Chapter Sixteen

This year’s Samhain was a solemn celebration. So many Otherlings had gone to hide in the hills or islands. With winter coming there would be less dancing, less gathering in the fields to play.  A quiet time approached, they told Lilli.  She did not remember other winters, could hardly imagine why she wouldn't dance in the hills.  She had simply had too few turns of the wheel in her life, so Illianna told her.

Even so Lilli danced.  That constant sense of joy welled up in her and dance she must.  She flew high and low over the streets, weaving and dipping, scattering stardust in her wake, bands glittering, interwoven and complex.  Ah, the beauty of the patterns!  Lilli loved them, entranced, in a world apart.  With her laughter as her sole companion, through the dark autumn streets she danced, tinkling and ringing a song of simple merriment.

Lucky the humans who would walk this street early on the morrow.  Lilli's joy would lift their steps and their eyes above the rain-puddled sidewalks.  Her joy left the street infused with enough magic to see the good around them, rather than the sad and bad.  With lightened steps, everyone would smile and feel kinder and gentler.

Spotting a group of young humans down the street, Lilli's natural curiosity pulled her to them.  Oh how she loved young humans, with their slow play and simple movements.  These humans looked different; their colors were all wrong, muddy and dark.  Lilli slowed her flight, unsure.  She circled them, slowly, at a distance.  There were three, all male, all young: not children, not adults.

“They're sad,” Lilli thought.  “They laugh with just their mouths, no fun, just ugly.”  She flew closer to see what they were doing.  It looked like they were dividing dirty green strips of paper into three stacks.
Lilli flew closer yet.  “Maybe I can give them some of my fun.”  She laughed at the thought.

One of the boys started at the sound.  "What the fuck was that?"  Lilli laughed again.  She couldn't remember a human hearing her before, and the pleasure tickled.

"Geezus, sounds like little tinkle bells.  Where's it comin' from?"  The boys stopped counting the money and looked around, wary, nervous.

Lilli flew between the boys, playing, weaving, her fairy dust trails tying them together.

"Holy shit!  What is that thing?"  "It sure moves fast--godam, I never saw anything like it."

"Catch it Bill."

Lilli just laughed and danced because she knew they could never catch her.  What fun it was to be seen!  Flitting and dancing, Lilli stayed just out of their reach.  But Lilli grew too relaxed, too certain of her safety, too innocent.  On a sweep through the group, her leg was suddenly trapped in the vise-like grip of one of the boy's huge, dirty hands.  She screamed as another boy clamped down on her delicate wings.  She felt their heat as a hot iron that burned her fragile flesh.

Now it was the boys laughing.  Not a beautiful laugh of joy and life, but a hideous parody of laughter, a sound so unlike laughter it need a new name.  The sound hurt Lilli as it washed over her tiny body, acidic.  Fighting against their cruel hold, she writhed and pulled and reached for freedom.  Each movement ripped her delicate muscles, so she stilled, hoping for release.

"Look at that damned thing!  It looks like my sister's Barbie dolls, except without the boobs."  The boys hooted and leered.

"What's so weird is this things got wings like a damned butterfly."

"Naw, they're more like dragonfly wings."

"Still n' all, looks like a girl to me."  The boy ripped the fragile fabric of her gown away and ran his rough fingers up and down her body, leaving burning scratches in their wake.  Lilli writhed in pain, causing her tormentors great glee.

The boy who pinned her wing began to twist and crumple it, causing Lilli to scream in pain and terror.  The delicate struts crumpled under his cruelty and the fine tissue shredded from them.  Lilli knew pain for the first and last time in her short life that night.  Her screams grew hoarse as she began to fade from consciousness.  Soon her light dimmed until it was no more.  The boys found themselves holding nothing but dust that had dulled to flatness beyond mere dirt flat -- something so devoid of life that it sucked the life from the very air.

“Where’d it go?”

“Shit, there’s nothin’ left of it.”

They were quiet then, their laughter stilled.  The fun had gone out of this pursuit, with nothing to show for it.  Who would ever believe them if they said they'd caught a miniature girl if they couldn’t produce it?  Yeah, right.  You made it up, they'd say.  So the boys pretended it had never happened and went their way.

Not so for the Otherlings.  Every fairy around the world had felt Lilli's struggle and her death.  Her screams echoed endlessly in fairy ears, until they cried for the horror and the pain.  Cillia woke screaming in her eiderdown bed.  In vain she covered her ears, hoping to silence the nightmare.  Unable to weep, she ached with a nameless horror.

Every fairy was in shock, except Illianna.  She remembered death; she remembered fairies who were no more.  The nothingness, the void where a light had gone out.  It had been centuries, but she could never forget.  There was a huge difference between then and now, though.  Those fairies gave their lives as a sacrifice and for a purpose.  This time nothing was served but evil.  Illianna was enraged, sick with her own impotence to protect her people.

Without hesitating to think, she flew directly to where she knew Rowan would be couched with his human lover.  This was all his fault.  Illianna had a deep longing to rip him to shreds.  She raged one second and pleaded with the universe the next.  What gods could bring an end to this danger; give some meaning to her loss of Lilli?  Her loss of the safety of her people was more than she dared contemplate.

She stood over their bed, the lovers peacefully oblivious that the world had changed irrevocably while they slept.  Soon Rowan roused, feeling her presence.  Sitting up sleepily, he said, "Illianna?  What are you doing here?"

"How dare you sleep in peace spooned with this human.  You don't even feel it, do you?  This loss, this pain, this unbearable pain."  For not the first time in her long life Illianna experienced a longing for the washing release of tears.

"Illianna, for Gaea’s sake, what are you raving about?"  Rowan rose, wrapping a sheet around him, leaving his lover stranded on the bed, waking, frightened.  "Be at peace, my Jessie. I'll be right back."  He passed his hands over her eyes, willing her back to sleep, then waved Illiana into the living room.

"Raving am I?"  She pulled herself to her full height, brushing Jessie’s ceiling. A fearsome specter then, she spoke quietly and measured her words for their fatal potency.

"Lilli is dead, Rowan.  Torn to shreds by humans.  They could see her, which she never expected, and she, my little innocent, thought it a fun game.  She danced for joy and played with them and never sensed the danger, unschooled in fear.  She is dead, and we are diminished, and you slept and never felt the loss.  Rowan!  What have you done to us?"  Illianna stared icily as Rowan slumped into a chair.  "You, not human.  No longer wizard, really.  You no longer sense the friends and family who've been your life for centuries.  But for the lusts of the flesh, like a besotted schoolboy, you've run willy-nilly, regardless of the Otherlings who trust you and depend on you.  You had no right, Rowan."  She walked to the window, staring unseeing into the velvet black.

“Oh, holy mother, no. Not Lilli!  What have I done, what have I done!”  He wrapped his arms around him and rocked silently back and forth in the chair, his head hung, never looking at Illianna.

Turning again to him, Illianna laid her curse.  "I pity you, Rowan.  I would not wish to live with a fairy's death on my heart.  May you live long."  She wheeled then, and left the house.

Rowan was unable to move, frozen in his own nightmare, picturing Lilli, imagining her torture, unable to stop.  Finally, as the morning light seeped through the window, he rose.  Facing Jessie right now was out of the question.  Instead, he crept away to nurse his wounds.  Unable to return to his shop, he took the first bus he saw, and rode it aimlessly for hours.