Prysmcat's Serial Fantasy Ongoing LGBT+ fantasy stories, PG-16 Tue, 07 Jan 2020 13:00:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Prysmcat's Serial Fantasy 32 32 5 – Kayla (3/3) Tue, 07 Jan 2020 13:00:51 +0000 Continue reading

“The night of the big blackout, a lot of fae who normally don’t spend any time around humans went wandering. One came home talking about the nice young people she’d met, some of them faelings, and how she’d given them her blessing, which basically involves using that aether energy. Her great-grand-daughter has some idea just what kind of havoc she could have started, so she asked my family to help. For those of us who are human, the results of a fae blessing can be strange, upsetting, awkward, but generally they can be dealt with and sometimes it can be beneficial in the end. A fae blessing on a dormant faeling, however, tends to create all kinds of weirdness.”

“Why would they bless anyone?” Kayla asked, picking at a splinter on the table, already certain of the answer.

“The most common reason is that you’ve done something kind. Like the fairy tales—the hero who stops to help out the poor old lady or share his last food, or sets the fox free or puts the fish back in the water.”

“I should never have let her in the gate,” Kayla snarled, both hands clenching into white-knuckled fists.

“What happened?”

“During the blackout, we had a barbecue. Old lady showed up, looked extremely poor, asked for water. We had a ton of food we cooked that would’ve spoiled, so we invited her in and fed her and gave her leftovers to take—we figured she hadn’t eaten and might not the next day without help. The five I know for sure are missing grew up together and were there. And two others we haven’t been able to contact.”

“Did she say anything strange?” Riley asked gently.

“Be who you really are? Something like that. Be who and what you truly are, that’s it.”

“That would certainly have the potential to stir things up. And that sounds like a very typical scenario, charity to an old woman in need being rewarded.”

“This is not a reward! And how the hell does it explain them disappearing?”

“I suspect,” Riley said, “she had some reason to believe that at least one person present is not happy with their life and has the potential to be much more—possibly more than one. It sounds like something intended to help someone find the aspects of themselves they can’t currently see or accept. In other words, to get closer to being who they are and therefore happier. It would have a subtle effect on you and anyone else not a faeling.”

“I’ve been through that particular battle,” Kayla said shortly.

“Then quite possibly little or no effect. But on dormant faelings, it could trigger some very dramatic effects. While you’re being mad at yourself, though, think how bad her curse could have been if she was angry or offended instead.”

Kayla paused to consider that. “Fine. I still wish she’d gone somewhere else, but I suppose pissing her off could have been worse. Maybe. Right now it’s hard to imagine how.”

“Believe me, I can.”

“Okay, seriously, reality check. When you tell people stuff like this, magic and fairies and blessings and stuff, do they normally actually believe you?”

“Well, it helps if they’ve just tripped into what feels like the Twilight Zone and they’re already looking for answers to things they wish they could pretend weren’t real,” Riley admitted. “Doing this more or less cold isn’t my first choice. At least you haven’t thrown me out yet. As long as we’re still talking, I still have a chance.”

“Yeah, well, camo-mouse there and the tree things are fairly hard to dismiss, and you know some things.” Kayla ran both hands through her hair, and paused halfway to let her arms take the weight of her aching head. “Fuck. I haven’t had enough sleep or enough coffee to deal with this shit.” How much of this could she believe? How much did she want to believe just because it was an answer, however improbable, for the currently inexplicable? Even though she still had no actual reason for the disappearance of her friends.

This had to be a con of some sort, and Riley wanted something.

Yet Kayla’s people-sense had yet to flash a single red light, or even a yellow one. Every instinct insisted that Riley was being honest and sincere. Which was insane.

Of course, so was the disappearance of five-to-seven people without a trace on an ordinary Friday night.

Riley reached into her bag again. “I can’t promise this will work for you, but it might. I do need to give you a warning, though. If it does work, it’s going to mess up your sleep patterns for several days and probably give you spectacularly bizarre and possibly disturbing dreams. And occasionally it works too well if someone’s extremely sensitive, which you might be. But if it works, it will trick your body into believing it’s had eight hours of decent sound sleep.” She opened her palm to show a small colourless plastic container with a screw-on top; inside was a smooth translucent white egg. “Physically it’s just quartz, you only have to hold it. Which will use up that charge, and they are a royal pain to recharge. But I need your help if we’re going to find your friends, so it’s worth a try.”

Kayla looked up enough to regard it sceptically, but finally reached out to take it. “Magic speed?”

“I suppose you could see it that way, but generally safer, despite the side-effects.”

“Just hold it?”

“Take it out of the container, hold it in your hands, and just give it, oh, it can take one to two minutes for the average person, faster for some.”

Kayla unscrewed the top, and spilled the stone into her palm—at the longest point, it was no more than a couple of centimetres.

“It feels… cold. And sort of tingly.”

“Then probably you’re fairly sensitive. Some people are. Drop it if it gets uncomfortable.”

“It’s not uncomfortable, just… odd.” She cupped it between her hands and closed her eyes, trying to analyze the peculiar sensation. Sort of like static, if static had a temperature.

Between one breath and the next, her nagging low-grade headache from fatigue and stress melted away.

Over the course of the next few, the exhaustion of dealing with a crisis on only a couple of hours of sleep followed.

Behind that crept a gentle, almost imperceptible energy that flowed from her hands towards her spine and radiated from there to everywhere, a soft warmth that drove back the cold of weariness and fear and replaced it with alertness. No giddiness or mania, no sense of intoxication, just the clarity that normally came with being well-rested.

Kayla opened her eyes, and parted her hands to look down at the stone egg. “What the hell…?”

Riley chuckled. “Probably just as well it’s tricky to do. It could get awfully easy to overuse those, although the long-term effects of regular use are not good. Feel better?”

“Um, yeah, by about a million times. How does a chunk of rock do something like that?”

“Resonances and vibrations, stored energy, it would take a while to explain and I actually don’t know all the details any more than I know exactly how aspirin does its thing.” She retrieved the stone egg, put it back in the container and closed it, and returned it to her bag.

“Okay. So. You’re planning to find my friends.”

“I was hired to come here and figure out what the effects of that blessing are on the people involved and minimize the damage as much as possible. Since your friends going missing is almost certainly a direct effect, then yes, I intend to find them and help them and their loved ones adjust.”

What did she have to lose? If Riley was crazy—although the balance of evidence suggested that there was something going on that was beyond Kayla’s own experience or understanding of the world—well, all she’d lose was time, and she was out of useful ways to spend that. If there was malice under it, despite her instincts all insisting otherwise, she was sure she’d spot it eventually, and she wanted Riley where she could see her. And if Riley was telling the truth and this was all for real, then she might very well be Kayla’s only hope of getting Theo and the others home safely.

“Adjust to what, exactly? You mentioned that before.” And Kayla had been too foggy-headed to pick up on it. “Where’s Theo and how does this fae thing relate to him and some of his classmates being gone without a trace?”

“I’m never sure how to put this part gently.”

“Then do it ungently. I’ll survive.”

“Fae aren’t human.” Riley gestured towards first the maple, then the apple as illustration. “Dormant faelings effectively are, unless and until their fae genes are activated, and at that point they start a transition period that leads to being in many ways strongly fae—the line between from-birth fae and fully active faelings is a hard one to find sometimes, so much so that there’s a sometimes heated argument over whether to just call at least some of them fae, and honestly, I usually do. Hob is a regular mouse whose fae genes are active, which makes her, not a fae mouse, but a mouse with fae traits. Mice are vastly simpler than people, though. They never find the process scary and disorienting, for example, or question their own identity, but some people do. That said, there are some powerful biological and instinctive mechanisms that kick in pretty rapidly to help them adjust. They never become anything incompatible with who they are, because bits of their fae nature bleed through all their lives to help make them who they are. Actually, they usually become much more intensely themselves, by the time that transition ends. In itself, it’s not normally all that hard to help someone get through. However, individuals vary, and I’ve encountered and heard of faelings whose first response was to hide from anyone they know. The first visible step normally occurs just about ten days after the initial trigger, in this case the blessing.”

“Which should be tonight.”

“It does vary a little, and potentially with a close-knit group, one changing could set the others off.”

“So you’re telling me that Theo and his classmates are not only out there somewhere, but they don’t look like them and they’re possibly not in a good place mentally or entirely rational.”

“Quite possibly, yes.”

Kayla rubbed her forehead and sighed. Every answer she got gave her a million more questions. However, she couldn’t sit around here grilling Riley while Theo was in trouble. If there was action she could take, then she needed to take it now, and gather info on the fly and after the immediate crisis. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d groped her way through unfamiliar territory, though unquestionably the most bizarre.

“I’ve got all the basics now, right?”

“More or less, in an extremely simplified and stripped-down form.”

“So how do we find them?”

“The first step would be for you to fill me in on exactly what you’ve done so far. Also, collecting my more heavy-duty divination gear from my van and bringing it here.”

Divination. Right. Why not?

“Which is where?”

“About seven or eight blocks from here, by a little park on Mackenzie Street.”

“Then scoop up the mouse and let’s go. We can talk on the way.” Kayla grabbed her phone and typed a text to Max on the go.

«Not sure, possible lead, weird but maybe. Stay with Heather, sleep if you can. Will let you know ASAP. Love you.»

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Meetings 11 Mon, 06 Jan 2020 13:00:02 +0000 Continue reading

By early morning sunlight, Tyrel gazed in awe at the river Kieran had been aiming for. The rivers near the forts and towns were mere streams, compared to this torrent. There was no sign of a ford or a bridge anywhere that he could see—at least with his somewhat limited vulpine vision.

Kieran paused at the edge, dropped the pack and raised his head to scent the air. He must have detected something, because he reclaimed the pack and set off downriver.

The sun was high when he halted again, left the pack tucked under a bush, and moved forward more cautiously. Tyrel and Kaveri took the hint and stayed close and quiet. They crept through the underbrush, halting when they ran out of cover.

There was a road there, interrupted by the river; a wooden bridge, supported by pilings in the water and wide enough for a wagon, spanned the gap. A steady slow trickle of people travelled in both directions: a painted wooden caravan drawn by a mule, a few wagons drawn by oxen or workhorses, someone on foot leading a trio of donkeys carrying substantial packs, a cart drawn by a short-coated dog that must be almost as big as Kieran with a human walking beside.

Kieran wriggled backwards out of the brush. The smaller pair found it much easier to simply turn around without drawing attention. Next to the pack, Kieran flopped to the ground and rested his head on his paws.

He was right, Tyrel conceded. There was no way a fox, a raccoon, and an amarog, with or without a pack, would get across the bridge without drawing entirely too much attention. Better to slip across unnoticed, not risking creating an incident.

Still brimming over with Talir’s energy, Tyrel couldn’t bring himself to just lie down and wait. He went prowling instead. He explored the woods for a while, but his curiosity about all the people was stronger. He hadn’t known there was much trade between the towns and outside places. Or were they just taking this route to another destination? That seemed unwise. Possibly a bargain made by a nearby town, with a high tax on the goods coming in and out, could win them relative safety, but without that, any fort close to a route like this would consider it low-hanging fruit, an easy game in idle moments.

He inched closer and closer, under the cover of the brush, keeping low to the ground. Being small was rather an advantage in stealth, he decided.

Two wagons, each drawn by a pair of oxen, crossed the bridge one after the other. The one behind shouted to the other, and they both drew to the side and halted. The driver of the rear wagon jumped down and strode across the thin border of grass in Tyrel’s direction.

Tyrel cringed back, wishing he had his katari and the hands to wield them.

It became apparent immediately that the man wasn’t even aware of him, and had only stopped to empty his bladder against a tree. He returned to his wagon without ever having seen the lurking fox.

Tyrel saw a rich-looking coach, its team of matched white horses in harness that jingled with shiny decoration. Armed fighters surrounded it—his nose picked up leather and bronze, strongly. Most of the traffic he saw, though, consisted of wagons, in both directions. It slowed somewhat as the sky darkened; no more came from the far side. Was there a place over there to spend the night, maybe?

Soft footsteps made him look back, and then up at Kieran, now in human form with the pack slung on one shoulder, and Kaveri, in her usual crisscrossed top and loincloth.

“There you are,” Kieran said, his tone amused. “The moons are up. I suggest you find a place where you can see Talir, without being in full view of the road, unless you wish to be a pet.”

Tyrel shook himself all over, rejecting the idea, and padded into deeper cover, watching for patches of yellow light coming through the trees. It took him a few minutes to locate a place with enough of a view that he could look up at the topaz moon and ask for his real form back.

It was harder finding his way back to where he’d left Kieran and Kaveri on two feet than it had been making the reverse journey on four feet.

Kieran was making things from the trickles of moonlight that reached him. Kaveri was now wearing sandals, thick fabric soles with lacing crossing and recrossing and tying around her ankles, and a light-hued skin-hugging shirt with a low rounded neck and snug elbow-length sleeves but that left her belly bare. Over her loincloth she was just now tying a wide triangle of dark cloth, wrapped twice around her waist so the point fell to mid-calf directly below the knot on her right hip. Kieran handed her a final dark article, a kind of waist-length open-fronted jacket with short loose sleeves. She tucked the butterfly knife Tyrel had given her into the folds of her skirt, half-hidden by the knot.

“At the borders, many people pass, but best if you do not attract unnecessary attention,” Kieran said. “That would be unremarkable anywhere for some distance across the river.” He looked Tyrel over measuringly—shirt, doublet, trousers, low boots—then swung the pack into reach and opened it. Tyrel caught his weapons belt in midair, and buckled it into place with a deep sense of relief. The familiar weight of his katar, the pressure of the lower strap around his thigh holding it in place, was comforting, though he missed his off-hand one still. The simple dagger on his left just wasn’t the same.

“Do not draw a blade on anyone once we cross the river, unless I tell you it is safe to,” Kieran said. “It would be better to leave them packed, but you will feel better having them, I think.” He refastened the pack, adjusted it on his own shoulder, and nodded towards the road.

The few wagons remaining on the road seemed in a hurry to cross the bridge, and paid no attention at all to the trio of travellers.

Crossing the bridge was almost anticlimactic, absolutely uneventful.

“Follow the road, “ Kieran said. The road ran up a hill on this side, in a kind of zigzag. At the top of the slope was a single-story stone building, with a tower three or four times that height beside it. “You now stand in Faton Province, in the country of Lutrim.” He glanced at them and smiled. “The world is a far larger and more diverse place than either of you has ever imagined, I think. There will be an inn not far past the border tower, and a town farther along this road. You have a great deal to learn, and there is no time like now to begin, hm?”

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5 – Kayla (2/3) Fri, 03 Jan 2020 13:00:18 +0000 Continue reading

Kayla blinked, and stared at the stranger, re-evaluating rapidly; the other smiled wryly, and spread both hands.

“Like I said, I might be able to help.”

“Okay, let’s try this again,” Kayla said. “Come have a seat. I’m Kayla.”

The dark woman’s strides were long and effortless; Kayla, who had little patience for women who equated being feminine with being helpless and weak, regarded with approval both the way she moved and the muscle visible in her arms as she drew nearer. “Riley. Do you want to get your friend?”

“No.” She saw no need at this point to explain that Max wasn’t here. And before I let you near him, sister, you’re going to have to convince me this isn’t a con game of some sort and you aren’t going to hurt him.

Riley nodded, and seated herself on the opposite side of the picnic table. “Sixty seconds after I start explaining, you’re going to believe that I’m insane or I’m a sadistic bitch getting her kicks or both, because the other option is going to be that the world is very different than it seems. I’m not asking you to believe everything I say right off the bat, that’s too much to expect from anyone. But if you can give me the benefit of the doubt enough to keep an open mind, I’ll do my best to prove that I’m not crazy or out for kicks.”

“I’m very good at being open-minded.”

“Good, hold that thought.”

“If I promise to listen to the evidence and explanations, can you hit the high points in a hundred words or less?”

“Um, I can try, but it’s going to be tricky given how limited my specific info is and how much I’m guessing.” Riley paused, visibly thinking. “I have reason to believe that your friends have extremely exotic DNA that was activated the night of the blackout, which is probably related to their being missing. They are probably not in immediate danger, but they are probably extremely confused and possibly frightened and unsure who to trust. I was asked by the great-granddaughter of the woman you helped that night to come investigate and help. I don’t have hard answers yet, but I’m working on it.”

Kayla considered that. “Right. And by exotic you mean…?”

“Well… not human.”

“Excuse me?”

Riley reached into the bag at her side, and brought her hand out carefully cupped. “Don’t freak. She’s as harmless as any other mouse, but she’s special more or less the same way your friends are.”

She moved her hand to the table and released, well, something.

It did look like a mouse, except that as Kayla watched it look around, the dark fur faded and changed to match the sanded pine of the picnic table.

Riley scooped it up and reached for Kayla’s phone, the case of which was metallic red; when she set the mouse on top of the phone, the soft light brown deepened to a very improbable red that almost perfectly matched the phone. When placed on the paper, the mouse turned bright white with, no less, broken black squiggly lines like smeared and distorted text. A tiny harness of flat cord hardly more visible than fishing line fit securely around the little body, fastened with a jewellery-type lobster-claw clasp; Kayla could see nothing attached to it or supported by it except a copper tag less than half a centimetre across, too small to have legible info on it.

“Just a mouse, but with some exotic DNA,” Riley said. “Her name is Hob. She’s not really much smarter than any other mouse, although that can be pretty smart, but I’m kinda fond of her. Mostly she’s helpful for situations like this, but now and again she can sniff something out for me. If I’m right, she’s actually a lot like your friends. Can you try to give me a fair hearing while I give you all the details and explanations and stuff?” Kayla’s people-sense told her the sympathy in Riley’s voice was genuine.

“Yeah, I think I can do that.” Kayla was rather surprised by how calm her own voice was. “You’ve got a freakin’ chameleon mouse and I can’t think of a way to fake that easily in my back yard or a reason to, and I’m pretty sure the rules of reality as I understand them don’t allow for that, so, uh, yeah, I’m listening.” Was the world weirder than she’d thought, or was she losing her mind, or was this an absurdly elaborate trick?

“Good. I hate shocking people, but, well, it’s very important that you actually hear what I’m about to tell you, and people seem to absorb less while they’re being rational and sceptical about some extremely irrational concepts.” Riley absently reached back into her bag for a couple of hard pellets of compressed seeds with brighter bits, which she gave Hob; the mouse settled down to eating happily, once again the colour of the wood of the table, except for her front paws that matched her snack. “Do you have any particular religious beliefs? I can try to put it in those terms, if you do.”

“Not really.” Yeah, just try to reconcile my life and priorities with what organized religions tend to say…

“Okay. As rational as I can make it, then. There is a form of energy that is actually quite common in the world, but it interacts with us only in relatively subtle and hard-to-measure ways, and while it does follow a very clear set of rules, those rules are quite different from the ones that physics says the universe runs on.”

“All right,” Kayla said warily. “Does this energy have a name?”

“Not in the sense that, say, gravity or electricity do. No one believes in it so why have a word for it? Call it aether, for the fifth element in classical science that couldn’t be directly perceived like the others. Or quintessence, if you prefer.”

“Aether. Right. And?”

“More accurately, humans generally can’t perceive it, but there are living things that live within and use it extensively, the same way we use ambient heat and light to survive and function. Because of that, however, they exist just far enough out of sync with us that typically we have trouble perceiving them and they typically have trouble perceiving us.”

“Okay, that’s an interesting sort of abstract theory another day maybe, but I’m not much in the mood just now.”

Riley nodded. “Yeah, that’s frequently where I start getting funny looks. Try this.” She sorted through the chaotic collection of pendants on cords of varying length and material and colour, and untangled a ring the size of a dollar coin on a bright green silk cord. As she held it out by the cord, it gleamed. “This adjusts frequencies enough to work like a lens. Look through it at, oh, the nearest large tree, say.”

Warily, Kayla took it. Despite having been in contact with Riley, it was cool in her hand. A highly polished circle of silver two millimetres thick had two fine copper wires wrapped around it in opposite directions, forming a regular pattern; otherwise, it was an unremarkable hoop of metal. She raised it and looked at the lush old maple that cast one corner of the yard into perpetual deep cool shade.

And nearly dropped the ring.

She knew birds lived in the tree, and squirrels, and creepy-crawlies she preferred not to ponder too closely​—​but lounging on one heavy low branch, partially visible through the leaves, was a woman whose skin seemed to blend into the bark, her long hair the colour of the leaves around her. She lay on her back, one long leg dangling, her attention on the sparrow currently sitting on her hand.

Without the ring, Kayla could see a sparrow sitting on a thin branch, one that with a bit of imagination could look like a hand with impossibly thin fingers, but no sign of the tree woman.

“What the hell…?”

“There’s a person in the tree who looks like part of it?” Riley said, without turning around to look at it, but it didn’t really sound like a question.

Kayla twisted so she could see the tree in the neighbour’s yard, an ancient and knotted apple tree.

Perched on a branch next to the trunk was a gnarled humanoid figure of indeterminate sex, so shrivelled and twisted as to be hard to distinguish from the branches​—​except that it looked right at her, grinned with very white teeth, and gave her a mocking little wave.

Kayla yelped and did drop the ring, but Riley caught it, and set it down safely next to Hob.

“It just waved at me!”

“That’s, what, an apple tree? Yeah, they’re tricky buggers. Generally pretty benevolent unless you offend them, but a lot less easygoing than maple, and they don’t miss much.”

Kayla picked up the ring again, turning it in the sunlight. Silver band, copper wire, nowhere to hide anything and no markings on any surface. And she wasn’t seeing static images, both figures had been bizarre but looked very much alive. CGI could create that… but how?

“Okay, what the hell are those?”

“If I tell you the name that’s currently in use in English, it’s going to have all kinds of pop culture garbage and preconceptions attached to it, and it won’t really tell you anything. They’re an example of those living things that need the aether. Sentient humanoid ones, in this case, closely associated with those two trees.”

Associated with trees. Needing a form of energy that followed different rules. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that there are fucking magical dryads living in my back yard?”

“That’s one name that particular kind have been called,” Riley admitted. “They have a lot of names. Every culture has encountered these kinds of things, sentient and otherwise, and they’ve invented names for them and, usually for lack of real info, have made things up about them. Magic is a word that’s used at times but it has so much baggage it’s really not a good one for explaining anything.”

“And this current English name for these things is…?”


For a second or two that failed to process, as Kayla stared at her. “You have got to be kidding me. Theo’s been kidnapped by fairies?”

Riley shook her head. “No, the odds of that are close to zero.”

“Then how the fuck does this insanity relate to the fact that I have friends missing?”

“Most kinds of fae have overwhelmingly more females than males. Female fae frequently go looking for other options, and a very popular one is seducing human men. If they have a boy, they always keep him; if it’s a girl, she may be left to grow up among humans. It doesn’t take many generations for it to go into a dormant form.”

“Which I take it you think my friends have.”

Riley stroked Hob’s back thoughtfully with a finger. “In a word, yes. It’s not uncommon for humans to have fae genes. There are two steps necessary for that to have any relevance at all. The first is that they have to be stimulated, partially activated, prenatally by very specific and infrequent environmental conditions, which tends to mean that a small local group will be affected all at once. We call those dormant faelings. Um, not everyone loves the term ‘faelings’ these days, but it’s actually quite old and just means belonging to the fae bloodline, and there aren’t a lot of terms available that mean ‘human who has a fae ancestor at some point and their fae genes are at least potentially active,’ y’know? It’s commonly used and understood and doesn’t usually offend anyone. Dormant faelings are basically just regular people, but there’s a fae soul underneath that will always make them a little different from the rest of us. A little more sensitive to what’s around them, a little more attuned to rhythms the rest of us can’t sense, often a little more conscious of cause and effect. A preference for living where they were born. An affinity for other faelings, especially other local ones. If you’d rather, I can put it all in terms of epigenetics, the activation and deactivation of genes and traits without any actual alteration of the DNA. It amounts to the same thing.”

“And you figure my friends are part fairy why?”

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Meetings 10 Thu, 02 Jan 2020 13:00:42 +0000 Continue reading

Being able to hike without tiring or needing a drink or a break was certainly new and interesting. They travelled a long way by full dark, despite the various obstacles inherent to the Forest. Tyrel wondered at first why Kieran had chosen to be an amarog all day, but he soon realized that on four feet, Kieran was trotting along effortlessly, completely unhindered by uneven ground or underbrush.

Darkness was no hindrance, either: colours shifted, tinted more and more noticeably with pale yellow to Tyrel’s eyes, but there was no loss of detail at all. Kaveri must be experiencing some equivalent, since she continued to move with her usual ease. They could have kept travelling all night as well, he thought.

Kieran bounded off into the woods, and returned a short time later, drawing their attention with a short bark. He padded off in a different direction, glancing back to be sure they were following.

He led them to a clearing where a huge tree had fallen, taking several smaller trees down with its weight. New, young trees were edging into the clearing, but hadn’t yet grown enough to block the sky.

Kieran leapt up on top of the large tree and stretched out, attention on the darkening sky.

“I guess we’re stopping for a while,” Tyrel said, dropping his pack and looking around for a good place to sit, finally choosing a dead sapling that was braced above the ground. Kaveri simply sat on the grass, legs crossed, facing him. “Do you suppose life is going to change at some point to something other than just walking? To Banvard, away from Banvard, away from Dunnval…”

“It will,” Kieran said. Tyrel glanced back, and found him now human-form, reclining on the biggest tree. “It will take us perhaps two more days to reach a great river, the Valdet, and beyond it lie lands unlike either the Forest or the forts and towns. They will care nothing for where you are from. From there, you can choose what you wish to do. You have time before you to learn any skills you choose, try any life you would like to experience. Crafter, farmer, thief, hunter. Even priest—there are gods who will willingly accept you if you will commit to enough time and will live by their values. I have done so, and there is much to learn from it.”

“How old are you?” Tyrel asked.

Kieran shrugged. “I do not know. Something over a century. Kaveri, you should now be able to change. Lirit is last to rise, of course, but I think it won’t be long. Do you recall what I told Tyrel, of how to change?”

“Look at Lirit, and ask,” Kaveri said. Tyrel thought she showed every sign of eager anticipation, no nervousness at all to match his own mixed feelings about this.

Kieran nodded. “Exactly. In time, you will not need to see them to change, but it is the easiest way.”

“Is it my imagination,” Tyrel said, “or was Talir actually paying attention to what I was doing last night?”

“If you felt she was, then very likely so,” Kieran said calmly. “Talir cares very deeply for her children. She does not watch at all times, as far as I am aware, but at times when you need her, she will do what she can. The moons are bound by the Laws, like all the gods, and beyond that, it would not be a healthy thing for any mother to constantly intervene to rescue her children from every small mishap. Never doubt, though, that she will love you always and be there for you always. Kaveri, I am sorry I do not know Lirit, but I have no reason to believe she loves her children any less.”

“I could feel it last night,” Kaveri said softly. “An absolutely incredible sense of… of welcome and joy and love, as long as the moonlight was on me.”

“I believe I am going to make my way in the direction of Valeyan’s domain,” Kieran said thoughtfully. “He may have some insight into why Sanur and Lirit have taken an interest. I know the moons have had varied feelings about how the others, the ones my mother fled from, have behaved. Perhaps some of those feelings are changing. That is a very long way to the east, however.”

Tyrel could feel it, the instant Talir edged over the trees and her light touched him. The rush of strength and pleasure was unlike anything else, and he knew utterly that had he been offered a chance to undo the mingling of blood and be human again, he would never have accepted it, since it would mean never feeling this again.

A sharp nip on his hand made him yelp and look down.

A raccoon with luminous violet eyes regarded him mischievously.

On the ground nearby, bronze and gold and lapis lazuli glinted, abandoned.

The raccoon nipped at him again, harder. It hurt, but the yellow moonlight healed it almost instantly. Tyrel hesitated, unsure of the best response.

“You may be best able to avoid her as a fox,” Kieran said, amused.

The raccoon who was Kaveri made a staccato chittering sound and danced back a couple of steps before going up on her hind legs, braced on her long striped tail.

“Why’s it so easy for her?” Tyrel demanded.

“Because she accepts it and is enjoying it for what it is, perhaps, rather than seeking to control it?”

That felt uncomfortably possible. Tyrel looked up at Talir, and asked.

It was disconcerting all over again to be facing a raccoon who was, in fact, probably his equal in mass, though much lower to the ground and wider. She hopped excitedly in place, stiff-legged, and scurried off, short legs pumping with surprising speed. Tyrel tried not to think about how, only to decide to go after her, and even more to his astonishment, his own body responded smoothly, bounding off the tree in pursuit.

Kaveri, never breaking stride, went under a fallen tree that was close to the ground. There was no way he’d get under it. Before he could make a decision to stop, he was gathering himself for a leap that arced neatly up and over the obstacle, and landing on the far side.

They chased each other around and around the clearing, under and over the fallen trees. Without really thinking about it, they largely avoided Kieran, until a particularly enthusiastic and uncontrolled lunge on Tyrel’s part plus Kaveri dropping off her perch left Tyrel in mid-jump directly at Kieran.

Kieran rolled off the large tree and was an amarog before he hit the ground. Tyrel landed in front of him in a tangled heap; strong jaws closed on the back of his neck gently, picked him up, and lowered him slowly so he could get his feet under him.

Kieran looked intimidatingly large at any time, but to a fox, he was a giant, out-massing Tyrel many times over. Still, it was hard to feel fear of an amarog who had his tail high and waving and his chest against the grass, ears forward, clearly wanting to play.

Kaveri jumped off a fallen tree onto Kieran’s back, startling him into yelping and spinning around in an attempt to catch her as she slithered to the ground. She scurried around and stayed behind him, with the result that he kept going in circles.

Tyrel caught Kieran’s tail in his teeth, dug all four paws into the ground, and held on, though Kieran nearly pulled him right off his feet. Kaveri halted and went up on her back feet to seize a double handful of dense silver-tipped black fur on either side of Kieran’s face, licked his nose with a quick pink tongue, and scampered off.

They played, heedless of minor injuries that always healed immediately, tireless in the life-giving light of the moons.

And paying no attention at all to the time. Before they knew it, the moons had set, and there would be no returning to two feet.

Tyrel sat next to the packs, wondering what they were going to do. Stay here for the day? He didn’t want to leave everything behind.

Kieran padded over, tilted his head to one side thoughtfully. When Kaveri joined them, he nudged her gently, then grabbed the straps of one pack in his teeth and flipped it up onto his back. He moved a few steps, making it very clear that it was negligible weight, then brought it back. With one paw, he pinned it to the ground, nudged the covering flap out of the way to expose the buckles, and looked expectantly at Kaveri.

Small clever raccoon paws unfastened the buckles of that pack, then those of the other.

With a bit of trial and effort, they got most of it put together in a single pack—they had to leave quite a lot behind in order to do it, though. Kieran slung it into place on his back, shook himself to settle it securely, and looked at them.

A fox, Tyrel discovered, could dart through forest cover far more easily than he ever expected. His vision wasn’t as good, even in the moonlight, but his ears and nose more than made up for that—as long as he didn’t spend too much time analyzing the source of the incoming information. Any attempt to do so fractured it into an incomprehensible jumble of smells and sounds.

It was, he decided… fun. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done anything that was purely untainted fun.

He just wished he had Madoc beside him to share it.

Sometime after dark, Kieran stopped, let the pack fall, and changed.

“We’ve made very good time. If we continue through the night, we will reach the river before sunrise, and once we cross that, I think you can trust that your past will no longer follow you. Shall we go on?”

Kaveri stood up on her hind legs, chittered, and nodded emphatically.

Tyrel echoed the nod. This business of constantly travelling with no goal beyond getting away, while it had enjoyable aspects, needed to end. He wanted, needed, some kind of foundation to his life again.

“All right,” Kieran said, and they got back on the move again.

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5 – Kayla (1/3) – 3:00 pm, Real World Tue, 31 Dec 2019 13:00:47 +0000 Continue reading

Kayla laid her phone on the picnic table next to a printout of Theo’s long, obsessively-up-to-date, and helpfully annotated contacts list, and buried her head in her hands. The cheerful warmth of the early-afternoon sun did nothing to help the chill inside that was as much fear as lack of sleep.

Somewhere between Theo leaving early from his weekly DJ job at the club, which was highly atypical in itself, and coming home, he might just as well have dropped off the face of the earth. At least four of his friends had vanished at roughly the same time. And they were out of people to call, out of places to look. Out of ideas. Out of energy, for that matter.

The landline kept ringing, barely audible past the thunder that made the house quiver. Kayla finally woke up and dragged herself blearily out of bed and up to the kitchen to answer it, beating Max but not by much.

“It’s Heather. I’m really really sorry, but Zach went out to go to the corner store and get milk and that was over two hours ago.” Calm words, but panic bubbled just underneath, making Heather’s normally smooth-as-honey voice tremble on the edge of tears. “I’ve been out looking for him and he’s nowhere in sight. Not that ‘in sight’ means much, it’s pouring down in buckets out there. Hospital says he hasn’t come into Emerg. Maybe Theo’s heard from him?”

“Is Theo still up?” Kayla asked Max, trying to ignore the little icy feet that scurried down her spine—never a good sign when she got that feeling.

“Theo’s not home yet,” Max said, and both glanced at the glowing clock on the microwave. Coming up on three a.m. It wasn’t unheard-of for Theo to run into someone and get distracted and be late getting home, and despite all insistance that waking them was preferable, he sometimes forgot to call or text to let them know. If the weather was bad, he might have caught a ride instead of calling to ask them to come out in it, and that could have detours. Still, under the circumstances…

The icy feet called in reinforcements and repeated the earlier run down her back.

“Let me see if I can find him,” Kayla said reassuringly. “They might be together somewhere. I gather Zach doesn’t have his phone?”

“No, it’s here plugged in,” Heather said. “We both do that as soon as we get home. Thanks, Kayla.”

“Don’t panic yet, okay? It could be anything. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

She gave Max a quick explanation while she dialled Theo’s cell; she got voicemail immediately, which was odd. She said, “Hey, you, call home, would you?” and hung up. The bar had a back-end phone line for staff, and it was past closing but there would still be people around; she tried that, then waited while the manager went looking for anyone who might know whether Theo had left and when.

She thanked him, hung up, and rubbed her temples with one hand. “Okay, not so good. He left around midnight. Told Cindy he wasn’t feeling well and left his laptop there.”

“Hospital?” Max said. She could see her own growing worry mirrored in the tightness of his expression.

“Yep. Heather first. She’s probably got the number right there, too.”

The single local hospital’s emergency room had no record of Theo coming in, or of anyone unconscious and matching his description with no ID.

Max, meanwhile, had gone to get his own phone, and had tried first on that, then on Theo’s computer in the dining room as well, to reach Des. Kayla couldn’t recall ever contacting Des without a response in minutes: phone, text, email, various social media. In his own way, he was as bad as Theo. Nothing. His phone, like further tries on Theo’s, went promptly to voicemail, and there was nothing anywhere suggesting he’d been online since around ten-thirty when he’d said he was going to start building another recycled computer.

“Stay here and listen for the phones,” Kayla said, pinning her hair out of the way as securely as she could. She was going to get drenched no matter what she wore and it was summer, so she didn’t bother with anything beyond shorts and t-shirt and sandals, with the household’s heavy-duty waterproof flashlight, and her own phone zipped into a freezer bag and tucked into her pocket just in case. And, inevitably, her lock-blade utility knife in her back pocket.

“Be careful,” Max said softly.

She gave him her best confident, cocky grin, hoping he’d believe it even though she didn’t feel it. “I’m more of a handful than any of our missing boys.”

Heather was right, visibility was all but nil: huge drops slammed into the ground, and into her, with punishing force that left her breathless and wondering vaguely whether it would leave cheetah-spot bruises. The drops caught the flashlight beam and refracted it into near uselessness as she followed Theo’s normal route to the bar, and explored possible alternate routes on the way back.

“Nothing?” Max asked, helping her strip and wrapping a towel around her.

“Nothing,” Kayla said. “If this turns out to be just Theo forgetting to call, I’m going to kick his ass for that. It’s horrible out there.”

“Levi called.”

Kayla felt those little cold feet again, worse than ever, before Max even finished.

“Suzi took the dogs out for a last walk around midnight. He found the dogs alone, hiding under a porch or something, leashes dragging, over an hour later, both obviously terrified by something and he doesn’t think it’s just the storm. There’s no sign of her. Phone’s going to voicemail. She’s not at the hospital.”

“Fuck. This is just getting weirder and worse by the hour. What the hell is going on?”

Something very bad, she was sure of that, and she’d learned a long time ago to trust her gut feelings.

As the sun rose with all four still missing, they had expanded the circle of people to call, and then kept expanding it.

Niko’s bookshop’s voicemail now said it was closed due to a personal emergency and would re-open as soon as possible; Kayla left a message, though she wasn’t holding her breath—but couldn’t help wondering about the timing. A very short list of other local people in Theo’s contact list had yet to respond via phone, email, text, or social media, but she wasn’t sure how consistent any of them normally were.

And then Wade had returned the message left on his and Alison’s landline phone: he’d gotten home from working overnight at the sleep clinic to find no sign of Alison, the bed still made, her phone and keys and wallet gone, and attempts to call her got only her voicemail.

Max, with no response after repeatedly knocking on Des’ door other than Ramses’s distinctive high-pitched plaintive meow, unlocked it and pushed it open. “Des? You here? It’s Max and Kayla.”

Slim tuxie Ramses emerged promptly, but Ryu’s tabby tail vanishing under the couch was the only glimpse they got of him.

Kayla headed for the kitchen first. The bowl of kibble was lower than Des ever allowed it to get, though not entirely empty. Normally, there was always wet food as well, extra water to help Ramses’ aging kidneys and lower-carb to reduce the odds of Ryu gaining weight, but the scant streaks remaining in the bowls were dry and old. Kayla put them in the sink to soak, grabbed two of the alternate dishes from the drying rack, and got a can of food from the cupboard. Ramses coiled around her ankles.

“No sign of Des,” Max called from the bedroom. “Bed’s made about as much as it ever is. Looks like Ramses has been pawing at the blankets, piling them up, like usual.” He joined Kayla in the kitchen, and watched Ramses rubbing against Kayla’s hand and arm vigorously as she set the bowl on the floor.

“Start packing up their stuff,” Kayla said. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’m not leaving them here alone. They’re used to our house. We can leave Des a note. If we’re overreacting, well, he’ll forgive us for wanting to make sure the cats are safe.”

“No argument from me. Something’s got Ryu spooked bad.”

“Ramses too, I think. Ramses just reacts to being scared more like Theo does: he goes to friends for comfort.”

Five missing. All had grown up together all their lives, all were present at the blackout barbecue. Only two others fit that description, and both Erica and JC remained unaccounted for, neither answering phones; neither had an alternate number on Theo’s list, Erica’s listed work number went to an office of some kind with weekday hours, and there was no work number for JC. It was a pattern, of sorts, but one without any apparent meaning.

Which left them… where? The police would just laugh them out the door at this point. She’d talked Max into going to check on Heather in person, figuring that Heather could use a shoulder to cry on but also hoping that the respite might allow her to clear her thoughts and think of something.

Theo’s out there somewhere, probably with Des and Zach and Suzi and Alison and maybe Erica and JC, and I’m dead sure he needs me. But what do I do? There has to be something. Life without Theo… just not going to let it happen. Somehow. But how?

A somewhat tentative rapping at the gate made her raise her head and look over her shoulder. It wasn’t closed tightly, and swung inwards under the pressure, revealing a woman, cheetah-lean, dark hair cropped short, and Kayla figured she had at least a decade on the visitor. Her chocolate-brown tank-top bared t-shirt tan lines and, combined with khaki cargo pants and laced black boots, made a sharp contrast to the motley collection of rather folk-y jewellery adorning neck, wrists, fingers and ears. Resting against one hip, the strap across her chest, was a simple old-school messenger bag of faded canvas that had probably once been coppery-brown.

“Do I know you?” Kayla asked wearily.

The woman shook her head. “No. But I think I can help you.”

“If the next line has to do with finding Christ, I’ll probably throw something heavy and my aim is really good. I have someone a fuck of a lot more important to find.”

“I’m not here to preach. Or to sell anything, or ask you to donate to anything or to support anyone. I can probably help you find whoever you lost.”

Kayla slammed both hands down on the table, which made the cellphone jump at least an inch off the wood, and spun around to stand up. “There are two people on this planet I care about more than anything. One of them is missing, and the other one is ripping himself to shreds. Other people who matter to me are also missing. Think really carefully before you turn this into some kind of sick joke.” She was only average height, not particularly impressive physically, but she’d learned long ago—not long after she’d learned not to cry because crying only made you a target—how to use body language and voice to intimidate, and she was in no mood to be tolerant.

“The one who’s missing,” the stranger said, unmoved. “Someone who was born in and grew up in this immediate area and has never lived anywhere else, or at least not for long, and right around forty-five? There are others who fit the same description, and they were all present on the night of the blackout when something odd happened involving a woman, probably an old and frail one in need. You did something nice for her and she said something that made no sense. And they’re all missing, but no one else is.”

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Meetings 9 Mon, 30 Dec 2019 13:00:49 +0000 Continue reading

A gentle touch roused Tyrel. He opened his eyes, and discovered in confusion that there was no one near him. There was only pale yellow light, flowing over him like brilliant water, all at once comforting as warm sun, refreshing as cool water, filling him with strength and pleasure and joy. The pain in his leg had vanished, along with any trace of fatigue or discomfort. He looked up, and saw Talir just above the level of the tree-tops, the source of the light bathing the little clearing.

A quiet bark drew his gaze downward. The amarog was sitting next to him, tail curled neatly around its feet, eyes glowing. Moonlight shimmered like a reflection on water, and it was no longer an amarog sitting there, it was a tall, lean, dark man.

“You have been staring at our mother for quite a long time,” he said, his tone distinctly amused, his accent unfamiliar. “Perhaps, if you are feeling better, you could wake Kaveri and we can talk?”

“A long time?” Tyrel echoed in confusion, glancing at Talir… who was well above the treetops. “It didn’t feel like long.”

“I know.”

Kaveri had curled up beside him, half-wrapped in a blanket. Tyrel laid a hand on her shoulder and said her name, then gave her a gentle shake.

She stirred, stretched and yawned, then sat up, combing her hair back out of her eyes with her fingers. Thrall chains and cuffs glinted in the moonlight; Tyrel found his thoughts turning to how badly Kaveri probably wanted to be rid of them, and how they could achieve that.

“Now,” the no-longer-amarog said gravely. “My name is Kieran. Your brother is not dead in any common sense of the word, and he will return to you when Sanur rises full, none the worse for it. What we are… long ago, the moons created the first of us, not born but passed by blood. Their children grew corrupted, and one fled the rest. She was my mother. The others found her, and I have not seen her since.”

“Is there anyone else like you?” Kaveri said softly.

“Only you, now. I grew up far from here. Since I left there… I have for the most part been more careful than these past few days. I have learned to stay out of sight during the day when wandering through areas where there are no amarogs, to keep from attracting attention. You startled me. I had intended only to scare you into going elsewhere. I should not have allowed it to become a fight. In fact, you should never have known I was there. I let instinct win. I am sorry.”

“That’s what happened to Madoc?” Kaveri said alertly. “On the way to Banvard?”

“Yes,” Tyrel said. “When we got there, the Chief was not impressed about having someone not human in his fort. That’s why he attacked us. The ghosts were really draining me, but not him. Your spirit-protection herbs, in the oil, made our weapons work on the ghosts. I have no idea if the amulets helped or not. Madoc got us home.”

“Sanur was bright still, you were lucky,” Kieran said. “Much closer to the dark of the moon, and he would not have recovered so well.”

“I’m not sure I won’t decide it was a good thing,” Tyrel said slowly, finally voicing the thought that had been stirring somewhere deep in his mind. “I wasn’t much looking forward to a lifetime of being Chief, but leaving was such an enormous decision I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“It’s a blessing for me,” Kaveri said. “I’m out from behind walls and in the Forest.”

“We need to do something about those cuffs,” Tyrel added, and wondered about the glance Kaveri threw at Kieran.

“When we can,” she said. “They aren’t much in my way. But I’d very much like that, thank you.”

“What you need to know,” Kieran said, “is that you are very much Talir’s son. While she is bright, you will not need to eat or sleep, her light will give you everything. Closer to new, you will need to do both, and you will be very tired for a day or so around moon-dark. In the moonlight, you will be able to change to another form, although I do not know what it is. It is an easy thing in bright moonlight, less comfortable in less moonlight, and not possible during the day or at moon-dark. You will not age, or fall ill, though you do need to have a care for sunlight too long or intense, the sunburn will be very bad. Talir’s light will heal anything—though a severe injury may need more of it, and a bad sunburn will take a great deal. If you die by anything that comes from earth—metal, stone, bone, wood—you will go to Talir until the next full moon. However, you can die permanently if it is by something that is not of earth. Most humans will feel uneasy, at best, if they learn any part of what you are, so it’s best to keep it to yourself, even though that limits how long you can remain in any place—a few years, a decade. There are forever new places to see, new things to learn.” He left Tyrel pondering that, and picked up Kaveri’s butterfly knife. “Kaveri, the choice is yours. It would make it very difficult to go back to your own people, but you could never be chained again.” He offered her the knife.

She accepted it, toying with it. “I can’t go back to my people anyway,” she said finally. “I’ve had to change too much in order to survive in an alien environment. They would accept me home, but the past couple of years happened and can’t unhappen, and I don’t think I can feel like one of them anymore. That isn’t where I belong now. They’ve already grieved for me. Better to let it be.” She unfolded the knife, took a deep breath, and sliced into her lower arm just above her wrist, flinching but nonetheless making it deep enough for red blood to show. She handed the knife back to Kieran, who gravely echoed the motion and, swiftly, clasped her hand tightly, bringing the two cuts together. After only a few heartbeats, he let go. There was no sign of damage to his arm save the faintly-shining topaz blood.

Kaveri watched in fascination as the dark blood dripping from her arm gradually paled and turned to the violet of wild lilac flowers.

“Lirit?” Kieran said thoughtfully. “And Sanur claimed your brother. I had believed only Talir had taken an interest in us.”

“Do we need to stay here?” Tyrel asked. “Will Madoc come back to the same place?”

“I do not know Sanur,” Kieran said slowly. “Or what she will do. Talir has never returned me to a place of danger. Most often, she returns me as near as she safely can to where I was. This time, she left me close to you instead. I think we need to ask. What earthborn cares for this domain?”

“What what?” Tyrel asked blankly.

“You mean the Grandmother?” Kaveri asked. “She looks after the Forest.”

Kieran nodded. “Is there a way to call her that she prefers?”

“We don’t often see her. Tradition says that she’ll come to someone who calls her in sincere need and sincere respect.”

Kieran nodded again, and raised his voice. “Earthborn?” he called. “Grandmother? I am Talir’s son, and Valeyan calls me friend. Will you do us the very great honour of speaking with us?”

For a very long moment, there was silence in the clearing. Even the wind stilled.

A woman stepped out of the pines surrounding them. She was very tall with ample curves, large full breasts and wide hips, covered only by the long grey hair that fell to her knees. Her skin was deep red-brown, and her eyes gleamed like diamonds. Though definitely not young, there was equally nothing frail about her: she was as ageless as a rock or an enormous tree.

“I know you, Kieran,” she greeted him gravely. “Valeyan sent out word about Neoma and her bloodline, long ago in human terms but barely yesterday in ours. You are welcome here. What do you seek, son of Talir?”

“Sanur has a new son, who has just gone to her for the first time, without even knowing what he is. We are concerned about leaving this place, in case she returns him here where he died. But there are others who might come who mean harm to these two, Talir’s newest son and Lirit’s daughter, and it might mean more blood spilled if we remain.”

Another pause. “Sanur will see to it that he comes to you wherever you are, and she thanks you for your concern for her son. I am very glad you are free, granddaughter.” Without another word, she walked towards the nearest trees.

“Thank you, Grandmother,” Kaveri murmured, and Tyrel saw a tear trace a line down her cheek.

“Thank you, earthborn,” Kieran said. “If there is anything I can do…”

“You have done it,” she replied. “You killed some of those who harass and enslave the Forest’s wild children. Perhaps it will be a reminder that they are not welcome in the Forest.” She glanced back, as though aware of Tyrel’s sudden intense discomfort. “You are Talir’s son, foster-son of one Forester, a loyal brother to another, and you have protected and freed a third. You are welcome.” She vanished into the trees.

“You talk to gods often?” Tyrel asked shakily.

Kieran shrugged. “What one earthborn asks, the others will normally grant. My mother, when she fled, lived a long time in the wilds and helped the nature-spirits of the domain to protect it, at times in ways they could not. The earthborn there loved her very much. The earthborn are, I think, for the most part easy to talk to, and often inclined to be helpful if you show courtesy. Though there are exceptions. The moons do not speak, which I think is a sad thing.”

“You always talk about your mother as if she’s dead,” Kaveri said gently. “Is she?”

“She did not return to our home, though I was there a long time after. I have not found any hint of her since. I don’t know how she can be, but I think she must be dead. Still, I do have hope.” He shrugged. “So. Kaveri, Lirit is waxing and strong but it will take a little time for that blood to work entirely through your body. Tyrel, however… you have had time, and you have more than enough moonlight to change.”

“Um… how?”

“Look at Talir, and ask for what you want.”

Puzzled, Tyrel fixed his gaze on Talir again, and tried to frame what he was asking for as some kind of clear request, although he wasn’t entirely certain what he was asking for.

The oddest sensation tickled through his mind, like laughter but without any sound.

That was followed by an even odder sensation, a sort of tingling that started somewhere deep inside and spread outwards. The pale yellow light brightened… no, it was him, he realized, he could see through his own hand because it was made of nothing but light.

Before he had time for more than a brief flash of fear, the strange feelings faded away.

Everything looked much, much too large, and the woodland he’d thought was quiet was anything but.

“Fox,” Kaveri chuckled. “How appropriate.”

Tyrel tried to ask what she was talking about, but it came out as a yip.

“Red fox,” Kieran clarified. “Though not in fact quite red. I believe that is normally referred to as a cross fox, that mix of tawny and black. It will take some practice to grow accustomed to it. Try not to think too much about anything you do, simply do it.”

He was standing on top of a pile of his own clothing, Tyrel realized, and jumped off. In mid-bounce, he got confused by too many feet and the weight of a tail, and stumbled.

Kieran’s hands, which seemed entirely too big to be real, gently untangled him and set him back on his feet. “It will take practice. Have patience. Move around and it will begin to feel more familiar.”

Tyrel looked down, still disoriented by the sight of his own hand replaced by a slender dark-furred paw. How did animals walk?

Something tugged his tail; he yipped and whipped around, realized his ears had flattened and his feet had sorted themselves out without his direction.

“Stop over-thinking,” Kieran reproved him. “The reflexes are there. Allow them to work.”

“Why do your clothes stay, but Madoc’s and Tyrel’s didn’t?” Kaveri asked suddenly.

“Because my clothes are made of moonlight, which is what your body now is, as well.” Kieran cupped a hand, and the yellow light pooled within it like water. With his other hand, he drew it out, stretching it, and it formed a long length of fabric. “It is far more convenient. Cloth and soft things like rope are not so hard, though with practice you can be more precise and alter the colour. Other things are possible, but more difficult.” He ran the length of cloth through his hands again, and it darkened and possibly expanded. He handed it to Kaveri, who wrapped it behind her back, crossed it at the front over her breasts, and tied it behind her neck. “I think that we are in no danger of attack immediately, and we can safely stay here until you are ready to move on. You might consider what you truly need to bring along and what you can leave.” He gathered more moonlight, weaving it into what gradually took shape as a shirt.

Tyrel kept working on this. It had been a long time since he’d felt so little control over his own body, after a lifetime of driving himself to be always faster, always more accurate. Throw in the sense of sheer unreality about this, and he had to keep forcing aside an uncharacteristic impulse to run and hide. Even more, he desperately wanted Madoc with him—his brothers absence made him feel like he’d lost part of himself. And yet, the moonlight’s caress was a constant comfort, more real than anything he’d ever experienced before, a flood of not just endless strength but something he could only call encouragement.

“Talir will set very soon,” Kieran said. “You need to decide which form to spend the day in, since you will be unable to change again until moonrise. There are clothes there for you, with your pack.” He cupped his hands, drank moonlight from them, eyes half-closed in pleasure, then his outline fluxed in the light from human back to amarog.

Being a fox all day, without Talir’s support… not something that currently appealed to Tyrel at all. He looked up at Talir, and wordlessly implored her to change him back.

It still felt very peculiar, he wasn’t sure how he’d ever get used to the feeling, but when it passed he was human again. With great relief, he reached for the clothes Kieran had made.

They felt almost like real fabric, not leather but more like the cotton that was commonly used in the towns. All of it was a darker shade of Talir’s light, an amber-brown, and most of it was lightweight and cool against his skin. There were even boots, low ones of the same soft stuff, but with the soles much thicker; not rigid, and so lacking in any support, but heavy enough to protect against most damage.

Kieran was watching him. Tyrel told him, “Thanks,” and the amarog dipped his head in acknowledgement.

“So, let’s see what we need and what we don’t,” he said, sitting down across from Kaveri and reaching for the nearest pack.

Together, they unpacked everything, sorting it into piles on spread blankets. Clothing they decided to discard. They checked with Kieran on the usefulness of some things, and tossed hygiene supplies and cloaks into the pile with the clothes. Having established that they would have no need to eat for a few days, Kaveri set the remaining bread and cheese aside to leave to the wildlife since they’d be inedible before they got used. They debated about the rest of the food, and kept the jerky, tea, and honey, adding the oats and lentils to Kaveri’s pile to distribute. Weaponry and jewellery and keepsakes went back into the packs, along with the cooking supplies and the food they’d decided to keep.

Tyrel lifted one pack. “Well, that’s certainly smaller and lighter.” He looked at the sky. The moons were out of sight, the sky was growing distinctly lighter. “Are you tired?”

Kaveri shook her head. “Not at all.”

“Kieran? What about moving on now?”

Kieran got to his feet, stretched lazily, and padded over to wait for them.

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4 – JC 2 (2/2) Fri, 27 Dec 2019 13:00:51 +0000 Continue reading

The room beyond the door was simply a windowless trapezoid with the same grey walls that reminded him of finished cement, the same somewhat padded floor. To one side was a toilet with a sink next to it, a roll of toilet paper suspended under the latter, and a narrow full-length mirror next to that apparently set into the wall; there was, literally, nothing else in the room.

He took a deep breath, faced the mirror directly, and made himself actually look.

There was a hint there of his own facial features, but feminized and refined. He was certain he was taller, though probably not by much. The frightened eyes looking back at him were a soft dove-grey, ringed by long dense dark brown lashes and lined in much the same, with red and brown tones shaded over the lids; his lips, fuller than they had been, were tinted the same dark red as his clothes and nails, though he tasted nothing when he ran his tongue nervously along them—caught a glimpse of very even, very white teeth. Beige-brown skin was absolutely flawless, completely smooth and even in texture and colour, no variations in tone, no trace of dark under his eyes or even a hint of wrinkles at the corners, not a blemish or the slightest suggestion of four decades of exposure to sun and wind and a couple of decades of shaving. Absolutely straight hair, the dark brown of black coffee, fell in a long soft shining fall to something like waist-level.

The cropped top fit like another skin down to the base of his ribs, high around the back of his neck but dropping to a rapidly-narrowing V ending just low enough to allow a glimpse of skin between… his breasts. Warily, he ran a hand over one, cupped his hand around it to squeeze it. It was an extraordinary sensation, having all that mass there, and so sensitive. He scratched lightly over one nipple through the fabric with a red nail—which was longer than he was accustomed to, but not ridiculously so—and gasped at the shiver it sent along his nerves. The same thing happened on the other side then he circled it.

He turned in place, eyeing the roundness of his bottom, curving inward to his waist, giving him a distinctly hourglass shape; he ran his hand over his backside, found it neither hard with muscle nor soft with fat, but nicely firm between. The pants sat a bit lower on his hips than he was used to, but then, he wasn’t used to having hips that were wider than his waist to support that, either. The pants hugged his legs down to just above his ankles, leaving the glassy cuffs about as visible as they seemed likely to be.

Holy crap, a model would kill to look like that. Real women don’t look like that. Not without hours of specialized clothing, professional make-up, the right lighting, and some airbrushing, and god knows what as far as diet and implants and surgery. Heh, I learned something from some of Theo’s shows.

Except she didn’t say anything about real women, human women. And she’s right about feeling healthy. No glasses but I can see better than I could with them, and despite everything, I just feel healthy.

All right, that was him, from coffee-brown hair and wide grey eyes to long legs and delicate bare feet and everything between. It might be him forever, but at the very least, it was him for an indefinite period of time, and he might as well get used to it. Of the things he found most frightening at the moment, the pure fact of looking different wasn’t even in the top five—although the means of it happening was, and so were the possible consequences.

The clothes weren’t really hiding all that much. Fumbling, partly from sheer shakiness and partly from the unfamiliar nails and partly because he wasn’t used to clothes that fit like this, he tugged and wriggled the pants down to pool around his ankles, took a deep breath and, before he could chicken out, squirmed until he got the top over his head.

If I wasn’t me, I would so want to get me into bed but I’d be so sure I was completely out of my league… I look like god’s gift to men, and very seriously fuckable. Actually, that’s rather worrying…

Nipples and areolae were noticeably darker than the skin around them, making them all the more obvious.

Flat belly smoothed and rounded by a layer of softness, leading down to a narrow triangle of curly dark-chocolate hair, where something very important was missing.

He closed his eyes, and made himself keep breathing. He’d known already, it wasn’t a surprise. Freaking out wasn’t going to help.

He ran a tentative finger across the dark fur, and his skin picked it up, sent him a tickly-light sensation. He spread his legs apart just enough to reach, and stroked that finger along what lurked there… which was an outer pair of highly sensitive labia that had once been his scrotum, and a warm wet area he didn’t have the nerve to check out any closer.

This was insane, but it was real. He was actually, completely, one hundred percent a woman. In body, at least. He still felt distinctly like a man in a woman’s body, but would that continue? There was something to be said for being a ridiculously gorgeous woman instead of a skinny geek no one looked twice at…

On the other hand, there was even more to be said for life without impossible semi-visible restraints, and without ominous comments about what they’d turn out to be and about experiments if they resisted too much.

He needed to pee, despite how much the thought made him quail. But he was going to have to deal with this sooner or later; he could hardly put off all use of the bathroom indefinitely.

He sat down, trying to puzzle out a different set of muscles.

Abruptly, he found the right ones, and his bladder released. Experimentally, he tried flexing those same muscles, and found that they could cut it off mid-stream. They tightened somewhere else at the same time, somewhere a bit farther back, and that created an oddly pleasant, if subtle, sensation.

Oh my god, those are vaginal muscles.

He shivered, made himself relax completely so he could finish peeing… but he just couldn’t resist, when he was done, constricting and releasing those muscles a few more times.

He’d be lying to himself if he tried to pretend it didn’t feel good, in an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sort of way.

What would it feel like to flex like that around something?

He banished that thought hastily. As much as he wanted to be pragmatic and deal with this situation as sensibly as the insanity allowed, he was still male to himself, and still only attracted to girls, and he absolutely did not want so much as a single experience of sex with another male.

Wiping between his legs was a nerve-wracking moment, but he knew he needed to.

He picked up the red clothing, and wriggled back into it.

Okay, it covered everything essential and then some, but it fit so closely it really didn’t leave much to the imagination, and the skin it bared only added to the teasing effect.

There was no furniture, so he chose the corner farthest from door and toilet and simply sat on the floor. Instinctively, he pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, huddled in on himself as tightly as he could, which was tighter than he should have been able to despite some extra padding interfering.

He and six people he’d grown up with had been kidnapped, with no warning. That was an overwhelmingly terrifying thing in itself. He was certain that once it really sank in, he was going to curl up in a corner crying and wouldn’t be able to stop.

They were being told they weren’t human and never had been, that this change was a step on a road to becoming whatever they actually were. That they were inferior to humans had been very clearly implied, but that sounded like blatant prejudice and could probably be dismissed other than what it meant for how they were going to be treated. Not human… this was the first mention of it in four and a half decades alive, but it was hard to doubt the reality of what had happened to his body, and having something latent inside made as much sense as having something imposed from outside. Maybe more, because he was pretty sure he should be finding the change, in itself, a lot harder to cope with and much higher on the current priority list.

There must be some details that their captors couldn’t anticipate, though, judging from the reference to one or more of them being useful or interesting, and the bit about waiting to see what they were. Like capturing and raising caterpillars, which were hard to identify, to see what kind of butterflies they turned into?

Wizards? Seriously? And that was a very different concept of a medium than anything he’d ever encountered. Those explanations of what they were had been just too short, there had to be much more to it than that. Just like there had to be much more to this whole fae thing.

Roughly thirty-six square kilometres in a bubble of reality. How much land was that? A square six kilometres on a side… he could walk nearly that far in an hour, on clear sidewalks and on a good day, but that was only straight-line distance, not area. He’d researched conversions for mapping games, if he could just remember. A square kilometre was just shy of two hundred and fifty acres, and an acre was originally the amount of land that could be ploughed in a day with a team of oxen, which meant there was quite a substantial amount of space here. Despite that, they had nowhere to run to, even if they had some way to escape the structure they were in and the half-visible bands that could restrain or hurt them.

And those things were insane all in themselves.

It wasn’t as though anyone was likely to miss him anytime soon, or as though it was going to make any major difference in their lives when they did.

His gamers would notice next Friday; his landlord would when the rent wasn’t paid, and his current employer would notice when JC failed to arrive for work the next evening. Niko would notice, of course, and probably worry, but JC’s absence was hardly going to be devastating.

Niko. You’ve been asking me about odd things happening since the blackout. Is this odd enough for you? Or do you know more about this than you were letting on, and I wasn’t listening very well?

There were Theo and Des and Erica… but Theo was here in the same nightmare. That could very plausibly be Des in yellow, the features were close enough, the skin tone a bit off but no more than JC’s own was. If Zach and Suzi were here too, then who were the remaining two? Was one of them Erica? Give her over a head more height without altering her weight and make the colouring more dramatic, and you’d more or less have the one in deep green, skin warm tan and hair an amazing bronzy-brown with highlights that looked almost green but might just be picking up her clothes. Zach was probably the “macho one” who had given their captors a hard time, but who was the “blonde bitch” who presumably had become the golden-blonde with skin so porcelain-pale it had a pink tint, build almost as curvy as Erica’s, her clothes ultramarine-blue? He contemplated that, and finally decided she must be Alison, the seventh of the classmates who’d been at the blackout-barbecue, and who would almost certainly not have been easy to subdue.

Other than that short list of people, no one would pay any attention at all to a JC-less planet. Even his family had stopped expecting to hear from him, since there was really nothing he had in common with them other than genes.

That wasn’t true for his friends, though. Taking even one out of the world would leave a gaping hole, let alone all six.

They weren’t going to get far disobeying, that was depressingly clear. They were going to have to do as they were told. At least working in gardens and on housework and cooking sounded no worse than many jobs he’d had, and they could hope fervently that sexual services weren’t on the list.

Which didn’t mean that he intended to spend the rest of his life here and helpless. It just meant playing along and gathering as much info as he could. Things like this didn’t happen in the reality he knew, but they could happen in a game. Treating it as live-action role-play and aiming for the safety and eventual freedom of himself and his party, that at least gave him some sort of course of action.

His party of seven. Des, Erica, Theo, Zach, Suzi, Alison, and himself. All people he’d gone to school with from kindergarten on up, had lived in the same area with all his life. Trapped together in a nightmare, in which he was deathly sure they had only each other to lean on.

He curled up, head pillowed on one arm. Terrified as he was, he was also exhausted, and his mind would be clearer tomorrow if he could manage to catnap a little now.

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Meetings 8 Thu, 26 Dec 2019 13:00:51 +0000 Continue reading

Having spent three nights in the cozy and dry but limiting shelter, it was an immense relief when the rain finally broke.

They soaked, scattered, and buried the remains of the fire, and packed everything up. Kaveri gathered the odd mix of articles she’d collected and constructed into a net of plaited grass slung at her side and into the basket she supported on her hip with one hand. Tyrel had reclaimed his own gear, mostly out of stubborn habit, but he did make sure Kaveri kept a butterfly knife in case she needed it, its bronze blade safe inside the two folded-forward halves of the horn handle. While they moved, she foraged ceaselessly. Considering the meals she concocted from what she found, Tyrel wasn’t at all inclined to question.

They followed the edge of the Forest, neither venturing deeper nor returning to more open ground. The more distance they put between them and Dunnval, and ultimately all the forts, the better.

That night, they slept in the open under brilliant full yellow Talir, waning half-full greengold Sanur, and waxing lilac Lirit.

When spending days doing nothing but walking, it was easy to just let your mind wander, Tyrel had found long ago. The problem right now was that while there was too much to think about, there wasn’t enough information to reach any decisions or conclusions. Madoc was better at picking paths through the greenery than he was, and always had been. Maybe, to distract himself, he should ask Kaveri what she was looking for and see if he could help… no, the answer would probably be much the same as about the shelter, that she knew it when she saw it. Tyrel sighed to himself. Only a few days between having his future mapped out for him with little say in the matter, and having no idea at all what the future held.

Something caught his eye, and he frowned at the spot, off to one side a hundred yards or so ahead. Light… a glimpse of sun through moving leaves? Sun on water?

No, sun on polished bronze.

He whistled softly to Madoc and grabbed Kaveri’s arm at the same time, pulling her down to a crouch. There shouldn’t be metal like that here. Had someone gotten around in front of them?

Madoc dropped to a crouch where he was, shed his pack, and slunk over to them quietly. “What?” he asked, in an undertone.

“Metal ahead and to the left.” Tyrel shrugged his own pack off. “We need to check it out. Kaveri…”

“I can scout,” she suggested. “I’m more familiar with this kind of ground, and they’ll never see me.”

Madoc shook his head. “If it’s someone hostile, you can’t defend yourself. Climb a tree or something and stay safe. We’ll be back.”

The brothers left their original route and circled wide to the left, moving as quietly as they could. Tyrel saw Madoc pull on his clawed glove. Wishing wistfully for his lost off-hand katar, he slid a throwing knife out of its hiding place inside his leather jerkin and closed his left hand around the hilt—not the best hand-to-hand weapon, but it was something, and it was in reach if he had a target.

A piercing whistle echoed through the woods, startling both into pausing for an instant to evaluate.

An arrow skidded across the leather of Madoc’s jerkin above one shoulderblade, clearly fired from somewhere above and behind. Both dove to the sides into deeper cover, Tyrel reversing his grip on the throwing knife as he moved. He rolled to one knee and took aim at the archer who had concealed himself in a tree. A choked scream suggested that at least there’d be no further arrows from that quarter.

The problem was, there were now other bodies in motion, and they were presumably going to home in on this location. Going straight ahead would be stupid, and so would straight back. Towards the Forest to the right, or farther to the left, away from it?

The former was probably what they’d expect and plan for. It was also the more sensible course, since it led to more cover, and they were outnumbered.

Tyrel caught Madoc’s eye, and jerked his head towards the left. Madoc, expressionless as always in a crisis, just nodded.

Keeping enough distance between them that they couldn’t both be jumped at once, they worked their way farther from the Forest proper. Madoc pointed out another sentry archer, and Tyrel caught him neatly in the throat with a second throwing knife. That only left him with two more. How many people were they up against? How many could possibly be so offended they’d spend this long tracking them?

Madoc edged closer to the sentry, studying him, then flashed Tyrel a quick hand-signal: not-ours. Not from Dunnval? Then who?

“You rude arrogant little toadshit,” a harsh voice said, and Aella stepped into sight, her enormous partner Gair trailing her. “Where do you get the nerve to call us all names? I am so glad you came this way so I get to kick your sorry ass personally.”

“We won the last fight,” Tyrel pointed out, conscious of Madoc falling into place behind him.

“You won’t…”

An enormous four-footed shape, a blur of silver-frosted dark fur, lunged past Tyrel and Madoc and tackled Aella, ducking up under her spiked buckler and going directly for her throat. She went down under it with a grunt, her bronze axe flashing. Red blood sprayed across Gair, the amarog, and the nearby greenery. Gair bellowed, slamming downward with his own axe, but the amarog eeled out of the way and the descending blade only hit Aella’s violently convulsing body, driving deep into her abdomen. Gair wailed and dropped his axe, collapsing to his knees beside Aella, only to be slammed in the shoulder by the spike on Aella’s buckler as her body continued to spasm.

The amarog spun around and barked a warning to the stunned brothers, jolting them out of their shock—not quite quickly enough. Four more attacked Madoc, and three came at Tyrel.

A length of cord with stones weighting the ends whipped out of the trees and wrapped itself around the neck of one of Madoc’s. He clawed at it desperately, sword and dagger falling to the ground. A neatly thrown rock thudded into the side of his head and he went limp.

This was second nature, the blend of reflex and cunning to win a fight. The amarog was right in the middle of it, ignoring blades drawing topaz blood, and a few stones thrown with excellent timing provided welcome openings.

Tyrel looked around for another opponent, but none of their assailants were in any condition to fight any longer. Aella was finally still; Gair was hunched beside her, weeping, bleeding from at least two wounds from her buckler before he’d gotten it off her, and he paid no attention to them. The others were dead or soon would be.

Madoc looked around, nodded vaguely, and slowly fell to his knees. Greengold blood stained his shoulder and his side… a lot of it. Tyrel forgot about mercy strokes and leapt over a dying warrior to reach his brother.

Madoc blinked at him, his eyes exactly the colour of his blood, and smiled faintly. “Moved too slow.”

“Hold still.” Tyrel ripped at Madoc’s clothes, exposing the wound on his brother’s side. The peculiar colour made it hard to assess precisely, but he was certain it was deep enough to reach internal organs. He ripped a piece of Madoc’s shirt off, pressing it to the wound. The sheer volume of blood pulsing from both wounds was… bad.

Kaveri came at a run, dodging around dead and wounded. The amarog interposed its body to stop her, then nudged Tyrel aside, sniffing at both bloody sites. Oddly gentle for a huge carnivore that had just torn out throats and severed spines with such deadly precision, it nuzzled Madoc’s cheek, tail waving slowly, ears up and forward. It whined softly, pressing closer, supporting Madoc’s body with its own.

“Quit, ‘Rel,” Madoc said, leaning against the amarog, his eyes closing and his breathing laboured. “Lost too much blood already. Are you… the same amarog we met before?”

The amarog nudged its head under Madoc’s hand, and very deliberately nodded affirmatively.

“I’m… like… you…”

Another clear nod.

Madoc’s hand slid limply off the amarog’s head, and his head fell against the amarog’s side. His breathing simply stopped, and the pulsing of the bloodflow slowed to a listless trickle.

Tyrel shuddered, bowed his head, too much at a loss even for tears. Kaveri’s next breath was a sob.

The amarog’s soft whine made him look up.

Greengold light shimmered and flickered around Madoc’s body… no, through his body.

Madoc’s clothes collapsed into an empty heap, with no sign of Madoc himself.

The amarog stood up, shaking free of the clothes, and padded over to nuzzle Tyrel, luminescent topaz eyes fixed on his.

“Madoc’s like you,” Tyrel echoed numbly.

The amarog, never looking away, nodded.

“You died, and you weren’t there, and now you’re back.”

Another nod.

Tyrel swallowed hard, trying not to feel the rising hope. “Does… does that mean Madoc will be back?” He held his breath, waiting for the reply.

A very firm nod.

He released that breath in a shuddering gasp.

The amarog whined sympathetically again, and nudged carefully at Tyrel’s left thigh. Tyrel twisted to look, and blinked in astonishment at the broad, shallow wound across his thigh, where a substantial amount of leather and skin and flesh had been sliced away.

And at the greengold blood he hadn’t even noticed, all over his hands, and his own handprint that partially overlapped the slash.

And at the increasingly topaz sheen of the fresher blood, against the red of the older drying blood.

Tyrel swore. “It’s the blood, isn’t it. I’m like you now.”

The amarog nodded.

“I know you can be a human,” Kaveri said softly. “Can you right now, so you can explain?”

The amarog shook its head negatively.

“It’s the moons,” Tyrel said. “It has something to do with the moons.”

The amarog nodded.

“Then I guess we wait until moonrise.”

One more nod. The amarog trotted off to sniff at each fallen body, and each time it encountered one that wasn’t dead, it severed the spine. It slipped up behind Gair, and seized the back of his neck. Gair probably died too quickly to realize what was happening, Tyrel thought.

“We should get away from here,” Kaveri said, untying the long strip of cloth that covered her breasts and kneeling to wrap it around Tyrel’s wounded leg with practised hands. “Scavengers will show up soon.”

“We can’t just leave them to rot!”

“They won’t rot. Scavengers will clean their bones. You and I alone can’t bury them. If you bury them, different scavengers will eat them, but they’ll still be eaten. What’s the problem?”

“It’s so… disrespectful.”

“They weren’t very deserving of respect while alive, why should it be different just because they’re dead?” She fetched Tyrel’s discarded weapons, cleaned them on the nearest body’s clothing, and returned them to him, then gathered up Madoc’s clothes. “Here, I’ll help you up. Lean on me.”

Walking on a flat surface would have been painful. Walking through woodland was sufficiently excruciating to keep him from thinking beyond the next limping step.

The amarog padded along protectively on his far side, and a time or three when he stumbled badly, it was the only thing that kept him from falling. Each time, it nuzzled him reassuringly, supporting him while he gritted his teeth against the pain and struggled not to cry out.

With their packs in sight, the amarog steered them carefully off to one side, and guided them to a small sun-drenched clearing completely ringed by pines at least three deep. It trotted off, and Kaveri steadied Tyrel while he sat down, panting and sweat-soaked.

She unfastened his jerkin and pulled it off, then his weapon-belt and doublet, leaving him in just his shirt. She gave him a thorough examination for any other wounds above the waist.

The amarog deposited one pack within her reach, and left again.

“Nothing deep,” she pronounced, fishing around in the pack for a flask of beer. Taking great care to avoid the bloodied parts of Madoc’s shirt, she vandalized the rest with her knife and used the rags and beer to clean up a couple of minor cuts. She pulled his boots off, and picked up her knife again. Tyrel tried very hard not to move while she cut his ruined pants off—as much as she could, she cut seams apart rather than straight through the leather.

The amarog returned with the second pack and left again while she was doing that.

“This is messy,” Kaveri said.

“And it’s yellow,” Tyrel said with a sigh, letting himself fall back on the old pine needles and looking up at the blue sky above. “And Madoc is… dead, gone, who knows. I have no idea what’s going on right now.”

The amarog came back a third time, carrying Kaveri’s grass net bag. It set it down within her reach, gave her an apologetic look, and flopped on one side next to them.

She smiled. “I wouldn’t really have expected you to carry the basket. Most was in the bag anyway. Thank you, and don’t worry, I can make another basket. Tyrel, this will hurt, I’m sorry. What… move, I need to clean that properly before it goes bad!”

Tyrel sat up enough to see what was going on. Every time Kaveri reached for the wound on his leg, the amarog bumped her hands away with its head. It finally caught her right wrist in its mouth, very gently, and simply held her.

“I don’t think it’s going to let you,” Tyrel said. “Is it because you don’t want her touching my blood?”

The amarog released Kaveri’s hand before shaking its head in the negative.

Tyrel forced his mind to focus. What other reason? There was topaz blood liberally streaking frosted dark fur, enough of it clumped densely together to suggest real damage underneath, but the amarog seemed completely unconcerned.

When they’d first encountered the amarog, Madoc had been hurt, but by morning, there had been no trace.

“She doesn’t need to because it will heal?”

The amarog not only nodded in the affirmative, but thumped its tail against the ground.


More tail-thumping, even more rapid, and the amarog’s ears perked forward.

Kaveri heaved a sigh. “We can’t get answers until moonrise, Tyrel can’t move until moonrise… I guess we just wait.”

The amarog lowered its head to its forepaws with a deep sigh of its own.

Kaveri helped Tyrel get comfortable, with a rolled blanket for a pillow, and he drowsed in the warm sunshine, trying not to feel the empty space where Madoc was supposed to be. He heard her soft song as she worked on something; her hands always seemed to be busy now they were out of the fort, and always with a song.

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4 – JC 2 (1/2) Tue, 24 Dec 2019 13:00:38 +0000 Continue reading


The command echoed through JC’s entire body and jerked him back to consciousness with uncomfortable abruptness.

Firm, though not hard, surface underneath… but that was barely the beginning of what felt wrong. He sat up, or tried to: his wrists refused to separate from one another, and his ankles likewise; he felt completely off balance, weight and proportions distributed all wrong.

He could hear motion around him, and struggled to his knees so he could look. The light level was higher than before, still not quite daylight levels but enough to allow him to see clearly.

Six others were doing much the same. Six others who were, at least currently, women but, like the dark one in yellow he vaguely recalled seeing briefly before, all were inhumanly beautiful. Each wore close-fitting clothing, pants and a top though details were different, each in a unique colour that was mirrored in the colour of lips and nails and in most was shadowed over eyes as well; builds varied widely, as did the colours of long hair and flawless skin, no two alike. The parameters of beauty varied drastically by era and culture, but JC figured they could all have fit in perfectly in a late 80s rock video, and been the envy of everyone at the time, as far as he recalled what had been in fashion in high school. Except for the hair; there was a lot less volume of hair than he remembered, although considerable length. But of course all that needed was enough hairspray to increase the hole in the ozone layer.

And all looked as terrified and bewildered as he felt. The soft glow of the ceiling glittered on tear-tracks, body-language was overwhelmingly drawn in tight and he was sure at least a couple were trembling and at least a couple were near to outright crying.

Around each of his wrists, just above the joint proper, was a flat band of featureless smooth… well, something rather glassy, that was clearly visible only when the light caught it properly. Twist as he might, he could neither see nor feel any clasp or seam, nothing marking the gleaming surface at all. Via no mechanism he could detect, they refused to part from each other, though they were willing to roll along each other while he was trying to figure them out. They fit close against his skin, too tightly to slide off but not enough so to restrict circulation. He figured he could assume the same around his ankles.

Although the wrists and ankles in question, just like the long straight dark hair that was interfering and the much-too-full chest and all the rest, really didn’t feel like his.

A platinum blonde with skin the warm golden-brown of toffee, lean and athletic under violet clothing, hair pale as cream in a layered straight fall nearly to her elbows, fixed on something with a fierce intensity that drew not only JC but all the others to look in the same direction.

A woman leaned against the wall, arms crossed over her brightly-coloured cotton shirt; a wide elaborate golden cuff circled one wrist, incongruous with the faded blue jeans and the short-sleeved shirt. She was fairly fit, solidly built, and her tawny-brown hair showed signs of creeping grey. Compared to the rest of them, she looked very plain and very human. She regarded them with clinical interest.

“What the fuck is going on?” the platinum blonde demanded. Her voice was low for a woman, but definitely feminine in timbre despite that. “Who the fuck are you, where the fuck are we, and what the fuck have you done to me? To us, I bet.” There was rage there, but fear too. Something about that was oddly familiar…

“Enough,” the woman leaning against the wall said. “I will explain, but I can’t while you’re ranting. And really, is language like that necessary?”

That made the platinum blonde gather herself, expression darkening. “Is kidnapping necessary?”

“Be silent. Now.”

The blonde started to say something, but pain flashed across her face and her entire body convulsed; she grabbed for the gold collar with her bound hands, clawing at it. A second spasm, and a third.

JC and the other five captives could only watch in sympathetic horror. The jeans-clad woman looked… well, patient, really; she didn’t appear to be particularly enjoying it, nor did she look particularly disturbed, only like she was waiting.

“The pain stops when you stop trying to talk,” she said. “I’m sorry, I really have no desire to hurt you, but pain is how the collars work, and the collars are in place for your safety and ours. Cooperate with the collars and they won’t hurt you.”

JC distinctly remembered hands placing a golden band around his neck, and shivered. How could anyone be able to do this to them?

The platinum blonde sagged in place, head bowed, panting for breath, body shaking.

“There, see? Much better. Now I can explain without trying to be heard over you. In the interests of making sure we understand one another, the first thing you need to grasp is that those pretty cuffs you’re wearing aren’t jewellery any more than the collars are. The cuffs are literally made of magic. There are only two people who can remove them, and I have the master.” She tapped the wide intricately-decorated cuff on her wrist. “While I’m wearing this and you’re wearing those, I can do things like this.”

The glassy bands released each other abruptly, allowing wrists and ankles to part.

JC yelped, and wasn’t the only one to do so, when the glassy cuffs jerked his wrists back together, abruptly and with alarming strength; the bands on his ankles also snapped themselves forcibly together.

The fear reaction to the restraint got lost in a searing shock of pain that, he thought, started at the collar in the instant that he began to cry out and raced along his spine, spilling out to either side. The pain itself made him whimper, which triggered a new surge before the first had even faded. He choked down any further sound desperately, and after a few thudding heartbeats that felt like forever, the pain melted away. He could still feel muscles trembling, and something inside felt cold and sick. His cheeks felt wet—tears?

“I only need to demonstrate further levels on one of you,” she said. “And I think I already had a volunteer.”

The platinum blonde in violet grunted, obviously struggling not to make any further sound, as the cuffs extended tendrils up her arms, wrapping around them and dragging them more and more tightly together, until her elbows touched. The attempt at staying silent failed, though it took her longer than JC was sure he could have lasted, and even that small sound of pain had consequences—the blonde jerked violently, which couldn’t be a good thing when restrained like that. The creeping filaments kept going, and as they did, they linked themselves backwards, contracting as they spread, forcing her elbows to flex until her hands were right under her throat.

“If I were to do similar with your arms behind you,” the woman said with clinical detachment, “even your joints would have difficulty with it and eventually there would be damage.” The extended tendrils withdrew, flowing like water all the way back down to the wrist cuffs themselves, leaving the platinum blonde fighting to catch her breath.

“Point made?” the woman said. “Just nodding will be fine.”

Shivering, JC nodded, and saw the others doing the same.

“Very good. It would really be better for everyone concerned if we can just do things the easy way. I’m a reasonably nice person, and I don’t like to hurt anyone more than absolutely unavoidable. My partners are less nice, and don’t care who gets hurt as long as they get what they want. They, for example, wouldn’t bother explaining anything to you. I, however, prefer to make sure you understand what’s happening, because I think leaving you in ignorance is needlessly cruel and is more likely to lead to having to do things the hard way. Although, I suppose ultimately they’re right and it doesn’t matter whether you know or not, and you might decide to fight anyway.”

Oh, that didn’t sound good at all.

Right, like things weren’t already so terrifyingly bad that he was sure he was in shock and not processing it properly yet.

“Now. You aren’t human. You never have been, you and everyone else just thought you were. You all have fae genes, which thoroughly taint human ones on all levels. You are currently one step closer to the forms that reflect your individual true natures, which you will ultimately find more comfortable than pretending to be something you aren’t. You are probably going to find very quickly that you feel stronger and healthier, because while fae generally have restrictions that are connected to their nature, fae also tend to be consistently in physical health so excellent that humans can’t match it. My partners are hoping that at least a couple of you will turn out to be something interesting or useful. I know you don’t currently have any real understanding of what the fae are or what it means to have fae blood, but that will change—by first-hand experience if nothing else.”

She paused again to look them over, maybe making sure they were listening; with seven pairs of eyes fixed on her with absolute attention, she must have been satisfied that they were, since she continued.

“My name is Isabel, I’m what’s called a medium although any understanding you have of the term is wrong. I work with two wizards, Nestor and his student Phrixos, and you also don’t understand what a wizard is. Wizards are human men who devote their lives to the study of what is generally called magic, which is just another form of energy that has its own rules. Mediums are people of either sex who mediate between wizards, fae, and mundane humans in one way or another, using a variety of skills including some magic use. The one medium and two wizards on this island are the ultimate and only authority and power. Nestor and Phrixos are busy most of the time on wizard matters. I look after the day-to-day running of the island, which is approximately thirty-six square kilometres in a reality bubble connected to what you think of as the real world by a single doorway that only Nestor, Phrixos and I can open. There’s quite a lot of work to do, including looking after the gardens and doing the housework and cooking. We do have employees who have their own responsibilities, but there’s too much to do for them to keep up with it all. While we wait to see what kinds of fae you are, you’ll be helping them catch up. If you cooperate, you’ll have decent meals, a place to sleep, no punishment, a useful job to do, and you can stay together. You probably haven’t figured this out yet, but you do know each other, you’re all the same age and have lived in this area your entire lives.”

What? JC tore his gaze away from their captor to scan his fellow captives again. Odd hints of familiarity, but nothing he could identify—but then, if they’d been changed to anything like the degree he had, not so surprising. Nor was he the only one. The ivory-skinned one with wavy dark auburn hair looked particularly intent; then—his? her?—eyes widened, regarding the platinum blonde. Even white teeth caught a vividly aqua-blue lower lip, a mannerism that suddenly triggered recognition.

Theo. That’s Theo!

The gaze of the woman in brilliant blue who was Theo flickered around the group, and JC saw him swallow hard a couple of times. His eyes met JC’s for a heartbeat of shared fear, and JC was certain Theo recognized him.

But if that was Theo, who were the others?

Oh, that platinum blonde couldn’t possibly be dark-tanned, sunbleached-blonde Zach, even though the aggressive anger was about the only response he could imagine from Zach…

But what in hell was going on? Wizards? Not human… had she seriously called them fae?

“You do need to be aware that if you are persistently uncooperative, well… there are wizards who have devised experiments to run on fae to see what you can tolerate and what you’re vulnerable to. I really don’t think you want to experience that. Now. Normally you’ll all be sleeping right here together, but I think just for tonight it would be best for you to all have some time to reflect without distractions and get some rest so you’ll be able to start your new jobs in the morning. Thanks to my partners, there are temporarily seven identical rooms around the edge of this one. I’d like for each of you to go into a different one, please.” The tension on the glassy bands around JC’s ankles released abruptly, though not the ones on his wrists.

The slim woman in rosy-pink, long hair a light ash brown and skin a light olive, tried to say something, but… her?… whole body jerked in pain, tearing free a small whimper.

There was something eerily familiar about the perfected facial lines under the new streaks of tears.

Oh my god, that’s Suzi. Though it was a miracle he’d recognized her, since she should have been a good head shorter and considerably more solidly built—Rottweiler, not Doberman, Levi had said affectionately before—with her hair a darker brown.

Eyes on the floor, Suzi got to her feet and turned towards the nearest door in the featureless walls around them.

Theo, Zach, Suzi… who were the other three?

Suzi probably had the right idea, there was no point in resisting right now. This woman had power over them that just shouldn’t be possible but was all too real. She hadn’t added a specific threat with the request, but then, there was a clearly implied or else at the end, and the consequences were probably going to be unpleasant and impossible to fight.

JC got up, deeply unsettled by the change in his balance, a supple strength that just wasn’t his own. No glasses, but he could see perfectly well.

One wall of three was curved, and along it were doors, seven of them. Eyes low, he crossed the floor to one other than Suzi’s.

He heard an ominous, though unsurprising, snap as the door closed behind him. His wrists came apart just as suddenly.

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Meetings 7 Mon, 23 Dec 2019 13:00:43 +0000 Continue reading

Comfortable on a blanket at one end of the shelter, Kaveri sang a gratitude and blessing song under her breath while she wove the fine flexible willow into a basket. It felt wonderful beyond words to be free of the confinement of the fort, back in the woods, and doing what she was meant to be doing.

At the far end of the shelter, the brothers, distinctly restless after a day spent inside, were going through their gear and checking the condition of everything. They wouldn’t find much that needed work, since Kaveri had been maintaining it herself for the past year and more, but it kept them busy.

There was more she would need to make or find, basic tools that would give her access to everything one could need here, but that would come. A basket would make foraging easier; so would a digging stick. Once she found the right sort of plants, she could make cord, and then it would take only a few stones of the right weight for her to have her preferred hunting weapons, though she was probably out of practice. A wooden hook for fishing was easy, a stronger antler one would be harder to come by until the deer shed them later in the year. A simple spear took little skill, though more if she made a stone blade for it. The people of town and fort were frightened of the Forest, but a Forester could be alone and empty-handed in its depths and have everything she needed.

She added the final twist to the basket, a simple round-bottomed shallow circle that would have made her grandmother scold her for sloppy work but would suffice for now, and got up. The air was still filled with fine dense rain, but it was late in the day and if they were to have a meal beyond dry bread and cheese and dryer meat, she needed to find it.

The leathers the brothers wore would have been miserable in the rain, but her own bare feet and minimal clothing were comfortable enough. She padded through the gloom, watching the ground intently. The root of this plant, the leaves of that one, the seeds of another.

By the time she finished putting supper together, it was full dark. She and Tyrel ate, and coaxed Madoc into trying some of the stew—he enjoyed it, at least.

As she had last night, she took the dirty dishes to the stream to wash them.

“Don’t be afraid,” a low voice said from the shadow of a large tree.

Kaveri rocked back on her heels, ready to spring to her feet and flee, wary but curious, as a tall lean figure stepped into view. Her first impression was of topaz light, but then she wondered why, when everything about him was dark. Only his eyes were topaz, faintly luminescent in the dim light.

“Who are you?”

The stranger ignored the question. “Why are you wearing chains?”

Kaveri glanced down at the bronze cuffs on her wrists. “They don’t come off, and we don’t really have the tools here to remove them easily.”

He shook his head impatiently. “The two you’re with, were they the ones who chained you?”

“In a way, but they also protected me. The fort they were born in raided a town. My uncle and I were there to trade. They don’t capture Foresters often, they prize us when they do. My uncle was killed. The others of the fort would have enslaved me and made me a toy for the sexual pleasure of everyone in the fort. Madoc’s mother was one of my people, a captive, a courting gift from Tyrel’s mother to his father, and she was the one who nursed and cared for both of them until she died. For her sake, Tyrel claimed me as his own so no one else could lay hands on me. They’ve both been very gentle with me, in their own way. They wouldn’t even leave me behind in the fort when they had to leave.”

“They’ve made no effort to free you.”

Kaveri shrugged and smiled. “They aren’t bad people. They are what the forts have made them, but they don’t entirely like it. I don’t think they’ve thought at all about what I’m wearing since we left Dunnval. I’ll find a way to be rid of them in time, or they’ll realize it and think of something.”

“Why do you stay with them? You are far better suited to life here than they are.”

“They saved me. I saved them, more recently, although possibly that was more luck than skill or reason.”

“All debts are paid?” It was definitely a question, not a statement.

Whoever this stranger was, he seemed far more concerned than threatening. She let herself relax somewhat as she shook her head. “By the traditions of my people, the debt of a life cannot be cancelled out even by another life. The vines of my life and theirs grow intertwined now. They chose to accept responsibility for me. I chose to accept responsibility for them. All is well, and I have a great deal of hope for the future.” She took a chance. “Why does it matter to you?”

A brief pause. “When I was very young, my parents were killed, and I was put in a cage. Someone saved me, and I was raised free instead. I don’t like people confining others. If they were holding you, I would have killed them both tonight. Because they have protected you against their own, I will not. What else I will do, I have not yet decided. They went to the ruined fort, did they not?”

“Yes. Tyrel was to prove that he was worthy to be the Chief’s heir. I don’t know what happened, other than that they were attacked by ghosts there and the spirit protections I gave them saved them from being killed. I wasn’t sure it would work at all, I only really hoped it would protect them when they camped. Tyrel looked terrible when they came back to Dunnval.”

“Only the one?”

“Yes. I’m not sure what’s happening with Madoc—he’s the taller one, with Forester stripes if you look closely in the sunlight. He isn’t eating or sleeping at all since they came back, but he seems to have no end of energy. I’ve been worried about him.”

“You don’t need to. He’s in no danger from it.”

“Will you come talk to them?”

Another pause, then he shook his head. “Not yet. I’ve been… away, and only returned tonight. I need to think. I’ll be nearby. Call me if you need me.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Kieran.” He backed up a couple of steps, deeper into the shadows. Kaveri saw pale yellow light shimmer, and she was certain that the shape that vanished into the night was large and four-footed.

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