I lift my frown to him, just as he’s pulling his top leathers over his head, dishevelling his faint blond hair, pale sawdust caught in a blizzard. He draws out his arms from the sleeves, and I’m never more certain that he’s sculpted from marble. It isn’t the cold look he turns down at me, the echo of the warning lingering, but the sight of him that stuns me.
I don’t know what I was expecting, if anything at all. But it startles me, just how much he looks like us.
People.
Humans.
Only bigger, stronger, and I’ve never seen skin so smooth before, not a blemish in sight, no veins to push against an ivory complexion.
It really is marble.
I’m sure of it, that if I reached out my fingertips, he would be cold to the touch, and as hard as a brick fucking wall.
Then my frown hooks on his stomach.
Flat and strong, bordered by the lines of a V-shape. In the middle, there should be the indent of a belly button.
There isn’t.
That snags in my mind.
No belly button?
What the actual fuck…
Do these fae not have umbilical cords in the womb? Do they just fall out? Do they come from eggs?
No.
No, that would mean Bee, too. She didn’t come from some egg. She’s fae…
But she’s like me, too. Human.
And she’s not like these fae either, the dark ones—and this cold warrior also isn’t like the dark ones.
My mind is mush.
I glitch like an old operating system, and my mind just crumbles under the spiral.
Before the fae can take off the rest of his leathers, I drop my head into my hands and let the mush sway in my skull.
I grew up in the Welsh countryside. Only left when I was maybe eight years old, but before that, I was around my grandparents a lot, the older generation with those persevered stories of the fae, of Elidyr, the Telwyth Teg.
I sift through the stories in my mind, a mind washed clean of the constant pain that’s had me since the fae trapped us on the road, but a mind that struggles, like an old computer in the 90s starting that dreary task of just turning on, and it sounded like a fucking rocket ready to take off.
That’s my brain.
Always has been.
Overload, crash, reboot, repeat.
I feel it now, drifting closer to me, the crash, as I go through all those old stories my grandparents told me before bed, the kind that gave me nightmares and made sure I didn’t wander off too far into the fields.
But I don’t remember a single fucking tale that went through lack of umbilical cords, fae coming from eggs, or dark ones and light ones and cold ones and human ones.
So I shut it down.
My hands slip down to the rocks and flatten before I sink my weight, slumped, and look around the unit.
