Some leaves are changing color, I’ve turned a heater on some nights, and I’m in the mood to read spooky books, connect with ancestors, and watch Vincent Price movies. This is my favorite time of year.
Back to Elestren the pixie….
In case you missed Chapter 2:
https://open.substack.com/pub/whimsicalwords/p/amaryllis-and-the-pixie-chapter-2?r=5m2is&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Amaryllis & the Pixie, Chapter 3
Elestren wakes with a horrible ache in her right shoulder and her forehead. She groans and doesn’t open her eyes. She feels chilled. She is lying on a hard, stone surface… it feels like stone but also feels smooth and perfectly flat. Oh, rotting mushrooms! What is happening?
She tries to reach up and clutch her aching head, but her arm is strapped down. She tries to lift her other arm, but it can barely budge for the same reason.
She finally opens her eyes, slowly. At first she doesn’t see much. Straining her eyes is a tiny bit of light… coming from a small, broken window. She blinks rapidly and waits to adjust to the light, before she opens her eyes fully and looks around at her unfamiliar surroundings.
The space she occupies is small, with gray stone walls… it looks like a small room… it has a low ceiling, she notices, with a corrugated tin roof. She supposes it’s tin, but she now remembers she’s in the human world. She’s not in Fae.
So this is what happens if you leave Fae.
What happened?
She widens her eyes and peers around in the semi-dark some more. This can’t be right…. Oh. She remembers now: a hawk chased her in the sky just above the forest, and she dived down into the forest… and lost control. She hit a tree.
No wonder her shoulder is aching. She makes another futile attempt to raise a hand, to rub her shoulder or at least touch it delicately, but she can’t raise her hand far enough.
She peers down—at an awkward angle—to try seeing what is holding down her arms. The light from the window is so dim, and it will probably only get darker, because—she realizes at last—the sun is setting. But she has enough light to see… shackles. She’d never seen such a thing before in her life.
No wonder Fae folk generally dislike humans. She’d been warned from time to time, but she laughed off the warnings, the reprimands. “Don’t visit the human realm. They don’t understand us. They are cruel.” Oh, if only she’d listened! It was true! How is she going to get out of this mess?
Even more so than the average pixie, Elestren was accustomed to running off, chasing any butterfly or smelling any flower in sight, enjoying her natural surroundings and living by the minute. She was not accustomed to… it begins to sink in what has happened.
A human in the human realm has abducted her and strapped her down to a stone table with iron shackles. Iron. She couldn’t have any sort of power with iron. At least, she figures it must be iron. She doesn’t know how much humans know about Fae, but their allergy to iron is likely one of the things they’d be aware of… so they could do cruel things to Fae.
Why would anyone want to do anything cruel? It makes no sense to Elestren.
Elestren smells rain and damp, but it looks like the sky cleared in time for sunset. Light visible through the broken window is pink and orange.
Her life was so carefree until now. She’d been running and flying in Fae for about a hundred years. She doesn’t know the exact number of years, because pixies don’t celebrate birthdays. They celebrate every day. She’d been so accustomed to happiness and to seizing the moment, she scarcely remembered the dysfunctional family from whom she ran away when she was only fifteen years old. She blotted out all those unpleasantries.
But now, abruptly, her current unpleasantries feel all too real.
Elestren closes her eyes. Her shoulder and head are still aching. She is a healthy pixie and isn’t accustomed to pain, to an aching shoulder and forehead. This isn’t how things are supposed to be for pixies. This isn’t normal by any means, and she intensely dislikes it.
She exhales and tries to think: how can I escape this disastrous mess? She must find a way, one way or another. Perhaps the window will be of service. Yes, it’s broken. Maybe if she screams, someone will hear her.
She opens her mouth—it isn’t gagged—and emits as loud a scream as she can. Urgh—that makes her headache worse—throbbing! She waits, eyes closed. Nobody is coming for me.
Where on earth is this place? This ugly, pokey little shed? How did I end up here?
She knows—it comes up in conversation from time to time—that human civilization includes towns and cities and rural areas. She wonders if this shed is in a rural area. She hears in the distance ocean waves regularly hitting against rocks. She knew before coming here that it was easiest to leave Fae via Cornwall. She’d heard it’s a wet and rocky place, but she hadn’t focused on picturing it terribly clearly. And it wasn’t as though she was seeing much of Cornwall from inside this shed. Or from behind her eyelids, for that matter.
Elestren opens her eyes. As she watches, a little bird flies through the open, broken little pane of the window. The bird looks mostly brown with a beige underside and gray legs, and on its head the brown mixes with black. Elestren recognizes the type of bird: a sedge warbler. She sometimes sees them in Fae.
It occurs to Elestren that she’s small enough that she could slip through that broken pane… which in her head is spelled “pain.” The warbler flies down to her carrying a clover leaf… which is holding a liquid. The warbler flutters until it’s above her mouth and tips the leaf upon Elestren’s lips.
Elestren tastes sweet nectar. It isn’t as sweet as the nectar in Fae, but it is sustenance. It could help strengthen her, just a little bit. It isn’t enough for her to become so incredibly strong she could break the iron shackles, but this sedge warbler’s assistance and pity might mean the difference between life and death, Elestren realizes.
The pixie clears her throat. “Thank you so much, little bird. Can you send for help?”
The sedge warbler, flying so fast Elestren’s eyes could scarcely keep up with its movements, keeps glancing back toward the window.
Elestren senses the bird’s fear. “Is someone coming? Where are you glancing? What is it?”
The warbler hastily shakes its head—clearly terrified of something or someone—and flies off with the now-dry leaf.
“Please! Please get help!”
The sedge warbler only briefly glances back at Elestren before zooming out the broken windowpane.
Elestren exhales. She presses her lips together and licks the last vestiges of nectar from her lips. Hmm, she wonders: will the sedge warbler return? Will the bird return regularly… and keep her alive with nectar?
Will the bird return and somehow get her out of this mess? Elestren doesn’t know how a tiny bird like that could break shackles. It would need magical powers, perhaps an incantation. But she didn’t get the impression that the warbler was capable of speech like a human or a faerie.
Who knows what will happen and what she can expect. But at least she does have one little friend here—that’s certainly something, I suppose.
The sky darkens. It’s more purple than pink and orange now. Elestren watches the sky through the little window. She needs rest, she supposes, to try to keep what strength she can get. Strength to help her heal—although even with the sedge warbler bringing her nectar, she’s not entirely sure she can heal as long as these iron shackles are on her. She wishes she knew anything—how she ended up here, who captured her. Let alone how she can get out of this mess. Drinking nectar decreased her headache from throbbing to a dull pain in her temples, but even the diminished headache certainly doesn’t help her think her way out of this harrowing situation.
Elestren again scans the darkening room. She closes her eyes gently and attempts to slip her hands through the shackles, but her hands are too big. The very idea of her tiny, delicate, pale green hands being too big for anything almost makes her laugh.
If she can laugh, that will prevent her from crying. She doesn’t remember the last time she cried, aside from that ear-piercing scream that attracted the sedge warbler. Well. We’ll have to see what happens. For right now, rest.
Surely whoever abducted her will return to gloat and will say something. Elestren isn’t gagged, so she will at least physically be capable of asking questions, never mind that her enemy might not wish to answer those questions with the truth.
Torture. Where did that word come from? It was something she vaguely knew exists in the human realm. Yes, one of her pixie friends warned her that humans are so cruel and callous that they might even torture her if she spent too much time in the human realm. But another friend thought that was utter nonsense and said that if you thresh their corn, they’ll give you nice new clothing. That happened to her great-great-great aunt.
But what if humans have become more evil over time? Was that possible? In the past they were grateful if you threshed their corn, but what if that has changed and instead they’ll torture you for threshing their corn? Or for… not threshing their corn? For being magical? For being pixies? Could her being magical be the cause of her capture?
Elestren hasn’t threshed any corn since crossing into the human realm. No, she just remembers flying and running through a forest and jumping out of a circle of mushrooms… and then wandering and flying through a forest here in the human realm. That was… before the unpleasantness with the hawk chasing her and getting her all flustered… and her flying into a tree and damaging her wing. What a mess. What a disaster.
It makes no sense for anyone to strap her down like this. She has no memories of doing any mischief against humans during the brief time she’s been in the human realm. So why is she imprisoned, why is she strapped down? This is all so frustrating… and horrifying.
Torture. Murder. There are ugly, ugly words that other pixies have used when describing things that humans might do in their realm against pixies and other Fae.
It is no wonder the Fae folk generally don’t respect humans so much. Many of her friends won’t even cross into the human realm, unless they do it by accident because they were horsing around in the woods—much like what she did. Was that today? Elestren has only the vaguest concept of time and the passage thereof, but this is of course normal for a pixie.
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Elestren spent a cold and dark night in the shed. The broken window that had been helpful when the sedge warbler flew through it was now the cause of a chilling breeze. Elestren managed to fall asleep despite shivering on the rock slab. She wished she had a blanket at least… which seems absurd, considering how dire her situation surely is.
She hears a door open behind her. It emits a piercing groan. Someone with enormous, loud feet steps into the tiny room.
“Good morning, little pixie. I have a special guest arriving today, so I need to drain you of blood for my youth potion. Hold still.”