There they stood; a tall lanky man with the usual studious stoop of a scholar and, the Hollowed eyes and pale skin of a man who spent far too many hours indoors; together with a slender woman who seemed wrong, perhaps it was how she stooped over him, hiding a height that must be impossible, or perhaps it was raven black hair the trailed inches from the ground.
The stood still for an eternity, or seconds, nobody was to know.
It was infinity that he saw in her eyes, an infinity that he was afraid that he’d lose himself in, and he did.
He saw nothing but beauty and was lost in the depths of those deep neverending pools that were her eyes.
She knew she had him and nothing could change that. He was an easy target, not an ounce of iron on him and skin that looked to have never seen salt. So many she had taken away this way. The truth was that her eyes were deep hollows into her skull, her cheeks sallow and gaunt. She arched over her prey and all he saw was a goddess, so true was the magic of the fae that this was his entire reality.
She reached in to take his hand, to take him.
PAIN
It burnt to touch. Seared into her palm were the marks of his fingertips and the illusion had fallen and he saw her true face. Realising the danger this face posed, he ran. He ran straight back to the workshop he’d been slaving in for hours already.
She cursed herself at having missed the signs. The cracked hands from the hours of lead fumes, and the iron filings that must surely be hiding in those cracks; the greenish tinge of copper wire streaking his hands; the slightly manic yet always curious look of one who liked to tinker. Too bad really, he would’ve made a good toy.
And so Zero the engineering student met the fae for the very first time, however it surely wouldn’t be the last; so dangerous was the call of curiosity.
x
[Follow-up ask: I feel as though Zero (the student I’m making) would try to see if Jimothy’s teeth conduct electricity, so as to make a robot (or other mechanism) without iron, but then I think that perhaps that may end in disaster if it did work out…. Side note: He’d likely do this because he loves to teach people about how things work, and what better audience than the Gentry who do not understand human magic, with it’s habit of involving fire and iron.[