Far above a lonely, sleepy town, a dark storm gathered. The night roiled and bucked with its fury, shaking the heavens with lightning and terrifying thunder. Those below huddled in their homes and beds, ignorant of the danger that lurked in those coal clouds high above their slumbering heads.
A trio of maleficent shadows lurked in the gloom, galloping wickedly across the boundless sky in search of mortal prey. They whispered and cackled in foreign tongues not seen in this realm in eons.
Arguments erupted between the trio as they surveyed and peeked through curtained windows and the keyholes of locked doors.
“Behold,”
one whispered to the others,
“is yond prey I spy that which we seeketh?’
“Nay,”
another denied.
“That one is too old, and the wrong gender besides.”
The last bit and chewed their words.
“Hark, all mortals look muchly the same. Ought we take it and be done with this dreary night’s call?”
Uninvited, the foul shades crept and crawled through the unaware neighborhood, trawling through the cracks like regulars in a peasant market seeking a deal that they themselves weren’t sure they’d find. A chill brushed along in their wake. Many mortals escaped a dire fate on this turbulent night.
They loomed onward through the gloam until they arrived upon an old, creaking home. Many rooms lay within, littered with discarded toys and faded wallpaper bedecked in scrawled drawings made with crayon. Youth and life. Such a delicious sight for the dancing shades.
“Here! Here!”
they called with gleeful malevolence.
“Just as foretold! Children within! One to fulfill a pact made! Quick! Quick! Find the girl! Snatch! Catch!”
Through the air, the fey wended, landing clean upon a dusty welcome mat.
“An invitation true!”
they laughed with glee.
“The foolish mortals welcome us in! Far be it for us to deny such a welcome claim!”
Into the home, they stretched, passing through the wood without issue.
“Foul iron nails!”
one wailed.
“Silence, sister! We need to seek in silence!”
The shadowy unseelie wandered the tight halls of the home, gliding past nestling adults camped before the flickering light of a staticky television. Into three rooms, did the fey wander, gazing upon three sets of children in contemplation.
A trio of boys slumbered within the first, aged between ten and fourteen, resting upon bunk-beds and under secondhand bedsheets. Their dreams hid their minds from the peeking fairies.
“Bah,”
one unseelie grumbled.
“Boys. We take naught for the court this hallow night. None for the Goblin King nor Grandmother’s pies. None for the Briar-Patch and its hungering denizens. Neither shall we take one for winter’s loving bite.”
On they flew, arriving before the second door.
Inside the second room played a pair of young girls, awake still despite the Stygian gloom and the promise of school beyond dawn’s rays. One was only of four summers, while her sister bore eight upon her life.
“Too young! Too young! And no time to feast or play! Alas!”
The fairies cried silently.
“Wouldst winter only grant us leave to beguile this long night! To guide young babes to become enchanted forevermore!”
Despite their desire, the fey left the girls to their play, unknowing of the dread destiny passing them by. The unseelie passed by a bathroom door, within which another girl tended her nightly needs.
However, it was in the third and final room they found their desired prey.
A tall girl sat upon a battered chair, perched like a harpy as she idly scrolled through an article on a glowing screen before her tired eyes. She was of a mere seventeen years of age, nearing eighteen within a few days hence. Her hair was dark like the night, long and limply shadowing a set of twilight-colored orbs set within a pale, lightly-freckled face.
Threadbare pajamas clad her athletic frame, toned from a lifetime of running. Her chest was modest and her legs long. And where she lacked above her waist, she’d gained below with ample hips and powerful thighs.
Behind the girl hung a uniform like a man swinging at a gallows. It was torn and dirty, awaiting resurrection by a skilled hand bearing needle and thread. A discarded bag sat beside the half-closed door the fairies peeked through, stained with juices. The name stitched upon it read: Autumn.
“It’s her! It’s her!”
cried a fairy in the dark hallway.
“Shhh!”
scolded the other two.
“Quiet, sister! We must be sure!”
Silently, they crept into the room. It was divided in two with a bed on either side. The fairies alighted upon the twilight-haired girl’s half, and searched through the scattered papers of half-done homework and ominously red-marked report cards. And within such, they found their evidence, for the name scribbled upon them stayed the same as the one already glimpsed.
“Autumn! Autumn! We found an Autumn!”
Black eyes swirled around hearing their owner’s name whispered upon the chill air.
“Hello? Trian? Was that you?”
the dark-haired girl asked shyly, seeking out the noise. She saw nothing. Heard nothing.
A frown burdened Autumn’s lips. She turned back to her screen, missing how the shadows gathered at her back. How they coiled beneath her bed. How they drew ever closer to her mortal life.
Thunder boomed outside, rattling the walls with their fury as if a giant had struck the earth.
A child’s scream of fright filled the air from down the hall.
Autumn turned in her chair, sullenly preparing to venture forth to soothe her foster-sister of her terror. However, she waited, listening as the sound of an adult’s footsteps lumbered tiredly up the stairs towards the frightened girl’s room. Her heart fell silent as she awaited the arrival of someone who’d never come to her again.
Sinking into her tortured chair, she turned hollow-eyed back to the glowing screen as the night dragged on.
Lightning struck once again, closer than before, illuminating the room. The screen went dark, as too did the power in the rest of the house.
Sighing, Autumn groped around beside herself for a small torch, inadvertently knocking over a bottle of rattling pills onto the floor, casting their white bodies across the carpet like knuckle bones. She cursed, flicking her flashlight on to examine the spill. The bottle’s label read: Fluoxetine.
“This waif is the one we seek?”
A fey giggled.
“T’was there none other?”
“This is the one, sister! The one! The one! Her name is true to the pact! Catch and snatch! Bring her to the court as we were bid!”
“Shh! She hears! She hears!”
Autumn spun her torch around the darksome room, banishing the shadows as she sought the whispers. “Trian? Seriously, this isn’t funny!”
Only silence met her.
Clutching her pounding skull, trying to push away her sleepless-induced migraine with taut fingers, Autumn staggered over to her bed and collapsed upon it. It sank beneath her like malformed dough. Shadows scurried beneath her bed, reaching out claws fingers toward her ankles.
She raised her legs to rest on her bed, and the hands snatched only air.
Another bolt of lightning flashed outside, sending dancing shadows puppeting across her blank white wall. On the other side of the room, posters hung, depicting rock bands and goth women dressed in dark makeup and dark clothing.
Errant shadows flowed out of the room’s corners as the light faded.
Thunder boomed like a giant’s bellow through the town, scaring the world with its fury. Autumn clutched her blankets with white knuckles as more child’s cries of terror filled the house. She was too tired to get up. Too worn-out to come to another’s aid.
Autumn closed her eyes, counting the time between the flash and thunder like her mother had once taught her.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
Boom! Thunder crashed. It was less than a mile away.
Opening her eyes, Autumn stared up into the darkness at her bedroom ceiling, seeing nothing. Thinking nothing. Fright rolled through her in time with the peels of thunder and flashes of lightning. She was no less afraid than the child bawling only a few doors down, she just knew how to mask her fear.
“I hope it hits the school,” she whispered to the shadows. “A day off would be nice.”
What a grim place, her school was. A den of banality and terrible socialization. Somehow, it’d taken the magic of learning and twisted it into boredom and mundanity. The only thing she enjoyed about it these days was gym class. Specifically, track and field. Running just made her feel so free.
“How shall we steal her, sisters? With trickery and focus? Or mushrooms and pocus?”
“I say we coil her with guile! With terrible glee and desire!”
“Silence! I shall take her with black and gloom!”
The bickering noise caught Autumn’s mortal ears. She spun on her bed, flicking her touch on quickly, casting back the dark with a scything beam. Yet for all her alarm, she caught nothing.
Her room was as still as a corpse. Nothing stirred within beside herself. Not a mouse, grouse, or even the house.
“I thought…” Autumn trailed off. She sighed, rubbing her eyes. “Now I’m hearing things.”
Laying back, she tried to put it out of her mind and get some sleep, slipping quietly toward an elusive dream. However, this time the nightmares that plagued her were real.
“Thou art to blame,”
one fairy accused the other, pulling on her fellow’s wings.
“Nay, t’was the fault of yours!”
the accused fairy protested.
The last of the trio sighed.
“Both of you art not blameless! Surrounded by half-witted sprites, am I.”
Quietly, maliciously, the fairies made their move. Monstrous shapes formed across the floors and walls like the most macabre of puppet shows, creeping across the room like oil stains. Keen claws clambered up the pale bedsheets toward the fitfully slumbering mortal.
Autumn’s troubled sleep made her squirm and thrash. She narrowly avoided the creeping shadowy claws once or twice, but was caught upon their third pass. The shadows wound themselves around her soft form like black pythons, squeezing around her hips and breasts, pinning her arms and legs within their oily coils.
In her sleep, she was entangled and trapped.
The shadows crept ever higher, winding around her throat. With a single twist, it could snap her swan-like neck, killing her in an instant. But that wasn’t their goal on this fateful night.
Twitching against her bondage, Autumn unconsciously struggled against the shadows binding her. Her body ached as the coils squeezed tighter. And when she gasped awake, the oily beasts struck, surging through her parted lips into her throat, silencing her as it poured into her lungs.
Autumn choked and spluttered. Her panicked eyes flew wide. She struggled and thrashed as the clinging oil stole her breath away.
Her struggles were for naught as the beasts of shadows only constricted tighter. She was but a mouse before a snake. Prey before predator.
Terrified tears rolled down her face like crystalline beads as her mind was lost. The burning fear bit into her reptilian hind-brain like a starved dog biting into a rotting carcass left before it. Her fragile psyche fought for all it was worth to protect her from breaking completely.
The black water poured from her lips as she choked. It spilled down her snow-white skin, staining it black as the oily substance pooled on the floor. Against all logic, the water rose higher and higher, not leaking from the room through the half-shut door or through cracks around the window frame. It crested above the lip of her bed, soaking the top in foulness.
Autumn’s screams for help were drowned in her lungs. Only a spluttered gurgle escaped her along with the last of her air. Her eyes rolled in her skull as the oily snake within her lungs coiled and writhed into unnatural shapes inside her body.
Sinister giggles echoed amidst her thrashing.
“Down! Down! Down! Into the abyss, she goes, taken to a land unknown!”
The waters rose higher. Autumn’s room was flooded. Almost completely now. Her head was underwater. She couldn’t escape as the icy grip of death dragged her down into the abyssal waters, robbing the light from her eyes. Everything faded.
Down, she sank.
In that bitter moment of life and death, the lonely girl realized she didn’t want to die.
The murky waters lapped against the ceiling high above her head. Her room was now completely filled with the black water, allowing no light to be seen. No escape was in sight. Only darkness.
Autumn sank deeper and deeper into the shadows.
Her thoughts turned to her foster-siblings. Would they find her body? Drowned in her room?
As her thoughts faded, she drifted beyond her world and into the waters of the bleak. A place between realms where only grim-nightmares and dire-nothings slept. Down, the shadows brought her, tasked with taking her into the land of the fairies through the black waters of the end of days. Tasked with taking her to a realm as beautiful as it was deadly.
The Feywild.
However, their path took them somewhere they ought not to have tread.
Autumn’s hazy eyes blinked open, staring out through the water toward an impossibly large figure lurking in the deepest depths of this forgotten place. Great long tentacles drifted in the unknowable currents, looming down from a serpentine face. Infinity stared back from ghoul-stars that took the form of eyes.
Madness took her in an instant, shattering her mind like a broken mirror.
The shadow that squirmed in her lungs wasn’t spared. It too had gazed upon that which should not be seen. It was broken more thoroughly than her, vanishing from existence in an instant, forming a paradox where Autumn had and hadn’t been stolen away.
She drifted in the neverbeen.
Terrible secrets scoured her mind, enlightening her with the wisdom of eternity, only for her to forget it as quickly as she’d gained it. There was no strength in her limbs. She couldn’t escape even if she had the thought to. Or maybe she had and just forgot?
Time held no sway here. She could’ve been drifting for an eon or just a moment before the great old one finally noticed her. Its attention was like a planet resting upon her shoulders.
Existence was a burden to such a being that Autumn lay witness to. It preferred to slumber beyond the confines of consciousness, and her attention upon it starved the creature of such a way of life. Reaching out with a hand that wasn’t a hand, it plucked at the broken puzzle of her mind, and pieced it back together the best one such as it could manage with its unconventional understanding of mortality.
It might’ve accidentally left a few odd pieces of its own behind.
When it was done, it wished the intruder to be on its way, and reality obliged.
Autumn vanished.
Back in her bedroom, now devoid of the watery grave, the trio of fairies hovered with confusion etched onto their faces.
“Uh, what hath just happened?”
one whispered to another.
“Didst we complete our goal?”
“I’m not sure. Yon girl went somewhere, at least.”
“Doth thee think she made it to the Court of Summer?”
The trio looked at one another.
“I careth not,”
the oldest said.
“We hath completed our part of the bargain. Yond witch asked for a girl, and we hath delivered. ‘Bring me a young girl worthy of being a witch before the dying of this year’s autumn.’ Not our fault some foolish mortal named their child after the season.”
Behind the fairies, the door creaked open, sending them scattering hurriedly in a flutter of wings.
A goth girl dressed in black entered the room, her eyes scanning for a girl no longer there. Autumn’s foster-sister, Trian, glanced around in confusion.
“Autumn? Where did you go?”
Autumn tumbled out of a watery womb.
Conjured forth by briny water, she tumbled free and drenched onto a tiled floor. Great hacking coughs escaped her battered throat as she disgorged lungfuls of black water. Salt stung her eyes and crusted her lips. Her pajamas clung wetly to her nubile body, highlighting her slim muscles with waterlogged definition.
Her mind was overtaken with language. Borrowed knowledge weaved itself through the flickering neurons of her brain, etching her ears and tongue with the gifts of all-speaking and all-hearing. Every language that ever was or will be, she knew and could speak.
Thankfully for her recovering mind, she couldn’t recall how she’d acquired this strange gift.
Frightened and fascinated in equal measure, Autumn looked up to see where she’d been taken, yet froze upon seeing the night sky.
It wasn’t a Terran sky that she saw.
No stars glimmered in the twilight above, nor shone or twinkled. There was only a blanket of black upon which a baleful moon hung, trapped within a cage of thorns. Impossibly large trees of great height and girth stretched high into the sky to entrap the howling moon. Within its cratered face, their topmost branches dug like clawing fingers.
Ensnared, it could only watch the unreality below with terrible hatred.
Silvery blood dripped down from the celestial body, staining the trees and ground, and mingling with bleeding amber to create great flowing rivers and lakes. The argentine tributaries encircled the hollow clearing where Autumn lay, twisting around an enormous ring of red-capped mushrooms. The fungal growths hummed quietly with an ethereal tune.
Autumn’s eyes looked from the singing mushrooms to the center of the clearing and inhaled a shaking gasp. A grand ballroom lay beneath the glowering moon, lit by its pale luminosity. Fairies of all kinds and creeds danced and swayed before her mortal eyes.
Hooves and feet beat a melody upon the ballroom floor alike.
Games of deadly courtesy were played both quietly and covertly. Beautiful elves and flirtatious nymphs joked and drank alongside lustful satyrs and prancing centaurs. A few pixies flitted overhead in graceful formations as they teased their fairer cousins. The noble fey eladrin of summer had hair like flowing sunlight and smiles that spoke of promises to come.
Many of which were looking Autumn’s way.
Her arrival had been anything but subtle.
She’d wet their hems and shoes with salty brine. A rather egregious faux pas, it must be said. However their ire was stayed by their curiosity. Their eyes racked over Autumn’s bedraggled form, tutting and admiring her interesting sense of style.
A particularly attractive fey approached Autumn, parting the crowd before her. She had hair like spun wheat and skin bronzed by a summer’s sun. Her lips were like rose petals and pouted like a first love’s kiss. The fey wore little upon her tempting figure, save for a maiden’s crown of flowers upon her head. And when she smiled down at Autumn, a shiver that had nothing to with the chilly air ran down her spine.
“My, my~ What do we have here?” the summer maiden whispered with a voice like summer’s night dream. “A visitor to my party? Would you care to dance?” she asked, holding a hand out to Autumn. “I insist~”