The Virgin and the Fae

A/N: Thank you so much to Rammina, lovelyl, ShelleDW, and Arche De Katze for your encouragement!!


Within a second Charlotte was on her feet again, struggling to determine which direction the breeze came from. She stood completely still, holding her breath for fear that it might muddle her perception of the breeze. The mud ran in rivets down her legs, pooling at the hollow behind her knees.

Part of her—the obsessive part that had demanded she always use anti-bacterials and sanitize everything—felt revolted. But that part was almost completely gone, eradicated by much weightier concerns.

There! The breeze seemed to be coming from the pathway off to the right. Charlotte began to run down it, but stopped after a second. As much as she wanted to move quickly, the risk of losing the faint breeze in her haste was too great. She forced herself to take slow, measure steps, paying careful attention to the warmth of the draft.

Her skin began to itch in response to the drying sweat and mud and she scratched herself lightly as she went, flaking the mud off her sides.

There was still no sign that this path was any different than the others. As she walked, Charlotte caught herself wondering if she was imagining the breeze, if it were just the product of hysteria and strong desire for there to be a breeze. It was hard not to wonder it. The walk seemed to take forever. Her feet were getting sore from the occasional bits of stone fragments and rock they stepped on, but still she continued.

What would Garrick do if he caught her? That was certainly a source of anxiety, and yet it was nowhere as alarming as the thought of what the other Fae would do to her if they found her first…

Finally she saw something. Up ahead at the end of the tunnel, there seemed to be a pile of rocks shot through with bolts of light. Could it be daylight from outside? God, she hoped so.

Charlotte began to run again to towards the rubble. Without hesitation she began picking up the rocks, one by one, and throwing them behind her. It was hard work—the rocks were heavy and often wedged in against one another. Charlotte found herself clawing at the rocks, trying to loose them enough to move them. Her fingers bloodied quickly, but it was barely noticeable. There were so many other aches and pains that this new one seemed more of an insult than an injury.

At last the top row of stones was cleared. From her angle, Charlotte could make out a sliver of blue sky. The knowledge that just beyond these rocks led freedom made Charlotte work even harder and faster, yanking at the rocks to move them aside.

Once enough of an opening formed, Charlotte climbed up and shimmied her way through, scraping bits of her back against the mouth of the cave and her stomach on the rocks below. She swung her legs around and jumped to the grass of the other side, panting from exertion.

It was the most beautiful day she had ever seen.

The sky was bright blue and the whole of the field seemed bathed in a golden light. Charlotte looked back at the cave from which she’d come from. The rock edifice above the opening loomed several stories above her. Mercifully, the tunnels within had not been so lofty. She’d never have been able to climb out if they had.

How far had she travelled? If she were somehow able to look above the cliff, would she see that castle that Garrick had spoken of? Or had he taken her far away?

Though she was tired, the prospect of remaining so exposed in this open field made her nervous. There seemed to be a forest in the distance and Charlotte began walking towards it at a moderate pace. It was really all the strength she had left, otherwise she would have been running yet again.

Charlotte was not normally a runner, but she wasn’t bad at it. In high school they’d had to run a mile for gym class every now and then, and Charlotte was always just above the average. She was never among the fastest girls, but she remained ahead of most of the others.
Ms. Wilson had taught gym, she remembered. She was a large woman with short curly hair, a loud whistle and an even louder voice. She was the only person to ever give Charlotte a detention in fact.

It had been a hectic day and somehow Charlotte had forgotten her gym uniform. She almost never forgot things, but that day—for the first time in three years—she forgot her uniform. Ms. Wilson had considered it a “cut” and assigned her to detention that afternoon.

Detention at her high school had been an interesting result of the need to have a system of punishment and a well-meaning, albeit naïve, idea that if children
where given time to “mediate on their inappropriate action” then they would know better in the future. As a result, detention entailed an hour and a half of silence
with no working, no talking, and no sleeping, just sitting in silence. For most high schoolers, it was a boring nuisance, but for Charlotte it had been tantamount to torture. To be left to her thoughts for so long a time without anything, like working, to drown them out, even intermittedly, had been the first time Charlotte confronted the fact that she was truly miserable. Perhaps miserable was over-dramatic, but something fundamental was not right and had not been right for some time.

She was lonely and lost and unhappy.

Rather than attempt to constructively utilize this newfound self-knowledge, Charlotte buried those long, unpleasant minutes under the name of sentimentality and threw herself further into her work. She worked and slept and left no time for such thoughts ever again, preferring the allure of things that you could solve and answer. Ambiguities and relativities confused her and so she turned to math and science where such things did not exist. And whenever an ambiguity did arise, it was only the result of incomplete knowledge. If she just continued studying, it became a certainty.

Everyone found Charlotte to be a quiet, driven young woman. They just never understood what drove her, blindly chalking it up to ambition.

Charlotte reached the edge of the forest and slipped in through the thicket of trees. Everything was lush and green and alive. Soft grass carpeted the forest floor and the thick tree trunks had deep green moss coverings. She saw what looked to be a tree frog jump up onto one such moss patch not far ahead.

It was peaceful here.

Charlotte walked further into the forest, wondering what to do now. She was out of the castle, out of the caves, away from the Fae. All immediate dangers appeared to be gone, and yet what was she supposed to do? She couldn’t just walk all the way back to college. Without Garrick’s help, she’d probably never make it home.

Somehow that thought didn’t bother her as much as it should. Here, in this forest, her body throbbing with pain, Charlotte felt more alive than she had in a long time, perhaps ever.

She resolved to take things slowly, to not think ahead of the next few hours.

She needed to find water to wash off, and then she’d set about finding things to eat.

She found a stream relatively quickly. It wasn’t deep, just up to her ankles, so Charlotte thought it best to follow it, hopefully it would empty into something larger eventually. She walked in the stream, relishing the coolness of the water against her feet. The stones were perfectly smooth from the water’s buffing of them and she admired their flat, discus shapes as she walked.

She had been right; the stream did empty into a lake. But Charlotte felt unsure as to whether she wished to wash in it. It had a dark, murky color and though there was nothing unnatural about it, the idea of being in water where she couldn’t see beneath her or around her was unappealing. As idyllic as this forest seemed,

Charlotte realized that she must never forget that it was not wholly normal. This was not part of her world, she told herself, it belonged to the Fae.

There was a small pooling of the stream at little ways before it emptied into the lake. Not deep, but it went up to her knees and was clear straight through to the bottom. That would have to do.

Charlotte knelt in the pool, washing off the mud and sweat. The water ran a brackish brown-red for a few minutes, but before long she had cleaned off most of the mud and blood.

Then came the more difficult task of cleaning out the cuts that littered her body. First she washed the shallow gashes on her feet, then the cuts along her thighs, then butt. She worked her way upwards until finally her arms and shoulders had been cleaned as well.

Charlotte looked around warily, making sure there was no one there, before quickly dunking her head and hair in the water. She rubbed her face vigorously under the chilly water before tossing her head back, her hair slapping against her back.

She looked around again. For the briefest of seconds, Charlotte thought she saw something white flash between the trees, but it was gone before she could get a good look.

Even though she was hungry, Charlotte desperately needed to get sleep. Not wanting to go far from her water source, Charlotte found a nearby tree and curled up against it, resting her head on one of its aboveground roots. Just before she fell asleep though, Charlotte thought she saw that same flash of light, darting between the trees.