Something Magical In the Woods Wanted Her — and Revenge
Want to escape into a fairytale? It could come at a price
You can be anything you want to be.
Jess thumped her palm on the steering wheel. In the replay in her head, she spat back: sure, but what I am right now, is fired.
But that’s not what she’d really said. She had muttered, thanks.
Thanks! She shook her head, staring emptily into the stationary traffic ahead. Why can’t I stand up for myself?
At least she wouldn’t have to work for that bitch any more. She tried to force a gasp of private laughter; but of course, the snipe was hollow. Isabella had only been her boss for a couple of weeks, but until today Jess had actually thought she was on her side; sharp, unpredictable, but like that with everyone — one minute the worldly mentor, the next the obsessive micromanager.
What about that time she loudly blamed the re-stocking cart when Jess dropped a tray of sauces, just as the store manager was walking by? Gave her a tongue-lashing afterwards, of course. Jess often deserved those. She was clumsy. And small: too short to reach the top shelves. Weak too. Needed help, more often than not, when restocking. Isabella did help, sometimes.
And then there was that other time. The time they had kissed.
She took advantage of me. I could sue. But, it hadn’t felt like that. Isabella had confessed an attraction, had asked for a date; and when Jess nervously demurred, had actually apologised. It was Jess who had impulsively re-opened the possibility, a few days ago; and though she wasn’t sure exactly how the next bit happened, consent certainly wasn’t a problem.
Somehow the dating part got forgotten; in fact it was weird how they just went back to work. And now, “reorganisation”?
She’s just getting rid of me. Don’t blame her.
The Woodland Queen eyed her personal guard with naked scepticism as she paced before them. They were lean, armoured, veins in their wings bright with energy; except for their leader, standing one step forward. She remained in soft-skinned and wingless shape, like the Queen, but scantily uniformed, ready to transform.
‘She will come to her chamber before nightfall. As soon as she shows the signs, you will reveal yourselves,’ the Queen instructed. ‘Detain her there until the Shift is done. Then, bring her to me.
‘If she will not come, bring her by force. But if any one of you harms her,’ — at this the Queen lifted a warning finger to point at the soldiers, turning slowly to encompass them all — ‘you will answer to me.’
But really, the risk was only with one. She approached the leader closely, menacingly.
‘Succeed, and I may consider returning your past to you,’ she hissed. ‘Fail, and you die. But be assured: you will never share my bed again.’
The door jammed against the pile of unopened mail behind it and twisted wretchedly on its loose hinge. Anxiously Jess lifted a hand to catch it, in case it came away.
‘Jesus, Lydia,’ she muttered, eyeing the opening. Deciding she would fit, she stepped into the gap, holding the door edge as she passed through.
In the hall she turned to stare accusingly at the mail, while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Lydia’s been gone for, what? Two weeks, three? Jess was assuming her Chinese housemate had actually told her where she was going, it had just been lost in her usual stream of fast, occasionally unintelligible, but weirdly posh English.
Jess pushed the door closed, and then feeling sudden spite, she kicked at the mail. But the obvious unfairness of the gesture provoked a choke of regret, like a warning. With eyes blurring and mouth wide, she stared at the dark, scuffed stairs to her lonely room, suddenly knowing that the first step would crush her.
She stood on the precipice for a second, flailing in her mind for an alternative that was not utter defeat; and duly, it came to her.
‘A fucking sandwich,’ she said out loud.
The leader of the Queen’s guard flew fast and low through the forest, uncaring whether her detachment could keep up. She was now in her brightly armoured warrior form, and the twilight had deepened just enough to show a flicker of her own azure light, here and there, reflected in droplets left by the afternoon rain. Of course, she could become invisible at a thought; but no pixie or gnome would dare try to bring her down, and as for humans — none had come here for years.
Her anger at the Queen fuelled her recklessness, to a degree; but mostly she sought to fill — with exhilaration, fear, anything — the aching emptiness of her mind. Rationally, she knew that the Queen had destroyed her previous memories upon renouncing her as a lover. But that had left the warrior barely able to hold madness at bay. Possibly it was only her inexplicable promotion, and the focus required by it, that kept her sane. After all, her new subordinates had expected her to be executed, and now they were resentful of her, as openly as they dared.
Maybe this mission could change that. A Shift was rare, momentous, and their role in it would be an honour.
The leader gritted her teeth at the confounding contradiction that she knew all of this, and yet nothing of her own past. But now ahead of her was the human artefact that marked the end of the faerie domain: a crude thing, but whose ugly bars were solid enough to kill at this speed.
She slowed not at all. She could hear involuntary gasps of dismay from her underlings behind, and the panicked flutter of at least one who decided to risk her wrath by flying over the obstacle instead of following her through it.
With a shout she tucked her wings straight back, simultaneously extinguishing her light, and shot invisibly through one of the narrower gaps in the portal. Ahead, the human dwelling loomed against the red sky. One of the lower windows glowed, but that was not the faerie’s goal. With a thrum of her re-extended wings, she began to climb.
Jess looked at the sad morsel she had concocted from sundry items in the kitchen, mostly extracted from plastic wrappers with the logo of her former employer. Despite that, it had been steadying just to have something to focus on: she had even considered extending the process to a full fridge clear-out.
Maybe later, she lied to herself. Unfortunately, that left her with the hazardous reality of having to actually eat the sandwich; and the decision of where to do so.
Not in this temple of germs. And the door from the kitchen back into the hall somehow represented her hopelessness. That left only one option.
She eyed the outside door. Its frosted glass was dark with the dusk, and cracked across one corner. When had she last been in the garden? Summer, probably. Lydia’s birthday. Jess’s eyes widened a little at the memory. The day her girlfriend came over from China.
It should have brought them closer, right? Something in common. But it hadn’t worked out that way. After all, romance was out of the question. Never mind the girlfriend — they broke up shortly afterward — but self-assured and super-fit Lydia was a million miles out of Jess’s league. So they just fell back into the same culturally-disjointed house-sharing they had before.
Jess sighed as she rummaged in a drawer for the key. I probably should have stopped fantasising about her. I mean, Isabella’s fit too, and I had an actual chance with her.
Until she sacked me.
The door surprised her by swinging open easily and silently. So she collected the sandwich with one hand and stepped out. Beyond the short patio the ‘lawn’ was overgrown, glistening wetly where the light from the kitchen caught it. To both sides were dingy wooden panels, but in the darkness Jess could make out the wire fence at the end, with the rusty but strangely ornate gate that led to scrubby woodland.
She paused, struck unexpectedly by how far away it seemed, and at the same time how extraordinarily compelling. As if it was an answer to everything that was wrong with her life. I want to disappear. I want the woods to claim me. Disappear and never come back.
She shivered with dismay at her own conviction. Never come back.
The room was dark and empty. The detachment of guards had alighted silently and invisibly on the outside sill, and their leader had shuddered as she reached out with a shimmer of magic to the alien mechanism that bound the window closed.
To creatures of the faerie realm the house was a cacophony of bizarre and hideous shapes and materials. But the leader knew it was better to be inside, and able to react quickly in case the Shifter succumbed to panic. The guards had fanned out as they had planned, taking up positions along the walls to avoid being accidentally crushed by the giant, magic-blind human.
So, they waited. The leader sat cross-legged on the pillow, a display of control over her disgust that could not fail to impress her command. And yet, as she meditated, it slowly dawned on her that she also felt something else. Something exceedingly strange.
She felt connected, somehow, to this unnatural bower. She allowed the feeling to play over her, carefully watching it. It was warm, a kind of pleasant melancholy. How could this be? Had she come here before?
At the thought, the feeling found a foothold. Yes — it was a memory. But distorted. Like a memory of something that had never actually happened.
Puzzled and discomfited, she stood. The darkness of the room was almost total. Her hidden warriors were silent.
She looked at the door into the house. Where was the human? It should have been here before dark.
Alarm sunk through her chest to her stomach. The Queen was wrong; and since that was impossible: she was wrong. Wrong to wait. Heedless of the noise she rose on whirring wings, turning a circle above the bed; then on a sudden impulse, she flew to the window, and looked towards the forest.
The iron portal out there looked different. With horror she realised: it was open.
Shit. Jess glanced around nervously as she recovered from the stumble. It felt like someone had deliberately tripped her. She could see tolerably well, even if the light from the kitchen was almost completely lost in the tangle of hazel and briars she had negotiated so far. But there was no-one to see. Just my clumsy ineptitude, again.
She paused to listen anxiously; and not for the first time. There were sounds here: unidentifiable, irregular, disconcerting rustles that her rational mind tried to dismiss — as drops of water loosened by draughts, the falling of a leaf, or the settling of the undergrowth disturbed by her own blundering passage.
I had no idea these woods were so… big. The dim grey-purple of the sky was just visible through the canopy, but that seemed to be four, five storeys above. The fallen branches impeding her seemed like whole trees, and briars and ferns towered over her. I even struggled with the stupid gate.
Her plan — hastily rationalised in response to the weird compulsion she had felt — had been to find a place to sit, to enjoy the natural environment for a while. Now, the idea of just sitting down in the wet darkness seemed… Dumb. But the self-reproach was hollow, like she didn’t even trust her own thoughts any more.
She hugged herself against the growing chill, only then realising she was no longer holding her sandwich. She looked down disconsolately, not really caring whether she could see where she had dropped it. It was odd how much detail she could still see; in fact, the leaves around her seemed to pop out from the dark background. There was a stand of tall grass at her side, which almost glowed. She stared at it.
No, it really was glowing. The fuck?
As she bent closer, some of the blades swayed a little. Almost at her feet, a moth was emerging — but a giant of a moth, the size of her forearm. She squeaked with fright and backed a step, only to catch her heels and sit heavily on some damp detritus. The moth took to the air with a sharp clatter — on softly iridescent wings.
Her heart hammered. That small encounter had altered her perception of the environment, like an optical illusion flipping to another view without changing at all. She wasn’t surrounded by darkness, but light — and the glowing, living things around her were not unusually large. Not at all.
‘So! Who ditched you, Shiftie?’
It made Jess jump, of course, but the voice was, in a way, something to cling to in the insanity. It was high-pitched, with an unplaceable Celtic twang; the speaker was close by her, sitting astride the rotting wood and grinning up at her. She’s half my size.
‘What?’ Jess managed querulously.
‘You out here all alone, Shiftin’ away,’ said the girl.
She was wearing drab rags, and the gentle glow of her youthful, impish face was shadowed by dirt.
‘You didn’t do this for yourself, bein’ a silly human an’ all. You’ll be eaten by gnomes before you’re done, if you’re not careful.’
‘Gnomes?’ said Jess desperately. Little fat guys?
‘Yeh,’ confirmed the girl. ‘That bitch of a Queen ain’t wiped ’em out yet. Nor us pixies. Say,’ — she reached forward a hand in response to Jess’s suddenly welling tears — ‘don’t cry. I got to you first. Y’ safe with me.’ She paused, one eyebrow raised. ‘Properly at sixes and sevens, aren’t you? I’ll be willin’ to bet you didn’t even know you’ve been magicked.’
She grinned at Jess and cocked her head on the side questioningly. But before Jess could mouth another baffled nothing, the pixie suddenly stiffened and looked significantly in the direction of the house.
‘Skiriwit,’ she said sharply. ‘Gnomes is the least of our troubles. C’mon Shiftie,’ — and now she was slipping to the ground, still holding out her hand. ‘C’mon!’ she snapped as Jess stared at her in fright; then explained irritably: ‘Fairies on their way. And not the nice ones, neither. If you wanna stay a free agent, we better get out of sight.’
Fairies. Sure, why not.
The fast-flying warrior faerie chose to pretend she had not seen the human, already fully Shifted and cowering pathetically. The pixie it had encountered was not a concern on its own; but there could easily be others about, hiding more effectively. Perhaps she should not have been so swift to disperse her detachment of guards to search the forest — but she dismissed the thought angrily, pivoting behind a tree stump and extinguishing her light. That pixie, and any others who sought to seize the human, would flee from her sword.
She was now an invisible spirit of the forest floor, slipping soundlessly through the tangle of glimmering life and dark death. The Shifted and the pixie had prudently chosen to move in a direction away from where she had disappeared; but the former human was so ungainly they were laughably easy to follow.
Shortly, the silent faerie caught up to them as they were making a rush for the cover of a briar thicket — which would advantage the wingless pixie. So, she chose to end this ridiculous chase. As soon as her wings roared, the pixie was aware of her presence; her weapon flashed out to cut it down whichever way it fled; but instead it jumped sideways and tackled the Shifted human to the ground, rolling them both over and denying the warrior a target.
With an angry shout, she landed between the escapees and their cover. They were coming to their feet, both clinging to the other, one in fear, one cannily. Now for the first time, the faerie could fully see the face of the Shifted.
The threat she was about to snarl died on her lips. The human was so… familiar. The wistful connection she had felt in the house was back, but now powerful, overwhelming.
The human herself was simply panicked. But the tears streaming down her cheeks somehow stabbed at the faerie’s spirit, cutting deeper than any blade and making her gasp.
So it was a moment before she noticed that the pixie was gazing at her, not in fear, but in curiosity.
‘Well well!’ it was saying. ‘This is a pretty puzzle.
‘You wait a lifetime to see one, and here’s two!’ She cocked her head. ‘An’ one just as muddled as t’other.’
Focusing her attention on the pixie returned the steel to the warrior’s spine. She aimed the point of her sword at the creature.
‘What are you saying, pix? Speak clearly, before you die.’
The pixie laughed nervously. ‘Maybe. But I reckon if I tell you, you’ll owe me. Wanna make a deal, Shiftie?’
At last.
The Queen rose, naked, from her bower, lifting her arms; and a pixie slave immediately rushed forward with her gown.
‘Bring the Shifted to me here,’ she said, addressing the prostate guard who had brought the news. ‘I hunger for adoration. I’ll not wear my finery for long today.’
As the guard stood to go, the Queen’s smirk faded, and she added with venom, ‘Also bring your commander. I would congratulate her.’
At last, revenge. She sat, to allow the slave to arrange her hair. Satisfaction at the culmination of her designs had already beaten back some of the exhaustion, but soon, with a lover to satiate her, she would begin to recover her power.
She had cast not one, but two Shifting spells in a matter of weeks. It was risky, she knew, and not just in weakening herself. The human authorities could become agitated; they might even invade her forest, looking for their lost citizens. She dismissed the recurrent thought from her mind angrily. They are easy to fool.
A bell chimed, and she raised a finger to the slave. It backed away from her, then scurried to the tall doors to open them. With a final sigh to settle the thrill of victory, the Queen stood.
The Shifted human, shuffling in fright and dejection, wrists bound with a chain, was led into the room by her captor.
Delicious, thought the Queen. But putting on a mask of outrage she snapped, ‘How dare you bind our guest? Remove those shackles!’
With two regal steps she descended from her dias, reaching forward with one downturned hand, middle finger lifted. As expected, the human, Jess, had at first been awed by the spectacle of a Faerie Queen; that was now overtaken by the inevitable shock of recognition.
‘Isabella?’
The Queen smiled. She stood before Jess and turned her hand to gently touch the girl’s chin.
‘Yes. Now you see me as I truly am.’ She watched the amazement take its course, thinking how she would toy with that wonder, that innocence. ‘As you truly are, also,’ she added. ‘Yes!’ she confirmed as the human’s eyes widened further. ‘You are Shifted. You are faerie now.
‘I find I must apologise to you, once again. I will explain everything,’ she said in reassurance. Perhaps when we are exhausted. ‘But first, there is something I must attend to.’
She turned her head to the warrior; eyes narrowing and glinting. ‘Your mission was a success,’ she intoned hollowly. Nodding to Jess in parting, she took a step to face the commander. ‘Certainly it took longer than quite necessary; but nevertheless, a success. You must be rewarded.’
She drew herself up further. Tendrils of magic coalesced in the air around her as she focused, the visible torture-cries of reality itself.
‘Your duty is done. I would return to you what I took.’
The Queen knew that the next moments would hang on a knife-edge, and among the arcing colours of the first spell there lurked darker shades of the one to follow.
‘Yes!’ she cried in triumph, as the warrior’s eyes betrayed the return of her memories. They jerked around in wonder, stopping when they happened upon Jess, awestruck, her hand on her mouth. The faerie staggered in recognition, sudden joy, and then dawning horror.
The Queen exulted. Now, you know what you have done!
You loved her. So much, that you refused to love me! Now, you have delivered her to me, and she will be mine!
The darkness blazed around the Queen, mounting for the final blow. You have lost and betrayed her. And now you die! And the murder-spell exploded forward.
But instead of impacting, it parted around the warrior, shrieking into swirling turbulence which set to racing either way around the room. The Queen screamed in dismay and fear. A counter-spell? She knew!
It was too late to protect herself — nor did she have the power left to do so. At the last moment, as her own spell converged on her, her head fell forward in defeat.
So my boss, the wicked fairy, got herself killed.
Does that mean I’m still fired?
Jess dragged her incredulous eyes from the remains of the Woodland Queen and gazed up at the face of the warrior, who was breathing hard as though winded — but whose mouth was sporadically twitching up at the corners with joy that could not be suppressed.
So Jess smiled too, taking a step closer, and reached out a tentative hand. She still could not quite believe what the pixie had revealed about this unearthly blue, glimmering creature; knowledge which even it had been mysteriously denied.
‘Lydia?’ she queried softly. ‘Are you okay? Um, are you in there?’
The faerie nodded fractionally, smiling wider; but she interposed her own hand to keep Jess at arm’s length. She seemed to be concentrating — and at once, the air again began to show its colourful scars once again.
This time, they grew inwards to cocoon the warrior in rainbow light; when it faded, there stood Jess’s housemate.
Naked. Well, mostly. Oh my god, she’s so fit.
But then Lydia pounced forward and gathered Jess into a bear hug.
‘I’m so sorry I didn’t know who you were... you see, she took my memory but I remembered you… I did remember when I saw you, and you were so smart to go into the garden, or else the guards would have brought you here and she would have killed me and taken you too… but the pixie found you, and she knew that I was shifted too…’
Jess had started to laugh through her tears. ‘Lydia,’ she interrupted softly. ‘Lydia, you’re not making any sense.’
The Chinese girl relaxed her hold a fraction. ‘I’m sorry,’ she concluded. ‘I made this happen to you.’
That’s even less sense. Jess opened her mouth to object, but Lydia suddenly clamped their bodies together again.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
What?
‘Reckon the new Queen’ll be any different?’
The two pixies sat hand in hand, watching the dawn slowly illuminate the humans’ drab dwelling beyond the gate.
‘Just as keen on makin’ love with Shifties,’ quipped the other.
They both giggled. ‘Not so big on slaves though. Still, it were a good thing you had to hang around watchin’ the old one, else we wouldn’t have known about Shiftie number one.’
‘Got some other ideas too, didn’t I?’ said the ex-slave, shuffling a little closer suggestively. ‘Don’t you want to know what the humans get up to?’
‘Nah. If they make love like they make sandwiches, we’re best let them be.’
the end
I’m Cody Kmochova and I write lesbian fantasies. If you need a fix with a little more heat (actually, who am I kidding, a lot more), try this:
