Chrysalis Ch2: The Market (pt1) (Patreon)

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The Leannán sídhe, or Fae mistress, will prostitute itself to any knave fool enough to trade in blood for lust and inspiration.  Vampiric in her tendencies, once the pact is made only a maddened life and early death await the man; save he find an even more fool soul to fill his unholy contract.

There is a trick to her, however. A gift to us mortals.  Deny the vile mistress her offerings, and she is cursed to be your slave for however long you may live.  And may you live a long life, good sir, for what a lucky man such as yourself might do with such an exotic whore at his disposal, I leave entirely to your imagination.

-From the writing desk of Alastor O'Reilly, 1827

There are no dreams. No strange narratives or visitations. Just a white blanket of light...soft.

Warm and soothing. Familiar but distant, comforting...

Intoxicating.

He drifts through a haze of static and lost time.

"..."

The first thing to return is his hearing. Something pops, followed by a long, drawn-out frequency. He coughs, rusty aches shooting through his dry throat, and the sound vanishes.

Everything is aches and stiffness, like he’s slept on concrete.  The world is a dark, confused blur, coming at him one impression at a time. A dusty, wet smell of cobbles. Something dripping, and beyond it a distant murmur.   A shiver of a heavy draft, prickling at his arms.  

And something else, something familiar...
Something like…

Ice.

Lloyd can hear distant chatter. Soft voices. Lots of voices. Not that one voice, though, the one he’s listening for.

Her voice.

It all comes crashing back at once. The soothing, dizzying feeling sweeps out like the tide. Lloyd scrunches into a ball, gasping, squeezing his eyes shut. It has to be a bad dream. He’s just taken a spill, a bad one. Whatever they’ve given him at hospital has made him hallucinate. That’s it. That’s all.

And then Lloyd opens his eyes.

He’s not in any hospital bed. He’s in a cage. A low, cramped cage; the sort that a large dog might travel in. He’s resting on a matted surface, but the rest is made up of iron bars. The wintery, cold sensation floods his senses, raising goosebumps and turning his stomach. Lloyd gives an agonized whimper, trying to roll away from the metal - and then flinches back as a stabbing ache shoots through his arm and wing.

His wings.  They’re still exposed.  He flexes and senses that whatever jacket he’s wearing has holes in the back, large enough for his wings to extend out and down.  Not his jacket, of course.  Not the one he was wearing.  That one had been torn apart when that woman had…

His mind goes to static, his concentration losing him for a moment.  He can’t think about that… not now.   He doesn’t have time for it. He pulls it back to the present.

He’s been dressed while he was unconscious.

Someone’s pulled a bright white jacket over him, hooded, with a high collar that obscures his lower face… and something else.   Something resilient.   After a moment’s testing he’s realized it’s duct tape.  Someone’s taped his mouth shut.  His hands have been securely cuffed behind him. Not iron, thankfully. Fitted shorts offer marginal warmth to his upper thighs and leather flats are all that protect his feet from the iron they’re pressed against.

Lloyd’s skin goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with his allergies...  if that’s what they even were.  Lloyd was growing more doubtful by the second.

He lifts his head without sitting up, peering through the bars. The cage - his cage - has been placed in a dark corner of some kind of enormous stone hall. Pillars rear up from the floor and reach down from the ceiling like an architectural ribcage. Lights hang from the archways - electric yellow, sickly green, eye-searing blue. The colors twist and blur into each other, splashing surfaces with eerie colors.

Shapes murmur to each other in the deep shadows, strolling along the walls, some idle and staring. Most are hooded and covered, either wearing jackets like his or wrapped in scarves and burlap. Unlike his own clothes, theirs are grey or deep black, rendering them anonymous in the flickering darkness.

Lloyd can see stalls and blankets and barrows, little ramshackle carts and cavernous niches. They’re piled high with boxes of unrecognizable produce, bins of leather bound books, dried husks of plants, or phosphorescent stones. Strange little wooden figures stand clustered in elaborate displays.

One cart is simply full of bones.

There are other cages. Most of them are off the main walkway, just like his. Even at a distance, he can feel the nauseating cold rolling off of their bars. In a cage a few yards away, something stirs, blinking at him in the darkness. A shape wearing a white jacket, just like his. Lloyd struggles to sit up.

“...h...hmmllhhh?”

He groans. The figure sits up as well, gracefully arching to accommodate their surroundings. Lloyd squints. Something about them doesn’t look...quite…

A long, waving tail curls out from behind the shadowy outline, nimbly twisting to avoid touching the bars.

Before he can decipher exactly what he’s looking at, heavy footfalls draw his attention. One of the hooded figures has detached itself from the rest. Lloyd shrinks back as it crouches down in front of him, obscuring his view.  The figure’s entire body is shrouded in a damp charcoal robe.  Four golden eyes stare out from within a deep hood. Each one of them blinks at a different interval as it studies him.

"Hellooooooo."   The creature says. Its voice is a speculative, warbling chirp - an exclamation instead of a greeting. Its top right eye closes.

"NnnnnnnN-ice pair of wings you have. GmmmmmmMind if I take a closer look?"

The figure croaks, something bulging inside its hood. A cloth-wrapped arm reaches towards the bars of the cage. Underneath the fabric, Lloyd can see it bulge and twist, more like a snake than a limb. Four long, upsettingly flexible fingers reach toward him. There’s a faint sizzling sound as one brushes past the bars. It twitches bonelessly away from the others, smoke rising from a fresh burn.

The spell breaks.

"HmmmNnmmmhrm!"

Lloyd's wings jerk rapidly in panic as he wriggles away from the figure, instinctively avoiding the bars. The sudden, stinging tingle on his skin is enough to make him pull up short as he nears the back - but it’s still too close to the creature’s hand. It grabs him by the edge of his right wing, stilling its frantic flapping. The other one beats even faster, and Lloyd struggles furiously.

“Lhhhmmghh! Lhhhmmhgghh!"

A second hand drifts into the cage, running gently along the edge of his trapped wing, picking out delicate traceries of veins. It feels like someone tracing along his spine. This goes on for what feels like ages - until the hooded figure withdraws, fingers glistening with green and brown dusty moth-scales.

Lloyd gives a hacking, muffled cough as the stench of stagnant water rolls through the cage. Moments later, a long, deep purple tongue spills out of the figure’s hood.

And licks the scales off its fingers.

Lloyd flattens himself against the ground, shaking in horror, watching the creature smack its lips. He can see something moving - squirming - deep inside the hood, below those brilliant golden eyes. The upper left and lower right ones blink simultaneously, pupils dilating as they take him in.

It crouches down in front of him, legs bending in a froglike squat.

"Mmmmmmdon't have a purchaser nnnnnndo you?"

"Excuse me..." A tight, high pitched woman's voice slices through the air, cutting through Lloyd’s panic like a knife. Before the creature can turn, a foot slams into its side, sending it sprawling across the floor.   As it hits the cobbles it doesn’t so much as fall down as fall apart. A few passersby stop and stare.

"... I don't believe I was offering free samples."

The woman in the jacket sidles up to the front of the cage. She peers down at Lloyd as she positions herself between him and the figure, now slowly pulling itself back into a vague semblance of a standing position. Her eyes are no longer entirely red - bloodshot veins stand out starkly against the rest.

"He didn't hurt you, did he, love?" She asks.

Lloyd just stares numbly up at her.

The creature finally rights itself with a squelch and a snapping motion that shouldn’t be possible for anything with a skeleton. One eye is still avidly fixed on Lloyd. The others are all narrowed, staring furiously at the woman.

"... hrrrrrrgh.... nnnnnnnot goood bizzzzznesssss... to treat a pot-t-t-t-t-t-t-tential customer so crassly."

The woman ignores it, not breaking eye contact with Lloyd.

"Would you like me to cut off his tongue?" She raises a curious eyebrow, ignoring the outraged burbling coming from the creature behind her. The scent of blood is in Lloyd's nose again. That awful noise he heard as he ran into the kitchen echoes in his ears. His stomach churns, and he hunches over. He shakes his head harder and harder, waiting for the dizziness to pass.

"Oh, you're no fun" the woman says, giving a long, drawn-out sigh.  She digs around in her pocket for a moment before taking out something that Lloyd would think of as a lollipop...if it wasn’t wrapped in gauzy, glowing fabric. She slides the wrapper off and pops it in her mouth, straightening up. Her bloodshot veins dissolve and fade, leaving her eyes glowing a soft pink.

The creature lumbers closer, its own eyes bulging. Now two of them are swiveling to track Lloyd as he shrinks back to the far side of his cage, while the others warily regard the woman.

"Hoooooooow much?"

A third eye turns, widening hungrily. The woman rolls her candy from one side of her mouth to the other.

"I don't do business with parasites."

The creature's eyes shift from golden orbs to a milky green, and it grows thinner - taller, as if it’s stretching towards the ceiling.  After a moment it towers over them both, its robes undulating and rustling in an aggravated fashion.

"Yyyyyyyyooooouuuu’re one to taaaaalk. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmighty full of yourself for unnnnnnseelie trash."

The woman crunches down on her lollipop. A little pink shard of candy shoots out of her mouth. As it strikes the floor, it detonates with a soft crack, leaving behind a puff of smoke and a whiff of copper.

"I said she’s not for sale."

She plucks the cardboard stick out of her mouth and flicks it away. One of the creature’s eyes tracks the movement. For a moment, its robe roils...and then it shrinks back down, makes a contemptuously moist sound, and slithers off.

Lloyd finally lets go of a breath he didn’t know he was holding. There’s so much happening that he doesn’t understand - where he is, what these things are, how the woman can do what she does and why she keeps calling him she - but it’s very, very clear to him that he’s just barely avoided something terrible. She’s saving him for something.

So when she leans forward, coming eye to eye with him in his cage, he doesn’t flinch away. Lloyd sits still, trying to bring himself back into the moment, observing every movement his captor makes. She grins at him like she knows what he’s thinking and flips a small blue-green orb of rock candy out of her pocket. Looking at it closely, he can see that it’s shot through with reddish-brown swirls, coalescing in the center.

“Care for a refresher?”

Lloyd fixes her with an incredulous stare. He looks back and forth between her face and the candy. She seems completely serious about the offer, which only assures him that he wants nothing to do with it.

“Nnh.”

For a second, he considers asking her to take the tape off, but that feels...obvious. Like she wants him to. Lloyd rolls his shoulders, trying to work out some of the stiffness in them, before looking away.

What had that thing called her? ‘Unseelie’? He couldn’t have possibly heard that right. That was a word that belonged in one of his celtic-lore books, the sort of word he’d find in stories about banshees and kelpies, about feasts of magical food that could ensnare the unwary…

...about people burned by iron.

"Hmmn nnhh hh ghhrll." He mutters at the floor. That, too, seems a little ridiculous, but it's familiar ground. He's prepared to banter with Ian over it, but her?  She's a different matter.

The woman grins and tilts her head, cupping her hand to her ear.

"Whaaaaaat?"   She asks, drawing her voice out. Her belt creaks as she leans closer to the cage, staying an inch beyond the bars. "You'll have to articulate, lemon drop. I didn't quite catch that."

Lloyd doesn’t take the bait. She shrugs before tossing the rock candy in her own mouth and crunching down. The light in her eyes swirls and dissolves away into a deep teal.

There’s an awkward moment of silence, punctuated by the woman chomping away at her treat. Lloyd wrinkles his nose. It might just be his imagination, but he’s almost certain he can smell blood again.

As unobtrusively as he possibly can, he ducks his head down and stares moodily through the bars. Lloyd can’t help but notice that she’s keeping well away from them herself, like she doesn’t want to touch the metal. An upsetting, unsettling thought is coalescing in his mind. It isn’t like he’s never wondered, after all. If there might be some grain of truth in the stories, something that might explain...him. Usually, it’s easy enough to rationalize away, to lean on what his parents told him.

He just has an allergy. An allergy and a truly strange mutation... or something. The sort of thing that had to stay secret for his own safety.

But here...surrounded by all this...

His thoughts are interrupted by a sudden, incongruously modern glow. The woman has pulled out her phone with an exasperated huff. The screen lights up her face as she taps at it, muttering loud enough for him to hear.

"God dammit. Where is she? I cannot believe I’m wasting this buzz just sitting here. Where am I supposed to find more gwyllion ichor at that price.”

She looks up, staring around at the booths, then heaves a sigh.

“So much drama over this."

The woman balls her hand into a fist, sliding her jacket sleeve over her hand and raps on the bars. The reverberation echoes in Lloyd’s ears, and his wings flick open in alarm. She smirks at the reaction, and Lloyd glowers up at her, unable to stop himself from bristling. He knows he shouldn’t be rising to the bait, but something about her is starting to really get under his skin -

"Neith?”

A careful, fragile sounding voice cuts through his thoughts. He looks up at almost the exact same moment as his captor.

Someone is standing a few paces away, silhouetted against the lights. Whoever or whatever they are is about the same height and build as Lloyd.  Arms.  Legs.  Human looking.

His captor - Neith, apparently - flashes a wide, slightly greenish grin.

"Finally! What took you so long?"

The newcomer takes a step forward, light streaming in around her. It takes a moment for her to respond, and when she does, it’s not much of an answer.

"Neith, you're here. So that means…
... is this... her?"

Her voice wavers.

Neith nods and gestures at the cage. "That's her, neat as a present on holiday."  The figure takes a few more hesitant steps, then quickly moves to the cage.

Lloyd can see her more clearly now. She is also wearing a hooded jacket pulled over her head, and a green, flat stone with a hole in the middle strung on a necklace around her neck. Luminous white-blonde hair peeks out of the edges of the hood, framing her soft pink eyes.

He almost pulls back as she crouches down, but he stops, staring.

Those eyes.
Familiar. Soothing.

Like someone he’s always known.


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