Chapter 10

(Author's note: This chapter ran on a LOT longer than I was figuring it would. Puck is long winded, he obviously had a lot to say. It's hastily proofread, but generally the grammar mistakes you'll see are just due to Puck's speech patterns. Sorry it was so late going up, either the next chapter or a bonus story will be forthcoming within a few hours!)

Nobody really knows where the faeries came from. They don’t age and die like humans, so that could explain why there’s no fossil record of them on Earth. Then again, for all I know, they really just sprang up out of the innate magic of the Earth, like the legends say. But however they came about, they were the furst of us. The general consensus is that the elves came next, most likely through the natural process of evolution. Then came us sprites, although whether through evolution or magical tinkering, I really couldn’t say. It was pretty common for the faeries to use magic for genetic experimentation; they made a hobby out of testing the bounds of their magical abilities (how could you think the platypus was anything but a genetic experiment?). It’s pretty certain there was some such experimentation involved in the creation of the sidhe, but all the faeries I ever met in my lifetime were either too young to remember those early days, or so old that they’d forgotten them. I do know that they passed along their penchant for fiddling with other species’ natural development down to the rest of us, because the elves have been known to do the same sorts of things, and the sprites as well, although most of the time we have to rely on more scientific methods. Between us three of the oldest feykinds, the elves got the lion’s share of the magic, and it wasn’t too long after their creation that things like trolls and unicorns and pixies were running around as well. The sidhe, on the other hand, were never too big on messing with the natural order of things. Not that I blame them, really, but that’s another story altogether.

For more centuries than I’m old enough to recall, the fey creatures lived in relative peace with humanity. To some of them, we were gods and goddesses, especially in the beginning. To others we were just “spirits”, sometimes good, sometimes evil, and to a very rare few, we were just people, living alongside them. There were the odd cases where some nut would go off and do something rotten, of course, like enslave an entire human village or the like, but overall we had a nice mutual respect thing going on.

Unfortunately, as humanity started to grow and spread, they started thinking of the Earth as their domain, and they were less and less intent on sharing. We didn’t help matters much, either, because there was an overall tendency to keep to ourselves, and “leave the humans to their own business”. I guess we thought of ourselves as above them, somehow, and that definitely didn’t pan out to our benefit; the humans were spreading out, and we were drawing back, but overall things were still generally peaceful.

And then Christianity came along.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Christianity itself. As religions go, it’s one of the nicer ones, full of good ideas. Love thy neighbor, thou shall not commit murder…those are all good things. And there were Christians long before the problems started arising; a lot of people claim that the shit started to hit the fan when Christianity started to spread, like your healer buddy Tengu, and wanted to band together to wipe it out. But from what I saw…and I’m pretty observant…it seems to me that the real trouble with Christianity started when the government got ahold of it.

Well, our folk, unlike the humans, never really had any kind of central leadership. I guess because we tended to stick to smaller, individual settlements that invariably developed their own ideas on what leadership should mean. I was living in Wales at the time things started to go sour, making a merry hell out of the farmers’ lives and bringing a smile to the faces of their wives and daughters….I didn’t have it so bad, really, compared to some…when I ran into a young man traveling through named Oberon.

He was a nice enough young man, good looking, in a blond haired, Germanic sort of way. He was well spoken, and polite, and obviously well educated, but when he told me about the outrageous mission he’d set down for himself, I laughed until I cried: he wanted to unite all of the feykinds under one rule, and make himself our High King over everything.

Now, that might not seem like such a crazy idea to you, but once you get to know just how diverse our folk are, and how resistant some of them are to outside rule, or change of any kind, you’ll understand why I was laughing for the rest of the night. I thought he was crazy. But it got me to thinking….why not? Even though we might all resist a central rule to our dying breath, there was no denying that it was a big part of what made the humans so powerful a force. They weren’t all under the same rule, granted, but their kingdoms were getting bigger and bigger, with one kingdom often encompassing several continents. The humans had safety and power in numbers, and the Pope was none too kindly disposed towards our kind. We were a threat to his power, a threat to the scope of Christianity. The Inquisitions hadn’t started up in earnest yet, but we had gone from spirits and deities to demons and shades in the blink of an eye from the time of the appointment of the first Pope, and I figured that maybe if we could stick together, we could make it too much trouble to be worth it for the Church to keep hunting us down.

So I packed up my stuff and hurried to catch up to Oberon, and the rest is history. Literally, you can read it in our history books. I might have one stashed under my bed, I’ll look around for you when we land.

Now, Oberon wasn’t stupid, for being a young brat and all. He was passionate about his mission, and he believed wholeheartedly in what he’d set out to do, and he’d already found himself a pretty good base of support in the common folk. But bless him, he didn’t have a politic bone in his body; that was where I came in. With me providing the occasional insightful suggestion, it didn’t take long before he’d gained control of of all of Britain, and Wales was shaping up to go the same route pretty nicely. His army was big enough, by that time, that those few that didn’t go along willingly didn’t really put up much resistance. It might sound a little barbaric in this day and age, but that was how the world ran in those days. Soon, though, it came to be obvious that we were going to have to move along to the rest of Europe if we wanted to keep our momentum going…so I did something that I’ve been kicking myself for ever since.

I suggested that Oberon get married.

See, the only real threat to our plan was, ironically, the person who’d originally given Oberon his inspiration. Her name was Danu, although in Britain she’d somehow gotten to be known as Titania, and no leader among our kind yet, up until now, had rivaled her scope of power. No one really knew where she came from, but she’d risen to power in Ireland some centuries beforehand; she ruled Ireland, Scotland, a good chunk of Spain, and that last, niggling bit of Wales that had been giving us trouble. They said her second in command was a psychotic madman who made a hobby out of butchering the inhabitants of monasteries and nunneries, and hated Christianity with a fanatical passion; her army could sweep through a country in a matter of days and have it under her thumb, if she so chose, and they claimed that her personal army, a clan of sidhe called the Wild Hunt, were a band of unnatural berserkers who could fight for three days on no food or sleep. Just the idea of going up against them sent some of our more seasoned soldiers into a panic.

That was a tough act to follow. So I took a trip to Ireland to meet with her second in command in person, and talk to him about an alliance.

I didn’t like Tengu from the first moment I met him. I didn’t like much about Ireland in general, honestly, and it damned sure didn’t like me right back…no, princess, I don’t think I’ll be sharing that tale. Let’s just say my first meeting with the Wild Hunt really didn’t go too well, and they’ve never quite forgotten it. And I found Tengu to be a stubborn, arrogant bastard, with some pretty extreme ideas on what constituted right and wrong (not much different than he is today, actually). But he was reluctantly in favor of an alliance….he didn’t like the idea of sharing his queen’s attentions, I don’t think, but he was hungry to get his hands on our military power….so he went off to convince Titania that it was a good idea (she was apparently a little wary of the idea of sharing the reins with someone else herself. I don’t blame her there), and I hopped the first boat back to Britain to drag Oberon across the sea. Tengu and I figured that as long as the two of them didn’t hate each other on first sight, it’d be a better match than most of the royal marriages either one of us had seen, but it took some doing to convince Oberon that it was the right thing to do. Idealist that he was, he had a pretty hard time with the idea of a marriage that wasn’t based on true love and all that romantic rot, but like I told him then, we needed Titania’s support badly, and sometimes, frankly, you just have to take one for the team.

Wouldn’t you know the two of them were crazy about each other from the first time they met?

Not that I blame Oberon. Titania was a looker, all masses of red curls and curves, and she was no fairytale royalty. She was a war-queen, what the Gaels called a ban-rion. She didn’t rise to power for nothing, that was for sure. She had presence, but in a different way than Oberon did; she could be a real politician when the occasion arose, but she wasn’t afraid to saddle up and lead her troops into battle, either. I’m not saying that I liked the woman, but I respected her, at least back in those days, and I was satisfied that it was a good match. The wedding went off without a hitch, and between the two of them, it was a matter of less than a century before they achieved what Oberon had set out to do all those years ago. Their rule reached every continent of the Earth; there were a few pockets of resistance, there always are, but they were generally acknowledged to be the High King and Queen of….well….everything that didn’t involve humanity. Every major leader from every fey species swore allegiance to them, and for a while that was good enough. For the most part, once we put up a little resistance, we were left alone; we’d send in a few troops, kill a few human soldiers, and it’d all be done with.

And then the Inquisitions started.

Those were dark days for anything with pointed ears, let me tell you. If you saw a monk or a priest, you ran. Our numbers were decimated in a matter of decades, and the Inquisitioners weren’t even content with that. They slaughtered every human who had the slightest connection with our people, to boot, accusing them of witchcraft and heresy. To be honest, I think they were tougher on the humans. We tended to get killed quick and easy if we got caught, because the Inquisitioners were afraid of whatever magic we might muster up against them. The humans, they weren’t so lucky; it amazes me sometimes the atrocities that humans can commit in the name of a religion that’s supposed to be rooted in peace.

Something obviously had to be done, or we were going to be wiped out. Tengu wanted to take our armies and slaughter or enslave every last human on the planet….and Titania was all for it, really. She always put way too much stock in his opinion for my comfort. But Oberon wasn’t big on mass murder if there was another alternative, so he searched and searched, and finally he came up with one: if the humans wanted this world so badly, we’d just make our own.

Now, he didn’t come to that conclusion all by himself. He met with the most ancient and eldest of all our species, particularly the faeries. I’m pretty sure it was one of the elder faeries who came up with it, really, because it sounds like the kind of outrageous thing one of the old ones would cook up, but he never let on that it wasn’t his idea. I guess he learned a little about politics in all his years with me. But the faeries claimed that if they all pooled their magics, they could do it with relatively little effort; there was a huge outcry at this, especially from Tengu and his supporters, and from the Wild Hunt and the other sidhe (they always were more rooted to the land than the rest of us). But Oberon was the High King, and Titania was the Queen. Once they’d made their decision, it was pretty much law, and it didn’t take more than a few days for Oberon to convince his wife that this was the right course of action.

I can’t speak for just how the world was created. I’m not gifted with any sort of magic myself, all I could really do was watch from the sidelines. I do know it barely took a week, and looking back I think the faeries timed that on purpose, sort of thumbing their noses to the Christians….and then, on the seventh day, they all died.

I guess I shouldn’t say died. Their bodies expired and turned to dust, and what we were left with was a portal to a ready made world that was as close to Earth, I think, as they could make it.

What followed was sort of like Noah’s ark, but in epic proportions. Hundreds of thousands of creatures of all different races, shapes, and sizes, gathered deep in the heart of Ireland’s woods to cross the portal to the new world, carrying everything they owned in whatever manner they could. We rescued as many of the magically born animals that we could; the dragons were pretty hard to smuggle over, that was a hell of a sight. They fought tooth and nail. The unicorns, the kobolds….and there was plenty of “normal” flora and fauna being brought over as well; we had a whole world to populate, after all. Rumor has it that a few humans made their way over as well, but if that’s true, they were wise enough to lay low, even to this very day. Humans are particularly persona non grata in most parts of our world; no offense, but I guess you can see why. There are a lot of bad memories wrapped up there.

Anyway, Oberon decided unilaterally that the world should be named Faerie, in honor of those who gave up their physical existence to create it. Not the most original of names, but not a single person spoke up against it. Well, the portal closed up behind us, and we were left with a new world that we didn’t quite know what to do with…so we spread out. People tended to keep to their own, even without the humans to influence us; for instance, those elves and sprites and sidhe who’d been living in, say, Scandinavia, tended to head for the snow, and settle there, while those who were from the equatorial settlements tended to gravitate towards the warmer, tropical places. But Oberon and Titania were still the undisputed rulers, and everything was more or less good, aside from the occasional petty war over territory and such.

Call me a pessimist, but I knew it wasn’t going to last.

The idea of turning tail and running from a war with humanity had never quite set right with Titania, I could tell. She was progressively more and more restless, and the two of them just weren’t as close as they were before the Great Migration (that’s what they call it in the history books; a pretty lofty title, huh? Capital letters and everything). More and more, I think, she started to feel that her idea had been the right one, and Tengu sure as hell didn’t do anything to change her mind. He was all for the idea of finding a way back to Earth and taking it over, and he made no secret of the fact. I was always shocked that Oberon let him spout his opinions in court the way he did, but I think he respected the fact that Tengu wasn’t at all afraid of him. If you want my two cents, Oberon was always a little too attached to the idea of freedom of thought and speech. He’d even let Titania appoint Tengu’s brother Karu as head of their army. Granted, he’d been her general and chief tactician before she and Oberon had gotten married, but I always thought that his own general would have made a much more trustworthy choice. What’s done is done, though, I guess, and I really have to say that aside from his willingness to do whatever his brother tells him is the right thing to do, I’ve never had too much trouble out of Karu on his own. Of course, I imagine you’ll get to know the both of them a hell of a lot better than you really want to when we finally make it back to Faerie, so you can make up your mind all by yourself which one you hate more.

Every marriage has its ups and downs, I know, but when you rule an entire world, the choices that you make have higher stakes than most. It wasn’t too long before Oberon did what I would have thought unthinkable just a century or so before: he strayed from his wife’s bed. And the union produced a child, which the mother laid on the doorstep, so to speak, almost right after she was born; I never even learned her if she was an elf, or one of the last remaining faeries, or what she was, or even her name. All I knew was that Oberon was suddenly a father, I was one shocked as hell godfather, and….well, I guess that put Titania automatically into the role of pissed off, wicked stepmother.

You haven’t seen a temper tantrum until you’ve seen it thrown with magic, lemme tell you; there were parts of the castle that had to be rebuilt entirely. But Oberon was determined: he was sorry, he’d wronged her, and he would do anything she wanted to amend it. But he was keeping his daughter, and she would be the heir to the throne, because it was pretty obvious by this point that Titania was barren.

Life went on, and it was pretty damned tense in the castle for a while, but Titania seemed to have accepted things as they were, and she was never actively cruel to the baby. Just….distanced, I guess that shouldn’t really be surprising. And then….I don’t know all the details, because even Oberon won’t tell me….but Titania up and disappeared for almost a year. Where she went, I have no idea; I’m sure Oberon and Tengu both know, but nobody’s sharing any details with poor Puck. When she came back…well, things just weren’t pretty. She hated poor little Ivy, and it was obvious, and she was none too well disposed towards Oberon, either. Oberon, on the other hand, felt guilty as hell, and the crown was really starting to weigh heavily on him. He was starting to age, and not gracefully, the way Titania was. He just looked….tired. I think the effort of putting his kingdom before his heart really took something away from him that he never managed to get back. Sometimes I’m kind of sorry I ever helped him with his mad scheme all those years ago. He might have been better off if I’d just written him off as insane and doomed to fail, and went on my merry way.

But Ivy was still the light of his life….the light of the whole court, honestly. She was beautiful, and smart, and kind….well, I might be a little biased, since I was the one who babysat her while Daddy was holding court and all. She would have made one hell of a Queen, though, if she hadn’t gone and done the unthinkable.

She fell in love with a human.

He was a frontier scout. Of course, I didn’t know that then. Nobody knew, or cared, what he was; just that he had landed in his scoutcraft and Ivy had fished him out, half dead, from the wreckage and demanded that Tengu heal him. Everybody was shocked as hell when he did; that was either a testimony to how well Ivy was liked, or to Tengu’s talent for seeing the future. For all I know, he knew just how much trouble it was going to cause, and he did it on purpose. I don’t put much past him. It took him days to get the job done, though; I don’t think he’d ever healed a human before, and the guy was still weak as water when he was done. Ivy tended to him herself, despite her father’s very vocal protests, and brought him food and water every day, and sat with him to read him books and teach him about our history. The poor guy probably thought he was going over the deep end at first, but he spent weeks at court, and pretty soon he knew damn near every bit of our history as well as any historian, thanks to Ivy. Titania was furious at this; she demanded that the human be killed, before he could go back to his own people and guide them back to Faerie. She wasn’t the only one; there were threats and even a few minor riots and attempts on his life. Finally, Oberon didn’t really have any choice but to order the man to do what he could to fix his craft…I got the dubious honor of helping him, because unfortunately Oberon learned early on that I have a gift for the mechanical…and leave Faerie for his own safety, and for Ivy’s, because she wouldn’t leave his side for a moment. It took some work, but we finally got his ship up and running again (I learned a lot about human technology when I was working on that ship, and I was amazed at the advances they’d made)….but the night before he was supposed to depart, he disappeared….and so did his ship and Princess Ivy.

Oberon was heartbroken. I was just plain pissed off; I knew he wouldn’t have taken her against her will. Nobody could make Ivy do anything against her will, she was stubborn as a goat. She went with him because she was infatuated with him, and I really should have seen it coming. Oberon was beside himself, and not thinking straight, and that was the day that I lost all the respect that I ever had for Queen Titania, because she chose that time to try and stage a coup and take over the throne as the sole ruler of Faerie. Smart, I guess….but cold and heartless as hell.

It didn’t work. Oberon was too popular and well loved. He should have had her put to death; I know that was what I advised him to do, and to get that weasel Tengu as well while he was at it, even though there was no evidence whatsoever to implicate him in the attempt. I knew better than that, of course, but he was a slippery bastard. So Titania was permanently exiled, and Oberon’s grief gave him a burst of creativity: since she was so attached to her former life on Earth, he told her, she was to be exiled back to the human world for all eternity. It took a good bit of powerful magic to force her away against her will, but it was finally accomplished. And then Oberon turned to me.

I’ve never seen him look that cold in my entire life, especially not towards me. It sent a shiver down my spine, not to mention….well, it just plain hurt my feelings, but now that I’ve had a decade or so to reflect, I know he was just taking his grief and anger out on me, for lack of anyone else to focus on. He said that since I was the one who let Ivy slip away, and I failed so miserably in taking care of her, I could damn well go and find her….and I wasn’t to come home until I did.

So I was exiled as well, although I freely admit I didn’t put up nearly the fight that Titania did. I was still in shock, and I guess I sort of felt that I was responsible as well….and a very, very little part of me wanted to get a good look at this new world the humans had created, with spaceships and supercomputers and travel between the stars. I never really planned to get this good of a look, going on sixteen years now, but I haven’t let the time go to waste. I’ve studied damn near every branch of science you people have managed to come up with, I’ve learned a good chunk of the new languages, and in general I’ve become a lot more well known than I really meant to when I got here. I’ve had a few run-ins with Titania, but she never quite manages to catch me, and if I ever get the chance, I’ll do what should have been done when she stabbed poor Oberon in the back like that: I’ll put a bullet right between her eyes, so I can make sure she never finds her way back to Faerie again, or has the chance to raise an army against Earth. But I’ll be just as happy to take you home to your grandfather, just so I can see his face light up when he finds out who you are. Even if he gives me the noose right after that, it’ll be worth it just to know that I did something to right the wrong I let happen all those years ago.