![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookishwenchWritten for Eccentric_Hat for Yuletide 2024
Servitude to a mortal is unthinkable for my kind, and yet it has happened to me twice now. Oberon must think me very careless, and Titania has not ceased laughing even yet at my stupidity. In truth, the Fae are not given to much empathy, for we have no need of it. We live long lives. I have never yet known one of my fellows to die, though I am told such things have happened, and I have no reason to doubt it. Before I came into being, the lost ones were and then were no more, and their names are never again spoken by those who once knew them. To utter those words might bring a curse on the speaker, and just as the Fae have little compassion, they also have only the smallest particle of mercy. The others would strike down the one who named them in an effort to avoid a bolt from the celestial vault: an arrow from Orion or lightning sent by the Kindly Ones. What the Fae know remains hidden, and death is the penalty for speaking the names of the dead.
When I was pinned within the split pine, I hoped death was not a myth for my kind. I would have fallen at the reaper’s feet with gratitude for the end of that torment. An end would have been sweet.
Twas Prospero who heard my screams and took pity on me. The witch who had imprisoned me, whose name I will not speak, had died. She was but mortal, and after wasting what few gifts of magic she had in creating nightmares and cruelty, she perished, as all of them do. No one mourned her, except perhaps her son Caliban, and who would relish being mourned by a devil? Naught but another devil, I suppose, so perhaps it is enough for her memory.
It happened thus. Long ago, I had foolishly played games with my fate, and that was how I fell victim to her tricks. Her plan was such a simple thing that a child could have done it, and yet it trapped me. I had heard a call on the island, an echo of my own music, and thinking I had found a new playmate, I dashed towards the sound, not considering any danger. But the witch was clever, and she had baited her trap with a flower that I had never seen before, one I knew would greatly please my mistress. Its petals shone like moonlight, and its perfume breathed forth in waves that smelled like unto the folds of Venus’s gown. No sooner had I stooped to dig its root from the ground than I felt as though I were suspended in tar. The witch had laid iron round about, hidden to form a circle in the high grass, and to close the loop, she had only to add one last bar, which she had tossed into position as soon as I was within the circle’s grasp. I was held.
Not all the Fae can weep, but I am one who does, and my tears were bitter as the witch cavorted in joy at her prize.
“You are now mine,” she said, drawing as close as she dared to the ring she had cast. “You must do as I say.”
“I will not!”
This brought her up short. She had not expected rebellion, apparently, only immediate surrender. Granted, the pain burned through me so hot that I thought my mind was afire, but my anger burned hotter yet. The witch’s wizened features grew pale, and I knew my face was not merely a mask of fury but the true image of it, enough to make most mortals run mad.
“You will,” she said, drawing her brows together, “or I shall hold you within that circle until the day of doom.”
“Then let Doomsday come! I will abide here until then without complaint. Can you match my intention, witch?”
Just then, a scratching noise from the brush heralded the arrival of her son. He was still small, barely more than a babe, his walk unbalanced, a thing but newly learned. In general, the Fae enjoy children. We have been known to steal ones who are too fair for a human fate, and they are dandled and spoiled and treated as our dearest pets until they grow old, which seems to us to happen in but a day. Not a Fae in all the world would have chosen this child, though. It was not merely the warping of his face and limbs, which is common enough amongst their kind, but I could see that the spirit within him was twisted into something foul. I do not know who got the witch with child, but I would wager all I own that it was not one of her own kind. I suspect his sire was of the darkest beings, those that see no daylight and abide forever in the realms of starless night. He filled me with repugnance.
“What ho, my precious one,” the witch said, a strangely sweet tone to her voice. “Hast seen our new servant? Is it not pretty?”
The child, if it could be called that, made a noise that passed for laughter and came nearer with uncertain steps. I turned my gaze on him and changed my shape to that of a dragon breathing fire. He screamed and hid behind his dam.
“Enough of that!” the witch scolded me, then gentled her voice to speak to the abomination she had created. “Child, tis only a trick, as the Fae endlessly create. Naught shall harm you.”
He slowly peered out at me from behind her legs, then stuck out his tongue. I ignored him, but returned to my usual shape.
“Spirit, you are unreasonable. If you serve me, you can end your confinement. Can I be a worse master than those you now have?” she asked.
I did not deign to answer, only looked at her in a way that made her know I thought her mad and knew she was lying about freeing me as long as she drew breath.
“I see,” she said, snickering quietly. “The Fae have far more power than I, and therefore are more palatable to serve. Think you this?”
“The King and Queen of the Fae are more than any mortal, and to serve them is the same as being free. I will not wear the yoke of a self-deluding juggler of simple spells!”
“’Simple’ say you?” she said, leering at me with her single tooth. “What say you to this?”
Even in memory, my pulse races and my skin grows pale when I call before my mind’s eye what happened. The hour was near noon in the summer of the year, and yet as she lifted her arms and mumbled, the sky grew dark from one end of the vault to the other. The moon appeared, full and round as an apple from the forbidden garden, which in itself was wrong for it should have been only in its quarter. As I watched, horror-stricken, it grew larger, and at length I realized it was being pulled out of its path above the Earth and was sinking lower, dragging with it a train of stars that bent the familiar constellations into new and monstrous shapes. I cannot explain what I saw, but I know it was real. The witch was calling down the moon, and the ocean, in revolt against the kidnap of its guardian, roiled like the Midgard Serpent was waking from his slumber to swallow Diana’s symbol whole. The madwoman was making the world come undone, and for no reason at all. All the while, her son looked up without flinching, chewing on the stem of a mandrake as though it were the most delicious sweet and clapping in delight.
I screamed. The sound pierced the air like a thousand arrows fired in all directions to the edges of the earth, and I know my mistress must have heard it, though she did nothing. The witch stopped, and the moon returned to its place slowly, accompanied by a creaking that sounded as though the universe had been pushed too far upon its hinges.
“There,” she said, absurdly pleased with herself. “You see?”
“Yes, I see,” I said, realizing if this fool were not coddled, she would destroy us all, mortal and immortal, in a pique of temper. How she gained such power, I cannot begin to guess. She showed no other sign of extraordinary talent in the time I knew her, but that one skill was enough, especially when I realized she had so little wit that she might use it without thought.
“Very well,” she said, giving a smile filled with gaping holes where teeth should be. “And you consent to be my servant and do my bidding to prevent my anger?”
I thought hard to find a way to twist my words to avoid being caught in her web. The Fae cannot lie, but we have made an art of choosing just the right phrases that keep us from revealing too much without actually saying anything untrue.
“No tricks,” the witch said in a quiet, deadly voice. “I know the ways of the fair folk. Do you agree to my bargain or not?”
“I consent,” I said.
“And you will do naught to harm me or my son Caliban?”
“I will not harm you in any way.”
“Nor will you use others to harm or kill us?”
“I will not.”
“And whate’er I order, you shall do your best to accomplish it without tricks or alterations. You will not betray me?”
“I will do as you bid and not disobey you,” I said.
The witch made a movement and the iron flew apart from the circle.
“Then as your first task, you are to lure a goodly merchant ship onto those rocks, and once the sailors upon her have perished, bring me what treasures lie within,” she said, sitting on a nearby rock and examining her long, twisted fingernails before biting at one like a vicious animal and spitting out the offending part. “Go now, and do all I have asked before sunset tomorrow.”
It is not in my nature to kill. That is the domain of sirens. I flew off, traversing the air like a solid road beneath my feet, and called upon those who live beneath the waves for their aid. As is often the case with their sort, they were moved to tears at my plight. It is only for mortals they have no pity, but the fish and whales and monsters of the deep are their playfellows, and they feel a kinship with all their earthly and airy counterparts. Oft I had heard one or another sing at a feast given by my queen, and there has been amity between the courts of the naiads and the Fae since time immemorial.
They agreed to wreck that first ship as though it were no greater a matter than plucking a daisy that lay beyond my reach and handing it to me. I knew guilt still lay on my shoulders, but I could bear it at that distance, and not every game my own kind plays is pretty and sweet. Will o’the wisps lead men astray at our direction, and some have fallen to their deaths off high cliffs or perished in the hidden lairs of wolves, but it was never to my particular taste. I shuddered a bit for the mortal dead, then retrieved the small amount of gold and silver their ship had carried. It would not have filled even one of the thousand jewel boxes that my queen owns, but it pleased the witch enough.
I learned how long a simple year could be, and that one turned into many. Most days, I sank as low as a common servant, bringing water, kindling fires, gathering food and preparing it as she saw fit. However, at intervals the witch would use me to fetch her bits and pieces for her spells or to pilfer riches from the coffers of the great. I carried toad eye and batwing for her, searched out phoenix feathers and the cast-off claw of a harpy, procured snow from the tallest mountain and water from the fountains that bubble in the deepest murk of the oceans. On some days, she wished me to cause harm again, and never for any justifiable reason. While I cared little for humans, the prospect of destroying them wantonly made me feel ill.
At length, I could no longer bear it. I realized this as I looked at the sunrise one summer morning and heard the birds of the islands singing together in jubilation over the end of another night. The glorious colors of dawn were somehow even more brilliant that morning, a feast for the senses, yet I had no appetite to dine on the spectacle. In all my countless eons of existence, there had never before been a morning when I did not find some small bit of joy in the prospect of a new day. She had quenched my spirit so much that life seemed an unending tedium. This change was so profound that I knew I would rather risk the witch’s wrath than continue as I had been.
The problem is that a Fae cannot lie, and I had pledged myself to her terms. I could not extricate myself from obedience to whatever she wished. But just as the Fae are trapped by this rule, so have we also learned to be clever. I was bound to serve her as long as she wished with. My only hope, then, was to make her wish to be free of me. I smiled grimly, and a plan grew in my brain. I was explicitly forbidden from harming her or her offspring, but “harm” is such a malleable word, is it not? Obviously, I could not kill them or cause them to be killed.
What I could do, I thought, was annoy them.
I started with simple things that gave me a disproportionate amount of pleasure. My only rules were to follow the witch's directions and not to harm them. Hence, when the witch told me to fetch spring water, she said nothing that forbade me from gathering it then pouring it on her bed. When I was ordered to dry her blankets, I did so by laying them in the sun on the sandy beach where sand fleas quickly took up residence among them. She compelled me to steal bread for her dinner from a distant baker, but she neglected to say I shouldn't cover it in pitch. Soon, every new errand was being so carefully phrased that it was becoming far easier for her to do most things herself than entrust them to me. When she told me, most distinctly, to gather ten pearls from the ocean and put them neatly into a bag she provided, and to put nothing else with them, and to come back in less than an hour, and to speak to no one, I did so. However, when I returned without the bag at all, she was infuriated to learn that I had done exactly as she had asked, then, as she hadn't said specifically that I should give the bag to her when I returned, I had put it beneath a beggar's head who slept on the pavement in Athens and returned again.
At this point, I was hoping she would choose to release me since I was naught but a nuisance, but instead, she redoubled her efforts from spite, and I matched her. Finally, exhausted, she cursed me most fluently and colorfully, then returned to her hovel, which now stank of skunk and was painted in an eye-searing shade of yellow, intending to sleep.
I counted to two-thousand silently, waiting until she was soundly asleep, and then immediately drew in a breath as deep and as wide a valley in the Alps, opened my mouth, and began to scream. After all, she had neglected to tell me not to disturb her.
You have most likely never heard a banshee keening her wild death song upon the night wind outside a hut where one is lying between this world and the next, about to tip over the edge and sunder their mortal coil. Strong men have run mad from it. Compared to the sound that issued from my throat, a banshee’s howl was a soothing cradle song. I set my own teeth on edge, but I continued to pour forth sound, increasing the volume and potency with each passing second.
The witch reappeared nearly at once, her brat in tow, both with hands clamped over their ears. While I was careful that the sound did not threaten to actually harm them, keeping my vow, I brought it as close to that point as the width of an atomy. The witch’s mouth moved furiously, but not a word could penetrate the sound I made. I could not be expected to obey a command I could not hear, now could I?
The rage on her face was enough to terrify most beings into stone, but I had not emptied my supply of air by even a quarter. Even the island’s trees were not immune to the sound, dropping their leaves as though weeping for silence while flowers faded. Dragonfly and butterfly alike dropped in their flight, and even I was not sure if they were merely stunned or dead.
At length, a huge tree split from top to bottom, yawning like a V, still connected only at its roots, and this must have given her the idea to silence me by shutting me inside. I never saw her hands move to cast the spell, but I was thrown violently off my feet by an unseen force and pinned against the splintered wood. Even as she closed the pine back together around me, I never faltered in my scream until I was trapped inside the darkness of the trunk.
Very dimly, through the layers of bark and wood, I heard her voice cast a curse upon me.
“You shall rot here, stupid spirit,” she spat. “I shall not free you for a hundred years, and when I do, I shall make you wish you remained within the close embrace of this pine rather than feel the delights I shall prepare for you!”
Then all noise stopped. I heard nothing, saw nothing, and could not move the smallest bit. It was horror beyond words, but I still preferred it over my servitude to the witch.
I had no hand in the witch’s death, nor do I even know how she left this world. Perhaps she tried to force a stronger and wiser being than I to become her new servant and paid for her tricks with her life. Perhaps she tried one spell too many and choked on her own poisons. For all I know, her son may have had a hand in her death if he desired to rule the island on his own. Truthfully, I did not care. I was still wedged in my prison, unable to escape, for her charms held firm even after her death. She was wretched, but I had never seen her like in power for a mortal.
Time passes even within the confines of a prison of wood and darkness, but it is out of joint. I have no human heart to tick seconds away within my core, so I was adrift, alone, and abandoned. Sadness is its own torture, and loneliness. My kind is not meant to be so still for so long, or to go for so many years without the sound of music and merry voices. I felt as though I were becoming something else, someone else, withering like the flowers after frost. Some tiny particle of me, though, refused to give up hope, and that is how I did not simply cease to be and join the memories of the ones without names.
When the wood of the tree split apart, bathing me in nearly forgotten but long desired sunlight, I had not suspected any change was coming. I blinked, my limbs shaking from the sudden exposure to air and light again, and even with my more than mortal strength, I could not uncurl my body for many long hours. I lay like a grub in the wood while the man, Prospero, who had freed me, regarded me curiously. He too had a child, but comparing that one to Caliban was like comparing gold to dross, as different as good and evil. It gave me more hope, and I found my voice again.
“I thank you,” I managed to whisper.
The man nodded, and something in the movement told me he was used to his commands being followed, a person of some power among the mortals. What he was doing on that forsaken island puzzled me, but even before I heard the story of his exile, I had pieced together enough to realize someone had been envious and, coveting what he had, took it, leaving him with naught but his daughter and his life. And his art, of course.
“Are you well, spirit?” he asked.
“Not yet, but I soon shall be,” I replied.
“Will you swear to serve me and mine, without tricks, until such time as I shall free you?” he said.
“I do swear,” I promised, and I meant it. My gratitude for even this much freedom was immense, and as I watched his small child playing with the flowers of the island and weaving them into a pretty crown that she looped upon my head, I knew my fate would be softer than what I had known under the witch.
I protected them, did as I was bade, and was far from unhappy with my lot, though I yearned for freedom each time the sun rose or the stars danced. In time, I brought another wreck to the island at Prospero’s command, watching as Miranda, now a young maiden, fell in love and Caliban’s plans were thwarted. All was coming to a sweet end, or so Prospero thought when he finally kept his word and let me have my liberty.
He did not know I stayed close, but invisible, watching over him until his death not long after, and then transferring my care to his daughter. Perhaps one or the other sometimes noticed that their courses ran smoother than most, filled with a greater number of rainbows and fewer storms, but if they sensed my hand in it, they never said. When Miranda had grown old and died as mortals must, happy and warm in her bed and surrounded by generations of her descendants, I felt my duty was at last fulfilled, and I returned home to Titania’s court.
In my absence, nothing of substance had changed. We were still beautiful and powerful, as I suppose we shall be until the world unwinds like a ball of worsted. I was greatly teased and roundly shamed for my silliness, but I was accepted back. All was well, or should have been.
But I found I missed my mortals.
I had made the greatest mistake of an immortal: caring too much for those who live and die and turn to dust. Worse yet, though my lips did not form the sounds, my heart repeated their names, keeping them in memory as centuries rolled past. I grieved, and it confounded me utterly.
That was why I travelled hence. I had heard tell of one who told tales that were destined to live long beyond the scope of a brief human life, whose characters tread the stage and then leave it, going straight into the hearts of those who saw them to be carried in their minds and those of their children and grandchildren and on along a line that leads beyond the horizon. I have hovered, invisible, above your Globe and watched your Hamlet, your Iago, your Juliet, and a long parade of others who shall join us Fae in immortality in their own right. You have even spun tales of my king and queen, though only from what you have heard from others, not seen yourself.
William of Avon, kissed by the muses in your infancy, I would have you write one more play. In your words, make those departed humans who have stolen bits of my heart live once more, and if you do so, I swear by Titania’s crown that your own name will never be forgotten amongst your kind. Let the names of Prospero and Miranda be spoken again. Not all of my kind can weep, but your words shall be blessed with my own tears. Now, have at it, mortal!
