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If I should disappear for a few days, it's that it's doing rainy things here and that interferes with the internet. Have already had to practice magic on the phone line to get the internet back up and that's getting very old fast.
May. 12th, 2014
Title: The Hunt
Author: charisstoma
Word count: 1002
My Grandmam had said that long ago in the time of her grandmam’s grandmam, that one of the Faefolk had been at revelry, drunk on magic, and tupped where he wouldn’t have normally. The family had moved before the next full moon for fear he’d return and steal away that many times ago ancestor or later the child that came of it. It was a girl child that had been born, fair of face that showed her ancestry, and taught to hide what she was from everyone. Over the generations, sometimes the stolen blood came out stronger, sometimes less so and then there came me. All those generations the secret was passed down through the birthing of but one child, a girl each time, and again there happened me, caught someplace between with male parts and a female’s entrance. I’d heard the talk late in the night when they thought me asleep of whether to move to let me grow into the man my parts said or to stay and keep me in my maidenhood. In the end fate decided for them, the year the sweating sickness came, and I wrapped their bodies in shrouds for burial in the churchyard, along with the others the sickness took away that summer.
My muscles hardened from work readying for the winter; making the wood pile flourish in its growth, garnering in for storage some of the vegetables in case the ground froze solid under the protective leaf litter and herbs drying, dangling from the rafters. I’d been learned in the art of snarls and carefully nurtured the plants that the rabbits ate when the winter came on. There would be ample to feed me and keep me warm but I would need to decide what my future was before when the earth heated under Spring’s return and so would the passions of those to repopulate the village.
I’d wondered that my family had moved so close to the edge of the Great Forest, where it was said the Faefolk lived. The village lore talked of them and perhaps there I would have been noticed but for my family not being of the village, new moved from further away, and yet obviously human. And then there was me, my face coarsened from rubbing red clay into it to dull its ‘less than human’ perfection. Perhaps it was that I grew less cautious in my seclusion or lazy that I did not renew the clay quite as often with no family to remind me.
The moon shown through the window and the world did suddenly seem to magnify the sounds in the silence. Hooves caroled in the night, not of horses though at first one would think it for the shadows revealed mounts with their riders. It was only when they came into the open, silhouetted against the fullness of the moon’s glow, that the red deer with their riders could be seen for what they were and the two legged prey that they hunted. I was glad that I’d long quenched the fire and left the candles unlit, relishing the faint nip of cold of the season’s change and the clear crispness of the moonlight. My Mam would have said it was my Faefolk blood asserting itself and perhaps it was so for the riders had no heavy clothing to cosset them against the night though that might have been from the heat that burned in them for the frolic they meant to do with their prey, a male this time and not a female as had been told of in my family’s history. I stayed hidden, watching through the window, and did not know if I pitied the prey or was jealous of him or of the riders who would have him at the hunt’s end.
That choice too was taken from my hands for the next week when the night had turned chilled enough to thicken the stream with leaves that clung together with cold against the banks, there came a tapping at my door and I was fool enough to peek from behind the limp curtain at who was out there.
A red deer grazed in my herb garden, pushing the leaves with its nose to uncover the still green stems. Almost I went out to scare him away and in anger I did what had been discouraged by my Grandmam. I pushed at him with thought and watched as he startled up turning his head in reproof towards the outside of the door.
From inside the shadows I watched in horror as the fastening on the door undid itself and slowly moved inward. The shadows were not my friend, for that talent had gone missing in its appearance in my younger self. He stood in the doorway within the Moon’s path, gazing at me and smiled, then put out an upturned hand in invitation.
“Come away with me, my sweet. There is family yet for you among us of The Wood. Such as you should not be squandered on the human folk.”
There was compulsion in his words and I resisted to his amused approval but I was enough human and he not so. I placed my hand in his and we rode to within the forest where I could be what I was, both male and female, taker and taken. By the next autumn’s revelry I was with child and my lover stayed me from taking part in the hunt, saying instead that our riding should be in the comforts of our bed as was right for mated pairs. Instead we did our coupling on soft eider and thistle down. Our child, when I birthed him, was hearty and strong but like enough of his sire to be beautiful in that not human way. The child born the year after that, from my siring, was just as perfect and so did we rebuild the numbers of our clan; just solid enough of human kind, ethereally strong of magic for Fae.
Author: charisstoma
Word count: 1002
My Grandmam had said that long ago in the time of her grandmam’s grandmam, that one of the Faefolk had been at revelry, drunk on magic, and tupped where he wouldn’t have normally. The family had moved before the next full moon for fear he’d return and steal away that many times ago ancestor or later the child that came of it. It was a girl child that had been born, fair of face that showed her ancestry, and taught to hide what she was from everyone. Over the generations, sometimes the stolen blood came out stronger, sometimes less so and then there came me. All those generations the secret was passed down through the birthing of but one child, a girl each time, and again there happened me, caught someplace between with male parts and a female’s entrance. I’d heard the talk late in the night when they thought me asleep of whether to move to let me grow into the man my parts said or to stay and keep me in my maidenhood. In the end fate decided for them, the year the sweating sickness came, and I wrapped their bodies in shrouds for burial in the churchyard, along with the others the sickness took away that summer.
My muscles hardened from work readying for the winter; making the wood pile flourish in its growth, garnering in for storage some of the vegetables in case the ground froze solid under the protective leaf litter and herbs drying, dangling from the rafters. I’d been learned in the art of snarls and carefully nurtured the plants that the rabbits ate when the winter came on. There would be ample to feed me and keep me warm but I would need to decide what my future was before when the earth heated under Spring’s return and so would the passions of those to repopulate the village.
I’d wondered that my family had moved so close to the edge of the Great Forest, where it was said the Faefolk lived. The village lore talked of them and perhaps there I would have been noticed but for my family not being of the village, new moved from further away, and yet obviously human. And then there was me, my face coarsened from rubbing red clay into it to dull its ‘less than human’ perfection. Perhaps it was that I grew less cautious in my seclusion or lazy that I did not renew the clay quite as often with no family to remind me.
The moon shown through the window and the world did suddenly seem to magnify the sounds in the silence. Hooves caroled in the night, not of horses though at first one would think it for the shadows revealed mounts with their riders. It was only when they came into the open, silhouetted against the fullness of the moon’s glow, that the red deer with their riders could be seen for what they were and the two legged prey that they hunted. I was glad that I’d long quenched the fire and left the candles unlit, relishing the faint nip of cold of the season’s change and the clear crispness of the moonlight. My Mam would have said it was my Faefolk blood asserting itself and perhaps it was so for the riders had no heavy clothing to cosset them against the night though that might have been from the heat that burned in them for the frolic they meant to do with their prey, a male this time and not a female as had been told of in my family’s history. I stayed hidden, watching through the window, and did not know if I pitied the prey or was jealous of him or of the riders who would have him at the hunt’s end.
That choice too was taken from my hands for the next week when the night had turned chilled enough to thicken the stream with leaves that clung together with cold against the banks, there came a tapping at my door and I was fool enough to peek from behind the limp curtain at who was out there.
A red deer grazed in my herb garden, pushing the leaves with its nose to uncover the still green stems. Almost I went out to scare him away and in anger I did what had been discouraged by my Grandmam. I pushed at him with thought and watched as he startled up turning his head in reproof towards the outside of the door.
From inside the shadows I watched in horror as the fastening on the door undid itself and slowly moved inward. The shadows were not my friend, for that talent had gone missing in its appearance in my younger self. He stood in the doorway within the Moon’s path, gazing at me and smiled, then put out an upturned hand in invitation.
“Come away with me, my sweet. There is family yet for you among us of The Wood. Such as you should not be squandered on the human folk.”
There was compulsion in his words and I resisted to his amused approval but I was enough human and he not so. I placed my hand in his and we rode to within the forest where I could be what I was, both male and female, taker and taken. By the next autumn’s revelry I was with child and my lover stayed me from taking part in the hunt, saying instead that our riding should be in the comforts of our bed as was right for mated pairs. Instead we did our coupling on soft eider and thistle down. Our child, when I birthed him, was hearty and strong but like enough of his sire to be beautiful in that not human way. The child born the year after that, from my siring, was just as perfect and so did we rebuild the numbers of our clan; just solid enough of human kind, ethereally strong of magic for Fae.