1-17 R

The girl in the mirror didn’t look like me.

Even looking down I could barely recognize myself. Part of that might have been the numbness. Not physically, but emotionally. After everything today, I’d almost shut down in that department. Having two strangers dress me was just another nail into the coffin of weirdness and embarrassment. At least they were both women that tried not to touch me. Agatha because she had an idea of what had happened, and the new one because she seemed scared of me.

Or maybe of him, since he’d sent her here with what I was wearing.

Agatha and her both seemed just as lost as me while they helped me into it. It was clearly not something a regular person could put on by themselves, or at least not fast. Too many pieces and things that needed to be held taut as they clicked or snapped or cinched together. The timid girl had apparently gotten just enough instructions to figure it out between the three of us, even with me just making the motions while Agatha tried to prepare me for what was going to happen.

Somehow, when it all finished and they moved on to my face and hair, the end felt almost like it wasn’t there. All the leather and metal that somehow let me move and feel almost normally. Just a slight tightness around my chest and at my hips or a barely-there weight on my shoulders when I stretched. It just didn’t click in my head that this was actually what I was wearing. I’d expected gaudiness – obviously it would be something ostentatious if that awful Faerie was planning to show me off – but this wasn’t what I’d imagined.

It was better, but…

There was a small clink as my hands started shaking again. The metal phalanges nudged together while my nails dug uselessly into the leather around my palm. The sound was just slightly off, closer to what glass should make than metal. It looked like something more at home in a fantasy story than real life, so maybe this was normal for whatever it was.

The way he had described it, though, the entire outfit wasn’t normal.

It was mostly metal. Something that looked almost like gold but was tinged closer to bronze. It shone in the dim light, the crystal’s glow soaking in and flowing in luminescent streams along its grooves and patterns. In daylight it would’ve been blinding. For most of it, that meant glowing lines of something that looked vaguely like either bark or scales. But on the breastplate, it radiated from a symbol I wasn’t sure how to describe as anything other than a fractal tree. Even where the metal stopped and the underlayer was exposed the glow leaked out in rippling veins that connected everything to the symbol. Even standing still it seemed to waver, dappling between dim and bright in a nearly hypnotic pattern that it would be oh-so-easy to lose myself in.

I’d only touched the metal with my bare skin a few times, but it felt a lot warmer than it should’ve been. Even before I put it on. It was so smooth that I couldn’t even feel the engravings that had to be guiding the light and magic in it.

And there was definitely magic.

It wasn’t as bad as trying to look at the Fae, but it was significantly brighter than I was. A swirling maelstrom centered around and writhed inside the metal. Maybe there was some order to it, but it was too abstract for me to see. Yet. Maybe ever – for some reason I doubted that the Fae would teach me whatever this was, or even let me learn. I could be wrong, since nothing since they took me made any actual sense, but letting someone that wanted to kill me learn magic would just be stupid.

Wait… could Fae even die?

That – that probably wasn’t a question I should ask. I didn’t want to think of what kind of punishment they’d come up with if I actually asked it.

The armor barely even clinked as I shivered. I knew it weighed a fair amount. When I’d helped hold up the breastplate as it went on it had been enough for my arms to shake. But somehow it was perfectly balanced around me, imperceptible in how it sat. Everywhere the metal touched, it slid over itself perfectly. Where it didn’t, the nearly skintight leather or cloth or whatever it was in the underlayer covered me completely. The only skin exposed was on my face and neck, and even that was covered with designs in some kind of metallic grey paint. There was no helmet, not unless I looked with the Sight. Then a dome of racing light appeared, somehow thick enough to hide everything behind it and crystal-clear at the same time. The effect gave me a headache as it swirled, unceasingly, around my face. When I looked past it, I couldn’t even see the joins between each piece. The magic just flowed seamlessly; if I hadn’t watched it seal together with my own eyes, I’d have thought that it was all a single unbroken piece.

I really hoped there was an easy way, or at least a plan, to get it off. Otherwise using the bathroom would be problematic.

Something I hadn’t noticed until I tried to look at it in the mirror was that the Sight didn’t show anything in reflections. The juxtaposition of looking out through a chaotic glow and seeing my painted face looking completely normal had made me nauseous until I gave up looking. The grey marks made my eyes stand out, wide and shining, while the thorns in my hair glinted green. I knew there were more of them running through the thick braid down my back, but they weren’t visible from this angle. I honestly didn’t feel like posing to look.

Unlike the armor, they would actually prick me if I turned too fast or bent my neck at the wrong angle.

“Ma’am, it’s almost time. Do…?”

Agatha’s obvious question was just too much. I snapped.

“Yes! I’m not deaf, or stupid. I heard you the first dozen times. What that monster told me comes first. Don’t open conversation with a Faerie. Do what he says. Do what the other monsters that watched a wolf with acid spit try to murder me and laughed say. Listen to the other ones and do what they say unless it contradicts him or would hurt me. Be polite. Bow instead of curtsy, even though the armor has a skirt. No eye contact, no promises, no agreements. Try to look impressive and like the bauble he says I am. Never, ever, point my spear at someone, or draw the ‘knife’. There, did I get it all? Happy with how you drove home that I’m nothing but a pretty piece of meat for them to show off yet?”

I’d listened to her go over etiquette and niceties and gestures for what felt like hours as they dressed me. I knew it was meant to help me, but all it did was make me feel worse. The disconnection in my brain could handle a lot, but not this.

I did feel bad about how the other girl pulled away. She dropped her brush and a bowl of the paint, which somehow landed together without spilling or splattering, then hid behind the older woman.

Agatha just took it in stride and rolled her shoulders as she started to push me out of the room. The girl followed and shut the absurdly thick door. Once we were all out, she took the lead and didn’t even look back to make sure we were following.

“Don’t do that again either. Please, think about what I said. You need to be careful. I can’t say if we’ll be allowed to mingle and help you, yet, but just go up to any servants there if you must. There’s not much else to say – most of us, we don’t have quite as explosive an introduction to these things. Just try not to get overwhelmed, then try to get through it. It’ll all get easier, Ma’am. I promise.”

The hallway was a lot like my room. The same patterned wood, albeit with narrower banding. The path had a slight curve to it, only noticeable when I looked way out ahead. It was undecorated save for the twisting cages that held the lights. Doors at near-uniform intervals studded the walls, one every few dozen feet. No signs, no marking, nothing at all to differentiate them; I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d even be able to find the one we’d come from on the way back.

Were there people like Agatha or the other girl or me in all of them?

I saw the end of it coming long before we got there. The curve ended at a ring of black that grew thicker the closer we got to it. A railed path crossed what looked like a fairly significant drop, the hallway resuming across it. I thought it was just crossing the upper part of a bigger hallway, at first. But when I got there, it was obvious that I was wrong.

Seeing that little slice of it wasn’t nearly enough to prepare me for stepping through that ring of charred wood.

Space unfolded around me alongside a wave of vertigo. It could’ve been actual magic, or it could’ve just been how huge the place was. This place – it wasn’t a hallway. It was clearly indoors, yeah, but the word didn’t fit. All I could manage to do was keep up with Agatha as she turned to walk along an empty, burnt pathway. We didn’t run into any other people, but that wasn’t because the place was empty. Far from it – there were more people in sight than I’d seen in total on my tours around Pinecrest. There was no way everything I was seeing could have fit inside of a tree, not even the gigantic ones that had been in the distance this whole time. Not unless they were the size of literal mountains.

That would be… wait. Honestly, I’d believe it.

We’d turned from a bridge onto a ramp that cut its way along one wall, completely devoid of railings. It was inset into the blackened wood, almost a tunnel with how amber goo dripped across its open side in an unending curtain. Through the gaps, I gawked at the dizzying maze of pathways, landings, and open-air rooms that stretched out further than I could see. Every wall, every piece of wood I could see beneath the ceiling – was black. Burnt. What people walked on was smooth, polished to a mirror-like sheen that reflected the glow of my armor. The vast expanse of the walls were riven with cracks that dripped the sap that blocked out entire chunks of the room as it fell. Some drops slid down the boundaries of the place, bigger around than I was tall, but others fell from protrusions to land directly in the turgid river dozens, maybe even hundreds, of feet beneath our ramp.

There were at least a dozen different ‘levels’ I could see of walkways, but none covered more than a fraction of the space. On one I saw rows of shelves and people in monk-like robes. Another dipped down below the rest of its level, an amphitheater centered around a platform just barely suspended above the drop. Nonsensical rooms and omnipresent paths, some of which seemed to do nothing but loop back together. Where they reached the ceiling, littered with the only lighter spots of wood outside of the hallways, they disappeared through pockmarks that led out of sight. Each one was ringed by a cascade of sap.

“What is this place?”

It felt like my voice should have echoed. It just fell flat, the sound dying barely past my lips. That made me realize that since we’d walked in, everything had gotten…muted. I could see all the people, see the river and the dripping walls, but there was nearly no sound. Not even footsteps.

When it came, Agatha’s voice was just as muffled. She wasn’t quite reverent, but her words dripped with both regret and respect.

“The House’s deathblow, Ma’am. The Weeping Gallery. Always bleeding, never rotting, never healing. The other Galleries, they’re all wounds. But this – it was the last.”

Inside me, the vast thing rustled. It glanced out, pulses of sadness shooting through me before it pulled back. A vague image of Grandpa came from it, complete with a garbled rendition of our first and only ‘conversation’, before it pulled itself down deeper. There, it shut whatever equivalent it had to eyes.

I kept my own eyes down the rest of the way, focusing on the floor to try to calm down. Talking here – it felt wrong. Or maybe it was just what I was talking about. The air here – no, the entire atmosphere – felt like a funeral. One for something that the thing inside me had cared about. It wasn’t right to bring my own problems into it, or to disturb it. This place wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t its. It wasn’t the cause of my suffering. Hurting it worse than it already was – if I could even manage that – wouldn’t be polite. It – the House? That’s what Agatha called it – wasn’t the Fae, and definitely wasn’t the reason for the pain in my left hand, every time I flexed my fingers.

That was all him.

The walk was almost calming after that. The pain, the anxiety, the nauseating revulsion and fear at how he’d touched me – it was all still there, just pushed back. It was hard to dwell on my own problems when I was being led through the mortal wound of something massive and undying. The hardest part was keeping from crying.

Going through another archway saw that atmosphere lift, the urge to cry going with it. The somber mood stayed with me, though. It grounded me enough that I thought I was ready to go through the massive pair of literally silver doors that Agatha led me to.

As soon as they opened I realized I was wrong.

Everything hit at once.

A wall of sound poured from the opening and I stumbled back. One armored hand clapped painfully to my ears as the other reflexively slammed the butt of my spear into the ground. I’d almost forgotten I was even holding it, but it kept me steady and standing as I adjusted.

Agatha and the other girl went still while I did that. They froze as the eyes of half-a-dozen Fae locked onto us.

“Excellent! I thought I’d not see such a sight again, not since the Grower’s list of failures grew so long.”

It was a feminine Faerie. One of four, among the set. The other, and him, were just the slightest bit masculine. Neither went far enough to be obvious, at least not before they’d chased me.

My freeze was a lot less instinctive than the other two’s. That chase, all the running – it had taught me to move when they showed up. Doing that now would be a bad idea, so I fought the instinct.

“As the mortals are wont to say, history repeats itself.”

“No no, that’s not right. It has something to do with rhyming.”

“As if mortals could see more of the Weave than their own arses.”

They still wore the same colors – silver and black and dirty brown – from before. As they devolved into more bickering, I had a chance to study their outfits. Those had definitely changed – that much was clear even though I’d never gotten a chance to just look at them after the ritual.

What they were now had significantly more frills than what they’d worn while hunting me.

Two were in dresses that cascaded to the ground and rippled in a wind I couldn’t feel. One, a silvery silk run through with black veins. The other, their inverse – silver veins shooting through black. Their arms were wrapped in strands of pebbly leather, either dyed or burnt to match. Dark, twisted wood curled around their eyes, the branches or roots or whatever they were snaking back and into the complex braids of their hair to rise into wing-tips that didn’t look like any bird I’d ever seen.

Somehow the wings still felt familiar.

The other two feminine ones – I think – were in something similar to me. Strips of leather and wood formed cages around their torso that, if I squinted, looked kind of like a breastplate. Drooping vines that looked like they’d been charred to the point of falling apart wove together into a skirt on each of them, nearly dragging the ground. The same wooden masks as the first two adorned their heads, and all that told them apart was their hair. The one furthest left had a ribbon of what looked like the sky threaded along theirs. It was robin’s-egg blue, complete with wisps of cloud that shifted as I watched. The other’s ribbon was the roiling grey and purple of a thunderstorm, complete with flashes of lightning that lanced out while I watched.

I could smell just the faintest hint of ozone.

The masculine one was closest to me, wearing a full suit of plate armor. All of it was tarnished silver, shifting filigree and engravings writhing across it. They seemed to favor trees and wings. The only things he wore that gleamed were the bare metal of a massive sword on his back and the spikes of silver intertwined with his own mask of wood.

When I blinked, I saw that wasn’t quite true. On his right wrist – in fact, on all six of theirs – the hall’s light glinted off an intricately grown or carved or something crystal. Every time I blinked, it changed colors. I tightened my grip on the spear when I saw it. It looked like his hands, except the colors were there and vivid. Living.

The last one I avoided looking at. It was Him.

Fearghal.

“Satisfactory work, once more. You are dismissed, Chosen Agatha and…other.”

The two of them bowed. Then, they walked away. The girl didn’t meet my eyes, but Agatha gave me a small nod.

“Just a single finishing touch to add, and then we may begin.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I liked it even less when I tried to turn my head back towards the Fae and it didn’t move. That, by itself, was enough to warn me that something was going to happen next. Something I just knew I’d hate – that they’d do specifically to belittle or humiliate me. Dominance games that he’d decided to play after earlier.

“This Seedling is a fine representation of the Grower’s work, when shown properly. Wouldn’t you all agree? A shallow portrayal of what it pretends to be in the armor so generously gifted to it. Now it just needs made clear who owns it.”

There was no warning. No reaching hands, no footsteps, no sign that he’d moved. Just the cold, hard touch of something on my neck.

Then a click.

The cold vanished after a moment, alongside the pressure. All that it left was a vague weight, an assurance that something I couldn’t see was locked tightly against my skin. It was so obvious, though.

A collar.

“Perfection, if I dare say so.”

The other Fae chorused their agreement. Their smiles didn’t twist this time. The seemingly genuine emotion on the faces I was used to seeing twisted into violent sneers felt wrong. Worse was the way I couldn’t even bring myself to feel angry, or scared, or ashamed. All of that – it was overshadowed by acceptance and resignation. This had happened and was going to keep happening, until I figured out something I could do.

“Are you ready, little Seedling?”

I stood up a little straighter. Moved my spear into an upright position. Doing that – it felt right. Filthy and like I was admitting defeat, but right. Fearghal himself came into view as I did. In one hand, he held a loop of braided silver. From it, a fine silver chain sloped down. Then up.

To my neck.

A twitch of his hand and I felt myself bow. That was forced – I couldn’t stop it if I tried. My lips moved almost of their own accord. Almost.

I felt sick doing it, but I was sure the words were mine. I had to play along with his rules. Even when doing it made me die a little inside.

“Yes, Master.”