Rebirth

A brief note: To those of you who have never played 'World of Darkness: Changeling', a quick explanation is necessary. Changelings live between the real world and that of the fairies. Humans cannot see changeling things, although they exist alongside the mundane world. Some changelings are 'seelie' and 'good', while some are 'unseelie' and usually regarded as bad. Now for a few terms:

Sloagh: Pale, sombre Goth-fairies. They can dislocate their bodies gruesomely and can only speak in whispers. They love ritual and ceremony and delight in etiquette and all things intricate.

Pookha: Playful, animal-like fairies. They can only speak in lies and love playing tricks. They can turn into certain animals.

Bansidhe: Think banshee. These are fairies that have interbred with humans and are mutants, more or less. Their screams cause fear and they are invulnerable to cold iron.

Bedlam: Madness created by becoming too magical and consuming too much glamour.

Cold Iron: What it sounds like. This substance is anathema to the fae.

Banality: Boring, mundane, magic-less things. That which pertains to order and the real world…fairies can get more banal as they grow older.

Sidhe: Noble, beautiful fairies. They look like we think fairies do; graceful and pretty with butterfly wings. They are proud creatures that have always been pure fairies away from the mundane world.

Glamour: Magic. That which fuels the fae. Changeling children have a lot of glamour.


Rebirth


The room was dark, crowded and choking with the smoke of a hundred moodily lit clove cigarettes. The music was hypnotically dreary and it wore into the skulls of the pale, swaying dancers, who moved in a ceaseless, intricate ballet.

To those who could not see, the room was a tacky, gothed-up nightclub with a tiny dance floor packed with young Goths. At the edges ranged a smattering of punks with piercings and leather and what seemed to be faux fur. Here and there, seated serenely at beer-stained and sticky tables sat older, more refined looking night goers…businessmen, maybe?

To those not blinded by banality, however, it was quite a different scene.

A twilight-lit cavern of witch lights and deep shadows filled with an undulating, writhing mass of hypnotising sloagh dancers. The sloagh, tall, frighteningly disjointed and supple wraiths, were being watched by a protective ring of pookha who looked not only feral…

…but also rabid and completely insane.

And the businessmen at grime coated tables? None other than the regal bansidhe lords, majestic in their fell splendour as they watched the ritual of the sloagh with cold, unblinking eyes and gazes that spoke of iron, never wavering for an instant.

This was the awe-inspiring and more than a little disconcerting scene that greeted the eyes of one small sloagh child as she entered the ‘club’. To those who could not see as she did, it looked like an ill-kempt, underage child in fluorescent, clashing clothes had snuck into a tawdry alternative nightclub. Those more perceptive, however, were warily watching this new arrival, critically sizing up the pale, spider-like creature in torn jeans and a baggy black shirt. The child was a sloagh, undoubtedly, but a strange one…

…her face was rouged up like a cheap harlequin’s and her hair had been stained blood red and wrestled into messy braids. Her adornments were not the black lace and intricate jewellery so familiar to her kind, but sparkling plastic beads, glass baubles and candy necklaces worn as chokers tight across her spindly, twisting neck.

The sloagh who spotted her frowned at her like adults always frown on unsightly children, but did not cease in their dancing. To do so would be to court the ire of the bansidhe nobles before whom they abased themselves so intricately.

The pookha caught her scent and would’ve leapt from all corners, ripping her useless voice box from her death-pale throat, but for the grace of a raised hand from the highest bansidhe table.

The child saw none of this, so caught up was she in the forced beauty of the winding dance before her deep-set, glowing eyes. A cold, shiver-wrenching hand fell lightly upon her bony shoulder and she looked up, starting, to see a pale, hawk-eyed man. His eyes were liquid gold, like brandy, fire and the chaos of oncoming bedlam. Most would’ve quailed at this sight, but the child’s own eyes reflected the same madness, with many souls screaming in the depths of her beetle-black pupils.

“Doth this spectacle please you, changeling-childe?” The man, clearly a bansidhe by his cast and a noble by the sumptuousness of his otherwise tattered dress, asked, his eyes glinting with what could’ve been amusement, were it not so tainted with cruelty.

The little girl-creature nods enthusiastically. It does not even occur to her to be afraid. Nor does it worry her that all eyes are on her and her bansidhe host, from the animal glares of the feral pookha to the craned and twisted necks of the sloagh dancers and the cool assessment of the other bansidhe nobles.

“Then come, childe, and sit a piece with this old man.” The bansidhe beckons, his voice raspy and harsh from an eternity of screams. The child acquiesces, beaming and comes to sit at the man’s feet in front of the high table. The bansidhe raises his hand, carelessly, and the sloagh scatter from the floor, sinking and slinking away like pale snakes and liquid shadows to coalesce in sombre groups tight against the walls.

The man nods and a handful of exceptionally rabid looking pookha rush behind a curtain and return, wearing thick, dragon hide gloves and wielding cool, gleaming spears that sent the first real jolt of fear into the child’s shattered heart.

Cold iron.

The two words that every changeling fears.

Her bansidhe host saw her fear and smiled like a chorus of razors. “Just watch, childe.” He urged. She complied, watching fearfully as the pookha, who looked wholly uncomfortable with their weapons, used them to usher a cloaked creature into the middle of the floor. They pushed it and the cloak fell away, revealing a woman.

To the untrained, banality-filmed eye, she is a high-class harlot, dressed in little and made up too much. Sequins, sparkles and overdone eye makeup, all topped up by a chavesque too-blonde hairdo. Her mascara is running with tears she cannot quite hold back and her faux-tanned skin is covered in scrapes and bruises.

To those blessed with sight, the sight is not much better. The woman is a sidhe noble brought low, her bright and glimmering robes torn to barely-concealing shreds, her swirling patterns of glamour askew and not enough to cover the blackened burns in her golden skin where the cold iron spears had stuck her. Her eyes were tearstained and wild with despair. Behind her, the tattered remnants of her once proudly gaudy wings fluttered desperately and futilely.

The child found her unspeakably beautiful.

The pookha surrounding her growled low and in synch, bearing sharp, animal-like fangs. The woman cowered but rose to her dainty, weary feet, opened her cupid bow mouth…

…and sang.

She sang of lost love, wilted flowers and winter that came too soon. Her melody was pure and angelic, but morbid; like the swan song of the last of a dying race. When it was over the pookha seemed tamer, more human. Tears welled at the edges of their feral eyes.

The sloagh clapped politely, their sunken eyes shining with real pleasure. As those who were doomed to silence, their appreciation of music was most keen.

Only the bansidhe remained unmoved. Their eyes were dull with judgement and their lips twitched while, as one body, they turned to their lord, that bansidhe at whose feet the child sat, awaiting his pleasure.

Grinning in kind, the man spoke. “Thou hast fulfilled thine purpose, sidhe-wench. Now die, and in dying, despair.”

With that, the bansidhe set up a catcall chorus of laughing scream that set the sloagh child’s skin on edge. The pookha advanced on the weary sidhe, intent on carrying out their master’s orders, but the sidhe, weeping, dredged up the last of her strength for one last song…

…it was a song of ending, and it lasted for only one note.

The cavern filled with bright, golden light that dazzled the eyes and assaulted the senses. When the light receded, the pookha lay prone at the sidhe’s feet, mewling with pain. The sidhe smiled, weakly before slumping forward, silent save for her laboured efforts to breathe.

The bansidhe began to curse their displeasure and their lord rose, serpentine, to his feet and turned to them, silencing the room with a curt gesture. The sloagh child stood, as well, watching the spectacle with confusion. Why had the light died? Why were the strange people upset?

“The sidhe displeases them.” A voice lisps insidiously in the child’s head. Tilting her head to the side in contemplation of this the child stands and walks towards the floor. The bansidhe and the sloagh turn their gazes to the wayward, garish Goth-child, watching intently. One of the sloagh races forward, snake-quick, to pull the child away, but the bansidhe lord holds up a hand, maddened eyes narrowing in consideration.

Oblivious to all of this, the child walks up to the panting, weary sidhe and reaches out to tilt the woman’s graceful chin up to face her. Deep-set sloagh eyes tinged with bedlam lock with pastel, washed-out sidhe ones.

Understanding passes between them and, in a voice too low for anyone else to hear the sidhe woman whispers to the child. “We are tired, childe.”

The child nods and, grimacing, reaches for a discarded cold iron spear. It burns her clammy, skeletal hand as she grasps it, but she is strong enough to bare the pain. Never underestimate the strength of children and the resilience of madness.

The sidhe woman manages a gasp, which is quickly silenced as the sloagh child lowers her head and kisses her. It is a light, butterfly-like kiss, barely more than a brush of liquorice-black sloagh lips against old rose sidhe sweetness.

It is enough.

The sidhe eyes slide closed with acceptance and as the room watches, breathless, the child raises the burning spear and…

…plunges it into the sidhe’s heart.

Muttering, whispering…

…and then, a single clap.

The sloagh child drops the spear, silently, and turns back to her audience. The bansidhe lord has clapped for her and her alone. It almost makes up for the pain in her hands and the sickness in her tiny heart.

She has been accepted.

The child has come home.