This Blighted Metamorphosis: Prologue Two
Solly
Song: “Fairly Local” Twenty One Pilots
CW: Murder (off-page), body horror, mention of grooming (historical), blood, bugs
Changelings are regarded more as prized, volatile commodities than fellow fey. Despite the rarity of offspring, many fey parents will send children to the mortal world, hoping the journey loosens some primal magic in the form of fey light, which emerges and allows the changeling to see and act on their infinite potential. Handlers are chosen early to train these children in their magic and guide them home, where their courts command them. All power, no freedom. Bit bleak all around.
—excerpt from personal correspondence of The Viridian Jack, borrowed from a private collection.
Not a single temple in Harrowviste had ever heard the name Cassia Chanterelle, which was odd, because Cass had sworn up and down since the age of eight that she would become a cleric of Mother Harvest.
This left Solly no choice but to break into yet another temple, the one that had raised the two fey children as best as mortals could. None of the Mothers had seen fit to smite Solly for the indiscretion. Yet.
Solly clung to the outside of the temple with the tips of their fingers, fortified by the dregs of teenage angst they’d left behind in their childhood home.
Potent memory flooded through them so swiftly their grip wobbled. The clerics treated children like plants, ready to help them thrive with consistent sun and water, but Solly’s roots were shallow, more like the wiggling legs of a bug than a vine. They longed to scuttle and explore, to toss off the taut suffocation from the stone and mortar of the temple squeezing them like a persona they’d outgrown.
Bim, their fey light in the form of a butterfly so commonly seen in Solly’s childhood, brushed their cheek, breaking the reverie, and fluttered through the cracked window before landing on the ancient hand of Cleric Sarah.
“Oh.” The old woman jumped at the feather light touch, then again at Solly’s grinning visage on the other side of the window.
In hindsight, spotting pointy teeth, from a great height, in the dark probably was upsetting.
“You pest. Giving an old woman a fright like that,” she clucked as if it had been hours, not years, since she’d disciplined them. “Get your scrawny arse in here before you tumble into the rose bushes again.”
As noiseless as their butterfly, Solly slid into the old woman’s rooms and scooped her up before she could complain. Sarah was as wrinkled and fragile as a walnut in their arms, her laughter still warm, her robes filled with the scent of rosemary incense and earth. Solly clung to her, the first anchor in their life, the only creature to look at Solly and fully see.
“Not so scrawny now.” Sarah adjusted her bug-like spectacles. “You got tall.”
Solly crossed their arms in a flawless imitation of their teenage indignation, tossed back their deep blue locks, and shot up another few inches. That tight, itchy feeling spread. Maybe it hadn’t been a memory. Maybe they were due for a shed. “You’re just short.”
Sarah’s smile tightened, not at the quip but at something she read in Solly’s eyes.
No matter the persona or form the changeling took, Sarah knew Solly when she saw them. To this day, she was the only one to do so. Even Cass wasn’t difficult to fool, if they wanted to.
They had hoped for laughter. A few tears would have been nice. A reunion like the ones in stories printed on thin paper and traded for coppers by too-clever, entrepreneurially spirited children on busy street corners. Maybe even a sense of…home. But the temple had never been a home in the first place. Foolish of them to expect dead stone to grow into one in their absence.
“Oh, my wee love, what has happened to you?”
They shrugged. They didn’t have time to ease that burden off their back, as nice as it would have felt for her to see it and love them anyway.
“You shouldn’t have left us when you did. You were too young.”
“It wasn’t my choice, Auntie.”
The smile crumpled and so did Solly’s heart. “You should have always had a choice. Cassia, too.”
“You can’t fight the fey when they come to collect,” Solly said, heart hammering at the confirmation that something was wrong, that Cass—
“I don’t think you got my letters.”
Their stomach fell and splattered against something hard. Solly shook their head, blocking out the bleating panic. “I wrote, but got nothing back.”
Sarah sat again and rifled through the parchment on her desk. Bim melted from a butterfly into a mote of light to augment the single tallow candle Sarah used to illuminate her chamber.
Cass had never expressed interest in a family. Had refused multiple couples wishing to adopt her. Solly had hoped if Cass did not go to Harrowviste, she would have stayed with Sarah, but as they surveyed the room, there was a distinct lack of mushrooms—of any evidence of Cass at all.
“Auntie Sarah,” Solly said slowly, “where is Cass?”
One by one, Sarah placed pages of parchment and bits of paper in front of them. They listened quietly while Sarah explained, tunneling deep within themself to keep from destroying the few possessions Sarah had.
At sixteen, Solly left because they didn’t have a choice. Solly left because someone always came for changelings, and Solly had been scared of what would happen to Sarah and Cass if they refused the offer that was little more than a thinly wrapped command.
Solly had left.
And Cass had suffered anyway.
“I’m going to fix this, Auntie. Don’t you worry.” Seven years too late, but they would fix it. Nothing that they had done, nothing that they had sacrificed, learned, or gained in those years since leaving the temple were worth it if this couldn’t be mended.
“Solly,” Sarah said, her ancient squint a warning in itself.
“I won’t make a mess in the temple. Promise.”
They winked and whistled as they walked toward the door they’d burst through so many times as a child. Solly paused at the box of gardening supplies Sarah kept for her own personal use. In one smooth movement, they plucked out a rusted sickle and let slip a small coin pouch, taking care not to let Sarah notice the trade.
The iron burned into their palm, cracking the exoskeleton down their forearm in a sweep of sweet relief. The anger swirled inside them and coalesced into a bouquet of eyes and long, soft limbs. Spidery legs slid out of the old form, and at Bim’s touch, the shell ignited and crumbled to dust, then to nothing at all.
The tentacles still burned along the sickle, but Solly didn’t like growing their own weapons. They’d gotten their hand stuck in a spine more than once, and their handler always laughed at them, which wasn’t very kind.
Bim dimmed into something dark and full of teeth in the shadows at their side. Sarah smiled, shook her head, and turned back to her desk. “There’s butter cake in the kitchen. Take a slice before you go.”
Solly felt lighter when the sun rose that morning, despite the dense butter cake filling their belly. Bim chose to remain a swarm of beetles, scuttling through the bits of flesh and blood left over, the river washing away the remains of the unfortunate cleric that Bim didn’t want.
No one would miss him, except perhaps the wealthy men who bribed him on occasion to adopt girls against their will.
That was excessive, chuckled the voice in their head.
Maybe, Solly said, sharpening the sickle.
But it felt good. It wasn’t the first problem Sarah asked Solly to deal with. It wouldn’t be the last, if they had any say in it. Solly was a tool, and where love was involved, there was no limit to the ways they could be used.
Good to be home?
Sorta. Strange without Cass.
Then you’d best find her quickly, changeling. We’ve work to do.
Solly threw the last of the butter cake to Bim and tied the sickle to their belt. As the sun sparkled across the water, Solly turned to the west, shed the mass of eyes and tentacles, and became someone else entirely.