Changling

I smiled at the babe in my arms, healthy, strong, human, all things my own child had not been. I had spent weeks looking for a replacement in the human world, I wanted the babe I chose to look similar to my own sickly thing. Granted no human babe would have his iridescent wings or his light lavender skin, but I would settle for a boy with milky blue eyes like his, even though in the human realm those milky eyes were an undesirable trait because in the human realm that meant the inability to see. This child was more than I could have ever imagined, his eyes were the milky blue and his hair was a deep inky black of my child’s.

I had watched him for weeks, he was quiet and calm, but his parents could not handle the boy, try as they might they were only human. So I determined the best time to steal into the babe’s nursery and whisk him away to my land, the night he was under the watch of his mother’s mother, an equally incompetent human woman for she fell fast asleep, even without my urging. I came to his room, my own baby in my arms, doubtlessly about to die shortly. I glamoured him myself, he being to weak to hold the simplest magic. When he died he would look exactly like the human boy whose bed he had died in. They would determine his death Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, not knowing every death of that type had not been human, but fae. I laid him in the crib next to my new child and scooped my human baby up.

All the way home he had not cried out at all, his tiny fist circling my finger. And to think I shall be able to have him in this way for thousands of years.