Tag Archive | Fae Apoc Vol 1

‘Ware Fairy Gifts

Jan3

For kelkyag‘s prompt.

Thanks to @DaHob for brainstorming help on this one!)

Now.

Tom looked at the knife the girl had given him, if you could call it a knife. He didn’t look long; there was a monster in front of him. There had been a lot of monsters in front of him lately, since the – well, since whatever the hell had happened. The gates or something, the gods, they called themselves, the dragons and monsters pouring into the world.

“Kneel,” the monster snarled. Its breath stank of carrion, and its hands were dripping with blood. The other truckers were dead around Tom, or dying, and all he had was a wooden knife.

Three Months Past

The girl looked terrified. Tom couldn’t blame her; she was being cornered by three sleazy college-boy types who were, it sounded like, offering her all sorts of rides. From the bag she was carrying – bags, he corrected – she wasn’t looking for that sort of ride. And from the looks of her, delicate in feature, wide-eyed, and a bit fae – yes, she had pointed ears, sticking out of hair that was faintly green in hue – she might need a little help.

Tom wasn’t much of a fighter, but his size usually did him where skill didn’t. He lumbered over to help.

Five minutes earlier

“I am the God of the North Wind.” The creature’s voice reached them before he did, echoing through the parking lot. “I am the monster of your nightmares. Serve me or die.”

“Fuck that shit,” George rumbled, and loaded his shotgun.

“Fuck all these freaks.” The truckers prepared for battle.

Three Months Past

“Can I help you, miss?” Tom asked, in his deep bullfrog voice, the one his second wife had called the Don’t Fuck With This Guy tone.

“She’s fine, gramps,” Boy Number One sneered. “She’ll be fine with us.”

“Just fine,” Number Two chuckled. “Besides, you know how the fairy freaks are, anyway. She doesn’t need your help.”

“She might need a priest, though,” Number Three added helpfully. He had a knife, Tom noted. They probably all did.

“I think what she needs,” he rumbled, “is a ride. Am I right, miss?”

“A ride,” she agreed, her voice quavering. “Thank you.”

Three Minutes earlier

The creature ripped through George and Martin, their bullets seeming to do nothing more than irritate it. It looked, Tom thought, like a cross between Swamp Thing and an octopus, snarling “Kneel.”

“Fuck you,” Jake yelled, and emptied his shotgun into the thing. The thing, howling, clawed Jake’s belly open.

Three Months Past

“I told you, she’s fine, old man. Move along.” Number One brandished the knife. “Move. Along.”

“I think she’s coming with me,” he answered, letting his voice get hard. “Right, sweetheart?” He thrust an arm between Two and Three and took the girl’s outstretched hand. “You boys run along.”

Number One did not want to be stopped. He grabbed the girl by the shoulders. “The little fairy freak is coming with us.”

Tom sighed. He didn’t like fighting. “She’s coming with me,” he repeated, and punched Number One in the nose. The girl escaped in the startled spray of blood.

 

One Minute earlier

Jake was bleeding out. George was dead, and Clyde – you couldn’t live without a head. Martin was in bad shape; so were Liz and Little Mike. The guns weren’t doing anything. The fire seemed to hurt it some, but the flame-thrower had died. Tom was the only one still standing.

Three Months Past

“Thanks,” the girl murmured. “I’m Ner.”

“Tom. Nice to meet you.” He helped her into the cab of his truck. “Where you going?”

“Anywhere else?” She smiled wryly. “West and South, preferably. As far as you’re willing to take me.”

“I’m going to Minneapolis.”

“Sounds great.”

“I’ve, ah, got a hat…” he offered, tapping his own ear.

“Ack!” She frowned. “That’s been happening more and more lately. Something’s going wrong.” She concentrated, and looked normal, blonde, round-eared. “Better?”

“More human.”

The drive was nicer for her company, and it was with some reluctance that Tom let her out in Minneapolis. She smiled shyly at him, checked her ears, and offered a long wooden dirk. “Things are getting weird,” she murmured. “Weirder than me. This might help.”

How a wooden play knife would help, he didn’t know, but Tom said “thank you” just the same, and hung it behind his seat.

Now.

Nothing else had worked. Tom looked at the long knife the girl had given him, ducked under three tentacles and a pile of seaweed, and jammed the knife somewhere that looked vital.

As the monster screamed, writhing in death throes, Tom chuckled, and stabbed it again. ‘Ware fairy gifts, indeed!

~*~

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/218381.html. You can comment here or there.

First Planting

Jul10

From clare_dragonfly‘s prompt: “Fae-apoc: the first planting.” Fae Apoc, clearly. Hob, I swear I got Dree from your name. (It’s actually Adriana Moreau, “dark one/little dark.” Um, she’s a bit dark. 😉

***

Dree surveyed the ruins of the city with a critical eye. Most of the people had left when the gods started fighting overhead. Of those who hadn’t, most had trucked out when the power plant had gone offline, or when the food stopped coming in. Dree and her small crew had lasted through that by building their fence up the moment trouble started, boarding up their windows when things got really bad, and moving into a nearby apartment building when the fires ruined their old neighborhood.

The winter had been hard, and they’d done their share of covert cheating to keep alive. The building hadn’t originally had a chimney, but who was left that knew that? A city of over a million now had maybe three hundred inhabitants, a good third of those refugees from larger nearby cities who hadn’t made it any further. They knew each other, their tiny conclave, only by what they chose to share, and, in Dree’s case, as in many others, that was precious little.

They’d made it through the winter on willpower, burnt furniture, and canned goods, but now the frost was gone, and something you could call spring was here. The yard near the apartment building had been a museum, once, and, inside, some art, mostly statues, still remained. But what mattered to them right now was the long stretch of ground which had been unplowed, mowed, fertilized, and well-tended for over a century.

They peeled off the sod, Dree and her crew and their team of fellow refugees, plowed up the lush, fertile soil, and planted scrounged seed after seed, watering with hoses and cans stolen from the houses of the dead and gone, muttering Workings when there were no humans to see.

Like the seeds, they had landed in a small corner of hospitable land in the midst of a burned-out wasteland. Like the seeds, they would grow and flourish. Like the seeds, they would live.

***

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/75333.html. You can comment here or there.

Being Alone

May10

Sometime in September, I posted Two by Two, a fae apoc story set in a travelling show. clare_dragonfly asked:

“As usual though I want more context 😉 Why did Anaca allow herself to be caught? (Or if she didn’t want to, how did they catch her?)”

This is a partial answer to this, from Anaca’s point of view.

***

I’d gotten used to hiding, but I never really got used to being alone.

When my Change had come, I’d been just past my fourteenth birthday, and the world had been mad with wild gods in the skies. My bones had twisted, my thumbs vanished, my tail grew, while I hid in my closet and tried not to scream. When it was over, I looked something like a rabbit, and something like a deer, and only like a human in the silhouette.

A long time past, that, and, that time, my family and I had managed to flee before the lynch mob came to get me. Anything strange was suspect, and I was definitely strange.

I learned to Mask from a travelling biker gang not long afterwards, bikers who mostly didn’t bother, in that age, to hide their horns and tusks. That helped some; it helped hide me from the strangers who were afraid of all things fae. But it didn’t help the real problems. My parents were not fae, and neither were my siblings, and, though they tried to hide it, they were as afraid of the monster in their midst as the strangers we were hiding from were. I ran off in the middle of the night with the bikers, and tried to pretend it didn’t hurt.

So’jers like that had no real place for a teenaged girl who’d barely Changed, so I didn’t stay with them for very long. I bounced from group to group, hiding where I could, helping when I was able, and learning from those who would teach me.

It got harder and harder as time passed. Sometimes, the Mask, the glamour that hid my appearance from humankind, would flicker on me, and sometimes it failed completely. I couldn’t risk spending time in the company of humans, or at least not much time at once, so I found groups of fae that I could live or travel with. But, as the decades passed, those groups got rarer and rarer, and the so’jers were no better company for a fifty-year-old preybeast than they had been for a fourteen-year-old.

I had been living in the Appalachian forest for what I was pretty sure was ten or eleven years, in an area where humans rarely travelled. It was one of those places they called a “twisted zone,” where the magic thrown around during the God Wars had changed the landscape and the animals. Other fae would come through sometimes, but humans found the places scary, and their legends told them that they, too, could be changed, by the air or the water or just contact with the strange creatures there. It made for a lonely existence, but I’d grown a bit tired of running, and here, I’d been able to settle down.

I had a nice set-up, a cave that was dry all year round, with some scavenged furniture from a few falling-down houses. My Change had made me an herbivore, and so I had a nice garden, spread out enough that it didn’t look like a sign of habitation. The weather never got cold enough to really need clothes, and I never saw anyone, so I’d stopped bothering with clothes. It was a comfortable life, if wild, but it was lonely.

I guess I’m really not built for the solitude. When people came through, I’d hide in the trees and watch them, listening to their conversations, imagining talking to them, wondering what it would be like to travel with them. I’d follow them to the edge of my territory, sometimes sleeping nearby just to feel like I was near people again.

When the ringmaster came through, with his cart for catching strange creatures and his bright, chipper, twin companions, they didn’t even have to put forth any effort to catch me. I hate to admit it, but I fell right into their trap.

And sitting there, struggling with the net, hissing and spitting like a wild thing, I have to admit… somewhere in the back of my mind, I was relieved.

***

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/41847.html. You can comment here or there.

Drabble: Collateral Damage

Apr29

From dailyprompt: “Stunt Double.”

and

Three Word Wednesday,
foolish, mercy, relish.

Fae Apoc.

“Do you think we were unwise?” Jackie twisted to look at the unconscious man-boy in the back seat; shirtless, rain-drenched, unconscious, he looked even younger than he had cowering in the corner.

“That sort of mercy is always foolish,” Anne answered, but, seeing the expression on her sibling’s face, relented a little. “But I’m sure we can work something out for him. He’s kind of a nice little rabbit, isn’t he?”

“Mm, more of a ferret?” Jackie mused. “Or a mink.”

“He does have sharp teeth.” Anne rubbed her arm ruefully. “But I thought we weren’t going to skin him.”

“Otter, then.”

“Good, I’ll throw him in the water. So, basically, you think he’s a weasel. And yet you saved his life.”

“Well, he’s a cute weasel. Not quite a weasel. Marten. Like that pine marten we saw last week. And it wasn’t his fault, really.” She glanced back at their captive again. “Okay, the biting was his fault, and he really seemed to relish it when he kicked me in the shins, but I guess I can’t really blame him.”

“I can,” Anne muttered. She glanced in the rearview at the boy, and then further back. “Is that a tail?”

“No, they just pulled on at the last exit. Just an asshole.”

“Throw a blanket over the kid anyway, would you? I don’t want someone calling the cops.”

“I’m sure the cops are already looking for us.” She tucked the blanket around the unconscious boy anyway, trying to ignore the double twinge of maternal-like concern and assassin-like homicide. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that the target had had a stunt double. It probably wasn’t even his fault that he’d attacked them; he had a bit of a brainwashed look to him, conscious. But he did look exactly like the man they’d left dead in Detroit, down to the mole on his cheek and the way the dyed-red curl in the front hung enticingly over his forehead. Someone had to have shifted him at some point; even twins didn’t look that similar.

“We almost killed the wrong guy,” she muttered.

“We almost killed an extra guy,” her sister corrected. “Do you really think we would have failed to notice when he fell over with lead bullets and didn’t get back up?”

“If he did,” she countered. “Are you sure he’s human?”

“What makes you think he’s not?”

“The way he went catatonic when we killed his Keeper.”

“Keep… oh.” It was rare she got to see Anne taken aback; she relished it a little bit even while making sure the guy behind her was, indeed, just an asshole. “You think he’s an Owned halfbreed?”

“He certainly was acting like it. I mean, enough mind control could do it, too, so I guess we’ll have to wait until he wakes up.”

“Speaking of which, he’s not likely to do so before we get to a safe house, is he?”

“Nah.” She tapped the boy’s forehead lightly. “He’s out. Human or fae, he won’t be waking up until I want him to.”

 

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/38194.html. You can comment here or there.

15 Minute Ficlet – Building

Mar9

From Ty’s prompt here, check out the picture!

They were building it anew.

There hadn’t been much left after the devastation, and the city they’d lived in had been a stinking, rotten, fetid ruin. Better to leave it to the dead and dying, better to leave the diseases to work their course. Those of them who could walk, who could carry a pack, who wanted to live, had banded together and headed for the hills.

They had among them a surprising number of skills for “city people,” and just as surprising, to them, were their gaps in knowledge, vast holes that the city, that civilization had filled in. but they had what their ancestors had had, in spades: a strong desire to keep living, and a willingness to innovate.

They didn’t all have a willingness to work hard, but those who didn’t either fell by the wayside, or found ways to work “smart,” to reinvent old technology quickly, and to steal or jury-rig what they couldn’t just make.

They were on an old tor, where thousands of years ago, castles had risen from the ground. The castles were gone, victims of age, victims of the same devastation that had ruined the city, but the things that had made the tor a good place to build a castle were still there: fresh water, a view for miles in every direction, and stone. Stone and stone and stone. They grew tired of looking at stone, of carrying stone, of cutting stone. Their hands were covered in so much dust that they might as well be stone. They dreamed of stone.

But they dreamed in safety, behind sturdy walls that grew sturdier and safer every day; they dreamed with full bellies, their food supplies growing from hunting and gardening and plain old scrounging; they dreamed in a growing community, in a world they were building for themselves:

Their dreams were of stacking stone; but their hopes were of stacking knowledge.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/21335.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute ficlet: Slideshow

Mar6

Originally posted to Fifteen-Minute-Fics, a 15-minute-ficlet to the prompt “platitudinous”

She smiled at the gathered crowd and took a long, deep breath. They would listen to her; they’d paid to come in here, after all. But would they hear?

She waited while they squirmed a bit. No-one expected her to be all that interesting, did they? They expected her to preach, to pontificate, to pour platitudes on their plebeian pates. They came to say they’d heard her speak, not because they expected it to be an entertaining speech.

“Punch ’em in the gut,” he’d recommended. “Don’t be platitudinous. Don’t use words of more than two syllables unless no other word will do. They’re here to look at you, after all, and for the cachet of hearing you speak. Let them look at you. Then, and only then, honey, hit them in the gut and don’t let them catch their breath until you’re done with them.”

He’d added a wry smile then, one she’d come to know very well. “I know you can do it. You’ve done it to me.”

She stepped away from the podium, carrying only the small remote control for the projector. She shed her business jacket. Let them look at you. All right, then; under the jacket she was wearing a thin, strappy chemise and a skirt that looked a lot less professional without its matching jacket, especially when a mystery breeze began brushing it to and fro, suggesting more than showing, but certainly suggesting a lot.

While they were staring at the moments of revealed thigh, at her freckled shoulders, at her flame-colored, hair, the projector screen lowered. She stood so that she was directly in front of the images, and showed them her pictures:

Avignon, where a would-be god sat on a throne in the middle of city hall, young men and women in chains at his feet. The light made it seem as if she, too, was chained before him. Click.

Barcelona, where the center of the city stood as destroyed as if an earthquake had hit it. She looked, now, as if she stood buried to her waist in rubble. The crowd began to make uncomfortable noises. Click.

Lisbon, looking as if nothing had changed, at first glance. Peaceful. Calm. Happy. Click… and so very uniform. Everybody the same. Everybody moving with a small careful fixed smile on their face: nothing wrong here. We like our uniforms. We are not stepping out of the crowd. Click.

The light of an American anytown showed them her face, with the same careful smile, the same blank expression.

“The enemy is already here,” she said into the nervous silence. “The questions is not when they will arrive. It is what. will. we. do?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/18938.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery Channel

Oct26

From Wystie’s prompt to the August 9th call for prompts – “Exotic, erotic, and/or exogenous”

***

The halls of the internment camp – voluntary relocation center – were nearly empty. In the first couple weeks here, they’d been full and bouncing, as people, antsy in the confined space, a repurposed abandoned high school building, had wandered from room to room, visiting, meeting new people, just looking for an excuse to get out of their barracks.

As the days (“This will only be for a little while, until we get back on our feet.”) wore on to weeks (“People are scared right now; this is for your own protection, you understand”) and now were flipping over to months (“Just keep your head down. Here. Plant a garden. Do something useful.”), the air of frenzied activity had faded. The excitement of the new, however terrifying and strange, had waned.

Now people stayed, listless, in their barracks, and moved, listlessly, to the meal hall for their bland and unsatisfying meals. They had allowed themselves to be trapped here, for the sake of frightened humanity. They had built the cage themselves, to show that they were not the threat that the others were. And now they milled like cattle, waiting for the slaughter.

“Hey, Synthie.” The chipper voice interrupted Cynthia’s morose musings. Only a few people called her that obnoxious nickname, and only one of them was here, in the voluntary relocation center with her, so she didn’t bother looking any direction but up.

“Hey, Airhead.” Aaron was dangling upside down from one of the HVAC conduits, his favorite style of travel. “You’re going to freak the guards out again.”

“Let them freak. They want to treat us like animals, I’m gonna act like an animal.” His tail flipped down to trail in her face. “Have fun with it. I mean, we’re stuck in this dump through no fault of our own; are we supposed to just lay down and die?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what they want. Or stay quiet long enough that they can just brick us up in here.” The Cask of Amontillado probably hadn’t been the best bedtime reading, but there was only so much available in the former school’s library.

“Bah, we’ll get out when enough of us are ready to leave. They don’t know enough about us to really keep up locked up effectively.”

“They seem to be doing a good enough job so far.”

“Everyone who’s here came voluntarily. You heard what happened with the prison they tried to set up.” He wiggled his tail temptingly in her face. “Come on up, Synthie. Stop worrying so much.”

She tugged lightly on the offending tail. “Unlike you, I don’t stick to the ceiling.”

“Oh, you know you can get up here. You’re just worried about the guards.”

“As you should be,” she retorted, more sharply than she really wanted to. “They get rough when they’re nervous.”

“They’re always nervous.” And they were always rough. And they weren’t going to get any better, were they?

“You have a point.” She reached for a shadow, found a nice set of them up above the conduits, and slowly wove them into a net around the pipes.

“I always have a point. That’s my job, to be as pointy as inhumanly possible.” He swayed cheerfully.

“No, that’s Sarah, over in the Science section. She has those spikes…”

“Ah, but I have the pointiest mind.”

“Pointy-headed, I’ll give you.” She pulled herself up towards the ceiling with her net of shadows. “Do you care about anything, Aaron?”

“What, just because I’m not sitting around fretting and waiting to die? Of course I do.”

“Yeah?” She braided a few dark, dusty shadows into a swing, and hung a few feet from him. Upside-down, his face was more expressive. “Like what?”

“Like this place. Like being treated like animals. Like the war going on outside.”

She shook her head in exasperation. “You’re just parroting my worries back at me.”

“Hey, just because I don’t wander around with a storm cloud hanging over my head…”

“That’s just my shadows, Airhead.”

“…wander around moping like a miserable moppet, doesn’t mean I don’t have worries.”

“And you deal with them by hanging from the ceiling.”

“What, your way is any better?” He had a point, but she didn’t want to say that, so she settled for not answering at all. “Look, we’re trapped in a cage. We’re treated like interesting but potentially really dangerous animals. I’ve even seen some cameras tucked up in the rafters here, where they don’t expect us to go.”

So had Cynthia. The ones she’d found didn’t work anymore. “So you’ve said. Cages. Animals.” It was all so very dreary.

His upside-down leer lit up the gloom suddenly. “So why not make like the Discovery Channel?”

Next in this sub-setting: Invisibles.

Two by Two

Sep8

A story of the fae apoc world.

The Two-by-Two Zoo rolled into the county fair, its long wagons and carts brightly-painted and hung with cheap gingerbreading, the giant draft horses hung with garish barding and the handlers dressed in bright, archaic finery. They were a spectacle parading through the center of the small town, a loud and cheerful eye-catcher, the ringmaster hanging off the edge of the main wagon, shouting to one and all to come see the wild beasts! The endangered animals! The strange creatures found deep in the twisted zones, where few dare to tread and fewer come back out!

Those that do come out, of course, are said to have left sanity far in the distance. Looking at the ringleader, with his elaborate get-up out of some old book, one could believe it. Looking at his stage girls, in their top hats and tails and not much else, one could believe the other rumors about circus folk, too. But excitement like this only comes to this small town once or twice a year, and so, mad or not, alien or not, the zoo, with its bawdy wagons, was well-attended as it rolled through down.

“Do you have lions, mister?” asked a little girl, jogging to keep up with the horses.

“No lions this year, sweetie, but we’ve been looking. We do have something even more neat, though.”

“Elephants?” She bounced up and down. “My grandma says elephants are real, but I’ve never seen even a little one.”

Her grandmother could probably remember back before the devastation, then. “No elephants. I’d need a bigger wagon for that!”

“They’re just a story,” a boy tagging behind her scoffed.

“Ah, who can say, now, what’s a story and what’s not? I know a man down in the Carolinas who has a full skeleton of an elephant in his barn. It’s a sight to behold, let me tell you.” The ringsmaster smiled at the children, and at their parents, pretending not to be as eager as the young ones. “But no, I’m afraid I have no lions and no elephants.” He gestured towards the covered cages.

“What I do have is a pair of snow leopards, creatures that were nearly extinct long before the war and whose very existence now hangs on these two beasts! I have alligators dredged from the swamp of Florida! I have squirrel monkeys, macaws, and a pack of coyotes! And, ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, I have…”

The crowd, all together, held their breath. Life wasn’t as hard now as it had been in the years just past the devastation, but lives were a lot more limited than they had been at the turn of the century, and their entertainment simpler.

“…but you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?” The girls capered behind him, taunting the crowd, who moaned much as they had caught their breath, as a single organism. “Just after dinner, folks, down at the fairgrounds! Bring your barter goods, make Ella and Emma happy girls!”

They’d be there, they’d all be there. Not for the snow leopards, proud and beautiful and very nearly actually the last of their race. Not for the dragon skull that Aloysius was hawking four carts down, or the trade goods from far-away Saskatchewan and Dallas, but for the unknown, the exotic, the mysterious. And they’d give it to them, wouldn’t they?

“Is this gonna need a runner?” The wagons had been parked in the fairgrounds in two long rows, their solid sides to the outside to shield their contents from view; down this aisle, the ringmaster walked with his twin companions. Their voices were low; no-one outside their round-up would have heard them.

“I think we’re good,” one of the twins answered. “They’re intrigued, but there’s none of that dark tension we had over in Erie. They barely believe in elephants, Jack; they’ve already lost some of the fear of the exotic.”

The other twin giggled. “We’re more likely to get rocks thrown at us for our skimpy costumes than for… that.”

That was in the cage they were standing at right now, the piece de resistance, the center-stage freak show, the wildest of the wild animals. That was listening to every word they said from behind the thin plywood wall, and couldn’t help but chuckle at their conversation.

“I think your biggest concern is that they will try to rescue me again, like those children in – where was it? – Roanoke?”

“Hush, Anaca,” the ringmaster scolded, and I hushed. But I’d gotten his attention. He and the twins unlocked the side door and entered my cage.

They were always so cautious about it, so careful that it make me laugh. They’d be no less careful with the snow leopards, or with the alligators. As if I was some vicious creature who would bite if provoked. As if they hadn’t chosen me for my dull, un-frightening teeth and flat, un-threatening claws. As if I’d run the moment they opened my cage without precautions.

Well, all right, I might. If only to see what they’d do.

“It’s time to get ready for the show,” the ringmaster told me, as if I didn’t know that already. Sometimes I think he listens to his own propaganda a little too much. But I just nodded at him. He’d already hushed me once tonight. No need to get him annoyed this early in the evening.

“Hold still,” he said anyway, and I held still as he put the horrible leash on the horrible iron collar around my neck and locked it to the ring in the back wall. He left off the shackles for now, and stood between me and the door, looking pointedly away as the twins got me ready.

Ella brushed my fur and braided my hair, her clever fingers gentle. I could do for myself, of course, but not as quickly or as easily as she could. Besides, if they were going to keep me in a cage, the least they could do was wait on me a little. Emma swept the cage tidy, shook out the blankets, and brought ne fresh clothes from the cupboard they thought my flat-fingered, thumbless hands couldn’t open.

They let me change myself, at least, the backless, sleeveless shirt covering my four mammaries, the tiny shorts settling below my short, stubby tail. Enough to suit those who were prudes about such things, while still showing very clearly just how different I was.

“She’s ready,” Ella told the ringmaster, and he came back with the shackles. I hissed at him, showing my useless teeth. I could no more not complain than I could stop breathing.

“Shh, Anaca,” he coaxed. “You know we have to. You know they riot if we don’t. You remember what it was like.”

I did, indeed. Being lit on fire is no fun at all. “I know,” I complained quietly, “but I hate them anyway.”

I didn’t make him hold me down to put them on me, though. Some days I have to. Some days the memories won’t allow anything else… and on the very bad days, all four of us are bruised and bleeding and crying by the time they lock me to the wall of my cage. But this night, this night I could hiss at him and allow the indignity.

They left me there, then, tethered and chained and caged, locked down so much more than even the poor snow leopards, and went out to begin their show. I sat in my fresh hay, chewed idly on a carrot, and waited.

I heard them coming, of course. It takes the crowd a long time to work down to my cage. They ooh at the alligator and they aah at the snow leopards and they aaw at the tiny little monkeys, but they’re always looking forward, looking at the curtain covering my cage. It would be flattering, if it had anything to do with me.

It doesn’t, of course. It’s all the ringmaster’s brilliant showmanship. And it is, really, an amazing display of psychological prestidigitation. He’s set this whole show up, the sad animals in their sad cages, the exotic, wild and still non-threatening, the last of their kind. All of it to build a mood, a mood of sympathy, of interest, of titillated compassion. And, if he’d played the crowd right (He didn’t always. He’d misread them in Erie, overplayed them in Roanoke), when they got to my cage, they’d be tuned perfectly to hear what he had to say.

“And these are squirrel monkeys; a gentleman adventurer of my acquaintance went all the way into the rain forests of South American to bring these back, and aren’t they adorable? Please keep your fingers away from the cage, folks; they may be cute but they do bite.”

“And now we come to center stage, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. This one can be a little shocking, so I urge you, if you have a weak heart, please bypass this exhibit.” No one moved, of course. “I myself found this creature, deep in a twisted zone, denning in a cave, living like a common animal, found it, captured it, and brought it here for your viewing pleasure.” All of that was technically true. All the crowd heard, though, was living like a common animal. The murmurs started. What was he hiding behind the curtain. Someone whispered dragon. The ringmaster’s voice rose up louder.

“You have heard the stories of the monsters from the time of devastation. Those creatures would not have been held by a cage, ladies and gentlemen. Those creatures were monsters of mythic proportions.” The twins grabbed the curtains and pulled them away, revealing… me. The crowd gasped. I hissed back at them. The murmurs rose. The ringmaster’s voice rose higher.

“But, like your housecat is a cousin to the lions and the leopards, those monsters had smaller cousins.” I looked nothing like a cat; if anything, my ears and tail made me look more like a rabbit. “Annie here is one of those smaller cousins… don’t worry, folks, she can’t hurt you. Collar and bars and chains all of good solid iron.”

Like a rabbit, I’m not all that scary once you get a look at me. People who had pulled back originally crowded close to my cage again, as the ringmaster continued. “These smaller cousins, these wild fae, have been hunted nearly to extinction, due to their unfortunate resemblance to their malevolent older relatives.”

It was a good lie, better because people wanted to believe, better because the oversized collar and shackles made me look small and pitiful, like the snow leopards pacing back in forth in their cage, better still because time enough had passed, two generations and more since the devastation, that the monsters he was speaking of were myths to most of these people. The twins brought the little children up to pet me through the bars, and I sat docilely and allowed it. I like being petted.

It was a good plan, the ringmaster’s. Tell them enough that this is not a monster, that’s just an unfortunate resemblance, and eventually they will believe you. Show them the harmless and let it seem like that is all there is, and eventually they will stop being afraid of the monsters in the night. Show them me instead of the godlings who had wrecked their world…

“Hey, mister.” The little kid had petted me for a moment, his hands gentler than I expected from someone his age. “She’s lonely. Everyone else in your zoo’s gotta mate or a pack or something… it’s the ‘Two by Two Zoo,’ right? When you gonna get her a boyfriend?”

From Eseme‘s prompt of “endangered animals, snow leopard.”

 

Read “Being Alone“, written after this.