By Ami E. Bowen

The young fae emerged from the center of the silver lake and shook the droplets of water from her pale head. Turning about she kicked and flailed her arms, calling up numerous froth-pixies to dance in circles about her. Laughing, she called in a lilting tone to the elf seated on the bank watching with a bemused smile, “Reed! Watch this!”

Reed laughed and shook his head, charm-dyed amber hair falling across his perfectly shaped black brows, “Your something, you know that, Ashe!?” The silverness of pool reflected a million times over in his jade eyes.

She laughed, the sound rising like stars to kiss the air around them, and dove beneath the water, the ivory froth-faeries scattering in her wake. Reed waited, thumbs hooked casually into the pockets of his faded black jeans, a mixed look of awe and boredom vying for control of his clean-cut chiseled features. When she emerged again, a smile pasted across her delicate, glass-like face, she threw her body into the air and rose above the surface.

Reed faked a yawn and studied his fingernails, he knew this was her favorite trick and he loved teasing her about it. When he looked up again, she was before him, arms askew and anger flickering her deep blue eyes at him. Sparks nearly danced from her irises. Involuntarily, Reed took a step back.

She waited for him to speak, her normally pouting mouth turned down at the ends, seemingly oblivious to the chill air as moisture dripped from her naked form to pool about her feet.

“Nice tits,” He said crudely, ogling her cold-hardened nipples. He grinned at her irritation and added, “Go jogging much?”

“Shithead,” She snapped, and reached to cuff his head, “That’s my best trick and you ruined it, asshole! Do you know how long it took me to perfect it?”

“Seven days?” He ventured, catching her hand and brushing his warm lips against her knuckles.

“Yeah, me and God, pal,” She sighed then and stepped closer, wrapping her thin arms about his waist,

“You’d best remember that, too.” Then, in a feathery tone, “I’ll show you another one, come on.”

“I think I’ve seen it before, Ashe,” He said, with just the revenant of a provoking grin, as she led him into the surrounding forest, “Does it resemble a thatch of....” Interrupting him, Ashe slapped him playfully on the arm, hissing, “Don’t be vulgar!”

Reed sat up and reached to pull a scrap of Baby’s Breath from Ashe’s long flaxen hair. Damp tendrils reached to ensnare themselves about his wrist as he pulled the plant part away. Such was the natural of a fae’s hair, or any part of a fae for that matter, highly adhesive and strangely vivacious. She stirred in her sleep and reached up to smooth her tresses back into placidity. Reed observed as individual strands rubbed against her fingers almost hungrily. He couldn’t help thinking how much the act reminded him of children bonding with their mother....

He pulled up his pants, buttoned them and kissed her on one bare shoulder. He stood and waited as the thick grass around her grew at an astonishing rate to shield her from the chill and sight of enemies as she slept. Another one of her ‘tricks’, Reed knew, though nearly all faes had the coverage magick ingrained within them, it came with being a fae and a creature of the wild.

Reed, a city elf himself, barely understood his girlfriend at times and choice to make his way back to his lair when she was in a particularly fae-ish mood, as she often was after sex. Pulling his worn jacket over his shoulders, he stepped lightly away from Ashe and whistling a vague elvish tune, turned towards the road out of Bogwood Forest. He was halfway across the threshold of the forest, the long smooth stretch of highway visible between the last few trees, when he heard it.

A scream.

A sense of overwhelming terror rocked his reality to it’s foundations and left him panting, on his knees, like some drunk kid with the dry heaves, gasping for air. Motorists passed him by as he staggered out of the wood, fell to down and gagged. He barely heard the leering shouts or saw the crude gestures as they sped by, laughing like the insane stuck a washing machine on spin cycle.

He caught a few choice words and phrases, “Suck my cock, Elf!” “Eat shit, shithead!” “I got something for your tinkerbell girlfriend, fag!” As exhaust-nixies spewed behind the vehicles and scattered like gray leaves in the wake to disintegrate into nothing more than dust-like smog rising into nothingness, something hard struck him on the shoulders, bounced from his back and landed in a shatter of glass in the street next to him. He glanced at it, it was an empty beer bottle.

Just by picking up a sliver of the dark amber glass, Reed knew he would be able to track down the last person who had held that bottle before it broke, it was a simple enough enchantment and required no great amount of skill. Yet, he could care less about it and, he also knew, there was the off chance that the broken glass had been charm-altered in itself to slice the flesh of whomsoever decided to try scrying through it for it’s previous owner. Such protection against discovery was not unknown and very likely. The prospect of a sliced wrist wasn’t the least of it, though. By drawing his blood, the hexed object would then be able to report back to it’s master, whoever had cast the spell, everything knowable about Reed. He did not like that idea, at all. As a rule, Reed never touched the weapons of his foes. Nor anything else belonging to them for that matter.

His head swam, he felt like he had just downed a whole bottle of Ragwart and Hayseed in one setting, his mind filled with blasted images on mirrored surfaces, cracked and bleeding, screaming yet silent. His stomach lurched again and he lost his lunch near the side of the road. He was scarcely aware of the ant-sized Vomit-sprites issuing from his offering, such brief a existence they enjoyed, born writhing in pools of fresh puke, dying moments later as they inhaled the chunks and downed. It would have been sad, really, if the little buggers weren’t so damn disgustingly ugly.

Ashe screamed again and thrust her fist into the air, falling forward with the momentum. Strong hands caught her under the arms, grating her flesh from beneath her arms in painful amounts. She staggered backwards, eyes wild and frightened, scanning her surroundings for a way out, an escape route of some sort. At each angle she was confronted with a face, large, hideously malformed, small black eyes peered at her from beneath folds of pulpy gray flesh and wide, slash-knifed mouths grinned showing her small sharp teeth the color of sap. She darted her gaze from one face to the next, each one a more repulsive mask of the other, yet so different that she could easily tell them apart if she had to. Of one thing she was certain, they were members of the same race, if not family.

The one nearest her grabbed her hand and ran a cold, sluggish tongue the shade of rotted flesh across her wrist, murmuring in delight at either her taste or her dread. “Bastard!” She jerked away, slammed her fist into his pulpous stomach, he grabbed her wrist and twisted, snickering so that spittle flew from his mouth and smacked her bare chest, he leaned forward and lapped up the saliva.

She screamed as he bit down hard on one of her nipples, not so much in pain as in fear and nausea. She closed her eyes and willed all of her protection spells about her. Please, please, She repeated as a prayer-incantation-plea, tears spilling from her eyes to dampen her cheeks, making tracks through the dirt already smeared across her features from her recent roll in the loam with Reed. Her mind was in such a jumble emotion, thought and images that her protections could not be summoned. She squeezed her eyes tight and concentrated deeply.

She swallowed back a surge of abhorrence and sour-sweet vomit as she was shoved backwards into the grass and her legs extended outward so much that she cringed at the sharp pain shooting up her inner thighs into her stomach. Eyes still sightless she went limp, blessed darkness embracing her. With her last conscious breath, she used all her strength, focusing her whole essence into the one word. Reed!

Reed had gained his footing, fear creased his brows and blanched his skin. Ashe! He had had a brief image of several lumpish creatures drooling and snarling, the image was strangely disoriented and hazed. He realized that Ashe had been sending him an image out of her own mind, that he had been seeing out of her eyes, seeing her plight. With the view, came her pain and terror. He cross the forest paths without even thinking about it. It was insane to think he could save her, if they were bent on killing her. One lone elf against....them? Just one of their kind could crush his skull in one fist without even pausing to wipe the sweat from it’s brow, there would be none. Reed swallowed and resumed his search, he could not allow Ashe to die. Or, in the least, he could not allow her to die without him. He ran, determination fit for a madman pumping his blood into molten fire.

“Reed!” She gasped, flying into his arms, “I’m so glad your here!” He stroked her hair and noticed that the locks quivered in fear at his touch, seemed to cuddle into his fingers and sigh in weariness, a mirror to their owner’s emotions. She backed away from him as he glanced down at her womanhood, crimson liquid had begun to clot into the fine fuzz of pale reddish hair and he brought his hand down to gently touch her. She cringed with pain at his innocent touch, knowing that it was not intended to be sexual, and waited for him to remove his hand before she began to close her legs. She stopped, realizing that the movement aroused the agony of torn and bleeding skin and she pulled them apart again, ignoring the ache in her thighs as the lesser of so many evils.

“Wait,” Reed said, drawing near again, his fingertips coming almost within caressing distance of her battered femininity, “I can help.” She nodded, knowing, and gave her accord with a smile, “Go on. I promise I won’t move.”

He worked his healing magick expertly, taking only moments to knit torn flesh back together and draw in wasted blood, putting rights what was wronged. It had been decades since he had performed his base function and being out of practice left him weak, a torrent of vertigo seized him when he was half finished and he leaned away, head bent down into his hands for several moments. He smiled at her to ease her concern for him and went back to work, probing the essence of the pain and pushing it back to where it belonged.

She felt his ministrations as a cool breeze, comforting and soothing. A drug-like obscurity encompassed her being as he worked. She felt distant and a faint buzzing had begun to sing in her ears, she had the oddly asinine urge to giggle. She held herself in check, knowing their really was nothing to be laughing about.

“Okay,” He said at last, drawing away, “Finished, you can open your eyes, Ashe.” She did and found the world had stopped it’s full scale backward tilt towards the heavens, she closed her legs and sat up, cross her arms about her waist as if suddenly embarrassed to be nude when bare flesh was her personality in a nutshell, “Thank you, Reed.” “Ashe, I should not have left....”

She placed a slender, cold finger to his lips, ceasing his words, his thoughts, “No, Reed. You know better. We both know better.” She removed her finger, he looked away, murmured, “They wouldn’t have....I mean...”

“They would have killed you, as well,” Ashe said softly, so that he knew she couldn’t be lying, a fae rarely tells the whole truth, but when it has to. Reed knew this fae well enough to know when she was half-fibbing and when she was caught in Lady Truth’s web, “This encounter...I think it happened for a reason, Reed.”

A new apprehension caused his throat to catch, “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know,” She stumbled over her words, “I’m tired, Reed, and scared. The world is not as nice a place as it used it be....I’m scared....” She relapsed into trembling tears as he held her, listening to her weep for reasons far more grievous than a gang-rape could inspire.

Ashe sighed like a summer breeze and began to dissipate into tiny fragments in his arms. He looked down to realize she was altering, still weeping, she was changing.

“No! Ashe don’t!” He screamed, pressing her tightly to his chest, as if trying to pull her physically into his soul, “Don’t!”

He cried in vain.

He held nothing but a pile of autumn leaves, which shifted and scattered in the breeze no matter the effort he put out to hold them together into the form that somehow still resembled his Ashe.

“No!” He crushed the last few leaves in his fists, listening to there deadened crunch, and screamed. Somewhere, in the distance, foul laughter and shrieks could be heard.

“No.” He groaned, realizing that she was gone. Her soul had been murdered as certainly as her flesh had been violated and bruised, without it, she could not survive in her current form and so left him to await another re-incarnation, to await another life.

Reed stood, gazing out at the lake, so pure and beautiful. He watched the sun dip low over the horizon, painting the surface of the shimmering water a wondrous shade of rose. He reached up to feel the heavy stones about his throat fingered the runes carved their by his own trembling hands, death-runes, held about his throat by ropes he had fashioned from heavy vines and hours of laborious work. Even as the thorns stuck his flesh and drew minute bits of blood, he grimly received the pain as further promptness for what he had to do. And as a inconspicuous punishment for inadvertently betraying Ashe. He stepped into the lake, the chill of the water welcoming him as the arms of a long absent lover, and he began to stride out towards the deep, the stones clanking together about his neck, almost too heavy for his to carry. He made a silent plea to the Goddess of The Pool, Otenia, that she would find him a worthy offering. He longed to rest forever sheltered in her suffocating depths, forgetting all.

The image of Ashe danced across his mind, Ashe in the springtime, winter, fall, summer. Ashe in her element, the wild, the untainted, the unbesmirched, swirling, whirling, a dandelion gone to seed, spreading in the wake of the spring, a lark and bee, a maiden and a seductress. A child of Earth and as natural as life. A perpetual child, a lovely woman....as unconstrained as death....

The world is not as nice a place as it used to be, Reed, Her voice haunted his last moments, lending him strength, determination to see his action through, It never will be again.....

I love you, fae, He thought as the water filled his lungs, I love you.

Shithead, He heard her laugh, somewhere beyond the agony of death, in the deep, I have another trick to show you....

And, from all around him, the Goddess laughed with Ashe’s voice.

THE END