A Cloud of Nothing
I am nothing. I have become like a piece of flotsam floating around in the air rather than the sea, where nothing fills my heart, where I am so desperate to get back to the ground because that is where my young charge waits for me. But I have had to make myself invisible. I had learned the spell where I become a nothing in the dark by the Lord Serpent. I cannot see any light, so I float around in some dark madness of sheer, passionate desire with the red wind the fairies have created. The fairies have color-coded all of their happy life in which they live in by tinting it with a color-meaning coordination, so that the colors mean something. I, of course, cannot see the bright ones. Red wind is not so bright unless coming upon a great climatic peak of force, so in my invisibility, which certainly fits my mood, I have become part of the wind. I am filled with nothing though, because the air has no feeling, see. So I am simply part of the world of fairies.
I have never actually been in the Land of Fairy Dusk before, so it may be that I have simply learned these spells of the Lord Serpent before I have ever had a chance to know what he wanted me to learn, in the dark days when I had been completely alone with his followers, the dark ones- the dark ones! I will not ever think about that time I spent alone in that drab cave, which made me to forget who I was by demonically twisting up all of the emotions inside me so that I could no longer distinguish between myself and those around me that were friends and not enemies. My mother, all of my relatives and friends. I had seen them before ever knowing what the Serpent's spell did to me, and I will never again be able to face them. It could not have happened, this terrible time, without my learning all sorts of different spells, most of which I cannot remember learning . . . I have lost my entire identity.
I float among the thick vegetation mixed up with enormous trees of the Fairy Lands by meandering slowly through to the Queen, who I am certainly aware of causing some grievance to by my quest. I am not to see people. Nothing about that makes any difference. Of course, the Queen cannot really be called a person, although fairies do actually resemble people quite a bit, save for their wings and the fact that they weigh not more than several ounces. But I am not supposed to see her anyway. Fairies are part of the good population, and I should not be tinting them with my dark appearance.
"Poiseda! Where did you go? Poiseda!" She sounds panicked.
"Ahhh." I turn to look behind me and fall to the ground, immediately springing back into my original, ugly bat form. "Why would you do that?" She whimpers,
"You are not supposed to leave me." Her blue eyes are enormous in her white face beneath that crown of chocolate. Suddenly I re-think my actions. I should not be doing this, should I? I mean . . . this is nonsense. The fairies cannot take a child with them who has been cursed. But what if she has not really been cursed? I shut my eyes slowly. Reaching down with one large, bat-like, elongated hand, I pet her head gently.
"You are not aware of what has happened to you, Seri. For all I know, everything you said has been infused in you by another entity of magic. You may not be in your own mind, if you are cursed." Her eyes widen at that. Immediately I scold myself. Surely there was no reason to tell her that.
"What do you mean, I am not in my head?" Her voice is scarcely above a whisper. "I know that I have been cursed, but Poiseda, is someone else controlling me?" Her speech becomes more fluent every day. So far it has not taken on the deep intonation though which I fear indicates some possession inside her. She obviously grows under some sort of growth spell, but what this implies exactly I cannot know. I swallow a couple of times, still stroking her hair.
"Seri, I do not know exactly. But I think that we must keep going. We should find you a temporary living arrangement. If you are under a spell of some kind, then you cannot stay with me, and you cannot stay with me if you are not under a spell. Either way you cannot stay with me," I finish quietly. "I am part of the Lord Serpent. He controls me."
"He doesn't control you, Poiseda. You control yourself. You have not done anything evil to me, or to anything since we have been together." I close my eyes again.
"Stroke of luck." I sit down next to her.
"Look, if you stay with me, what shall I do with you?" She hops onto my lap.
"I don't care! I love you." She wraps her arms around me. My wings droop. I feel defeated, deflated. She reaches up to push my black hair out of my eyes. "You need a hair-cut, Poiseda." I laugh. Again, it feels so strange to laugh.
"Have you been taught that spell?" She shakes her head.
"No."
"I haven't either." I remember all the spells I used to know, all of the useful ones such as giving hair-cuts, before I had been stolen. We sit on a patch of blue grass for a while, listening to the music around us of the fairies. We haven't spotted any yet, but the sweet, slight noise of their wings must have been following, or rather meandering over to us from long distances, so poignant is their music. "You would love it here," I tell her, almost to myself however-
"No, I don't think so. It is nothing like my kingdom back home."
"Do you know why you are no longer there?" She thinks for a minute, and her large eyes rove over the land away from mine.
"I can't really remember anything." I nod. "It is all foggy . . . kind of like a cloud in my head." I nod again. It does sound like she has been cursed. I am not sure whether this frightens me more or any less than if she had not been. If we stay together, at least in the short while, it would be more of a plausible option than being apart. So many ideas cross me. How good it would be to have a friend to go on all of my treks with, to have company for a short while . . . it would all be so different. I have been alone for so long. As I am musing this over, a fairy darts out from the trees before us. It moves off in the other direction like a zooming bug that we can barely see. However Seri sees it, so she has had her wild shout of delight for the day. I back off, just a little, in case the fairy does glance over here of a sudden. Seri turns to me. She does not say anything for a moment.
"You need to shave, Poiseda," she says softly. I nod. It is almost too close for me to say anything beyond . . . I am shutting my eyes. I hear something cross into my hazy thoughts. She must have said something to me. I didn't realize I was so exhausted.
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