Faerie's Champion

by M. H. Johnson

  The badger squealed with delight, clapping his paws together daintily, adroitly exchanging the mirror for the silken bag he had evidently prepared for her. The villagers around him were dancing about with joy as they gazed deep into their hand mirror once more, apparently delighting in what they saw.

  “Oh thank you, great knight! You have done our humble town a wonderful service indeed. Please, stay as long as you like. The plushest bed at our inn and the finest delicacies in our larder are yours for the asking!”

  The villagers nodded as one at the mayor’s grand declaration.

  Jess smiled and nodded in turn. “And for your grace, we thank you. Indeed, my familiar and I could use a good night’s rest and perhaps a bit to eat before we continue on our way upon the morrow, but before that, we have a pressing matter we hope you can assist us with.”

  The badger's whiskers quivered enthusiastically. "You need but ask, my dear lady knight! How may we serve you?"

  Jess eyed the mayor carefully as she stated her request. “I was hoping, mayor Goodwin, that perhaps you or your townsfolk might be able to tell us something of the artifact known as the Mirror of Truth.”

  The hustle and cheer of the crowd went still. Chatter instantly ceased, good-natured bustling frozen in eerie stillness. As one, heads twisted slowly to face Jess directly in eerie synchronicity, as if she faced a gathering of lifelike dolls, all controlled by invisible strings.

  Jess shivered, forcing herself to stand firm, palm gently caressing her hilt for reassurance.

  “The Mirror of Truth,” eerily the mayor’s words resonated through the crowd.

  “The breaker of deception,” echoed the other townsfolk gazing blankly at Jess.

  “The queen’s heart,” whispered the mayor.

  “That which reveals darkness most hidden!” the Townsfolk roared in counterpoint.

  “The light upon fools that would serve as folly's tools.”

  Mayor Goodwin’s voice seemed to echo long after he finished speaking, and as one the townsfolk started blinking and yawning, as if awakening from a pleasant doze, gazes open and friendly once more.

  “The Mirror of Truth, you say?” Mayor Goodwin asked of a somewhat shaken Jess, all the townsfolk nodding pleasantly at this interesting topic of conversation, if they were not otherwise occupied preparing for festivities.

  “Yes.” Jess nodded slowly. “It is a question we had asked of the Applegroves and Roundacres as well. Their advice was to perform acts of virtue and valor, saying it would lead us on the right path, leading to the Queen’s Palace, which is where the mirror is kept safe.”

  The badger nodded approvingly at this. “Those Applegroves and Roundacres are always bickering over something. But even they have common sense sufficient to advise you rightly on this, at least.”

  “Ah, but what if by some unexpected turn of events this Mirror of Truth is not safely tucked away where everyone expects it to be?” a bemused Twilight queried.

  The mayor blinked and shivered. “That, Sir Cat, is a most troubling line of thought indeed. To think that our most prized artifact is not safely ensconced at the heart of our great queen’s power. Heavens forfend!”

  Twilight quirked an eyebrow. "Do creatures of Faerie truly believe in Heaven, then? For I sense no ties whatsoever to realms Abyssal or Divine. In point of fact, this odd realm seems to lie completely outside the vast continuum of existence upon which angels, mortals, and the Fallen all reside, between the extremes of Creation and the Void. It is strange to think of you giving credit to the existence of what is, after all, but one end of a vast continuum of which your realm seems to play no part. For it is only by a mystic tome and moonlight at odd angles to all known dimensions that has allowed us to step outside standard frames of reference entirely, and into this Faerie realm."

  Jess nodded in accord. “For what is black or white, to a creature that cannot see?”

  Twilight grinned. “Precisely, my queen.”

  Jess pouted. “I told you not to call me that.”

  “Of course, my mistress.”

  The badger's beady eyes gazed back and forth between his two guests with growing confusion. “Forgive me, fair travelers. For though I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the wonderful service you have provided us, returning our beautiful mirror to us, I am afraid I have absolutely no idea as to what you two are talking about.”

  Jess smiled apologetically. “Of course, Mayor Goodwin. Please, trouble yourself not at all with our little discourse. Rather, let me simply ask, what advice would you have for a questing knight seeking the Mirror of Truth?”

  The mayor gave a relieved little chuckle at the perceived change of topic. "The answer to that is simple, lady knight. Just follow your heart! It will lead the way." His gentle gaze then turned oddly knowing. "And keep your secrets close. For there are those that hunt for you. And all your secrets and all my knowledge of a conversation we will once have shared in a time that never was, you now have safely sealed in the silken bag even now upon your belt."

  Jess felt a cold chill wash over her, even as Twilight chuckled softly. “What are you talking about, good mayor?” Jess asked.

  The badger shrugged. “There are those that would steal the possibility of what could be. But they leave footsteps, and a wise mayor learns to sniff out those clues and put a stop to such miscreants as that. And your sword is fierce sharp, mistress of the blade, even if all you fought were shadows and dream, all memory fading away as if it had never been.” The badger sighed. “But one such as I am cursed never to forget. So I have packed away all memory of that which is forbidden, so it can never be plucked from my own mind, and even as I say these words to you, I forget them for eternity, my gift at last taking its due."

  Jess nodded politely, haunted by the creature's suddenly terrible gaze. “Thank you, Mayor Goodwin. We appreciate your help.”

  The mayor beamed, his expression jovial once more, and Jess understood at once that the badger remembered nothing of the gift he had given her. “Not at all! It is we who are grateful to you, questing knight!”

  46

  “Well, what do you think?” A quietly contemplative Jess asked sometime later in the freshly lain hayloft that had been given for their use that night after an animated feast full of sweet mead, humble but filling fish stew, and much good cheer.

  Twilight spent some moments purring under his master's gentle touch even as he rested upon her chest, they both gazing contemplatively at the stars twinkling in all their brilliant wonder, far above.

  “I think there is much to be learned just gazing at the brilliant panoply of stars dotting the horizon as far as the eye can see, luminescent as they are, here, so far away from our own home.”

  Jess whistled appreciatively. “Truly they are a wonder, blazing bright and beautiful, a marvel of flashing color that never shined so brightly by Father's apple groves, even when all the torches and magelights back at the manor were but a twinkle in the distance, Geoff always grumbling about wanting to sit by the hearth fire, not stargaze in the dead of winter.”

  She could feel her familiar nodding gently against her stroking palm. "Indeed. And you will not be able to make out any of the constellations that should be familiar to you, after all the hours your father had taken you stargazing with his fancy brass telescope during your childhood, no matter how long you gaze at the brilliant nighttime sky before us."

  Jess felt herself blushing. "You know how I loved spending time with Father and learning the stars with him. It was one area where Geoff and Apple never tried to compete, never felt jealous of the time we spent together, gazing up at the stars. but as much as I enjoyed learning about astronomy, the maths Father tried to teach me to better understand the heavenly motions of the astral bodies always gave me a bit of a headache. And I always felt a bit guilty, because I knew that as much as he enjoyed our shared interest, my inability to understand the calculations disappointed him. But of course, I learned the constellations as well as anyone."

&nbs
p; Twilight gently patted her cheek. “Your father is very proud of you, mastery of calculations aside. But back to the topic at hand. Do you see any of those constellations that you studied so fervently with your sire in the skies overhead, my mistress?”

  Jess spent some minutes just gazing in awe at the vast, brilliant night sky.

  "No, not a one. But by the gods, that is a brilliant canvas above us! The stars shimmer and flash with a rainbow of colors I never even knew existed, before coming to Faerie, and the entire southern horizon is alight with a green gold brilliance!"

  Her familiar nodded. “Yes, my Jess. No doubt a massive sun had ruptured and died countless years ago, the brilliant roaring of its passage still visible as the energies of its death knell continue to ripple through this reality, plain for all with eyes to see, should they but look up at the nighttime skies above. But as you so aptly noted, this spectacle is nothing like the far less brilliant skies of our own realm.”

  “Indeed,” Jess concurred. “You need not say it, Twilight. I can tell we are far, far away from home.”

  “More than that, my dear Jess,” Twilight murmured softly. “As I do believe you too can sense.”

  Jess just gazed quietly for some time, stroking her beloved familiar. “I know. The flickers and flashes of illumination that roar through me like moments of deja vu, whenever I enter the Dreamrealms tell me as much. That creeping awareness that there is far more to the story of Jess than daring adventurer; whole dark tomes of which I dare not turn a single page, lest I be sent screaming into madness.” Jess shivered, chilled by her own words, yet finding the courage to say things this night, Twilight snug in her arms, that she did her best not to even think about, back home. “But I will pat those tomes quietly shut, and would rather they leave me to my own peaceful dreams and gardens of this day. Even so, dear cat, I know what it is you want to say.”

  “Do you?” Her familiar queried gently.

  Jess nodded. “The skies. They are not just a continuum between the realms of mundus and the Abyssal Realms, the latter ruled by madness, tormented souls, hideous fortress moons of destruction looming above, the roaring flagships of Hell, flashing with the brilliant eyes of dark seers and vile wizards, all corrupting and tainting those hideous, twisted skies. For when all those forces and furies are discounted from the equation, should such a hideous realm be somehow freed of demonic taint and raised once more to the realms of mundus, the starry heavens above would look very much like the skies of Dawn, no? For the skies of all of those worlds, saved and damned alike, are but reflections, mirror images of one another."

  Jess gazed solemnly at the brilliant night sky far above, awash in the green gold corona of a dying supernova, millions of stars all twinkling in a bright mad cacophony of color, blazing with energies she fancied she could almost feel rippling through the nighttime sky. It was as bright as a moonlit night would be in the lands of her home, and when the brilliant moon of Faerie was out, as often blue and orange as ivory white, it was as bright as an overcast day would have been. Yet when sunlight graced the land, washing the morning skies with a brilliant display of crimson and gold, the day was as gentle and warm as any she could have hoped for on the sweetest of spring days in her father's orchards.

  "This realm, my dear Twilight, is outside the continuum of those we are used to, entirely. I do understand the lesson you were trying to teach Mayor Goodwin, my dear kitty," Jess chuckled softly. "Though I never had the patience to master all the boring intricacies of advanced calculations, I can certainly comprehend the big picture as well as anyone. If you were to take our entire realm and flatten it so that it was as thick as but a single sheet of vellum, so that up and down stood for a distance far vaster than height and depth, and stack endless sheets of vellum on top of one another, each page being assigned a designation; hundreds of sheets serving as all the realms of mundus above us, another hundred sheets serving as endless realms of the Fallen below, and the highest sheets of all being the heavenly realms above, then that entire endless binding of sheets, that grand book of creation, would be the continuum of our existence. And all the realms of Heaven, Hell, and all the mortal worlds sandwiched between, like our own, of which I can only assume there are many, are all part of that grand tome, and our forays into the Dreamrealms are like journeys into notes in the margins; outside of our own realm, yet not quite scribbling upon the adjoining page." Jess felt delicious chills race through her, awed by the mad, glorious images burning brightly upon her mind's eye as well as the brilliant skies above.

  "Yet this realm, my dear Twilight, is like a sheet torn free of the grand tome of existence entirely, torn free and left dangling on the other side of the divine reading table of everything. A page we caught sight of only when a stream of moonlight sprayed upon the tome we come from and this single piece of vellum at once, somehow allowing us to travel from our home to this odd Faerie realm, disconnected as it is from everything else," Jess shrugged. "Or that is my thought on the matter, anyway."

  Twilight chuckled softly against his master’s chest. “A very interesting perspective, my dear Jess. Horrifically oversimplified, yet nonetheless, in its own way, perfectly correct. You always do seem to wake up a bit intellectually when you step out of your comfort zone, I find.”

  Jess smirked. “You mean when I step outside the realm of reality I was born in? I do tend to feel more clever, the farther away I am from Mother, for some reason.”

  Twilight yawned. "Pretty much, yes, but you are using comparative logic. You happen to be quite brilliant in your own way, but upon this turning of the great wheel you were born the daughter of a true genius, however much she hides that truth from her family, even her husband. It is why she eventually sees through all your pretenses, however much you fluster her in the short term; your unique form of reasoning and flashes of sheer intuition being quite alien to her own patterns of thought. And wise as she is, I halfway think she can sense me as well, though like any master card player, she is careful not to give her awareness of me away."

  Twilight chuckled ruefully. “But be careful, my dear Jess, lest you find yourself tempted to match wits with your mother and prove to her how wise you can be, when allowed to study to your strengths. For in the pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge, you might fall prey to different hungers than the more common vices of the nobility. Hungers far more wicked than a mere craving for apple brandy or poppy extract. There is always the temptation to learn more, once one has begun to stride certain paths to power, and the satisfaction to be found in wielding certain arts, in mastering their grim potential, only awakens a hunger, a craving, to command ever more power by means increasingly... unorthodox. And some secrets are better left sleeping comfortably in the dark, so to speak.”

  Jess nodded. “Like that terrible black book I stumbled across in that eldritch library during our first journey into those mad realms we call Regio. I could sense its pull… it almost seemed to tease me with whispers of dark lore that I knew, on some level, would change me forever, if I dared to embrace them.”

  “True,” Twilight said softly, tail flickering sinuously in the darkness.

  Jess shivered. “And the truth of it is, for all that I kicked it away most fiercely, that book was not lost to Regio at all, was it, my dear kitty? That Dreamrealm, it wasn’t just offering me forgotten lore or an artifact of power, it was resonating with that which it already sensed lay deep in my soul. Wasn’t it Twilight?”

  Jess gave a shuddering sigh, stroking her beloved familiar for her own comfort as well as his, feeling burdened with the weight of knowledge already more than she cared to bear.

  Twilight sighed. “Yes, my mistress. That tome is but an echo of knowledge once known long ago. Knowledge of the most vile and hideous of arts, awful magics that were once used to forge an empire both savage and glorious in its beauty and power. The very earth shook the day that ancient queen took her throne, and stories of her martial fury, arcane mastery, and inhuman cruelty were whispered of in tales and lege
nds for centuries, even after her ancient empire had long since crumbled to dust and ruin.”

  Jess nodded solemnly, her hand almost of its own accord pulling free the small silken pouch the mayor had handed her earlier that day. “I recall the names Mayor Goodwin called me, Twilight, as if he had learned all sorts of things. And from his words, I sensed that all his knowledge, and knowledge of events that will have happened in some odd future as well, are all contained within the little leaden chest within this pouch.”

  Twilight tilted his gaze toward Jess, saying nothing.

  "Is this another test, do you think? Memories, not of what was, but of what could be? Will it taint me somehow, learning the secrets within?"

  Twilight blinked his sapphire orbs, gazing at the pouch with cautious deliberation. “I think, perhaps, another fork in the road lies before us, even now.”

  Jess nodded. “I think you're right. What do you suggest we do, Twilight?”

  Twilight grinned. “I know what I will do... leave the choice to you. Just remember, knowledge cleaved from our minds has, apparently, been cleaved from some mysterious enemy as well. Perhaps what we learn they learn in that very instant. Perhaps the mayor sealed those secrets up for a very good reason.”

  Jess spent some moments gazing raptly at the exquisitely crafted silken bag, her fingers gently tracing the form of the leaden box within.

  Jess shivered. “Do you know what, Twilight? I think you're right. I would rather approach the future none the wiser, so that I am living it for the first time, my choices my own, not second guessed by foreknowledge or doubt. And as my ignorance is also my enemy's, whoever he or she is, the playing field is level. I will not know the terrain of the future, he will not know to set up an ambush to counter me.”