Nightmares

Of shadow reborn

Drift, feeding languidly

Upon slain souls

Undying

THE SECOND TIME SHE stirred, Allory knew what she must do. Wincing, she touched her own temples and tried to summon up the song. To her startlement, her questing fingers found a patch of short-shaven hair above her pointy left ear, within which was the outline she investigated and eventually took for a butterfly. When had that appeared? Marked by dust? No other explanation made sense. Her seeking the right melody took time, however. The key was hitting upon the frustratingly facile trick of pretending that her body was her serami. Ineffable music coursed through her being, leaving her vibrating like the action of her own voice box, enervated, but clear-headed at last.

“How are you, dear?”

“Inixipi?” She cracked open her eyes, then opened them more when she discovered that fresh pain did not strike. “How long has it been?”

Back in the Healer’s pretty cavern, sigh. Back in bed, sigh. Reduced to patient status yet again in this her true life, not some nightmare. Treble-sigh with dollops of sour nectar on top.

I’m so weary of all this.

“Four days. We were very worried about you. Has this happened before?”

Her brain stirred like sluggish nectar soup, working out what the Pixie meant. The attack – that one, while she had been on Yaarah’s back.

“This is the second time – recently, that is.”

At least. She had no idea if two was the correct number, only that it sounded right to her ear.

More days lost in her search for her family. Tears threatened. Unbidden, her thoughts shifted to the attack on her colony.

Allory frowned. For a fractured second, had she recalled seeing her Dadfae standing in solitary pose, alone and unaffected amidst the chaos of that savage battle? Two arrows hung mid-air between them as if trapped in amber. Time stood still. His deep, blue-in-blue eyes calmly fixed upon her as if he gazed through leaf and branch, right through her eyes and into her soul.

Dadfae? Why do you inhabit my memories?

She soared somehow around the edges of that frozen fragment of time, observing him from different angles. An oddity in his posture, in the set of his shoulders, drew her awareness like a lodestone – he blinked, the eyelid wiping across a disconcerting spark in his eye. Nothing Scintillant.

Something different.

He watched her watching him, his eyes like a hawk tracking its rodent prey. Terror speared into her being. How could he stand in her past like this? Something must be desperately awry with her mind.

A smile touched the corner of her Dadfae’s mouth.

The memory vanished as if it had never been.

The Faerie girl blinked too, startled to find the deep wrinkles and folds of the Pixie’s face before her rearranging themselves into a query. Reaching out to touch the butterfly, she said dryly, “Pixie dust. It’s the oddest substance at times. I am sorry about your pretty hair, dear, but the dust has its own way. This happened when you cried out once. You show every sign of extreme mental trauma, yet none of us could work out why or how it came about.”

She said, “All through my childhood, I suffered from attacks like that one.”

“How many times, mrrr-prrr?” the Felidragon asked.

Inixipi barely wriggled a fingertip, but he fell silent at once. By her sap! Power.

“Countless times,” she said, thinking back. “At least twice or three times a month and for days at a time. I called them migraine dreams. They … they tore my family apart.”

“How so, little one?” The Healer Sage fussed around her. “You seem recovered? How’s your sap – feeling bubbly?”

“I’m very much better, thank you. Let me explain about the migraine dreams. When I was a Faeling, no-one in my cocoon could sleep a wink. I’d scream for hours. Days. It was intolerable. They tried everything, but only the amsinthe helped.”

Whee-yaa-yirp!

The shrill, strange scream preceded the Healer Sage landing with a thump on her rump. “No!” she gasped.

Allory spluttered, “I’m … sorry?”

Had the Pixie’s pixels all screamed as one and – well, aye, there they were, hiding behind the Healer Sage as if terrified! Weird. Yaarah’s neck ruff stood tall. Allory rubbed her arms as if that could smooth away the creeping of her flesh.

“Your Eminence, I don’t know what – what did I say? Amsinthe nectar is –”

Whee-yaa-yirp! The pixels bolted from the chamber!

“Ooo-kay. Confused.”

Picking herself up with a groan, the elderly Pixie dusted herself off and primped her hair. “Allory, they dosed you with amsinthe? Tell me it was only the once?”

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She shrank back in the huge bed she occupied, wondering what she had done wrong this time. Her voice had never sounded tinier as she peeped, “Many times. Uh … most nights. For years. It was that or I would have split open my own head to quarry out the pain, don’t you see?”

Gazing up at the ceiling of the cavern, the Healer Sage murmured a prayer or perhaps, a string of unintelligible curse words, Allory could not tell which.

She felt like a monster, a freak, guilty and complicit in what had been forced upon her.

The Pixie breathed, “They knew? They dosed you knowingly?”

In broken sentences, she told them about how her Dadfae and Momfae had argued over the treatment. How that powerful sedative alone had ensured a good night’s sleep for everyone – the alternative being a family, and indeed an entire colony, of sleep-deprived Faerie. Inixpi’s pixels popped over to give her one of the strangest but most certainly not unwelcome hugs in her life.

Then, Allory posed the obvious question. What was the problem with amsinthe?

At once, the Healer Sage cried, “Child, I am horrified! The use of amsinthe nectar is banned amongst almost all intelligent races on Spheris. I cannot tell you how dangerous a narcotic it is.”

“No. No … no!” Allory touched her throat, willing the panic to subside.

Drawing a steadying breath, the Pixie whispered, “It’s banned because not only is it a painkiller and a sedative without rival, but it is highly addictive and gives rise to catastrophic side-effects. These include severe developmental delays on the physical level, which may explain why you’re so small and frail, even for your Miniature Fae kind. It likely stunted your normal growth. Worse, amsinthe is a virulent psychotropic substance. It’s proven to cause a range of mental disorders such as psychosis, retardation of brain function, multiple personality disorder, hallucinations and, in a number of documented cases, reduced addicts to a permanent vegetative state.”

“Eep … no, tell me it isn’t true.”

Yet she knew the reply. The Pixie’s green eyes squeezed drops of dust from their corners.

Brutal truths. It was all she could say. Rationalisations tumbled through her mind. How her parents loved her. Xertiona wanted the best for her. She always had. Something had to keep the runt quiet for everyone’s sake. Amsinthe couldn’t be all that bad, could it? Could a madfae judge her own sanity? Furthermore, what about the shadows, dreams and nightmares that stalked her every waking and sleeping moment? That sense of being perched on the edge of a bough with an unknowable drop below? One wrong touch, one careless breath …

Over to the side of the chamber, Yaarah wheezed with a sound all too familiar to her, that asthmatic tightness of the chest and throat. Allory could not bear to look at him. Too ashamed.

She gasped, “Inixipi, do people recover?”

“Use of amsinthe isn’t a death sentence, dear, but it may as well be.” The Pixie stroked her head soothingly, almost as if seeking to shake dust out of – or into – her spiky sapphire hair. Or was she trying to comfort herself? “I’ve never heard of an actual recovery. You should be as mad as … well, as Pixie dust! Or incoherent. Or have been induced by some hallucination or another to kill yourself, long ago.”

Allory hissed, “It was the only thing –”

“Child abuse was the only thing? Shiver my dust!”

She recoiled. “Inixipi! My parents loved me!”

“I …” The old Pixie shook her hairstyle vigorously. Allory rued the Healer Sage’s evident distress. “I regret … those words. I’m appalled, child. Simply appalled. Dust of my ancestors, I had thought some acts beyond imagination …”

You and me both. If they truly loved me … Allory beat the thought away. No. No!

Why, why, why had all this happened to her?

Seeming to shrink within herself, into a place of ancient pain, the Pixie whispered, “That was its signature touch. Its favourite nectar … was amsinthe …”

“Whose nectar?” Allory breathed, knowing the answer before it even whispered forth, as dry as desiccated bones.

“The Wraith … aaah!” Inixipi groaned.

Something brushed against the Scintillant Fae’s soul. An echo of something indescribably foul, ancient, diabolical. Its faintest touch was anathema.

She remembered.

“The Wraith, it –”

“Don’t speak its name! I should not have – yet I saw it, once. Once when I was young and the world burned … I remember, ah my dust! I’ll die – even to think upon it is the soul’s very echo of death …”

So shaken. Fragments of memories swirled about her psyche once more, seeming to find a home amidst the inky blackness that the creature’s name evoked. Could it be that evil? So vile that the mere mention of its name twisted into this alien ambience, this spiritual pall she sensed – surely not? Her Dadfae would have called this idea numinous null-sap.

Yet she had seen it. She had seen the gathering of armies and remembered things which could not be. She had felt the Wraith’s terrible authority tremble her life’s sap.

Allory stretched out a hand, pleading, “Inixipi, come here. Please!”

Why should she be the one to be giving comfort? Yet she did. It was right. After all, as the Pixie admitted after a few minutes of unashamed mutual comforting, with the renewed support of her pixels, Allory really was not as mad as a rabid lymanx. Allegedly. Insofar as any intelligent creature could gaze within and regard themselves as normal and functional, she believed she was. Only a few oddities, such as that she wore a soul locket no-one else could see, and she believed she could hear the music of the world’s own soul, a melody no other seemed able to hear. Almost normal. Minor hallucinations, or truth? Well, unless everyone else she knew was sharing in some kind of mass delusion, her mythical ability did appear to generate real, measurable physical effects, from fixing clothing to pulling a Pixie’s dust out of the abyss.

Proof?

Proof of madness! Her giggle drew a matching one from Inixipi.

Why do I giggle now? Where did that eerie memory go, that abominable echo? she frowned slightly. Immediately, the lines upon her forehead smoothed themselves out. Nothing’s wrong. It’s all in my mind.

They chatted for a little longer, before the Healer Sage declared that her patient needed rest and time to recover from what she had been through. Departing upon her reconstituted bed of pixels, the elderly Pixie paused in the doorway to say thoughtfully:

“That Fae Philosopher you mentioned …”

“Xertiona?”

“Aye, Xertiona, the one who prescribed the amsinthe – I should dearly love to meet her and question her treatment methods.”

Allory rubbed her leaden eyelids sleepily. “Why?”

“I am sorry to say this, but to me, this pattern of treatment – if one can call it that – implies nothing less than medical experimentation, dear one.” Inixipi sighed. “It’s a heavy accusation.”

Jaw. Thump. How could she?

Allory wanted to start screaming and never stop.

Her words left the Scintillant Fae questioning everything she knew. Such an accusation should have been unthinkable, but it was not. Had Xertiona’s motives been pure? Unquestionable? Had her parents been complicit in this so-called treatment? What she remembered of their fighting and arguing over the matter of their frail daughter, was that they felt they had no choice in doing something they knew would cause her irreparable damage.

An acid taste curled her long tongue. Could she ever forgive them?

Moreover, might Xertiona’s motives have been openly evil? Could one imagine experimentation on a person who displayed Fae powers said these days to be legendary, perhaps a sinister attempt to understand or even steal a connection to ariavana, this mythical restorative power? Could the Philosopher have desired immortality, and pursued her goal at any cost? As the Healer Sage had said, a heavy accusation, yet one she could not deny. Yaarah might well know more but he had departed now, acting more shaken than she had ever seen him.

Aye. He had hinted at reasons why darker powers might be seeking the Scintillant Fae.

So, was she walking into danger? Braving danger for a family who might have aided and abetted her abuse for years, who had let this Xertiona live freely amongst them – one more than acquainted, it appeared, with the perils posed by amsinthe?

Allory gritted her teeth, then deliberately thrust these questions away.

Aye, she would walk. Eyes wide open. Antennae set to the fore.

One day, she would demand answers.