Kaosubaloo

CW: For some existentialism in this one. I did warn you that it was coming

When I come to, I find I’m lying sprawled on my back, on a dense bed of moss, on the raised, flat rock in the clearing. It’s a little lighter now than before, the world bathed in pre-dawn light.

I suppose the night is nearly over.

After our activities I might have expected to be covered in a cake of dried fluids, but surprisingly my skin is fresh and clean, though my tongue and my hips both have a satisfying ache from overwork.

I also have an odd mark on my left arm. A ruby dragonfly on the lower forearm, with pearlescent wings and a wreath of roots with budding flowers below it, circling my wrist.

I’m certain I hadn’t had the tattoo when I first changed. Perhaps a mark to remember tonight?

It’s a surprisingly happy thought.

I look around and find Lily, taking brief note that she is no longer Mistress Lily to my mind, sitting perched in the small tree that overlooks the clearing, watching me from there. She too is now cleaned of all fluids, including the oil she had coated herself with, though she seems to have developed faint freckles on her arms which catch the light, that I don’t recall from the night. She too is still completely naked, and obviously comfortable to be so.

“Oh Fair Knight, Fae Night; Our Night was most Fair indeed...” She looks away from me, off towards the east, and the not-quite rising sun. “Shine bright, Fae Knight, for the dawn has come.”

I furrow my brow. That doesn’t make sense. “But that doesn’t make sense. Dawn is still an hour to come?”

I have always been a good judge of the sunrise. Even so, I know when it will break the horizon with an unusual certainty.

Lily looks at me with fleeting disappointment. A look that says I should know better than to take her words so literally. I probably should, but they don’t make sense. The obvious meaning is...well, not possible.

“You truly don’t know? No, denial fills your still. Still thine heart and gaze deeply once more.”

I don’t feel panicked, or uncomfortable, or at all off put by Lily’s words. On the contrary, I feel a distinct lack of those things, as though the emotional part of me wholly agrees with them, even though I can’t wrap my mind around the words. I try to force the passion and do a decent job of faking it, though I’m certain my charade does not fool the Fae for a moment. “Don’t be a bore! Speak plainly to me!”

Lily takes a long look at my face, cheeks shaded by the leaves of her tree, before looking away again, almost seeming to pout. After another moment or two of confusion a breeze picks up, and it once more carries whispered words to my ears. Too quiet to be heard by anyone else, and, I now realize, a loophole around the compulsive need to follow a rule of dialect.

“You haven’t even realized. You’ve begun to speak in rhyme.”

I have? I think back to the words I’ve said, but I can’t think of any places where I’ve done so. I wonder whether this loophole also allows a Fae to speak mistruths, though my gut tells me that it does not.

“I don’t understand this time-” My eyes widen.

“Tell me, Amarantha, did you struggle to see at all this night?”

“I’ve always seen well enough without light,” I reply with growing restlessness. “...I thought perhaps you used some trick to help?”

“I did not. I had thought you had some Fae ancestry. A little hint of glamour in your blood.”

I swallow hard. “That’s possible...as mud,” this is maddening. “My parents are not by blood. I was found abandoned and taken in as a baby.”

Lily jumps down from the tree, gliding into place in front of me. I can see dark freckles, some as large as dimes, all along her arms, around her hips and across her face. They almost looked like sunburnt pinpricks and they definitely weren’t there last night.

“It is good that you need not doubt your parent’s love, for it will make this easier.” She gently but firmly grasps my arm and holds it up. I can’t help but notice that the dragonfly is in a different position now, with wings splayed open and tail curving part-way around my arm.

I notice that Lily’s lips do not move with the whispers in my ear. “You are a changeling, left by Fae to be raised among humans, until your glamour cracks and your true self emerges.”

She gently kisses my wrist.

“Crack goes the glamour…” The first part of a stanza, the rest unheard. My thoughts whorl with images and ideas. Not hypnotic ones, but ones which are deeply existential. I had thought that I had found my true self in this body. Perhaps there is some truth to that. No, there certainly is. But even so, has my life truly been a...an egg, to incubate an internal, nascent Fae?

My emotions are still strangely muted. I realize, dully, that part of me has already started to belong to what’s inside.

“It’s never easy. I’m sorry I did not realize sooner. I would have been gentler, if I had.”

Kaosubaloo

And that's the end of part 1!

Okay so first thing's first: I struggled to get the tone to feel quite correct here. I think the emotions on the page paint the right map for where our dear Amarantha is going in her personal journey. However, what they don't do is is properly convey Lily's place in things. It's a bit lazy for me to say this in a comment blurb at the end? But the chapter mostly works and I'd rather not let perfect be the enemy of good.

Or, as the case may be, sit on this for another 2 months as I indecisively try to fix its perceived flaws.

Anyway: Lily. I think she comes off as rather solemn in this chapter. At least she does when interpreted through the lens of Amarantha, which makes this whole chapter feel like even more of a whiplash from the previous chapter than was intended. My intent was to show a Lily who is coping with her own fallibility. She kinda fucked up! And not only does she have the sunburns to prove it, but Amaratha herself is facing the consequences of Lily's inexperience. Unfortunately my writing skills were not quite up to capturing that within this chapter, though hopefully she'll be able to demonstrate those feelings through action in part 2.

Speaking of part 2, I haven't written it yet! My current plan is to start on it just as soon as I've finished the last few chapters of something else I've been working on. I'd love to say that'll be soon. I'd love for it to be soon. But...well, suffice it to say it'll get here eventually.

In the mean time, if you want to read something way more lewd than this story, I recommend Succubus Tail, by FlitterPuff.

And, if you want to check out other things I'm writing, then please give my patreon a quick look~