describ the fairy wife
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The Fairy Wife
Dreamed 1985/1/17 by Chris Wayan
I'm in England for a year, thanks to an apartment swap. Though I'm living in a relatively modern two-story apartment complex, the village is an ancient farm hamlet. They keep to the Old Ways here: a pre-Christian ceremony's starting as I arrive. A Yeoman brings in huge carved and painted wooden gifts for everyone. Each has a pointed message about the person's character-flaws.
This Yeoman who brings in the gifts has been meeting a girl in the woods. By her delicate chin and great eyes and mobile ears, he knows her for a fairy. He courts her anyway. To his own astonishment, for he's heard how crude mortals seem to the Fair Folk, she's as intrigued as he is. His directness is as exciting to her as her delicate mystery is to him. They embrace, they kiss, and feel the current pulling them together. This is no casual dalliance. Soulmates!
He fears they'll be torn apart, and in the face of their difference, he casts the only spell he knows may snare even a fairy girl. He asks: "Will you marry me?"
"I will. Oh, I am mad. But I will!"
And so they wed, and have two children in the first year, who grow swiftly (for fairies are not mortals). Their children are midway in temperament: not quite so wild as Fairies, capable of inhibition and self-questioning, though rarely willing to... but unlike human children, they're never brutal or driven: intuitive though impulsive, airy yet rooted.
One year to the day after they wed, his fairy wife disappears. He's bereft. His friends, clumsily seeking to comfort him, say "She was a fairy, what can you expect? She was but toying with you for a season." He won't believe it. He seeks...
...and finds answers unexpected. She was forced to go home to Faerie. That is their law. She knew all along, but she loved him, and gladly paid the price of endless sorrow later, for one sweet year with him.
But HE married for life. He won't accept this as the end. He sets out to enter Faerie and free her...
And here the classic fairytale cuts off! For good reason.
It omits certain facts.
She did not leave due to a law of Faerie. That was a cover story. I helped her concoct it.
Next door in the apartment complex was a secret group of psychics. A group gone sick. They tried to enlist her, use her powers, and when she rejected them, they swore to kill her. She knew too much to be left alive.
She calls me up at lunch when her husband and kids are out; "Can you help me plan an escape?" I come over and watch her pace, unearthly and fretful in one incongruous dance... We try to plan, but it won't be easy, for they're clairvoyants and she's a psychic star, shining too strongly to easily hide. We'll need a distraction... we talk indirectly, for they're listening even now through the walls. I pace nervously myself now, on the balcony. Then to my shock I realize the wall's been removed between her balcony and the neighbors'. At the end of my pacing, as I turn, I may be visible to the group. But I get a glimpse of them too, and they're arguing fiercely. They don't even notice me--so tuned in with their inner eyes, they neglect the outer.
A spot for her to flee to pops into my mind. Years back, I found a little-used door into Faerie, in a small oasis in the Modoc lava fields of California. The area's riddled with long lava-tubes that helped shelter the Modoc warriors, when Captain Jack defied the American Army so long, in the Modoc War. One lava tube, a mile-long cave, collapsed at one spot, forming a sheltered stone hollow full of ferns, with two deep tunnels leading into the Earth. Or, if you climb amid the mossy boulders and the ferns, and find the talisman hidden long ago, and wish... a third way opens. To Faerie.My fairy wife hides in a ferny cave on the Modoc Plateau. Dream collage by Wayan; click to enlarge.
I hide the image under blankness, and keep pacing, but describe it quietly to her, mind to mind, in her native tongue. My Fairy grammar's poor, no more than pidgin, but they're unlikely to know any at all. "I'll distract them here, while you go."
She vanishes discreetly and begins a hide-and-seek game around the world, till they're mortal-tired and spread thin enough, chasing false trails, for her to vanish.