My pack slid off my shoulders, and I collapsed next to the pool to sit cross-legged at its edge. Strangely, nothing reflected in the crystal-clear water. If I hadn’t raked a finger across the surface and verified the tip came back wet, I’d almost believe I stared down at an empty hole in the ground with gold and silver fish darting back and forth through gossamer weeds that floated in mid-air.
I still carried plenty of food in my pack and water in the container I’d slung over my shoulder, but I wanted neither. My hand closed around the fruit from the strawberry tree I’d slipped into my pocket. I took it out and examined it again. Nothing this perfect could be poison, could it?
WTF. Eat it.
I did.
Juice and meaty pulp exploded in my mouth, waking my tongue to pleasure and didn’t stop there. The roof of my mouth tasted it, the insides of my cheeks could, too. Though I loathed to do it, I spit out instead of swallowing, just in case the sweetness I savored was a lure and the fruit really was dangerous. Several minutes passed while I leaned back on my elbows and followed clouds bumping up against the Hollow’s blue ceiling, but my tongue didn’t blister. I didn’t get sick. I didn’t turn to stone. It wasn’t poison. It was just a berry from a fruit tree planted by the fae.
Taking another bite, I swallowed this time and ate sunlight more potent than anything I’d ever felt on my skin. Nectar slid down my throat. A feeling I couldn’t name spread to every cell in my body. It wasn’t love—not that I trusted myself to identify that emotion—but I thought maybe it was akin to love. Nature’s love for itself and everything in it?
Whatever. It was delicious.
I finished the whole thing in four greedy bites, and then remembering the grapes I’d passed earlier, I rose, walked over, and used my knife to harvest a small bunch I took with me back to the pool. Each grape was precisely ripe and a deep, velvety purple. I tore one off its stem, popped it in my mouth and bit down.
Oh, God. Oh, wow.
I’d been right. Wine inside a living grape. Sangiovese, unlike any a master human vintner could produce, perfumed my sinuses, made intoxicating love to my palate. Just one grape and I was drunk. Deliriously inebriated. Two grapes, and my aches and pains lessened. The decree against my life, the loss of my home and belongings, Whisper’s death, knowing I was powerless to fight back against my enemies, whoever the hell they were, all of that just went bye-bye.
“Eff you, human council!” I shouted.
I tossed three more grapes in my mouth in quick succession.
“Shove your decree up your ass,” I said around a mouthful of fruit. “And while you’re at it, you can store those fireheads you sent to my apartment up there, too!”
Another grape. This one I mashed against the roof of my mouth with my tongue and let the wine swirl around my taste buds.
“Fuck you, Father Bartolo, for dumping six-year-old me out on the streets with nothing.”
Half the bunch was gone. I laughed crazily, screeched so loudly my voice cracked, and I startled a flock of powder blue doves off their perches high up in the pines. Their wings blended into the sky as they flapped away, camouflaged from my increasingly blurry vision.
“Fuck you, Mama and Papa. I don’t even know your names, but you didn’t want me,” I slurred. Bits and pieces of grape dribbled from my lips. “Father B. told me about you, you know. You higher than holy assholes who couldn’t handle a baby with a few nightmares and kept crossing yourself and shit when you threw me at the sisters.”
My ability to feed myself grapes went downhill rapidly as I mistakenly thought my mouth was to the left of my nose. My words slowed down, my voice retreated inside me. The next words barely registered as a whisper.
“And lastly, a giant fuck you to you, Sulla, you…you short-pricked…” My eyes had trouble staying open. “…pervert pedophile who raped a nine-year-old girl who didn’t have anyone but a fae cat to look out for her. If you weren’t already dead, I’d…I’d…”
I passed out.
10
The world used to be a bigger place.
Bigger than Ashia Hollow, anyway.
Anyone who had watched the videos or read the magazines and books from before the merge, knew the world once encompassed an entire planet called Earth, of which Venice took up only a small fraction. Before the wars and the merge and more wars, Venice was part of a nation called Italy, with a capital city called Rome, where the Trevi fountain with its hippocampi—to which I’d compared my dark hunter’s fierce attitude—had once existed. In turn, Italy was part of a “continent” named Europe. While Ashia Hollow could be traveled by vehicle from north to south, its longest dimension, in a couple of hours, there used to be countries that spanned thousands of kilometers. Some took more than a week to journey across and were home to hundreds of human cultures and societies. It was sort of mind-blowing to think of a world that supported billions of lives. No one had counted the population of Ashia Hollow since the last war, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred thousand, and that was including the outlying districts that bordered the lagoon.
I found my most treasured historical possession on a night when I was twelve, in the waterlogged ruins of a library built more than a century before. Its rooms had been picked over by dozens of scavengers before me and what was left of the books once lining its shelves was a wall-to-wall layer of sulfurous paper paste and dissolved cardboard at least ten centimeters thick, mixed with the occasional shattered electronic reader not even Sulla would have wanted. Nothing legible remained on the ground floor. Even the signs on the walls had faded into obscurity.
Tromping through the muck, I came to a set of travertine steps leading up to the first floor. Predictably, the room was mostly barren, with a couple of broken chairs, miscellaneous trash, and ravaged clumps of book pages scattered on the black and white tiled floor. I walked to a window overlooking the Rio de le Romite. An ancient building had housed this library, and its walls were thick and windowsills deep. I folded myself up on the ledge, watching vapor in the night air form a tourmaline ring around the moon. A fenix shed green sparks from its tail feathers as it wheeled over Dorsoduro hunting for bats to snap out of the sky and wolf down mid-flight. After the fae bird of prey moved off, I glanced down at my feet and there, jammed into the sill, glinted an object the size and length of my thumb.
I worked it out of the window track. It was a book. Mud filmed over a cover encrusted with gemstones, which I wiped clean using the bottom of my shirt. I set the book’s spine on the palm of my hand. A puzzle-sealed latch protected the book’s interior. It took me about twenty minutes picking at the mechanism to unravel the mystery, but finally, the book sprang open. Writing too small for an ant to read filled its pages. I didn’t need to read it, however, because the book told its own story in my head, ready to recite the history of Ashia Hollow in the language of any who came into contact with it, complete with authentic images captured from the past.
One hundred and fifty-nine years ago, the Earth was the Earth and the Fairy world its own. Both worlds kept myths of the other alive in their oral and written histories, but that’s all they were, stories to scare or entertain. A barrier separated the two worlds of which neither side was aware. No one had crossed it in either direction for millennia. Had they known about the barrier, they still could not have broken through, not the most powerful fae queen on the fairy side, nor the greatest, most technologically advanced army on the human side.
Humans might have been infamous for the depravities they committed as a species, but evil isn’t exclusive to human civilization. It plagued the fae, as well. Humans, with all their bombs and deadly chemicals and lasers, couldn’t match the dark fae when it came to endangering their own kind. Over the centuries, the number of fae led by the Dark Lord Acura multiplied to point where their malignant ways endangered all of Fairy.
Rasha, Queen of the Bright Fae, saw no alternative but to quash what was destined to be a coup waged against the throne itself. Thus, on the s
ummer solstice in the Year of the Goldhorn, when her forces were at their peak, she declared war on the Dark Lord, determined to end his rebellion before it could fully take hold and destroy them all.
The battle was bitter yet short by fae standards, raging night and day for eleven years only. Rasha and her army emerged the victors, but at too great a cost. So much bright energy had been expended to defeat Acura and scatter his evil to the farthest corners of the realm where they could never again recombine, that the barrier between fae and human realities, weakened by darkness on both sides, tore and the two worlds violently became one.
What neither side knew was that the worlds had existed in symbiosis since their creation, each feeding the other what it needed to survive. Earth’s inhabitants unwittingly gave their energy to the fae to sustain their magic, while the fae returned that energy to the Earth to power nature and its bounty, even the physics that drove its technology so that humankind might thrive.
When the barrier split apart, the balance of energies and magic unraveled and chaos ensued. Storms evaporated before they could nourish Earth or the fae realm. Dying birds rained from the skies. Rivers and lakes vanished. Fruit and nuts and seeds withered on vine and stem and branch. Seas poisoned the fish and all other creatures living in them. The very air in both worlds grew so thin in so many places that billions perished on Earth in minutes, and even the fae, who had always believed themselves to be immortal, tragically learned they, too, could die.
Those humans who endured blamed the fae, rightly so, for the disaster. They began hunting them. Without a steady supply of energy for their magic, more than half the fae were easily massacred and their limited magic stores siphoned off to restart the technologies humans needed to survive. It wasn’t long, however, before the fae discovered humans could be similarly used as a source of energy for the magic that kept their very hearts beating, gave their lungs the strength to draw breath.
Among the fae were two factions, settling along the old original battle lines. Bright fae disciplined themselves to take only the bare minimum of energy needed from any one human, leaving that human able to fully recover his vitality and life spirit. In so doing, the brights retained their own clear and perfect selves. Dark fae, on the other hand, could not resist the lure of absolute power in this time of crisis any more than they had before the battle in the fae realm had begun. Every human they captured—man, woman, or child—was drained of life’s essence so that nothing remained but an empty husk.
All the fae who traveled this depraved path lost forever their bright selves and were shunned by those who lived in the light. As a way of marking what they became, from the moment a fae made that first kill, his eyes were irrevocably altered, changing from their natural born color to dark blue. The more they killed, the darker their eyes became as a dire warning to others.
Tormented by all that her war against the dark fae had wrought, Rasha could not let the deaths continue. She used her strongest spells to gaze into the future and saw but one answer to the catastrophe. She must make the ultimate sacrifice, forfeiting both herself and, to a great extent, her children.
Rasha had thirteen daughters, all of them more dear to her heart than her own life, but she also understood that they were the key to ending the destruction on both sides. Taking each daughter, she buried them one at a time in the Earth in thirteen separate locations, using their innate magic to create thirteen new worlds or hollows merged of human and fae. Each world was self-contained and possessed its own barrier protecting it from the wastelands outside, but also isolating it from the rest of what was once a larger, greater world.
One of the thirteen locations Rasha chose was Venice, and the daughter she sacrificed to save and fuel the new world was named Ashia. Ever after, Venice was known as Ashia’s Hollow.
In every hollow, Rasha formed a fae council and a human council, appointed one leader for each and left them to decide jointly the rules that would govern their world. They would be free to make treaties on their own, work out an equitable exchange of magic and energies, and together cleanse the world of the final residue of darkness.
Having finished her task, Rasha was as depleted of magic as a human drained by one of the dark fae. Her last act of love was to kiss each daughter and wish them well as they slumbered beneath the ground for the centuries to come. With that, she too, lay down to sleep, knowing she never again would wake.
Sadly, none of the other hollows were named in the book, though the names of the first and only Ashia Hollow leader on the fae side, Gorsydd, plus the first four on the human side were listed. The history ended a few pages later in a flurry of sunny images depicting Venice as a place of renewed peace and prosperity.
No mention was made of the later two wars that devastated Venice, nor the post-apocalyptic state of current day Santa Croce and three of the other original human districts. I figured the book must have been written before those events occurred.
Curiously, the last lines of the book didn’t match the rest, being a prediction, written as a free verse poem.
When fae hides in human and human in fae,
when the heavens grow weak and the vulnerable are drawn to hell
in cruel numbers,
Rasha’s light disappears below,
and the final darkness shall rise above.
What the hell that meant, I’d never figured out. I guessed it to be written in a language that didn’t translate well to Italian.
I wished I still had the book. Whether it was the history it contained, or the detailed map of Ashia Hollow from the time it was first created, or the nonsense poetry at the end, I’d always thought the book was important somehow. I’d vowed I would never let it go. I’m certain it was the most valuable prize I’d ever found in the ruins, its value equal to everything else I’d unearthed over my lifetime combined. Who knew, if I had it today, I might be able to buy my way out of a death sentence.
Unfortunately, I’d had to eat and sold it to Sulla when I was thirteen, for a week’s worth of pasta.
11
When I woke from my drunken grape fest, it was dark, and my head reeled. Mercifully, I didn’t want to vomit. Even in my sorry state, the idea of defiling this place made me shudder. Sacrilege. It might not be holy by human standards, but with its beauty and quiet, it was the most sanctified place I’d ever been, hazardously boozy grapes aside.
I crawled away from the pool until I could get to my feet. I needed to pee, but I wasn’t doing it in here. I lurched back the way I’d come this morning, tripping twice because I’d forgotten to bring my penlight. Eventually, I was clear of the trees and its magical summer. La Luna’s last waning sliver stood out like a nail clipping against the night sky directly overhead. I squatted in the open in the bitter December wind. Embarrassingly indecent, sure, but who’s going to see you going to the bathroom on a deserted island kilometers from anything else?
Returning to the garden and the water’s edge, I slumped next to my belongings. Today’s escapade settled it. I was not a pretty drunk.
Yeah. You don’t ever want to do that again.
Thank God, the fae from the beach hadn’t been around to see me make a total idiot of myself, but he was evidently long gone. That morning’s stark killings felt like they’d happened days, not hours before.
I stared at the pool, shivering from my brief trip outside into winter. The water looked so inviting, the sands and rocks and even the tiny, darting fish at the bottom possessing a light of their own that lit up the cattails and a nearby citrus tree heavy with oranges. That light also showed me the grubby state of my hands and clothing.
I wondered what temperature the water was and tested it with my hand. It might have been my recent trip to winter, but it felt too cool for a bath. Maybe after I warmed up a little.
I thought back to the map of Ashia Hollow I’d seen in the fae history book I’d found in the deserted library so long ago. The more I thought about it, the clearer the map became in my head. That was the thing a
bout fae books. Read them once, and you never forgot them. I was glad that particular history wasn’t something that had made me unhappy. I would have hated reading something ugly that wouldn’t gradually fade to the back of my mind.
Nor did the fae book’s magic involve simple recall. When I wanted to remember what it had looked like, the air shimmered and a translucent 3D map hovered in front of me. Illusion, hallucination, or real, I couldn’t tell which.
Like everything the fae designed, the map was elaborately decorated, with borders of knotted and intertwined lines and foreign shapes I knew must have meaning, illuminated in gold. Creatures I couldn’t name and had never seen flew and swam and ran in the borders, bringing the image to life. The waters of the lagoon rocked gently with waves on the map, rushes, and grasses in the barene bent to the winds.
My first question when mentally studying the map was, where am I?
In response, a small area of the map solidified so that I couldn’t see through it and a tiny moon-shaped island glowed brighter than the rest.
Isola di Guariti Dolori. Island of Healed Sorrows.
It was funny; the map may have been only in my head, but I physically leaned closer to read the tiny writing in the center of the island. Again, the document responded to my needs, the words, limed in gold, enlarging enough for me to read them easily.
Pool of Peace.
I gazed through the map into the pool again. Even at night, the surface refused to reflect anything around it, which I found odd, like the surface of the water wasn’t really there.
Oh, well. Not a mystery I was interested in solving. Instead, it was time to face the big question I’d avoided for the last twenty-four hours. Where was I going? Where could I hide in Ashia Hollow that I would not be found by the human council’s guards? Where would I be safe from people who might recognize me from the decree that would have been released to every last district and mini-province in our world?
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 9