Advent Story 2012: The Fae World: Willow: On Earth (part 8)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

“I’ve heard of selkies,” George said, looking up at Willow and it was possible, for the first time, to see worry shine in his eyes. “They’re seal people, who can only change from one form to another if they have their seal skin.”

Willow nodded. “The stories are mostly right about the selkies, but they will be under our protection. It’s something we promised them when we arrived here, because you aren’t the only race who tell stories, and all the selkies have heard stories about what humans may do to them if they’re found.” She bit her lip, thinking once more about what George needed to know. “We have three colonies with us, who are all slightly different, but they do all need their skin to change. It’s strange, even for us, because shifting is normally simple magic. For the selkies it’s harder. Their magic…”

Sighing, Willow glanced at Alder. The humans didn’t need to know everything about fae magic, but honesty between her and George seemed the most important thing, even though fae history wasn’t something the fae talked about. Mistakes had been repeated, which was something she hadn’t known about until she came across a book that her father had kept locked in his desk. After sharing the information with Alder they’d decided once they were on Earth the fae would learn about what had happened before. The question shining in her eyes, that she knew he could see, was whether the humans needed to know too. Finally Alder nodded.

Letting out a breath she hadn’t even realised she’d been holding Willow opened her mouth and then closed it again. “This isn’t the first time the fae have moved from one world to another,” she said finally, knowing that no matter what words she used they wouldn’t be the right ones. “Millennia ago we lived on what we only know as our ‘homeworld’ and the fae back then managed to use up the magic that had once filled the core of the world. We know very little about what happened, because it’s not something that the fae have ever talked about, and I only found out recently, after I found a book my father had hidden in his desk. If we’d passed the story on from when we first made the mistake maybe we wouldn’t have made it again, but we didn’t, so…” She shook her head. “I know that we’re going to do our very best not to make the same mistakes a third time, which is part of the reason we choose Earth.”

“Earth has always, from the time of the first fae, been a world that we’ve visited,” Alder said, and Willow turned to look at him, wondering what he was going to say. “When I was looking for a world that we could live on my first thought was a world that was already inhabited, so we would be curtailed in what we could do, because I didn’t want us to make the same mistakes we’d already made before, and Earth was a world that someone told me might be the best plan. The magic we have, Prime Minister, is dangerous. It’s made our lives too easy, so the fae don’t know how to survive without it, and we can’t recreate what we’ve used.”

“What’s special about us?” George asked.

“We believe, although we’re not certain, that humans have some way of gathering any magic that’s been used and turning it from ambient magic into core magic.” Alder smiled. “There’s no way of testing you to find out if that is what you’re race does, or if it’s because of something else on this world, but we think our best hope… that is Willow and I think our best hope… is to work with you to make certain that the fae cannot destroy this world in the same way they destroyed two other worlds.”

“Doors are one of the things that can use up magic quickly and on our old world there were several…” Willow trailed off, not knowing how to describe the different groups of the fae to a human. “Most of the fae who followed me have always been ruled by my family,” Willow said, going back a few steps in an attempt to help George understand, “while others were ruled by other families. There was a group of thirteen families who gathered together and they had an elected monarch. The King or Queen would be elected from the elders of the thirteen families, based often on who was friends with who. We are a strange race and we don’t always get along, which was why we ended up with a number of different…”

The word still eluded her, but Alder continued, “Sects is probably the best word we can use to describe it, but at the same time it’s not the right word. We were all the same race, although we have different specialities when it comes to the magic we can use, and each of the groups was slightly different in some way. Like the thirteen families having an elected monarch rather than a blood monarch.”

“The mer was one group?” George asked.

Willow looked at him and found he was scribbling furiously in his notebook, which made her smile. “They were and they weren’t. I think that they were already on the world when we got there, but they have powers very much like ours, so I think they were fae who had chosen to walk away from the fae. If they’d have a choice I think they would have left our old world behind if they’d had a choice, but moving from one world to another had changed their magic.”

“In the same way the selkies magic changed,” Alder continued. “When they travelled from our home world, wherever that was, to our old world they lost the ability to shapeshift without their skins. I think the magic of all the shifters changed at the time, but the selkies had the most drastic change.”

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.