Lesson: An Introduction to the Fae

[thelisan]

28 Whitemoon, 2E 222

I hear a silent song on the breeze, and gesture for Melina. She and Lucinda follow me to the front door, and upon opening, I see an old friend. Hair black as obsidian frames her pale face, and her yellow eyes hint at the mysteries of her past. She wears a simple black wrap dress, ending at the knee, with tall boots under. Her exposed arms reveal a tangle of elaborate markings, moreso on the left than the right. "𝐺𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑑𝑎𝑤𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑒, 𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔-𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟," she greets us.

"𝐻𝑎𝑖𝑙, 𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑛," I reply, stepping out of her way that she may enter. "Melina, Lucinda," I introduce, gesturing to each in turn. Melina nods, and Lucinda offers a small curtsy. "Acantha Bluenettle, Warden of the Emerald Spires."

"Ah, I'm only here as a friend," Acantha says, waving off the title. "And for a favor."

"Anything I can do, you have but to ask," I graciously offer. The four of us return to the parlor, where I had already set out tea. I pour an additional cup for Acantha, and wait for her to elaborate.

"I need a hand-sized olivine pyramid, a peridot crystal the size of a fingernail, and a chunk of obsidian to replace my old ritual knife," she explains. "And it's all for the same reason."

Were this anyone else, I'd refuse. None of those are easy to get here. There's an island out past Kingfisher Port that sometimes has some, but usually I rely on traders. "For you, certainly. Melina, dear, could you retrieve those?"

"Of course," my apprentice says, politely excusing herself to find the items.

"She seems nice. You finally took an apprentice?" Acantha asks, adding a dollop of honey to her tea.

"Indeed. She'd had a bad encounter with a misguided fool of a hunter, and I took her in after handling the problem," I explain, tactfully leaving out the details of the encounter. Acantha knows not to follow up. "How did you lose your knife, though?"

"I didn't. It broke. I was piercing a veil in the Spires, ancient even for the fae. Unfortunately, the veil shattered and so did my blade, which made it a little harder to deal with what came next..." She trails off, sounding frustrated.

"I can imagine, the Spires are... I'm not even sure. Sometimes I think the whole forest is an ancient fae, dead-yet-living," I muse. "I've never heard of a veil shattering, though?"

"That was the strangest thing. They're not supposed to be physical, but when my blade pierced it, the entire field of dynamis glassified. It's... it's an odd sound, you know. Shards of ephemera tumbling to ground, like a dozen half-broken glass bells rung without rhythm."

"Fascinating. I wonder, might there be a use for those shards?" I ask, my attention fully on the story.

"That's why I'm here. The obsidian is to replace my knife, but the peridot and olivine are for ritual purposes. I think I can tame the ephemera, make it my own." She sounds uncertain of herself, and it is a dangerous thing to try. If it's the Spires, I shudder to think what the source may be. It may be from something that doesn't exist anymore, some lost will beyond time.

"Lady Suncrest," Melina begins, returning to the room with the stones in her hand, "you truly must organize better."

I offer a smile and a shrug. "You found them, though. I have a system, it works for me."

Melina sighs and sits down, knowing I'm unlikely to change. "Is there anything I can do for you in exchange," Acantha asks, "or do you plan to simply hold the marker?"

"There are two things you can help with, actually," I reply. "One, I could use a spare hematite mirror." I intend to give one to Melina when her lessons progress, but I hold my silence on that for now. "The other: you may be helpful for a lesson on the fae."

"Certainly, both of those are acceptable. My patrons would want me to teach regardless."

"Very well, then," I say, gesturing for Lucinda and Melina to come over to the couch where Acantha and I are seated. "The most obvious matter to address is the faemarks. As you can see, Antha has numerous faemarks on her arms, so many that it may be hard to recognize any one of them against the others. Each Court has its own favored styles of marking, its own symbology. To know the court and its imagery is to know the purpose of a mark."

"What courts are there?" Lucinda asks.

"So many," I answer. "There's scarcely an aspect of the world that isn't part of a Court's sphere, and sometimes that sphere is defined more by semantics than actual intuitive connections. There is the 𝐶𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑓𝑖𝑔𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛, who I've dealt with before. Theirs is the path of transformation, of something becoming something else. Nymph to dragonfly, caterpillar to pupa to butterfly. Seed to flower. Material to object. Owing to the nature of our contact, they have not left a visible mark."

"'The nature of your contact'?" Melina repeats.

"I was not always as you see me now, and I would fain let it lie there," I reply. She lets the matter rest, and I continue. "The 𝐶𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑢𝑠𝑡 is the court ever-present, found in all the things that lurk beneath sight. Dust, pollen, miniscule insects, drops of mist in the fog. The 𝐶𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑆𝑜𝑛𝑔 claims as theirs all song and dance, in all its forms. The call of the lark, the dance-speech of the bee, tavern songs both bawdy and solemn. And the-" I cut myself off. "I'm sorry, I can never say this one right. Acantha, the uncourt?"

"Right, the 🅷🅾🅻🅻🅾🆆 🅲🅾🆄🆁🆃," she confirms. My vision blurs, colors twist and contort. I see what isn't present, I cannot see what is, but mercifully for only scant few seconds.

"Agh, what was that, what was that?!" Melina exclaims, covering her eyes as best she can.

"That court is... difficult, even for one such as myself," I explain. Lucinda seems to recover faster than Melina, and I see her draw my apprentice into a gentle embrace. "Theirs is what is not, absence and opposition embodied."

"I don't quite follow," Lucinda says softly. Melina hesitantly uncovers her eyes and blinks repeatedly, seeming to try to wipe whatever she had seen away.

"I had mentioned earlier that the courts are sometimes semantic. The H-" I stop myself, quickly correcting, "that court is the clearest demonstration; anything that can be defined as un, as opposite. White as unblack, black as unwhite. They are most associated, however, with the absence of warmth and light. Or perhaps the presence of cold and darkness, as you may define it."

"If just hearing the name did that-" Melina begins with a shudder.

"Encounters with the uncourt are vanishingly rare," I say, hoping to offer some comfort. "The last rumored envoy was over two centuries ago."