#original fantasy

(Could this have been magic?)

He led you deeper, past the rocks covered in moss and ferns that hugged the trees. The air grew thick, and not just from the humidity, but from something left unseen. The weight of it gently pressed against your temples, the feeling not unpleasant, but more so, just as an afterthought. Undeniably there, but only if you noticed it.

Colours beamed and sharpened the longer you stared. Every hue turned up its saturation before your very eyes. The skies were an impossible sapphire blue, the grass glinting a brilliant green. The trees that swayed around you blurred into your vision, lulling you into a sense of relaxation, much like a lullaby. Beautiful was one word to describe it, but if you were to be honest, it was also terrifying.

Eloryn watched you quietly, his eyes ablaze with something you couldn’t quite decipher. You could feel his gaze searing right through you, not quite judging, but perceiving. He held tightly onto your hand, letting his fingers wander, his thumb occasionally clinging to your pulse point. He admired every beat about you, but found himself smiling when he felt it jump.

“This… this is amazing,” you spoke, unsure if the word you used could do what you were witnessing any justice.

Eloryn hummed, as if amused, but he didn’t care to tease you about it just yet. He wanted to give you a break after what you had just gone through, a distraction for you to discover at your own pace. Instead, he kept his tone kind, his voice low, “I knew you’d love it.”

He then let go of your wrist and took a step forward, walking into a clearing unobscured by the foliage above. The sunlight was so bright in the area that you could barely see his features anymore, save for the silhouette. His skin gleamed like polished ruby, reflecting warm jewel hues. His hair, which was usually pale, now shimmered a pearlescent shine.

He spoke again, his tone meant to teach. He wanted to tell you more about the world that was otherwise hidden from you, the good parts that seemed to be somehow rare. “Can you see how the embers cling to everything?”

You nodded absentmindedly; your brain too addled with everything else to even think simply.

Eloryn gave a slight tilt of his head, letting slip a choked back laugh. He bit back the rest of it all, not allowing himself to be visibly entertained by your stunned demeanour. This was new to you, of course, so he had to be patient. What was normal to him was foreign to you. Instead, he chose to educate you further, turning what he wanted to poke some fun at you into something you might want to know.

“Every little thing in this world has its purpose,” he murmured, taking your hand, pointing your fingers wherever you guided him, at first a bush of nettles. “These,” he began, thinking of a way to introduce his example, “sting you, don’t they? Most people avoid them. Cross a realm over, though?” he hinted. “Then you’ll find they have magic that can be used to ward. Either on property, against sickness, on crops.”

He then turned you around, guiding your hand to a point towards a near-perfect ring of mushrooms—one of them had been lightly trampled on—likely by fauna, he thought. The ring emitted the same sort of glittering light, shimmering in reds and whites and creamy, earthy hues.

“This,” he explained next, “is a gateway; when a ring fully connects, you can travel between realms.”

Then he pulled you back to him, directing your hand to point towards the sky. His lips pressed against the back of your head, but they didn’t linger. “Our home,” he murmured, “the world around us carries enough magic to contain life.”

You blinked up at the deep, royal blue sky that almost looked unreal to your very eyes. The same sort of flickering magic emitted from it, like a shroud of perpetually floating stars fading back and forth.

You were enamoured by just about everything, your eyes drifting around of their own accord. Everything shimmered and sparkled in clouding streams. From the grass you walked on to the little flowers that dotted the ground you stood on. From the sunlight itself to the bark on the trees.

But then your eyes caught onto something in your peripheral vision, something that left itself from the naked eye but kept tempting you to look.

When you’d turn your head, though, there would be nothing there.

You thought it could have been a side effect because you weren’t used to this sort of thing.

Eloryn, too, noticed that you seemed a bit distracted, but he brushed it off as you simply just feeling overwhelmed.

“Magic is all around us,” he tried to soothe, just in case that was the issue, “your kind may have forgotten about it, but it hasn’t gone anywhere since.”

You nodded almost blankly, and that’s when he noticed the shift in your focus right away.

You were just barely listening to him, prompting him to knit his brows in mounting confusion, but also concern. An instinct within his very core had awoken. He took a step back to look around, but there had been no immediate threat that he could pick up. Nothing changed in the air that could hint at something being wrong; so why did it feel like something was?

He fixed his gaze on you, studying what it could have been. You weren’t afraid of whatever it was that had captivated your mind, so he next guessed the same thing that you had concluded to.

Maybe you just weren’t equipped to process something like this. Modern humans were less accepting of something to this extent, even if it looked them directly in the eyes.

Still, he thought you looked beautiful like this, lost in the discovery of a world that the rest of the world had forgotten, on purpose, too. Your eyes followed around the fleeting auras on just about everything like a moth chasing light. Your smile was soft, your eyes glinting with awe. If it was just that, then he could relax a little; he could watch your mind work, and he’d bring you down from it all, one step at a time.

He looked at you again and gulped, finding that the way you were being, also, at the same time, made his heart ache.

You were otherwise always so quiet around him before; not shy, but reserved. You chose your words carefully so that he couldn’t read too much into them. You tolerated his presence, rather than accepted it. He supposed that he couldn’t blame you, since it wasn’t like you invited him into your life, but after he witnessed something he didn’t mean to, and intervened, he couldn’t help but stick around. It hurt so much when you finally realised his existence, but still pulled away from him whenever he reached for you, even in sleep. When your eyes would perhaps not intentionally, but still all the same, wander around and land on everything else but his.

It seemed different now.

You not only trusted him, but you also relaxed around him.

That had to mean at least something, didn’t it?

Come to think of it, it was a recent shift. Right after the mimic, it was as if everything fell into place, because perhaps you realised that he wasn’t the danger and that there were beings much worse roaming around that might want to hurt you.

Though this was an issue that could have been easily avoided.

(All he had to do was walk away from you from when he first encountered you.)

But just as he was lost in thinking about all sorts of things, his mind a mess from whether or not you’re falling in love with him all the same, if you’re accepting him, if you’re being somehow pushed away—your voice cut through—pulling him out of his lovestruck stupor.

“What about that?” you asked so simply.

Eloryn was about to answer you, but then he turned towards where your focus was, to the retreating depth of the forest where the sunlight didn’t reach. He stilled, suddenly rooted to where he was, his jaw clenching and his eyes widening to take in what he was seeing.

He missed something.

Dread began to bloom and boil in his chest, an anchoring feeling forming in his gut. That place that caught your attention for so long wasn’t the same as the rest. It didn’t shimmer or hum or glitter the very same, but the aura burned. The magic there didn’t sparkle, but churned. It convulsed like a pulsating sickness, what should be fleeting embers, snapping away like wisping smoke.

Shadows rose through the air, and beyond the dark pull of the trees, he could tell it confidently in his heart.

Something was there, watching, perhaps waiting for the right moment to strike, but it wasn’t directed towards him.

Perhaps that’s why he missed it.

The realisation gripped him with fear, because it was a bad thing when something like this slipped past him. Most threats could be easily picked up on because most benevolent entities were easily dispelled. Even the mimic was acting out of hungry desperation. Anything else he kept out of your home was just passing through.

This, however, felt like a hunt.

“Eloryn?” you asked, picking up on the tension that built around you. The shift in his demeanour didn’t go unnoticed by you. His features, once so soft, now looked as if they could have been carved from stone.

You’ve seen him as many things before: happy, worried, but not like this. Not afraid.

You swallowed hard, wanting to believe that this might have been nothing. Eloryn was protective, after all, and maybe there had been a chance that he was overreacting, but the set of his jaw said otherwise. He was bracing himself to face something.

(But what?)

He didn’t speak at first as he tried to navigate the situation. Instead, for the time being, he stepped right in front of you with a hand branching out to keep you where he could protect you.

You tried to ask for him again, hating being left out and alone in the dark. “Eloryn?” you pressed, hoping that he would shed some light on what was going on.

He then spoke at last, but his tone had been stripped of warmth and instead laced itself in warning, “Don’t move.”

You froze, feeling your heart drop to your stomach, gulping down what you next wanted to ask. The air around you curdled into something sour, as if your very doubt started to break through the false comfort it tried to display.

What had once been sweet with magic turned heavier, earthier, but not freshly and pleasantly. A faint metallic scent threaded through the air, like dampened soil but a little too strong on the senses. There was something in it that lurked within but you couldn’t pick up on it. Eloryn, however, did so right away.

Your mind wasn’t equipped to handle such threats, after all, whereas his was. He had grown up with warnings and precautionary tales that the common folk otherwise spun into children’s stories, as genuine, practical warnings. He knew the signs and the tells of a hostile situation in the making; he knew how to spot the doings of the things that his kind called fiends.

Desperately seeking comfort, perhaps you couldn’t be blamed for when your mind started to open up the possibility. Eloryn remained guarded, thinking that you would remain the same from fear, but he didn’t account for the fact that you didn’t process things like him at all.

He didn’t notice it at first, but your grip on reality was starting to weaken.

First came the laughter, and it was oh, so sweet. Soft and almost girlish, in a way that couldn’t have been a threat. It passed around the surrounding trees like a call to you, beckoning you to come closer. It was playful and inviting, but the unsavoury smell in the air kept you from giving in entirely, warping from just dirt but giving way to something thicker, almost too sickly sweet. You heaved a little, grounding yourself just for a split second as you took in the aroma of rotting fruit, the air anchoring in your lungs, leaving you just short of dizzy. You gasped and coughed, trying to expel it, but it didn’t leave.

When it was done settling in your gut, though, it started to feel right again, somehow, as if the infiltration had been successful.

You didn’t even notice as you took a step forward, not by your own will, but something that urged you to follow into the woods no matter what.

Eloryn was quick to notice—his hand shooting out to clamp around your waist—the gentleness gone from his approach. He held onto you possessively, if not in warning. His grip was tight, firm, and unforgiving.

“Don’t,” he warned again, his voice low. “Fight it, please. Don’t let it get into your mind.”

Try as you might, though, the world shimmered around you. Whatever it was that tried to lure you in, played on your naivety, knew that this was a new concept to you, and that meant you were easier to manipulate.

You then caught a strange thing in the corner of your eye, more solid than that time. It was a figure, dancing around in such an alluring sway that it was impossible to ignore. It seemed almost familiar, like you had witnessed this dance before, even if you knew deep down that this much was impossible.

Just like the other time before, however, whenever you’d turn to face it, it would disappear as if it had never been there in the first place.

You took another step, and Eloryn’s grasp around you tightened. The allure of the unknown kept calling you in a way that slipped right past him, which gave him less to work with in protecting you. Whatever it was had disguised itself with a familiar brand of softness, presenting itself as the safety you so desperately sought. While Eloryn fussed and slowly lost his composure out of his love for you, though, he didn’t even realise that he was pushing you away, right into the belly of the beast.

The laughter brightened, and the once black aura shimmered like gold, swirling around the forest in a way that it hoped to captivate you. The trees almost breathed with you, slow and soothing.

Eloryn’s voice was already an afterthought.

You could barely register his presence.

Even if you could still feel his hands on you.

All the while, his mind raced with a dozen possibilities of what this could have been. His initial suspicion, perhaps foolishly, was that it could have been a dryad. It wasn’t too uncommon for beings not that dissimilar to himself to wander a little too far out of the realm, but no, that couldn’t have been it. Those were gentle, healing beings. No dryad he had ever known had such unsettling intentions.

He focused again, trying to find the cause, anything that seemed wrong right in front of him, and then, finally, it all fell into place.

Right off to the side, he saw her.

A figure just beyond the trees, using the shadows to conceal her. She swayed around languidly, her eyes fixed on you.

While you saw the illusion she had dressed up in, the soft glow of her form, the ethereal light that had come to hug around her. The beauty that one simply could not ignore, offering both something you wanted, but on a deeper level, something you craved.

Eloryn, on the other hand, was able to see the truth about what this was right away.

A hag.

Something rotten and unkind, starved for what she could never be. A creature with no beauty of its own, its entire livelihood built on deceit and assimilation, only for it to falter and wither away. A vicious cycle for a blighted being.

What he saw beyond the cover made his lips curl back in disgust; limbs that sprouted far too long, the joints knobbly and protruding. Hair that was slicked down with seeping rot, her smile carved in jagged strokes, as if her flesh was bark.

What unnerved him the most throughout this realisation, though, was that her eyes were not locked on him, but on you.

He then realised it was too late; him noticing her was part of the delicate trap that she had laid out. You fell straight to the ground as soon as she made the eye contact she needed, violently tugging his hold on you, straight down. He gritted his teeth, tanking in the pain, leaving himself vulnerable on his right-hand side. It was just a sprain, though, nothing was truly broken. He could still fight like this if he had to, not minding too much at all, since everything he ever did in this realm was purely for you.

The hag advanced as soon as she sensed the coast was clear, her form quickly bridging the distance and diving towards your unconscious body with her shadow following behind her at a delay, like a snake. Her hands palmed flat into your flesh, spilling inky black rot straight into your form, poisoning you from within. It wrapped tightly around you, constricting around your wheezing shape, like serpentine cloth.

The hag settled into you, assimilating your body with her tainted filth. Eloryn attempted to prevent the ritual from reaching completion, but no matter what he threw at her, it wasn’t enough to dispel her for good.

A moment of stillness passed, and he started to feel uncertain, not quite sure what to expect. Everything that he thought himself to be knowledgeable about was outdated or tailored to the wrong sort. He knew what fiends did to humans back in the day, but what of modern times? He knew that fiends could infiltrate elderly fae or if those very young were left alone, purely because their wills were weak, but it shouldn’t have been a problem for those in between. You were neither, but you were also just barely used to the existence of the fae realm and the magic that radiated from it.

Your fingers twitched lightly, snapping him out of his dark thoughts but he didn’t find relief in the way that you moved. You sat up slowly over the forest floor, as if settling into your body for the first time. The eyes he made contact with didn’t at all belong to you.

They were glassy, the pupils whitened out.

“Not you, please, not you,” he gasped, stepping closer and yet unable to properly formulate a plan that involved ripping her out of your body, lest you become hag-ridden; leaving you vulnerable to disease and death, or worse yet, bound to her whims forever and serve as a mere puppet for her taking.

Eloryn’s jaw set in a grinding clench, trying desperately to figure out something, anything, that could help you at all. He didn’t want to think about the potential consequences of her rooting into your mind like a permanent parasite, nor did he want to think of her slowly whittling away at your life essence. She possessed the power to turn dreams into nightmares, which would eventually wear your soul so thin that you might never come back to yourself.

He cursed at himself internally, thinking that he had failed you so utterly. He had been well-versed in just about everything else, though, so he grew overconfident. He knew how to deal with most things, knowing when violence was necessary and when it wasn’t. Though sometimes, he couldn’t help himself. That man, for example, who was close to following you home—that was close to hurting you under the cover of the night—he couldn’t quite stop himself from breaking his bones, slowly, enjoying the pain in the man’s eyes.

He shook the dark thought away, going back to trying to seek out solutions. In a way, he would have preferred if this were somehow any other similar creature. An incubus or a succubus came to mind, since those were surprisingly easy to deal with. They were bound to an unspoken law, needing consent before continuing. Wanting it, even. The visitor he had last night heeded such a warning.

Eloryn paused again, taking a step back.

He felt himself changing again, but not physically, perhaps mentally. He promised you already that he wouldn’t lose himself to the corruption he faced from continuously protecting you, but at the same time, he couldn’t help but welcome such power. He couldn’t deny that there was something sinister lurking in the back of his mind that he didn’t entirely try to keep hidden away.

The concern in his eyes at such a revelation shifted into something else. It was no longer a simple sense of worry, but it was pure possessive rage that took root instead.

A plan surfaced in his mind, even if it was unsteady, but his desire to keep you close won out. He would execute it, and then hopefully the hag who dared put her hands on you.

There was one way to separate a hag from her victim, but he didn’t like the path taken to accomplish it.

Essentially, it meant breaking you off into two.

Hags, most of the time, especially when fighting lovers who tried to save the subjects of their affections, gambled everything they could that they wouldn’t attack them. Especially if they took on a familiar form. She had your looks, and her body was essentially fused into yours, but it wasn’t a permanent assimilation.

He could knock you out of her, but it required striking you while she was still possessing you.

That was the part he didn’t like.

Then there would be two of you; one who was the disguised hag, and then you, essentially locked in a sleepwalking slumber. The hag would attempt to mirror you, to save her own face, but there would be something that she couldn’t ignore.

A deal; one that this hag would no doubt, twist to her advantage.

One that Eloryn was determined to outsmart her on, and bring you back to him, where you belonged.

He was willing to do anything for you, after all.