps anticipating another meal, perhaps they were scared.
"Run away." The deep, actor’s voice rang out from behind her somewhere. Something lanced out through the night, burning through the ghosts, washing them away like clouds before wind.
A young man loomed out of the gloom, tall and green-eyed.
"Are you all right?" he said in a soft, sweet, boyish voice.
"No," she whispered, "but I will be..."
Anathea came up the gentle slope, burning with some fierce cold light.
"Oh, hello, Lady Anathea. Do you really want to make something of this?" said the actor’s voice, belonging to another young man, brown haired, dressed in a black coat, standing there in the dark, uncaring, glowing with his own light.
"Lycidas," she spat.
"Run away you silly old crone. Do you really think you can stand against the three of us?"
"Amateurs," she spat.
"Begging your pardon, madam. I do not believe we have been properly introduced. I am Magus Lycidas of the Order of Hermes. Do you wish to continue this discussion?"
Anathea stood, her face warping and twisting in rage. Fire danced around her fingertips, then she backed away.
"No."
"Good," said the man.
"But I swear upon my name that the little cow will know true sorrow because of this."
"You will regret saying that, little witch, I assure you." And then Anathea was gone, and the ghosts, leaving only the three of them in the gathering night.
The green eyed man smiled at Elaine, and she felt like crying.
"My name is Adam," he said.
"Elaine," she said weakly.
"This is Mark," said Adam, "or, if you prefer, Magus Lycidas of the Circle of the Merinita of the Order of Hermes."
"So," said Elaine, "Who the hell was she."
"Shadow Court." Mark said, "The opposition. The guys who know what’s going on in Arcadia and the Hidden World and all the places in between, because they are doing it, or are working for the bastards that are. Anathea was a flunky, just a little witch looking for promotion. Don’t worry about her like...Coffee, anyone?"
