Hogwarts (Challenges and Assignments): Assignment #8
Celtic Studies: Celtic Deities
Task #3: Flidais (Ireland) - Goddess of forests, woodlands and wild things: Write about getting lost in the woods.
A/N: I wanted to try my hand at something a little confusing, because I love writing vaguely creepy things about the woods and trees and faeries. That being said, it's really not that creep! But there might be some unsettling imagery, so I wanted to warn very vaguely for that!
The cell door shrivels up into nothing. Made of wood and grass as hard as steel, it takes a strong fire to burn it all up until the bars are charred to ash. Strong fires are hard to come by in the woods. But they do come, when someone calls for them long and loud enough.
Oak trees guard the path, the strongest and thickest of the fae sentries. Regulus walks it anyway. He stumbles out of the burning camp and runs along the path, fast and silent, eating up dirt with his bare feet, burning his footprints into the soft soil. Fire still skates along his skin. Noise like a spitting bonfire comes from behind him, the pop and crackle of spells crashing through the leaves, igniting upon contact. Shrieks fill the air. Curses fill the spaces in between. There won't be anything left of the fae camp by the time Regulus reaches the very heart of the woods.
He takes the left path. It gets darker and deeper, the bruised greens and browns winding further into pitch black night until Regulus can't see much more than his own pale hands reaching out ahead of him, trembling against bark and pushing aside branches. His feet are warm with the last embers of the fading fire. When he gets far enough in, the silence twists around him, thick and heavy like the softest kind of blanket. For weeks now, all he's known is earth and flowers and the sound of fae singing under the trees, dancing and pushing sweet cakes through the bars of his cell. The silence is a blessing.
Of course, with Regulus's luck, something has to ruin it.
"Finally learned your fire, have you?" Sirius says.
He steps out from the trees, bright and grinning. Something questionable is smeared on his face. Regulus doesn't question it; fae blood turns acid-green when it touches skin, and Sirius positively glows with a ghoulish, garish sheen.
"What are you doing here?" Regulus asks.
Something isn't right, but he can't find the words to describe it. The knowledge itches under his tongue.
"The hell does it look like?" Sirius cocks his head. "I'm getting you out of here. We've been looking for you for ages. Did they hurt you?"
Regulus shakes his head. "All they did was lock me in a cell. They have no interest in punishment. Only pleasure." Shaking his head only brings dizziness; he staggers back slightly, woozy and fatigued. "Pleasure is the entire point of fae-camps. It's what they live for."
"Easy there," Sirius says, so gently that it mocks him to the core.
The tree bark softens under his back. Regulus collapses against it, heavy and weighty in a way he hasn't felt before. Like he's coming back to his body after a long time watching from above it, floating above it. While he sinks to the floor, panting for breath, Sirius watches him. He doesn't move from the shadow of a great oak. He watches with a gaze that seems finer than a knife point, slicing through everything, clinical and clean.
"Oh," Regulus says. "Oh, you're not him, are you?"
"How'd you figure that out?"
"He wouldn't look at me like that," Regulus spits, forcing himself to believe the words. "He loves me. And he hates me. I don't always know which. But whatever he feels, he feels too much of it for indifference. He wouldn't ever just stand there and watch."
Sirius steps out of the shadows. It certainly looks like him. It looks exactly like him, from the roots of his shaggy black hair to the hems of his ripped, Muggle jeans. But the green on his face isn't fae-blood from the attack on the camp at all. It's fae-blood that runs under his skin, lighting him up from the inside. Only in patches. But enough to make it clear what he is.
The fae thing chuckles. "The smart ones always last the longest down here. But they suffer the greatest, too. It may have been easier for you if you didn't work it out quite so quickly."
"Denial doesn't help anybody," Regulus says, casting about frantically for a way out. "I'll burn you. I learned how. I'll burn you up like the twigs you sleep on."
"You remember how you got here?"
Regulus swallows, caught off guard. "I don't..."
"You escaped the Inferi. You sent your House Elf away to keep him safe, and to kill a monstrous creation. And you came to the safest place in the world, didn't you, looking for someone who could protect you? But you came the wrong way." The thing wearing Sirius's face grins with teeth like twisted, coiled wire. "Even the Headmaster doesn't know the true depths of the Forbidden Forest."
The woods shiver in front of him, and he sees the cave where he almost died. It's dark and hot. In the gloom he sees hands pushing out of the soft soil, except it isn't soil anymore; it's water, black as ink but still clear enough to see faces in the surface, lingering in the damp shadows. The hands push through, and Regulus scrambles away. He strains against the tree trunk behind him, seeking a path through, unable to do more than twitch as the dark grows hands and faces and open mouths.
"Do you remember how you got here?" the fae asks again.
"I remember," Regulus says, choking on the words. "I remember."
The woods shiver again, and the water returns to dirt. The trees return. And when he looks a little deeper, he finds that there isn't a path through it all, and there likely never was. The fae, crouched in the roots of a tree opposite him, looks at him with pity.
"I remember," Regulus says again. "I came to Hogwarts through the woods. I was looking for Dumbledore, or Sirius, or one of his damn friends. But I got… lost. I got lost in the woods."'
He walked for hours. Days, even. And when he stumbled into a clearing where the fae King welcomed him with open arms, smiling and spinning in a merry dance, Regulus spat in his face and tried to run. They put him in a little cell and cooed at him, trying to feed him, promising to treat him kindly. They were so kind. And it took a long time to realise that just because he didn't have a wand anymore, lost in the woods just like him, it didn't mean he couldn't make magic happen, not when there was wandwood all around him.
Fire seemed as good a place as any to start.
But now he isn't sure he ever did any magic at all. He isn't sure if he burned the fae-camp or his prison. Maybe he's still hunkered inside it. Maybe he caved and ate the tart fruit or gobbled down the wine they offered. Maybe he's delirious from hunger, still lost in the woods, still stumbling through the dark. Maybe he died in the cave, and this is what waits for him in the afterplace.
"Did I ever even leave the camp?" Regulus grits out.
"That wasn't a camp. It was a small piece of our world, Regulus Black, and you're lost in it now. You were not wrong, you know. Fae aren't very interested in punishment. We do prefer pleasure. So eat our food, and dance with us, and lose yourself further."
The fae-thing holds out a hand, and it looks so much like Sirius's rough, callused hand that Regulus reaches out in return.
[Word Count: 1263]