#feralink

[feralfae]

howdy there folks!

I made my first post on my substack today, a little essay about hearts and how faeries deal with having them (we aren’t quite supposed to)!

In the next week I’ll post more, and eventually they’ll go out as email newsletters when I get a decent amount of folks subscribed to the emails.  I can’t promise any sort of regularity on posting, it’ll be as the faerie content makes its way out of the coiled green mass of my flesh.

Check it out here if you’re interested, and maybe grab me a coffee if you like it!

[feralfae]

What scary firelight stories do the fae tell themselves about other creatures?

When I was smallerthan I am and lived in Faerieland, this is one of the stories they would tellthe little ones, the ones they hadn’t been able to trade away or deftly replace.

              In the Other-world, some ancientfolk would murmur, in the land under the sun, in the land of time and allthings that grow and change and are and are and are, there are monsterswho drew iron about themselves just as we draw glamour.  They wear it like an exo-skeleton and forgefrom it blades to murder and undo the selves of us.  (Iron is organized, it pulls, it tugs,it snags on the fragile signals that constitute our forms and unravels us likea knit sweater.)

              One of these iron-folk was calledSir Holth, and he was rumored to be a great and cruel warrior.  Sir Holth was known among the sunless folk asthe fae-slayer, Sir Faerie-Bane.  For nigh40 years he stalked the forests and the faerie-meadows, the points at which thesunless world touched his.  He guardedthese gates and took every faerie life that crossed with his iron blade.

              At that point, one of thewithered crones in the corner would pipe up and say some close friend oranother had been killed by this Sir Holth, or Renfidge, or whichever name theteller bestowed for the evening.

              Sir Holth (or Renfidge, orwhomever) ultimately died at the gate, his death foretold by a banshee, whom herather rudely murdered shortly before. But as he had died so near a faerie gate, and as his soul was full of bloodyiron and leaden hate, his spirit lingered. They say, and the teller would pause, looking around at the young folkin their audience, taking in, while they still had the room’s attention, thewide-eyes and the knowing, narrowing ones, they say that Sir Holth’s spiritslipped in through the faerie gate, still full of iron and hate.  They say his spirit has a bloody blade, thatthe phantom iron of it is still enough to kill a faerie if he gets enoughstrikes in.

              Sir Holth haunts the woods, (orthe beaches, or the meadows) the teller says, so beware! Keep bloodstone on yourperson, my good neighbors, for you never know when the fae-slayer might sneakup on you!

[feralfae]

They call it the stuffing-sickness.  It is what happens when the sun gets inside of you and starts to make you one of her creatures.  It’s what happens when the world gets stuck inside the prism of your body, it’s what happens when you start to have a body after all.  I never called it that, not for many, many decades.  Sun-sickness, I might term it, if I were to call it anything at all.

              I was one of the first to come here, to the sunlight lands, to the place of the real and the solid.  It wasn’t a choice, not really.  They murdered the Spring Queen.  They murdered my lover and sat on the throne scorpion-smiling.  I would have killed them if I had stayed, and they would have had me un-made, ripped free of my self, my being restored to the ground.  I worked so, so very hard to claw my way to selfhood, and I would not have it torn from me.  I asked instead if I could scout in the sunlight lands for a while, and wisely the scorpion-ruler humored me.

              When I came here, my first sight was the sun, and I was in love, despite having no heart.  I felt the seed of it then starting to unfurl like an alder sapling in the spot I called my chest, starting to quaver in the light of this brilliant, all-consuming star. The stuffing-sickness doesn’t always begin with a heart, I must mention.  For some, it begins with hands, with blood-vessels, with lungs or eyes or bones.  My illness started with my heart.  Although I knew I should, I could not pull it out of me while that beautiful light was shining.  And so it grew and grew and grew, and all the while the rest of me was growing too, the world winding like vines up my legs.

              In the first new-moon-dark I found, quite suddenly, that I could not change my form as I was wont to do.  Free at last of the captivating sun I tore and tore and ate and ate and ate until I was nothing but Name again.  I didn’t expect to, but I felt the loss of my flesh-pieces as keenly as I would a missing scrap of Name.  I ate them and made them part of my body once again, but it still didn’t soothe me, and I woke up bone-aching in the sunlight with a sense of shame that had no place in a faerie’s mind.

              I wandered far, and far, and far, until I found a forest unfamiliar and dense, like home.  My body had been growing, building itself up bit by twining bit, and I let it do so, even when I woke up and the moon was gone and I knew I could, I knew I ought to strip myself down to my Name and nothing else.  The heart was the only thing I could not bear to keep, because it pounded an itch-rhythm in my chest if I let it grow too strong.

              I tried to go home, once.  Faerie gnawed at me and for the first time its teeth in the meat of me was not comforting. I fled to the sunlight lands, to the star-place, to my growing heart.

[feralfae]

new substack post!

heya its an apparently weekly essay from your local exiled feral faerie! this one is about the stuffing-sickness, a peculiar condition that arises from remaining in the human world of flesh and time and matter for too long

read it here, and if you like, perhaps grab me a coffee!

[feralfae]

When I was ten, I choked on a peach pit.  It slipped into my windpipe and settled in my left lung.  None of the doctors could tell why I didn’t breathe right.  None of them believed me when I said the peach tree was growing.

         “Plants need soil, sweetie,” the pediatrician told me.

         No they don’t, I thought.  When I was ten, I believed that every time you swallowed water wrong it went into your lungs and stayed there.  I thought the lungs were a little like the womb, slowly filling up with liquid.  The perfect place for something to grow.

         It’s okay that they didn’t believe me.  People still don’t believe me.  But when I was ten and I told the doctors a peach tree was growing in my left lung, I was wrong.  A peach tree wasn’t growing in my lung.  I had felt the moment the pit cracked, had felt something splash into the pool of water at the bottom of my breath.  I felt the soft brush of something on my alveoli.  Sometimes a sharp pinch, I thought it leaves, spreading branches.

         I thought it was a tree until I was twenty and the creature that hatched from the peach pit clawed its way out of the womb of my lung.  It didn’t show up on the MRI, whatever it was.  But the big hole in my lung did.  The woman who did the stitching said she had never seen a tear like that before.  I liked her.  She told me after the surgery that, in the throes of the anesthetic, I had told her faerie stories.  We went out for lunch a couple of times.  The creature that hatched from the peach pit sat on my solar plexus and snapped at my heart through my ribcage.

         It gave up on that eventually and decided the meat of my leg was more interesting.  It gnawed through the ball at the crown of my right femur and made a nest there.  I carved my cane myself.  The top of it I made look like the creature’s head, or how I imagined its head looked.  Eyes like a cat, face like a bird.  Sharp spines.  The palm of my hand smothered that face, day after day.  It couldn’t know I had done this, but each time its careless claws sliced through a ligament or tendon it felt like retribution.

         When I was thirty it was big enough to dismantle my ribs.  It dove past the heart and burrowed into my long-abused left lung.  I swallowed water until I felt like I was drowning.  It scrabbled at the sides of my ribs, tried to find purchase on my bronchioles.  It drowned.  I laughed, and red water came bubbling out of my mouth.  I laughed as I spit up its body, as I hunched over the slop sink letting my lung drain all the way dry.

for @tenderbeasts’ monster pack prompts; 4. Burrowing

[feralfae]

new substack post!

some nights ago i dreamed of my death and the aftermath, and wrote about it.  all strange things are faerie things if you make it gold and glamorous.

read The Afterward here!

[feralfae]

“Who are you, this time?” her lover asks, and she throws her head back laughing, lifts her lover’s hand, presses slightly parted lips to the place where the heel of their palm meets the line of their wrist.

         “Angrboda,” she says.  She has been Medusa, Echidna, Geryon, the Minotaur, the Banshee, Mab.

         “Of course, my love.”  Her lover bows, the long sweep of their hair brushing the floor, melding into the soft fur of the rugs.  They have never seen her without a monster’s name, and she loves them for that.

         “Who are you tonight?”  she asks.  Between the two of them, there’s nary a name they haven’t heard.

         “Maasim.  The wrist of Hercules.”  Their lover looks at them fondly as the starlight makes fissures in their skin.

         They burn her, they always do, but when another star has risen the monster-name is dropped, another slid like a shift into its place.  Their skin heals in the shadow of sunlight and all is made whole again.  In the dark of un-being, Angrboda is re-made.  As long as she and the star are in love, there might be some use of it, in future days.

for @tenderbeasts’ monster pack prompts; 3. The woman clothed in monsters

[feralfae]

“Oren!”  He runs to the great stag, wraps his arms around the animal’s neck.  The stag’s body is leaking, flowers and seeds pouring from the gashes along his side.  Around them, the woods are on fire.  Oren sighs, turns his head to breathe into the boy’s hair.

         “I am going to die,” the great stag says.  “Climb on my back.  I will make you safe before I fall.”

         The boy tangles his fingers in the great stag’s fur.  He shakes his head.  Sobs.  A gentle sunflower grows up underneath him, vaulting him gently onto Oren’s back.  He rests there limply.  The wounds on Oren’s side tear further.  The gush of wildflowers is silent.  It leaves a trail like blood, all roses and red poppies, as they tear through the flaming wood.

         People with torches are waiting at the edge of the forest.  The great stag skids to a halt, slides the unconscious boy gently off his back.  The men raise their crossbows.  The boy slips into wakefulness at the dull thud of the first bolt.  He cries, and someone holds him back, presses his face into a throng of skirts, hushes him softly.  The great stag stands still.  Flowers surround him, a grounded, bloody halo.  Green tendrils shove the bolts from his shuddering body.  When there are no more bolts, the great stag takes a knee, rises again.  He looks sadly into the eyes of the gathered people.  Blinks. Nods. Turns.  Leaps over a burning branch.  Is gone.

         The forest grows back twice as beautiful.  In the spring, a young man’s daughter spots the great doe.  “I am going to die,” the doe tells her, sweetly.

         “Why?” she asks.

         “Sometimes the woods must be burned.”

for @tenderbeasts’ monster pack prompts; 2. Forgiven