This Fairytale
Her words had flowed through him like a ghost. Don't listen. They'll steal you away forever . . .
It didn't matter whether or not he had believed her at the time. Shortly after, they really had taken her away forever. He'd stood silently on the front walk as the search party peered into patches of canopy, sifted through sun-lit meadows. But no one knew where to look. They never did find a strand of her hair like a thread of amber, or hear a cry for help like a stranded nightingale's. She had vanished.
---
Once upon a time-there was a curious place. It was not ordinary; its denizens lived in a bizarre teeter-totter of extreme sensations. Fairy euphoria flipped and sank with a reverse of fear of the arcane.
Every morning a little girl child could trot obediently to the rain basin outside to wash her hands before breakfast like her mother asked. Yet as soon as she thrust her fingers in the seemingly empty pool of water, she would feel a nibble. And the well of clean spring storms would quickly blacken. The oily viscosity of poisoned blood would stream like ribbons about a pearly blue-lipped smile, peaking above the liquid's surface. Where there was barrel of water so clear and clean you could see to the wooden bottom, there would sit a calmly materializing nymph. Her hair would wrap airy tendrils about the girl's wet wrist and draw her in with a splash, and neither would ever be seen again.
For you see, this was how things were.
In uneasy symbiosis, with will-o-wisp's strutting unseen in their midst, things certainly were unfair. Undaunted by the anxiety of humans sharing their habitat, the pixies were strange. Alluring maidens shaded like flowers haunted the trees and stole the prettiest children. Night beasts of shadow and stench patrolled the dark alleys and ate them. And they melted out of walls, seeped from the center of a rose being sniffed. Beholding nothing, they suddenly were.
But as luck would have it, the sprites did not bother hissing litanies, fecund with sweetness and pain, into the ears of the unremarkable. They only liked the special ones, girls that looked like living dolls, or boys who seemed like princes incognito.
With things like this, it had been easy for his mother, some beauty goddess incarnate, to be tucked away into the shadowy corners of absence. Sometimes when things were the hardest and he was most lonely, he wondered if was still being kept away someplace like a trinket in a jewelry box, or if she had been devoured by many thorny mouths. In either case, he never saw her again.
Yet he resembled her more and more as time went on. Dark mutters clouded his mind as adults, caregivers, stopped telling him the fanciful tales of were-swans, and imps that hosted midnight dances in glades. They told him different tales, and they were more like warnings to watch out, to not end up like this: like his mother.
So he'd always known that she could have been macerated and enjoyed bit by bit. That she could have been sealed alive in a grizzled tree trunk. That she could have been bewitched into forgetting that she ever had a son, and was now a thing of trickery and frenzies like her abductors.
---
Elsewhere- there was a lily spirit. She did not have a name- they never did. She was nothing but a beautiful curse, an imprint of greenery and ether that could claw and hiss. Most of the time she wasn't anything that extraordinary. She'd be a lily in the wind, one of thousands in a field.
But one night, in those hot, hot nights where a flower sprite's idle penchant for devilment surges thick and strong, she had been one of a swarm. The plain of flowers disentangled each other from their roots, and from each bloom rose a girl-a girl that dashed into the air with papery wings.
Many lily spirits had skimmed the muggy sky, stirring up loose petals of summer flowers with them. On that night they had gone to collect another lovely thing to enshrine in their nest. It was their custom to coo threats to their chosen victims, garbled into nonsense by their little demonic tongues, long before taking them, by day. Then they would go back and sleep as lilies. But the night to collect had come, to burrow something deep, deep, beneath, something to tap for their flowers' radiance.
This was how things were for them. They were one breed out of the entire menagerie comrades, shadowy, mischievous, vicious.
But this one night one of the swarm broke away. For instead of the usual gleeful activity of bundling away the newest triumph, she lingered. She might have paid attention to their catch. For this one had cries that sang, a gaze like blue jewels in water, and long skeins of sunlight flowing from her head. But she did not clutch and propel their trophy into the woods, like the others. She paused by a windowsill, looked in, and nearly tumbled from her perch in shock.
A very familiar head rested on a large pillow, tangles all about a face paled by night and sleep. Temper churned up in her, and she on the verge of mewling to her sisters that they had been tricked, when she realized that it was not the same one.
It was a male. His face was smaller, rounder. Sweeter.
Some whirred within her, made her dizzy. She pressed her pixie face to the window, staring and staring.
Then one of her sisters had pried at her skin with sharp little fingers, whining. That was another one. They didn't want him. He looked just like the other one. How boring. They had to go.
They had both flung themselves into the night, shots of strange greenish light. Buoying the writhing maiden to their lair, the lily spirit cackled piercingly with the others. Yet a wild pulsing rocked her and refused to settle. It buzzed through her body, which was nothing but the precipitate of enchantments anyway. And somewhere behind her eyes, the image of the sleeping boy smoldered on. Something within her narrowed, and without her noticing right away, that became her link to an awakening.
Together, the lilies had added another little secret to their existence as single, large deceit, but one had come away with something else. Something like a worm spitting up on itself to become the fluttering beauty intended. Something like a star shower razing the earth to a blaze. Something that was entirely her own.
---
Narcissus grew and grew until he was no longer a boy. He was an idol to the young women, an object of extreme envy to the young men, and a cause of worry to the adults.
He hated them all.
He turned away the ladies who acted like they were a replacement for his mother. He was contemptuous of those who coveted looks so terribly beautiful that it was only good for making him a target and his mother a victim. He resented those whose dire warnings of monsters put him on edge by day and permeated into his nightmares by night.
He felt eyes on him that he could never find. He heard voices he didn't understand, and were like bee stings in his ears.
He didn't tell anyone. Things would only get worse. The girls would cry, the boys would tell him he deserved it, and the adults would confine him.
Sometimes he slipped into the woods when he was angriest, days where a girl had screeched at him that his mother was dead and gone, and couldn't he be happy for the love of a live body? And another young man, who had loved her when Narcissus had not, had hit him, swearing to break his face. And a grownup had dragged him back when he took a step in the direction of the forest, sputtering, didn't Narcissus know that that was their true domain and that his mother had had her skin ripped off to make their shirts before being impaled on a branch?
He wanted to confront them, maybe. But then his whole world would turn several shades darker, and a clamor of singsongs or snarls would pierce his senses. Phantom fingers would seize his limbs and throttle him as a caress or just strangulation. Then just as quickly, it would all withdraw. The dead silence, aching with clarity, would turn into a quiet resumption of bird chatter and leaf rustles. Then Narcissus could do nothing but turn back.
He was always unhappy. And he felt alone in a way where he knew he was helpless and friendless when the most dangerous of stalkers was already teething on his neck.
Before her eyes, cat's eyes with bars for irises, he grew. He grew and grew and not once did the flurry within her die down. She always loitered by the gap in his curtains so long as he slept. She chirped the sweetest sounds she could make to him, but probably did not know it was not much different from her old malicious chattering.
The other lily ladies were still content with having one just like him. But they were not alone in their habit of hoarding or feasting. The lily spirit chased off even the largest lumbering umbrage ogres from his window by night, jabbing and jabbering them away like a gadfly. In hours of light he sometimes ventured into the woods, unaware of the throngs of nymphs and flesh-eaters he could not see. The pursuers would all lunge forward, each eager to claim the strangling with hyacinth eyes and flaxen hair, but the lily spirit would dart in, fiercely biting and mauling away claws that clenched on him.
They always retreated. They had never had to bring down one of their own, and so were uneasy about trying for the first time with this waspish, fleet-winged insect girl. What's more, they found that they could not touch her. Her reasoning, her purpose, put her in position far better than their greed and gluttony. Where they were wild, she had tamed herself.
In short, the lily had become a travesty.
---
Once more, Narcissus headed out to the forest, even though he knew it would amount to nothing.
He waited for the usual seizure of black magic to come and go-but lately, not even that broke the monotony of misery in his life. Finally given the time to be alone, away from the chaos of admiration, jealousy, and anxiety, Narcissus simply sat. And then, his eyes began to blur.
"Mother…"
The lily did not come equipped with the ability for speech. Other than her threatening hums, she was basically a mute. But she could mimic well. It was another tool in catching humans. Some of the other boreal devils could shape shift too, but here the lily's skills were limited. She grew earnestly along with her sisters as a flower, over the fertilizer of slumbering beauties. But she did not change to anything else. And after a long, long time of hunting and haunting, when even an impish demon got tired, the spirit would dive into the earth as a lily and stay as she was, stubbornly refusing changing back. This had happened to some of her sisters.
But with things like this, this might have never happened. All the time now, there was a swelling sensation in her chest so great that she felt her heart might burst. Jubilance consumed her. It was like the brightest of yellows, expanding and breathing, flexing and jumping inside her.
Emboldened by such ecstasy, she one day stopped simply skulking at the boy's window. Instead, she alighted on his shoulder, riding as he walked. Light as mist, and just about as visible, he did not seem to notice as he walked into the woods and seated himself at the base of a tree. She was delirious with joy.
The lily had little intelligence, but she had all her feral instincts. She chattered when agitated or excited-such as when she had been on the trail of a new victim, or scolding beasts for bothering the boy. So in her delight at this sudden development, her ear caught very a soft, heart-rending noise from him. It resonated with the rhapsody that had thrived within her for so long, gently swelling into an insistent urge. She acted on what she knew; she opened her mouth, and burbled a loving echo.
---
"Mother!"
Narcissus looked up. "Who's there?"
"Mother…there?"
Narcissus quickly stood. It was the voice that haunted him-but it had never spoken real words before! Had it came to steal him away?
"Go away!" he shouted wildly. And then her face flooded into his mind. He stumbled, driven frantic by his loneliness and terror. He was confused. Disturbed. "No, wait!" he called out desperately. "Take me there. Let me find her!
"Go…take her. Find her." The voice taunted him.
He turned and ran.
Gasping, he stopped and listened hard. The voices had stopped. Dried out from his run, he bent next to a pool to drink. He was hazy with fatigue. Wearily he looked into a pool and saw…
"Mother?" He whispered, dazed. "Mother, is that . . . Did they make you . . .? It's me, Narcissus. Narcissus!"
She was pleased, playful. Quirking her head, she listened to his words. She had never heard him speak before. She was enraptured; to her, it was like a song. She wanted to sing along.
"Narcissus! Narcissus!"
His exhaustion, a mind frenzied with fear, all the wretchedness and faded memories- it all came together. To him, it sounded like a plea.
---
She shrieked as he suddenly plunged into the pool.
And then her brightness was gone. Extinguished. The absence was a knife, and split her insides into a thick, black chasm.
She dove in after him.
---
"Narcissus! Narcissus!" The villagers fretfully called his name, over and over again.
When they found him, he was face down in a spring. The dragged him out and attempted to sort through the mess of waterweeds and hair, clothes and limbs. But when they mournfully attempted to pull loose him arms, which seemed to be tightly embracing nothing, they found the he was not holding nothing after all.
Twisted in his hands, screwing into his dead, mottled flesh, was a single, fragile lily, radiant as life itself.
/AN: "Almost Divine" is an accompanying piece to "This Fairytale"