The Senkensha: Part 1

Chapter 1: Isleen

          ‘They’ named me Isleen because I was walking in a dream my entire life; or rather that’s what I was told. I was an outsider, a strange figure in this community. ‘They’ were the people I couldn’t see. The people from whom I had supposedly descended. ‘They’ were humans.
          I’ve never seen a human in my life, and you might find it strange that I say so, considering I am one. But I prefer to say that I had been born one. When one looks down to their hands, they see skin, nails; clenching the muscles to see their fingers curl up into a fist. What I see is the ground. I am unable to see the body which I inhabit, and I needed reassurance that I actually existed. And I received it one day.
          Just as I am unable to see them humans, I am unable to hear them, but one day as I listened close, I realized there was no silence. I wandered through the streets, searching for the voices that echoed through my head. They were loud, if I’ve ever known loud.
          I found myself entering what the humans called a park. And I found myself facing another living creature. I blinked, unsurely, and I waited, staring. It turned to me, pink eyes glittering brightly in shock. I glanced over it once, my eyes focused on its cotton candy-like hair that swirled in mountains of sparking pink whirls. It was exceptionally pale with slender fingers and limbs to match. Wings grew from its back, as pink as the rest of it.
          I found my voice suddenly. “Do… Do I exist?”
          It blinked for a moment longer and a smile sweeter than sugar blossomed on its lips. The voice, honeyed as can be, responded, “Yes. You do.”
          Its name was Moonmist, a female fairy. That was what she called herself, and my previous days of boredom and silence had become noisy and eventful.
          I met many other fairies to whom she introduced me, and I learned much about the world around me. I learned from the fairies and the occasional other visitors. Vampires, brownies, gnomes, etc. Once Moonmist took me to visit the mermaids. My new companions called me Isleen, the human, teaching me what I was for the first time and in return I found a name for them. Creatures.
          There was no other way to describe them. Human was what I was, and they were creatures. Different from me in almost every way. But different as we were, my world was suddenly not very lonely with the creatures around.
          Before I met the creatures, I lived in what they told me was a house. I lived with a female human and a creature that they called a dog. I later learned that I was also unable to see any creatures in contact with the humans.
          I wasn’t invisible to the humans that I had lived with, but they were invisible to me. They fed me, and clothed me, and in return I uttered not a word to them. My assumption had been that my food appeared there for me, a normal part of nature, and likewise the sheltering that they called clothes. I didn’t speak, and I didn’t communicate, except through books, which I had taught myself to understand through pictures.
          The human soon understood that and used it as her advantage to speak with me. She occasionally left me notes, which I barely understood or comprehended, but it made me question if I was truly alone in the world. It was also the same way that I learned what I should call myself.
          There was a part of the house that I had stayed in most of my stay there, Moonmist called a room. And that room had two names. One was basement and the other was my. My room. I remember looking at the dark walls, staring for the longest time. I hid in the corner from a monster I knew little about. I thought a lot in my room. I was a thinker.
          With the utensils that made marks that showed where it had traveled, I wrote and I drew. I drew the only room I felt safe in. I drew what I thought I might like look like. I drew what I believed humans might look like. I drew and I drew, and I barely wrote, because each picture said more than I could possibly write. I wrote what my voice lacked. I wrote because my speaking skills were vacant. I drew because my living skills were vacant.
          When I found Moonmist and the other creatures, my notes from the human grew more frequent. They had the marks that Moonmist told me were called question marks. They asked where I was, and what I was doing. I never understood the questions for every time I received them, I was right where the note was left. I remember staring blankly at the note, until it disappeared from my view.
          I was scared. I grew to hate my confinement in that basement. My heart willed to return to the creatures more and more every day, until I just did. I remember walking to the passageway to the outside, and trying to open it. It wouldn’t budge. A force was blocking it, preventing me from opening. I pulled and pushed and banged against the door. Until I found my voice once again. I used the voice that Moonmist had taught me, putting the words to good use. Tears streaming from invisible eyes, I cried, “Let me out! The silence is deafening!” And the force suddenly weakened, and I threw open the gate of my confinement and stepped out to the comforting sound.
          I never returned to that house by myself. I never entered it again, but we spied on that human-inhabited house time and again. The tiniest part of me missed the basement, and I missed the sheltered life, but I was learning and was happy.

          In the place that the creatures called an alley, I searched through the garbage cans that got filled and emptied occasionally due to the humans. I sifted through, finding anything of interest that the incoming new elves would take as tribute, so they wouldn’t steal my belongings.
          Suddenly I heard a strangely stable voice say, in quite a loud tone, “Lady Kanon, what are you doing here?!”
          I turned around, and gasped, facing a strange creature indeed. His hair was dark, but his eyes were undeniably light, such a clear blue that they almost looked transparent. His skin was darker than the normal creature, and his lips were an odd pink. He was tall, but not as tall as the fairies or any other creature of normal size. “Kanon?”

Link to Part 2:

The Senkensha: Part 2  [E] #1480624 Genres: Fantasy - Mystery - Supernatural by Charamer