Elsewhere

Mossy felt unmoored, adrift. He knew logically that Faerie would not solve the ache, only force it to abate.  He also knew that Faerie operated entirely unto its own logic.  He yearned regardless of logic.  Mossy’s feet pulled him into the dimming light of evening, darkness under the trees unraveled like a snagged scarf.

He walked, thinking of yarn, thread, wandering, beasts in labyrinths, until he plunged a foot into water up to his knee.  Mossy blinked at the pool, removed his foot slowly from the murky water.  Tiny spring duckweed and mint roots, water the color of old tea, flowed from his boot when he emptied it.  This wouldn’t be the first time he almost drowned while wandering. At least this was a pond and not the sea.  Mossy felt the pull of the sea almost as strongly as he felt Faerie’s hook in his heart. He walked into the surf sometimes, staring transfixed at the Truth of the horizon until his hands were soft and his clothes were crusted in salt and his teeth chattered.

His situation was, in a word, bad.  He’d been away from Faerie for years now.  The brief jaunt with Crysta hardly counted.  She’d purged him well enough afterwards that he could barely remember the scent of the meadow where the Hunt set them loose.  The sun in the other world that day tasted like dandelions in his memory, like a color so bright it was bitter….

…Mossy looked around again. The sun in this world was lower in the sky than it had been when he first began to recall…

Night.

The changeling slapped a biting insect off his neck.  He was no longer by the pond.  He still carried one boot.  Mossy stopped walking and unlaced the other boot, tied the pair together to his belt. Pine needles stabbed at the soft flesh between his toes.  Mossy crouched, balancing on the balls of his feet, and pressed the heels of his hands hard to his temples.  He clawed up a handful of dirt and fallen leaves only to let the handful slip through his fingers.

A falling star shot overhead.

Mossy stood and followed it. Dust drifted from his hands.  He walked until the land ended and dawn colored the tops of the trees.

Angus followed the blood from scuffed soles to its source.  Bark pattern creased Mossy’s face from leaning against a tree.  He turned to his god as Angus approached, eyes going wide before he hid them behind dirty fingers.  Mud, crushed leaves, the dark stain of sap, and a little blood mottled his hands.

“Which face do you show me?” Mossy croaked.  Angus frowned.  It wasn’t like Mossy to hint even so obliquely at his Sight.

“Both,” replied Angus, ever the poet.  He slipped Mossy’s canteen from the changeling’s satchel.  He knelt and pressed the cool container to Mossy’s fevered forehead.

“Both,” Mossy echoed. “I ken it’s both, but-“  He broke off coughing, the rasp of words too much for his parched throat.  Angus opened the canteen and made Mossy finish half of it.

Mossy spoke again, but the words were too soft to hear.  Angus leaned closer.