Your Parents Hadn’t Wanted To Give You Up. It Was A Hard Season, But Surely There Had To Be Better

Your parents hadn’t wanted to give you up. It was a hard season, but surely there had to be better ways. You knew better.

You could practically taste the salt of the soil, and as useless as you were as a planter, you could still tell things about your home, and right now your home was dying. You told them to do it. The only way they knew to ensure a good harvest, for now and forever. Offer a child in the dark part of the woods, where the mushroom circles were clumped together and hard to avoid. Where the fey courts lay.

The fey were surprised to see someone so grown as a child offered. Your smile is not the cute instinct of a babe, but something malicious. You knew how cruel the world could be, with your paper lungs and twisted spine. You who were nothing but a burden to your poor family of farmers.

The fey still take you. A bargain is a bargain, and they could not back out now. There were no lies, and the fey should have expected tricks. They make do, as most creatures will. You are to be wed to a creature whose name has long disappeared, whose every other spouse had vanished. An appeasement, they said. You figured you were going to be killed by your spouse for ‘entertainment’, like the horror stories you heard as a child.

The wedding is a blur of fancy outfits and your frail body being forced into dances that seemed to twist and warp it even further. Your bones crackle as you spin, on the edge of forgetting your own name. Then, just as quickly as the dance begins, it ends.

Your new spouse takes you ti their home, tells you the tricks to the courts. Do not speak unless spoken to, don’t eat the fruit or drink the wine, salt your food, and more. It all seems to blend together, yet you’re sure you could recite those rules by heart as soon as you hear them.

The first few days are quiet. Your spouse seems almost… afraid. Like they’re unsure what to do. Like they’ve never seen a human like you. You fill your time with the few tasks you knew how to complete at home- weaving scraps of thread or grass into cloth. One of the only things you were good for, now a comfort in this unfamiliar place.

You soon find a basket of weaving materials and a loom set up.

You remember what your spouse said about there being no such thing as a gift here in the courts, and so you immediately set to work making something in return. Weaving and cutting and sewing the cloth until it takes shape. The fae and their finery have no use for the simple clothes you make, so you instead make something entirely human: a child’s toy.

You gift the toy and receive an invitation. Dinner with your spouse. It is awkward and stiff and if you look a little too long you can see the flaws in the humanity of their form- but you talk.

There is another invitation the next night.

Your spouse is not, in fact, some dark creature. They are a lonely remnant, the powerful fae of ancient lore. They are scared to break you, their only companion as the courts move on to new ages without them. You assure them you will not let them.

Slowly, as you begin to know more and see more, you begin to see beyond the human facade they put on around you. Their power leaking through the cracks.

It’s beautiful.

There is birdsong and the smell of flowers that leaks through, enticing and earthy. You laugh with your spouse, and when you fall into silence you lean on them and listen to the babbling brook they have in replacement for a heartbeat.

Sometimes you miss your farm, but you know your parents are probably happier, no longer burdened as their harvest is plentiful. You have changed too much to go back to them, become too much fae and not enough human. Yet you have found a place of belonging here, in a spouse who is made of the beautiful parts of nature in a world of strange rules and laws. You have found a home, somewhat loving, and it is all you could ask for.

your parents just sold you as their firstborn to a fey. problem is you’re already an adult.