The Sylph Queen of Edenworld

CHAPTER 1 - NILLY

Snowflakes spun through the barren branches of the Dell Woods.  The doe was close enough to count the brown spots on its flank.  Its breathing was steady and calm, billowing through the air like smoke as it quested the ground for any grass still gripping to life against the everlasting winter.  They landed soft and ticklish on Nilly's eyelashes but still, she daren't blink.  She rose from behind the twisted root and braced her attack.  It was at moments like this she never felt more alive. 

Her ears thrummed, twitching so uncomfortably, her hand stayed.  Something was sour— a feeling not unknown to her.  A sixth sense, Nana Tena called it.  The old witch told her to always trust this feeling as a promise of imminent danger. 

Nilly scanned the woods.  All seemed as it should be for a wild wood—gnarled and over grown, except... something was strange about the shadows.  Inside the dark recesses of the trees, amid verges and beneath rocks the shadows writhed against the weak daylight.  They seemed suddenly alive and restless.  Branches rustled, startling the doe and forcing Nilly's strike.  The bone-tip of her spear ripped through its neck in a burst of blood and sent the beast thrashing to the ground.  

All was silent for a moment, except for a sudden wind that wailed through the wild wood.  It billowed the falling snow about her and tickled her ears with a strange sound...a sniggering.

Icy shivers shook up her spine.  Pulse racing, she scanned all around her for any sign of danger, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.  She rubbed her eyes furiously then raked her hands through her blonde frazzled mane, her fingers coming to rest on a single lock of her mother's brown hair, braided with her own— an enduring habit when uneasy or anxious.  Branches rustled again.  Fluidly, she spun, pulling another spear from her backstrap and cast it.  It buried its point into a tree trunk, just a foot away from two tiny, terrified fawns.  In a heartbeat, they fled back into the wood. 

            Sadness washed over her as she righted her stance.  Had she just orphaned two fawns, and cursed them to a childhood matching her own?  Isolated.  Shunned.  Treated like a freak of nature because her mother had died while giving birth to an outsider's baby.   'Don't worry little fawns,' she said to the snowy wood.  'At least you have the freedom to roam the world and go where you please.  If  only I could do as you do.'

           With tight ropes and tense nerves, she dragged the doe back towards the Esterlake shore, the task was made easier by the thick springy snow.  A more arduous task would have been welcome to keep her mind focused and not allowed it to wonder.  That eerie, ear-twitching feeling was always followed by something odd...and usually life-threatening.

She was just six years old when her grip faltered while climbing in Blanaberry Forest and fell fifty feet from the treetop, a fall that would burst open a normal person like a fresh egg.  As Wood Man Michael and the crannog men had carried her back to Nana Tena's healing table, she heard them say things like 'matter of time' and 'crippled for life' or 'touch and go.'  Yet, by the time she was placed upon the healing table, she sat up and skipped out of the hut.  No bones broken.  Not even a bruise on her pale freckless skin. 

At eight years old, she felt the same ear thrumming sensation while swimming on the Esterlake, right before that lake lion took hold of her leg.  When a lake lizard clamped its jaws upon its prey, it was said that not love nor gold would open them up again, and none expected an eight year old girl to surface the water holding the beast's lower jaw in her hands.  Was this another one of those times?  Would something threaten her life and would she walk away from it unmarked?

          Nilly dropped the ropes.  Whispers carried upon the air, coming from behind a shadowy gap between two hawthorn bushes.  Her heart pumped so loudly she could feel it in her toes.  She withdrew her spear and inched towards the bushes, ready for anything.  For a moment, all the tales she had been told as a child and dismissed as pig poop, flooded through her mind— tales of banshees stealing new-born babies into the night, of poukas dragging people down into the bogs and devouring them limb by limb, of giant serpents, black as coal with acid tongues and breath of fire.