Chapter 8

When twilight in its finality consumed the afternoon light into darkness, I sat there beneath the oak canopy in mournful remembrance of a woman I had just met and lost. This grief I felt, was not new...but, old, older than a lifetime. It was a constant in my variable, a bug hidden in my code. An imperfection in an establishment, a hiccup in a song. I would go on and on how familiar this other, that was in the furrows beneath the dissolution of my soul.

My father had died from a heart attack when I was just about to become a man. We built idle contraptions, motors, and structures. He died in the garage at night, tinkering on a plan we had conceived for a new compartment for our old Volkswagen camper. It wasn’t a sudden death, but a slow one, tempering in the quiet.

I have never told him that I loved him as a son to his father often do not. But in my grief of regrets, I was proud that he was my father.

Wiping the sorrows from my eyes, I stood up from my knees and looked up to the slumped mother and her sleeping son. This child will never know his mother or remember the final embrace that she had given him. It was a crippling understanding that deflated my shoulders and my mood that wanted to slip down into the soil of the ground.

But my feeling is different from my body, my wants, my need to huddle down in a heartache was pushed aside by the weight of the responsibility that I had been given from a mother, who once had a magnetic smile.

I jumped on her plated skirt, past the basket that was resting on her cooling thighs, to lift the cloth and baby with my small width. This took all my engineering talents and mathematical equations to navigate a clothed baby into a basket without waking him. I felt like a small counterfeit, handling a child that was not mine, but I pursued my decision by adamantly accepting the treasured responsibility that was thrust upon me.

I heard a flutter of wings once I had finished my task with the baby was still soundly asleep. Ignoring the sound, I continued to overlay more cloth around the baby’s skin that was exposed to the cold night air.

“Are you done yet?” A feminine voice spoke out in the dark.

I was spooked in panic at the voice, searching around for whence it had come.

“Up here, Green bean.” She hinted with sardonic arrogance.

I viewed up above me up at the oak canopy, there was a form who was shadowed by the creeping darkness of the night. She then stepped to pass the shade into the ray of the moonlight. I retreated in witness of an alluring visage, of a small raven-haired girl with an oval beige face. Her eyes catching the moonlight, glimmering purple and green as she peered down at me from up above. She then moved onwards more, silhouetting her back which had translucent black butterfly wings tracing shadows into the ray of the moonlight.

“Who the crud muffin are you?” I questioned her. “And Green bean?”

“Yes, you, green bean. And who am I? I’m no one of importance.” She stepped off the branch to then hover down with her flickering dark wings.

She rested her dainty black heeled shoes onto the plated skirt of the dead knight. They wear leather made, stitched up by the finest silk strings. I was amazed, where did she find such a tailor in a forest such as this? Have the fae folk evolved so they have a fashion designer tailor who can just give this goth looking fairy a suit.

She eyed where I was eyeing, then shrugged her dark leather jacket. “Bumpkins are always gaping.” She muttered loudly to make them audible to my ears. I shut my mouth up and eyed her speculatively.

Without any consideration or time for introductions, she nonchalantly walked to the knight's side at her waist. I was shocked by her brisk and disrespectful nature, as she fondles around the belt of the mother who just died.

“Hey what are you doing?” I said, relatively pissed now.

A few jingles and tugs, she said “Hurrah!” Pulling out a huge cloth bag which was tied and that was twice her size and weight. From the reflection of the moonlight, there were gold shimmers atop the opened circle of the bag. Jingles of coins clinging finally gave realization on what she was doing.

‘A Thief!’

Broiled in unspent grief and newfound enmity, I ran over and tackled the fae off her high heels.

The bag of coins jingled out into the dew soil below as I took her. The tackle was a surprise to her and me. It was instinctual, yet I was contented on how I reacted against someone that was she.

She tried to punch me, but I had both her arms back onto the soil with my hands pressing down them with my newfound and superior strength.

“Why you little!-”

“-You're the little thief!”

“Get your hands off me-”

“Why are you stealing from her!” I said, fury still simmering in my eyes glaring down her. She fidgeted then glared back at me with her purple and green eyes. A green fringe of hair, hidden amongst the raven locks, became prevalent into my eyes as I examined her reddened and furious face.

The green stripe of hair, had a grassy texture to it compared to the black, like two conflicting strains fighting for the vibrance. Now noticing more clearly her facial feature, her eyes, their size, and the protruded patterns by the sides of her head. A realization struck me then.

In disbelieving fascination, I whispered. “Half-breed?” I could not believe it, she wasn’t born like the average beings naturally born in the forest, from trees, pods, and pebbles? But through natural birth, mixed by two kinds?

She then froze to my murmured deliberation, giving me a glare that was like the turbulent green wind, fighting out of a purple storm. She kneed me in my gonads. I yelped, losing breath and falling by the wayside.

She hurriedly stood up, then kicked me in the guts for points. “Serves you right!” She sputtered in outrage and embarrassment. She gave me the biggest “Tsk,” like what fairies would do, then headed to the bag with coins scattered across the dirt.

“Why..?” I groaned out loud, my gonads in anguish agony.

“Because you deserved it.” She spat.

“No, I mean why are you stealing her gold.” I winced.

“She owed me.” The fae said, abrupt to her mood.

“What do you mean?” I said, still on the dirt.

“She had contracted me to take her and her party through the Fae forest. Now she is dead. She owes me.” She motioned.

Sitting up, the pain slowly dispersing from my nethers into the ether. “But you didn’t,” I argued.

“What do you mean?” She looked up towards me, with her hands putting golden coins into the bag.

“She contracted you to take her and her party.”

“They're all dead.” She remarked.

“There is one member left.” I contend.

A baby's sibilant cry focused their attention on said individual. Both the Fae and I looked to the basket and wrapped the baby with a jumble of emotions. She with disbelief, me with a groan of responsibility.

I gingerly stood up, with my gonads still bruised by their recent experience.

“What are you doing?” She looked at me still with a disbelieving look.

“What does it look like?” I scoffed but continued. “I’m going to play him his mother’s tune...”

Finding my makeshift harmonica in a small furrow in the grass, I lifted it and headed straight to the basket. I jumped and sat down on the woven edge of the basket’s open. I then calmed myself and my body into playing beautiful Amelia’s lullaby to her only child.

The Fae watched silently behind me, at the green little man and the wrapped up baby, with a look of grudging astonishment.

The baby calming to the familiar tunes began to slither back into slumber as I continued in the dark of the night.

After a while, I jumped out back into the soil to head to the slumping Amelia. I stared up from her metal greeves to her metal breastplate to her face and her visor that was lifted. A sad smile on my face, staring at her restful beauty in the meadows of the forest oak.

“What are you doing?” The Fae asked me.

“I’m gonna need Amelia’s help once more.”

I began to unlatch the leather belts that were attached to her plated greaves, removing her steel boots and armor.

“You’re going to loot her corpse?” Flabbergasted as she accused. I shrugged and continued, not replying.

“You-! Wha-!Verdant!Green!-Muck!” Her insults jumbled up in disbelief as she watched me and my disarmament.

“Hypocrite! Loser! Green! Moron!” She continued with her beratement throughout the whole process.

I took most of Amelia’s armor and chainmail, leaving her golden silks and underclothes undisturbed. I then went to the hooded man’s corpse and gleefully looted his corpse, his hooded coat, his leather bracers, jacket, and most of his gambeson; leaving him with his underpants, and his surprised and dead expression.

After the Fae’s tirade and my appropriation were over, I dragged both corpses into the flat soil earth. I left the once hooded man how he died and headed to Amelia to fold her hands together by her chest, in a praying slumber.

The Fae looked on at me with fascinating bewilderment. I continued looking for flowers and petals to scatter and plant them around Amelia’s laid out form. I had taken my time, a time to grieve for the death, a time that I needed before I say my farewell.

After all the preparations were completed, I peered across at the armor that I had requisition from her. I grimaced and asked her again.

“I’m sorry Amelia to leave you unarmoured in your sleep. But I promise, I'll bring it back, once the task you gave me is completed…” I whispered into the air, hoping in a world past the twilight she had listened and acknowledged my promise.

I then lifted my makeshift grass harmonica for the third time of the day, casting Invoke Song, playing a tune to the grass to shudder the soil, so both the bodies sink in buried from the moonlight’s glare.

Noble Maiden Fair.

After it was all done. I humbly ripped out some grass leaves and wove them into huge cylinder logs. Lifting the basket with the baby slumbering in cloth, I carefully shoved the cylinder logs in throughout the night.

After the whole process was done. I went behind the basket. I felt eyes on the back of me, go up to sit on the edge of the basket to peer down at me. A strange expression on the fae face as she pondered about me.

Like a Dane, in Saxon England, I pushed the Viking ship forward with logs beneath it above the ground.

“What's your name?” She pondered down at me as I pushed on the basket, heading northward.

“Sink. You?”

“Heh. Oona.”