Blood

The Wood is dark and beautiful and dangerous, filled with everything from grass snakes to flowers lined with teeth instead of petals.

The trees themselves are alive in a way different than any trees I’ve really seen in my life, silver bark racing upwards towards the sky and with leaves as fair as silk. And they have eyes. The trees are sentient, seeing all and telling it to their queen as she passes. Squirrels race up the trunks, only to be battered away by the roaming branches.

The queen laughs at the antics of her subjects, but doesn’t do anything to intervene.

All around are gaps of light, gifts from my world to the world beneath. The sun breaks create a grey twilight, present in both night and day, which are one and the same in this foreign light.

Shadowed in the strange light until you almost step on them are the flowers: blue and red, fat and thin, short and tall, sharp and round. The strangest are those that seem so normal until they sprout violet eyes or a mouth of teeth armed with song as beautiful as any I’ve ever heard. Some of the flowers and roots and trees follow after Maeve, whispering a request or sputtering the honour of her visit. Some of them bite at my arms as I walk past, and when they do, Maeve murmurs a name in a language forgotten by most, and the little faerie will combust in a cloud of smoke and petals.

The first time she did I had asked why in a little voice that I hadn’t expected her to hear, so when she had replied I thought she was going to make me explode as well, although I’m not quite sure why.

The faerie queen had frowned as though confused and said that there was no other way to rule the Wood. But she hadn’t called it that, the Wood I mean, she’d called it something in her language—our language: Sro Yoren. And although I know what she was saying, I have no idea what she said at the same time, which I guess doesn’t make sense. I guess the words made sense to me, but they also don’t work with any English I know, so it doesn’t…go together? I don’t know. I’m sorry.

Of course, a little part of me became instantly terrified, but the vast majority of my being is hyper-aware with excitement.

“You have a restless mind, my son,” says Maeve as she stops and turns to me with a kind smile.

I stop walking and shrug at the strange world around me. It’s crazy that you can be to a place so many times in your dreams and then still find it so wondrous in the reality, if you can call the world of the fey reality.

Maeve’s laughter is much wickeder than it had been. “You’ll see we are a lot more real than your Sakrot.”

“Sakrot?” I test the word, and it rolls off my tongue agreeably, but I don’t think I say it quite right.

The queen laughs again, except it carries much more joy. Two or three lilies float from the tree branches above, drifting slowly until they reach my mother’s ivory skin. There they change, making me jump.The flowers sprout heads and limbs as though it was completely natural and the flowers were always just a faerie skirt.

“Oh, my sweet son, I forget myself. You know so little of our world, only what the damnable tell you. The Sakrot are the beings of the other world, damn them to hell.” Maeve laughs wickedly. “Not you of course, you are my blood.”

I try to be courteous as I don’t fancy becoming a pile of ash, but the remnants of that clear alcohol has left my tongue loose. “If the Sakrot are so vile, then why birth one of their children?”

“Our words suit you, my son. That is what you are, my son. Not the blood of man.”

The half-light gives way to an unearthly glow, illuminating a valley within the Wood. We must have walked a mile at the least, likely more. The valley is one of hills and blue flowers dipped in crimson, waving in a wind that isn’t there.

“But, my father—”

The faerie queen smiles, “Is of the old blood. We were once one, you know, men and Sro.”

“The fey?” I ask.

“Yes, that is what you would know us by.” She says a little sadly. “Here,” Maeve makes a wide gesture towards the field of flowers beneath us. “This is the land of our dead.”

I frown slightly. We, as in humans, don’t bury our dead. Everyone is burnt when they die. It’s supposed to be something about needing your body in heaven, which I think is the opposite of Mainlander beliefs.

“The flowers sprout whenever a Sro or Sarkot dies, the Sarkot are those of the old blood.” My mother smiles wryly. “You have caused a fair number of flowers to sprout, my son.”

I wonder as my heart rate increases what word would destroy me. It couldn’t be Mallory Fionn because I’ve been called that more times than I can count, meaning that isn’t my true name. Which makes me kind of upset, mainly because Mallory is one of the cruelest names I’ve ever heard. It’d be nice enough on a girl, but unless girls have a fairly different anatomy than it appears they do, I am definitely not one.

“Have no fear, child. It is not against the laws of this world to defend what is yours, whether it be your life or a calf’s. And it wasn’t my choice to give you the name you go by.”

I’d rather not discuss my habit of destroying fey, or my name, so I change the subject to something of more interest, to me anyway.“You mentioned men and f-Sro being one. What happened?”

I start as Maeve takes my hand and pulls me towards the valley of dead sidhe. “Many years ago, long before my life began, there was no difference between a man and a Sro we were one people. We were the Kro, a name forgotten by the Sakrot. The Kro worshipped old gods, the gods that rule the sea. This island was created as a place of worship, and this wood the home of the spirits. The Kro were the beings placed here to tend the forest, shaped of the rocks and fed with salt water. For years, the Kro tended the forest shrine, keeping to the laws placed by the sea gods.

“This was during the black age, before the dawn of men. Men came into the world by the will of the new gods, those who created the seven continents and those that dwell upon them. The new gods sent a messenger, who you now know as Christ. You don’t believe in the whole Holy Spirit thing, do you?”

It takes me a minute to realize Maeve had asked a question, I had been dreaming of a Faer ruled by the sea, with forest shrines instead of the ugly stone church. “No.”

“Good,” says my mother.

She lets go of my hand in the middle of the valley, where a vast well sits.

The well has to be one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen. The structure itself is almost as tall as I am, built of stones the colour of an afternoon shadow. Embedded in the stone are vines the colour of rust, laced with thorns as long as one of my fingers. Around the edge are symbols shining silver. Ebony steps lead to the mouth of the well, and it calls to me in a voice I know better than my own.

“Go to it if it would please you.”

I take a step forward and then another until I’m ascending the wooden steps.

The well emits heat like a living thing, like the comfortable warmness of having a sleeping calf beside you, but not quite the same. The closer I get the more comforting the warmth is. The whispering grows clearer as well, the voice is sweeter than it’s ever been before, bearing a striking resemblance to a voice I can’t place, a voice from my world.

Hello, Mallory, she says.

“Hello.”

I’m glad you’ve come to see me, so few remember me now. Come closer, if you wish.

I take a step up to the mouth of the well and look down.

A sea of colours fills the well, ones with names and many more without. The colours and lights dance together majestically, creating a thousand different stories of the past and present and future. A man I recognise from the church murals looks down upon a crowd of beings, preaching the ways of the “Lord”.Half the beings break off from their kin, following after the man shrouded in light. They seem to be oblivious to the red in his eyes, or the burns on his skin.

The scene changes to one of industrialization, and boats and shotguns. And then it’s a Sro girl dancing before a great fire, and then the same girl being burned, her face twisted in torment.

Do you know who I am, Mallory Fionn?

“You’re a sea god,” I say, because it’s the obvious truth.

That’s what I am, not who.

I hesitate. “I don’t know you’re name.”

It seems as though the god of the sea laughs, I am without a name, for when I came into this world, there was no one to name me.

“Do you want a name?” I ask. It seems the polite thing to do.

Do you offer to name me, Mallory Fionn?

“If that would please you,” I reply, unsure what I could be getting myself into.

The god of the sea laughs again. Very well, I accept. What do you choose to name your god, Mallory Fionn? she asks.

I hesitate again. “Is…Is there a consequence for choosing wrong.”

Yes.

The images in the well continue to change, from a marriage in the black between a Devil and a human, to a boy standing before a well being dragged in by an oddly human arm.

I glance around at the silver symbols around the sill of the well, unsure of what they mean. One is shaped like an O, while another is three squiggly lines, reminding me of waves. There’s something like an X as well, but it’s rounded, and another like a rough drawing of a lily flower.

I smile because although the symbols don’t really relate to what I think of, it seems right anyway. “Your name is Death.”

The sea god laughs again. I’ve gone by it before. You are unlike those who have come before you.

Back inside the well, faces swim past, none of which I recognize. They all appear to be my age or younger, each with their own deformity. One boy’s ears are as pointed as an arrow, while a girl appeared to have tree bark for skin.

“Half children?” I ask.

Yes, the ones who failed.

I glance away from the well for an instant, just long enough to see the Sro queen’s smile.

“So I passed your test?”

Yes, Mallory Fionn.

“Can I ask a question, then?”

If it would please you, says Death. It’s hard to think of Death as a being though. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe Death is the well, and when I die, I’ll just become another one of the pictures.

“What am I?”

The god of the sea laughs, and this time I hear it with my ears, not just inside my head. The whole island seems to shake for only an instant, and then the lights of the well stir.

From the well, a head emerges, but not one that is human.

A being with skin as blue as the sky and eyes shining like rubies stares up at me. “You are not a what,” says Death in a voice that fills the whole world with a song richer than any I could ever create. “You are a who, Mallory Fionn, and it would do you well to remember that.”

The blue mouth smiles, showing teeth like a shark’s, and then vanishes back in the pool of colour and light.

I take step backwards down the wooden stairs, and another and another until I find myself back beside my mother.

When she speaks, Maeve sounds awed. “You woke a sea god, my son.”

I turn to the queen of the Wood and say, “I think I should probably get home now.”

My head is spinning like a wheel.

Maeve looks disappointed. In a low voice she says something I don’t understand, and then there is splitting pain before everything goes completely black.