Intermagical

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[intermagical]

For Trans Week of Visibility...

A little trans lit excerpt:

“Alright,” said Evita, “Now, look inside yourself and tell me, what should we do for an air ritual?" 

I hadn’t forgotten my part of the lesson, and I had been looking around at the space Evita had set up for us, and the items she had gathered, for inspiration. There was a good selection of objects that might be associated with the element. She had set out fans and bells, and feathers and flutes,  and incense smoke curled around us, perfuming the warm summer air. 

“Well,” I answered thoughtfully, “What if it was a dance?” The way we had flown with the owl had reminded me of dancing, and a ritual that left no trace seemed like a good way to honor the incorporeal element. We could use some of the flowing fabric that Evita had gathered for us, and dip and dive like birds, through the incense smoke. Channeling the spirit of the owl with some feathers in our hair, I thought we could ask the energies of air to protect the valley and stalk and dangers like an owl pursuing her prey. “Would that work?” I asked her. 

“I think it would do beautifully,” said Evita with a proud smile, and I glowed with pride at her praise. “Shall we get started?” 

“Sure,” I agreed, rising awkwardly from the low cushion and shaking out my tingling legs. 

zrp zrp one more 

From high up on the roof, I could see little winged faeries cavorting among the riotous blooms of the garden, and among them, with a basket full of ripe summer vegetables, was Calliope, wispy yellow hair floating out around her head like a cloud. 

zrp zrp   the three 

“Do you think Calliope should join us for the ritual?” I asked Evita, watching how breezily the waifish fae moved. She looked more at ease than I had ever seen her, and I wondered how much Faeryn’s absence had to do with it. 

“Calliope?” asked Evita with obvious surprise.

“Yeah,” I answered. I didn’t mention the pulsing messages that I had just received. In fact, I hadn’t mentioned them to Evita since the night I had done the spell. Her response had unsettled me, and I didn’t want it to seem like I was taking instructions from something outside myself. And, I reminded myself, I wasn’t. The messages were coming from inside of me. The whole idea was to trust my own intuition, and my intuition was telling me to believe these internal pulses of guidance. They hadn’t led me astray yet. 

“I just feel like it would be more powerful with three of us, just like the rest of the rituals. And Calliope seems kind of airy to me, you know? I feel like I wouldn’t need to teach her the dance steps.” 

“Well, it’s your spell,” said Evita skeptically. She leaned over the balcony and called for Calliope to join us on the roof. 

With obvious surprise, the delicate fae set down her basket and climbed the ladder. 

I stepped forward in front of Evita, and extended my hand to help Kalliope up the last few rungs of the ladder. Her bright blue eyes met mine. I hadn’t ever really met her gaze before, I realized, and I forgot myself momentarily. She really was a striking looking fae. 

zrp zrp  explain now

Huh? Oh. Remembering myself, I smiled warmly. “Thank you for joining us,” I said, releasing the faerie’s long fingers as she straightened to stand, “I was hoping  you might be able to help us with our ritual today. We need one more dancer.” I explained, and watched her nervous expression transform into one of surprised delight. 

“Like a bird on the breeze?” she asked, eyes alight with excitement, “Yeah, I think I can do that.” 

And so the three of us, scarves around our shoulders like wings, danced together and called to the spirit of the wind to lend its power to our cause. We moved like a windstorm, and like a gentle breeze, bounding and twirling, high above the ground. With her long, graceful frame, Calliope’s long leaps truly captured the spirit of wind in motion. 

Eventually we tired from our exertion, and spent, Evita and I flopped back down onto the cushions. Calliope’s dance didn’t falter, though, and she continued to leap and spin, like a leaf in the wind. She looked so full of joy in that moment that I didn’t want to interrupt her, but she was dancing with her eyes closed, and the curved edge of the roof felt dangerously close. I didn’t want her to fall. 

“Calliope?” I called, timing my interruption carefully, so as not to startle her. 

It didn’t work. Calliope’s head whipped around at my words. Thrown off balance, she tripped over her long, flowing skirts and tumbled off the side of the roof. Time seemed to slow, elongated by the adrenaline flooding my brain, and she seemed to hang there, like a cartoon coyote, for a long moment, before disappearing over the edge of the roof and out of sight. 

I hopped off my pillow and ran to look. To my surprise, she was still falling, drifting like a leaf, with her white dress floating around her like a cloud. A moment later, she made landfall, coming to rest softly in the same springy patch of mint that Visc had thrown himself into, a few weeks before.

Evita stood beside me, looking down at the crumpled pile of limbs that was Calliope. She nodded, pleased. “Apparently our ritual was a success. We’ve clearly made a powerful alliance with the spirit of air, today.” 

“You know, I think I knew that was about to happen,” I said, watching Calliope sit up and start to pick bits of leaf out of her pouf of hair, “I thought, ‘I hope she doesn’t fall off that roof,’ just a second before she did.” 

Evita nodded. “Yes, I’m not surprised. You have been activating your intuition these past few weeks. All of the members of our family have at least a touch of pre-cognizance.” 

“Huh,” I said, “That’s cool, I guess.” It seemed like most of the people I had read about in stories were pretty tortured by that particular gift, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted it for myself, but, I thought resignedly, I probably didn’t get to pick and choose. 

We climbed down and rejoined Kalliope. 

“Sorry about that!” I said, extending my hand to help her off the ground. 

“It’s nothing,” she shrugged, “I didn’t mess up the spell, did I?” 

“Not at all,” said Evita with a laugh, “Your dramatic flight was just the kind of finale that Fiona’s air dance wanted.” 

I agreed and told Calliope so, and there in the garden, under the open sky, we joined hands, closing the ritual by sending the power of air out into the valley to safeguard us with its elemental power. 

Releasing our joined hands, we turned up the garden path to head inside. I shook out my sore fingers and said, “Wow, Calliope! That’s some grip you have there.” 

“Oh,” she said, hunching and rubbing her upper arm self-consciously, “I’m sorry. Carrying all those jugs of water for my Lady is giving me big muscles. It’s not very feminine looking.” 

“And you don’t like that?” I asked. With her delicate dresses and demure attitude, Kalliope seemed like a perfect picture of femininity to my eyes, muscles or no. 

Her own expression clouded, suggesting a deep well of painful feeling. “I grew up in a different court, did you know that?” she asked. I nodded, remembering what Faeryn had told me. “They weren’t so tolerant about things like gender expression, there.” 

“They thought that you ought to be more feminine?” I asked, taking in the pretty girl’s thin, square shoulders and sharp jawline. I hadn’t ever taken notice of the somewhat masculine features underneath the trembling femininity that so characterized Calliope. 

“No,” she said, looking puzzled, and then, a moment later, blushed a deep, delighted crimson. “Oh, you thought… You didn’t know!” 

Of course, I realized. It was obvious, now. Calliope must not have been raised as a girl. And, apparently, she han’t been allowed to express her true self, before joining Queen Vivienne’s court. 

“No,” I said, with a chagrinned shake of my head, “Sorry, I really didn’t.” 

“Oh, no! Don’t apologize, please! That’s-” she flapped her long hands delightedly, momentarily without words. 

“That was a beautiful ritual today, Fiona. Thank you,” said Evita, giving Calliope a chance to recover herself. 

“Thank you!” I replied, “It feels like I’m starting to get it. Is that the kind of thing you would have done, for an air ritual?” I asked her, curious. Dance had seemed like such an obvious choice. 

“Not at all,” she said, shaking her head with a bemused smile, “Which is why we each ought to use our own intuition for these kinds of things, rather than following someone else’s rules.” 

“But not when baking shortbread,” I clarified.

“Precisely,” she agreed. 

I thought about that for a second, then said, “I guess one of the tricks is going to be figuring out what sort of magic should be intuitive, and what sort of magic is shortbread.” 

She laughed with a tinkling like so many tiny bells. 

“Yes, I suppose it will be.”

From New World Fae, Volume 2: 'Festival Season' (Coming soon!)

New World Fae, Volume 1: 'Intermagical' Out now!

http://intermagical.com

[intermagical]

Hot Property

“Pythia, were you ever baptized?”

She looked at me critically, then shrugged and answered the question at face value. 

“Sure, when I was younger. Mom went through a real religious phase.” 

“She did? I-” I paused, trying to remember everything I could about Jaah and Pythia’s mother. “I don’t know much, other than the fact she’s a nurse. Your brother doesn’t really say anything about her.” 

“Yeah, they don’t talk much these days. That religious phase had a lot to do with that, actually.” 

“How did it feel?” 

“To be baptized? Oh, I dunno. I was just a kid, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just did what I was told.” She looked off, contemplatively, and then said, “The cheering did feel real good, though.” 

I told her about the church service, and the baptisms, and especially about the girl in the wet dress. Why were all these women choosing to join such a controlling, oppressive organization?

Pythia nodded sagely. “I bet she was real pretty, too, huh?” “She was!” I exclaimed, glad that Pythia seemed to have some insight that I lacked. “She was stunning. Could have been a model. A lot of the girls there were. Unusually good-looking, I mean.” 

“I see it down south all the time,” she said, shaking her head, “Hot property.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“The religious, conservative trap these pretty women like to fall into. All this ‘saved’ stuff, it puts them above everybody. Morally, you know. Spiritually, or so they think. They buy into the idea that some people are just inherently superior to other people. And all the attention they get for their looks will back that up.” 

“Part of that whole white supremacy nonsense, right?” I asked. 

She shrugged, looking grim. “Sure there’s some of that, but I’ve seen plenty of black folks get caught up in the same kind of thought trap. You start thinking that certain people are inherently superior to other people, and there’s a short leap from there to believing that the inferior people deserve to be exploited.” 

A wizened old fae knocked his flagon of beer on the counter, getting Pythia’s attention. 

“Now, I don’t come here for all this politicking, young lady,” he said testily. 

“Then don’t come here, Melvin. It’s my bar tonight, don’t test me. Anyway-” She turned to me and poured me a tall seltzer water as she continued. I didn’t want to interrupt her flow to ask her to put a splash of something harder in it. “Now, in their ideology, women are inferior. We’re property.” I glowered, and also quickly checked left and right to be sure that Zinnia and Azalea were not in earshot. 

“But,” Pythia held up a finger, “They’re hot property. Valuable property. The game is rigged, sure, but they’re guaranteed to win, so why not play!” 

A fae I hadn’t noticed at the end of the bar reached out a long-nailed finger and a scene of barbie doll blondes in high-heeled baseball uniforms hit a home run in the direction of the liquor bottles. Apparently he was enjoying the discussion enough to illustrate it. 

“And of course, winning means getting a powerful, superior man to choose her to be his wife and whisk her off to a superior life, because she is what he’s been told he’s supposed to want.” 

“Supposed to want?” I repeated, making it a question. 

“You know,” she said, opening her eyes wide and pulling a face, “Thin, blonde. They’re not supposed to want me,” she gestured down at her lythe, dark, dancer’s body, “and they’re not supposed to want you,” this time she indicated my round, curvy frame, and winked, “but they do though.” 

“Anyway,” she continued, “it’s not about what he actually wants, or what she actually wants, it’s about possessing her, which will make other men impressed. And she’s been trained to submit to obediently catering to his sexual and domestic needs, for the rest of her lonely, limited life, or, God forbid-” Pythia drew a dramatic sign of the cross on her chest before continuing, and the blonde barbies traded their baseball bats for oven mitts and baby bottles. 

“She gets sick or disabled, or otherwise unhappy and therefore unpleasant enough for him to stray into the arms of the beautiful new young secretary or lonely neighbor, and she won't think twice about stealing our girl’s husband, because that’s her ticket to that same superior life.” 

“Why don’t they warn the young ones?” I asked, “It seems like women could break women out of this cycle, couldn’t they?” 

“Realize that they’ve been flattered into spending their entire life in service to a man who only ever saw them as a commodity? That being hot property wasn’t protection from being used up and discarded? Of course not. They’re in too deep. That would mean admitting to themselves that they’d been had.” 

The blonde barbies had morphed into middle aged women with sharp a-lines and botox, throwing shovel-fulls of dirt over pants-suit clad shoulders, as they dug themselves deeper underground. 

“So that’s why they do it, huh? They buy into a rigged game without realizing it’s rigged against them, too?” 

Pythia nodded. “Or it’s the only game in town. For a lot of women, there aren't a whole lot of choices other than to play.”

*** Excerpt from Festival Season, Book 2 of the New World Fae trilogy. Book 1, Intermagical by TS Davis, is out now

[annabelle--cane]

vampirism poses the question "what if there was a fundamental, horrible, unending well of want in your soul that, if truly satisfied, would lead to great pain for all those you hold closest and, in turn, their absolute and total revilement of you?" and naturally as a person with no problems I don't relate to this in any way at all.

[honourablejester]

Whereas lycanthropy poses the question “what if there was a wild destructive urge buried inside you to shed all cares and social bonds and pretensions of civilisation in one fell swoop, to tear your whole stultifying life apart around yourself in a glorious bout of transformation, and then you woke up and had to deal with the consequences of that, both to yourself and to everyone around you?” and yeah, as a person with no issues whatsoever, naturally cannot relate there either. Heh.

[intermagical]

And on the other hand, if there were an unbearable strangeness to you, that made everyone else you encountered look at you slightly sideways, because of the uncanny valley of your existence, and if you are naturally both much more skilled and much less capable at the various parts of human existence than you were expected to be, leaving people both eerily impressed and also continuously disappointed in your problematically befuddling levels of competence, and, if you were just a little bit allergic to being human, giving you strange aches and pains, and intolerances that no medical professional has ever been able diagnose, leaving you to feel slightly invalid in your own experience of constant inexplicable discomfort... Well, THAT is being fae.