Challenge #01486-D025: Worth a Life
“unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings” - Carrie Fisher -- RecklessPrudence
Oh crap. She'd tripped over a Faerie nest.
Of all the authors who featured the Fair Folk in their modern writings, A. A. Milne said it best: Their bodies were so tiny that they could only process one feeling at a time. What hardly anyone remembered about Faeries is this: immortality can drive cogniscent beings insane. Milne's traditional cause of faerie death is not what these hyperactive creatures needed.
They needed to be hurled into the sun, in her opinion. But just try talking to NASA about that. In the meantime, there were only so many ways to apologise to a hive of angry Faeries. And one of them involved rum. Which Caeri didn't have in her pack because this was meant to be a sober hike. The other method involved bloodletting.
Good thing she had her camp knife in her boot. And another good thing that she knew how to overact.
Faeries always loved theatrics.
"O lackaday, lackaday," Caeri wailed, flailing around at her exposed skin with the knife. "O woe! O horrible fate! To injure so many innocents with a careless foot! Lackaday, woe! Woe, woe, woe," and so on. The cuts, if any occurred, were light and bled impressively, but did not impede any imagined future hike. The point was to distract the Fae from being angry.
They could be amused. They could be entertained. They could even be sympathetic, but that wasn't likely. Faeries were famously not empathetic with mortals. Seelie and Unseelie alike. The Seelie could be if they tried, but Caerie had just tripped over their nest. Which was not putting them in the mood to try.
They stopped her after a handful of minutes' worth of woeful wailing and blood scattering all over the little clearing. "Such a human need no' bleed for us," they chirped. They were insects of a sort, so they always buzzed or chirped. "Aid us in making a new nest, and be on your way. Safe and whole."
The old nest, Caerie couldn't help noticing, was a skull on the verge of crumbling. "I cannot give my head, it's needed with the rest of me," Caerie bargained. "And I am fair certain you have grown tired of the smell." An idea came to her. "Take my hair! I tire of it and it's always in the way. You could weave a nest out of it that would last far longer than any old skull. And you can grow little plants in it, and have sweet flowers to smell, instead of that rotten head."
The Fae buzzed amongst themselves. It took an entire minute. Which was long for the easily-distracted Fae. "We will take your hair. Long and short. With which we will have a fine new nest. And we thank you for your shed blood. We will need that, anon."
Caeri made to cut her hair short, but the fae stopped her. "Nae, mortal. We will take your hair our way."
She agreed, of course. These were Faeries. She couldn't not agree. But those words were her only warning. She walked -carefully- out of that forest, bald from head to toe. And she would be bald for the rest of her life. Her hair had been left behind in that clearing, to grow so long as the Fae willed it. Independent of Caeri.
So she had to wear wigs all her life and get her eyebrows tattooed on. In fact, she had an ornate 'scalp' tattooed onto her head. All in all, she got off lucky.
[ Image (c) Can Stock Photo / PhotopiaImaging]
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