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 Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 2:19 pm
“Don’t you misbehave, now,” she told it, placing it by the fire in a cocoon of blankets. She was suddenly struck by how stupid this was, having her egg in the middle of the room when Ada would soon be not twenty feet away in the kitchen. She didn’t know how Ada would react to stumble across it—especially since everyone in the town had been evacuated but weeks ago due to a Succubus-related threat. Even if she didn’t panic, Ada was not a very good secret-keeper. She would never intentionally tell, but she was a simple girl, and untoward things were wont to slip from her lips.
It had happened but two years ago, in the hottest days of summer. Ada’s older sister had recently come of age and, in place of marriage, had taken a lover, a wealthy merchant who passed through the town quite often, staying for the summer. He was distinguished, charming, of good breeding, and he would have made a perfectly acceptable paramour were it not for the fact that Isidore had no intention of marrying him, and that he himself was married.
Ada had stumbled across the pair caressing and whispering to each other in the farthest field of the country property, arms gently wrapped about each other, so engrossed that Ada could have quietly slipped away without them noticing. That was not her way, however, and her gasping and sputtering quickly caught their attention.
Isidore had soothed her, calmly, and made it all into a game for Ada to play with them—she would keep their secret, and help them to meet, and in exchange Ada would want for no small luxuries and, more importantly, Isidore would sometimes sneak a conspiratorial wink over the dinner table. Being included in a ruse, in covert activities, was an irresistible lure to Ada.
Things had gone well for the rest of the summer, when Isidore’s merchant left to do his business, and Isidore sat by herself in the field. Family and friends commented on her solemn eyes and permanent frown, and always asked Ada what she thought was wrong. Ada was usually very careful to keep her expression worried and voice her befuddlement, but while engaged in some interesting diversion, she paid little attention to flow of a conversation, until by and bye she found herself commenting that her sister’s ailment was one of the heart—she was missing her beau.
Poor Ada was relentlessly assailed with inquiries and admonitions until she offered up the name of Isidore’s man. The young girl had confessed the story to Breizh one year after the event, sobbing over tea. Isidore had been sent away, and on the anniversary of her unwitting treachery, Ada was feeling wretched. Breizh had asked where Isidore was sent, but Ada had only been able to repeat what her grandmother had told her: Isidore had been sent to a place where bad girls got straightened out right quick.
Breizh sighed, and suddenly had an idea. She gathered more water from her small well, and dipped a few items of clothing in them, throwing them in a bunch by the fire. She unwrapped the egg and then haphazardly covered it again, wetting parts of the cloth that were not touching the winged shell. Anyone who caught a glance into the room would see only a pile, and if Ada asked after it, she would claim that the items had gotten filthy in an ill-advised bout of dusting and couldn’t wait till afternoon for a washing.
When Ada came by, bearing a pail of milk, Breizh escorted her into the kitchen, offering her a cup of tea.
Ada wrinkled her nose. “Not a drop, Miss Muireall, though—” she paused, clutching her cloak closer. “Can you make somethin’ warm? It’s awful chilly out.”
Breizh nodded and poured a cup of hot water, flavoring it with one of her last remaining lemons. Ada didn’t care for it much more than she did for the tea, but it was bearable, and Ada was very cold. She gripped it tightly in her hands and sipped, and more a moment there was no more sound than the gentle roaring in the hearth.
Ada set down the cup.
“Miss Muireall—can we go sit by the fire?”
Breizh was very, very glad that she had well-disguised the egg. She was tempted to tell the girl no all the same, but one look at her scrunched face and rapidly blinking eyes made up her mind. She carefully pushed the bundle to the side, and brought Ada to sit down, cup in hand. They stayed that way for a while, drinking their respective brews and enjoying the warmth before they both had to go about their days.
But Ada wasn’t staring at the fire anymore.
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 2:20 pm
“Miss Muireall,” she said, eying the pile of laundry with narrowed, curious eyes, “why are your clothes moving?”
Startled, Breizh said, “I’m sorry?”
“Your clothes—they’re—”
Panicked, Breizh turned to the bunch on the floor—it was not softly trembling, like it had been before, but shaking violently, the blanket heaving to and fro.
“Ada—you need to go home now.”
“Miss Muireall—”
“Now, Ada.”
Breizh was very rarely short with Ada. The girl blinked in surprise and stood up, and Breizh began to push her toward the door.
“But, Miss Muireall—”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Ada.”
Breizh maneuvered the girl toward the door, hearing in the background a furious cracking, and Ada tried to push back to see what was happening—Breizh placed herself in the girl’s line of sight and shoved her forward, out the back door.
She raced back to the living room, heart beating painfully against her breast. She knelt by the pile of clothes, sifted through it, and—nothing. Nothing but fragments of egg caught in a sleeve, or flung across the room. The little hatchling was gone.
Oh gods oh gods oh—
She scoured her small house, ransacking the seating room, the kitchen, her bedroom, before finally turning to the cellar. She threw open the door and nearly flew down the ladder, landing unsteadily and hard on the dirt floor.
No gaslight. She had forgotten it upstairs. Into the dim room, she said, loudly, uncertainly: “Honey?”
Something moved. From the small cove at the end of the cellar, there was a rustling, as of cloth. It was then that Breizh remembered that the blanket had been missing from the heap of clothes by the fireplace.
“Honey, wait here; I’ll be right back.” She wanted to see it, but not startle it; she made her way up the ladder and came back with a light. She took a few steps toward the little inlet, and the darkness was cast into the corners of the cellar.
She could still hardly see the little Succubus. She had the dark blanket pulled about her, up over her head, so all that Breizh could make out were a pair of large, bright blue eyes, staring up at her with odd serenity and curiosity.
Seeing that the tiny girl didn’t shrink away as she approached, Breizh closed the gap between them, sinking down to her knees and smiling in as welcoming a manner as she could. It wasn’t difficult.
She extended her hand, hoping to pull the blanket down to get a better look at her hatchling. A short, pale arm shot out of the blanket, tiny hand gripping a couple of her fingers.
“Mine,” she said, happily.
“Yes,” said Breizh, as though in a trance. She grinned. “Yours. Welcome to your new home.”
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Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 1:11 pm
Breizh had dealt with small children before—they were short-tempered, beastly little creatures with little to no ability to concentrate and an insatiable desire for attention. Most adults left their youngest children in the care of others when they gathered to listen to her stories, but often enough there were a few who had to take their spawn with them.
The older ones were fine; the littlest fussed and wailed until their embarrassed parents smacked them into submission or dragged them away. As far as small children were concerned, Breizh was long on agitation and short on patience, something the women of her acquaintance said would pass when she had children of her own.
But the little Succubus wasn’t like that at all.
She sat, quietly, on the little blanket-mound in the cellar, staring up at her with a smile; watchful eyes followed her every move. Breizh wanted to get her a stool to sit on; she had none for the cellar because she was tall enough to reach even her highest shelves. Then she wanted to move all her sleeping affects from the bedroom to the little cove down here—it was getting close enough to the time of the year when she did that anyway, and she didn’t like the idea of the little girl spending all night in the cellar by herself.
“Would you like to help me move some things down here?”
The little girl tilted her head to the side, blinking rapidly. She hadn’t said a word after the initial joyful proclamation of “Mine,” and Breizh was finding it a little unnerving. The girl was the size of a toddler, and every toddler she had ever encountered was either sleeping or shrieking.
“More blankets,” she said, trying to explain. “Pillows. We’ll build a little nest down here, you see? Where we can sleep. Does that sound good to you?”
The girl’s smile widened; she nodded and crawled off the blankets, getting to her feet and waddling over to Breizh. She lifted her arms expectantly. Breizh’s eyes flickered, momentarily, to the small, dark blue wings that fluttered on the child’s upper back—they looked too tiny to be of use in actual flight, and Breizh reached down to pick her up.
There would be no way to pass the little girl off as a human child. In addition to the wings, two small horns curled about her head, sitting atop hair that was no human color. Pale blue, like the clearest of water, streaked sporadically with an even lighter blue that looked almost white. The only way to disguise her would be to make her appear as Breizh had originally found her—covered in blankets, but for her face.
Girl sitting still in her arms, Breizh picked up the discarded blanket and wrapped the girl up, and cautiously went up the ladder and into the seating room. She drew the curtains over her few windows in the house—she lived in a quiet enough part of the village, and most people would be occupied going about their own business, but she didn’t want to chance anyone seeing something they shouldn’t—and went to the bedroom, setting the girl down.
She toddled to the bed immediately, grabbing the coverlet and yanking it down, pulling and pulling until it pooled around her on the floor. She began to tug it away, past Breizh and out the door, and Breizh hurriedly scooped up the under-blankets and pillows and followed.
The girl had stopped at the cellar-door, depositing the blankets and pulling the door open by the attached circlet. She shoved the blankets down, and turned again to Breizh, arms out-stretched. Breizh threw her own cargo down to the cellar floor and picked up the girl, carrying her back down.
“When I’m not around,” said Breizh, moving everything to the little sleeping-cave while the girl dragged a pillow, “I want you to stay down here. I’ll—find you things to play with, get some more lights, but—when I’m doing my work; it’s not safe for you to be anywhere else in the house. You understand?”
The girl stared up at her. Breizh imagined, then, that she might be a little bit intimidating—she’d had small children call her a witch before. They were made wary, she supposed, by her height; by her thick, furiously curling mass of dark hair; by her pale, too-wide eyes.
But the girl didn’t seem afraid. Merely watchful.
She nodded.
“Very good,” said Breizh, reaching down and patting her on the head. The girl grinned and nuzzled into her touch, like a cat. “I suppose I’m going to have to call you something, eh?”
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Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 6:53 pm
The girl continued nuzzling into her hand. When Breizh sat completely down, she crawled into her lap. Breizh fished her memory for some name, casting her mind back through her stories, through the scores of heroines who’d triumphed over evil, or had succumbed to it.
She decided on two. Morwen, a goddess of a far-off land, whose beauty had inspired men from all over the world to seek her hand; having little want of a husband, however, particularly the loathsome men who journeyed her way, she had cast them all into the depths of the ocean surrounding her castle and let them drown.
The hero of the tale, Caerwyn, spent fifteen years in search of her island dwelling, only to be rebuffed. He tried for three days to win her love, but when he eventually proved himself to be no more worthy than the others, he was also sent to a watery grave. His body drifted over the waves and back to his own shore. It sparked a war, of course—everything sparked a war in stories from that area—since Caerwyn was a prince, and his people thought that a neighboring territory had murdered him. And while they slaughtered each other, Morwen rested content on her island, with her nymphs, till the end of time, no longer pestered by suitors.
Noelani, in a tale slightly more recent and from another area entirely, had been cursed by a witch to wander forever through a misty labyrinth, cold and alone. The witch sent all manner of beasts, both earthly and otherworldly, to pursue her through the endless maze, but Noelani was clever and in turn killed each of them. Eventually the witch sent a human warrior, famed throughout the land, to slay her—the witch, in the guise of a beautiful maiden, had told him that a foul, demonic creature roamed the labyrinth, and that she would be most obliged if he would kill it.
He didn’t know, as he followed the racing footsteps through the blinding mist, that he was chasing his childhood love; she didn’t know, as she fled, that she was conniving to kill the man to whom she had long ago promised her heart. She did outwit him, eventually, and dashed his head against a stone; the mist cleared, then, and revealed the face of the man she killed. In despair, she drew the sword that he had planned to use against her and drove it through her own heart.
Breizh liked the contrast of twisted triumph and bleak tragedy, and Noelani Morwen had a pleasant ring to it. She was fond, especially, of the fact that the words that formed ‘Morwen’ meant ‘blessed sea’, for the little girl’s blue coloring reminded her of the ocean.
And, come to think of it, ‘Noelani’ meant something like ‘heavenly mist.’
“The Fates have decided,” Breizh told her tiny companion. “Your name is Noelani Morwen.”
The girl seemed to accept it—she made no comment against it, at any rate, as Breizh moved her out of her lap and pulled the bedding into the sleep-cavern. She merely watched.
“But,” Breizh continued, “that might be a bit of a mouthful for you, so why don’t we just call you Lani for short?”
“Lani,” the girl repeated, finally responding.
Breizh smiled. “Yes. Now, I have to finish my chores, then go out to entertain some children and purchase a few items at the market.”
“And Lani stays here.”
She nodded. “Lani stays here. Where it’s safe. I’ll be sure to bring you back some toys, as many and as often as I can, so you won’t grow bored.”
Lani crawled into the bed, and Breizh set the lamp down near her. She felt a twist of guilt at leaving her down in the cellar for hours, alone—it was like locking up a prisoner who had done no crime, and Breizh didn’t like it. The fact that Lani seemed to quietly accept it made it worse, somehow.
So she said, perhaps to soothe herself more than the child, “I’ll try to be here more, from now on. I don’t do my shaping every day, and…we can go hunting, you know. Get out of the house. I…” She reached down, kissing Lani on the top on the head. “I’ll be back in a while.”
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