Stan Pine voice: After all these hours of editing. Finally, I have finished writing this chapter.
This was inspired by Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement, because apparently my brain decided to file the book's beginning into the "save for later" folder. Who knew that a novel I haven't read in years would play a role in putting together one of my fics? Not me, that's for sure.
I'd also like to thank LoveMeSomeStories and TheVulcanNara for the story follows (and review). I'm glad you enjoyed the prologue, and I can't wait to share what else I have planned for the fandom.
It began with the kindness of a three-year-old boy. Truly, it had been filled with good intentions, as he had yet to learn that there was a suffocating darkness that wished to swallow the universe whole. Seeing his baby sister wail beneath a pair of menacing scissors half the length of his arm, thin strands of almost-invisible string the only thing between their sharp tips and her breakable skin, had stirred his protective nature – where the most important thing he could do was to make sure she was safe. However, his grandmother had warned him that taking them away would put her in danger, that he wouldn't even know the Fair Folk had come and gone until it was too late.
"Never, under any circumstances," his grandmother would sternly whisper whenever she tucked him into bed, wrinkled hands tightly clutching its sheets, "are you to remove the protections placed upon us."
And so he'd watched her on-and-off throughout the night, constantly switching his teary focus between his sibling and the thing that could hurt her – her soft whimpers keeping them both up well into the early hours of the morning.
Most of his grandmother's superstitious practices were ultimately harmless: thick lines of salt that traced windows and doorways; rods of iron placed just out of his reach, flakes of rust mixed with the gathering dust; clothes worn inside out, the not-quite-right feeling soon just as unnoticeable as the other little things he paid no mind to. But the scissors. . . the way the moonlight shined off its threatening, silver blades. . . . Those were what danced behind his eyelids whenever he dared to close them.
In his defense, he'd done what any big brother would do in a situation such as this. It was a decision that would haunt him well over a decade later: he untied them from her mobile of puffy sheep and smiling ducks - feeling a weight lift from his chest when happy coos left the infant, legs clumsily kicking the mattress while her chubby fists searched for his fingers.
This false sense of security, where he had been the hero she could someday trust to make sure harm never befell her, was what sealed their fate. One single thing, a moment that normally wouldn't lead to anything beyond the rare absence of cries, that forever changed the course of their lives.
He woke an hour later – when the air possessed an uneasy aura. The room, it seemed, had become much smaller, as if the walls had begun to topple inwards. An unfamiliar gurgle, like the mewling normally produced by a disoriented kitten, came from her crib. He hadn't known until he carefully, unsurely, tiptoed across the way that his childhood had shifted into something abnormal: a stranger, hidden in the shadows, peered back at him through buggish eyes – their movements strikingly like the gentle swaying of tree branches. The two had locked gazes, a glistening blue and an Earthy brown, the world uncharacteristically silent.
It was when the baby smiled that he knew this wasn't his sister.
Instead of lumpy gums, powder pink and slathered in drool, a tooth - keen as the scissors buried beneath his pillow - caught the rising sun as it slowly retreated; until no one would know it had been there to begin with. Irises that encircled large pupils glowed an eerie, pale blue for a fraction of a second before flickering away. This wasn't a child made of decaying flesh that could bleed if it so much as pricked a sewing needle. It was a creature that sweetly hummed along to lullabies sung by embers that danced within the confines of fireplaces. A weakened imposter, its exhausted breaths rising and falling in shuttering waves, had stolen what didn't belong to them.
The Fair Folk had paid them a visit.