Farah Dowling WRITOBER 2O22

Everything is connected

Benjamin Harvey found you amidst the carnage, crying uncontrollably, turning over body after body. He cried your name, seizing you by the shoulders and forcing you to stop.
“What are you doing?”
“Where’s Farah?” you sobbed, grabbing his bloodied jacket in your fists. “Where is she? Why can’t I find her?”
Next to Ben, Saul frowned. Did you just say ‘Farah’? You were only her assistant. Your desperation made no sense to him. “I saw her earlier, protecting a bunch of your fellow students from Burned Ones. She went after Rosalind. I don’t know where she is now.”
“You should be in the main hall letting the Healers take a good look at you, not out here” interjected professor Harvey with his kind voice. “I’m sure Headmistress Dowling is fine. Saul, bring her inside, will you?”
Headmaster Silva firmly guided you off the field where other professors and solarian soldiers were beginning to identify the dead and to remove the bodies. He left you in the care of a Healer in the hall, where a temporary field hospital had been set up.
You allowed the Healers to place you on a mattress on the floor and bandage your worst cuts, but as soon as they left you alone for a second you used light magic to make yourself invisible and you run back out on the field.
Once they discovered you were missing, a few hours later, professor Harvey sent one of your friends to find you.
“What are you doing out here? What are you looking for?” she asked, watching your tear-stained face with great concern.
“Farah” you stuttered, so tired and anguished that you weren’t able to think straight or put together the words. “I’m- looking for Farah.”
“Farah?” your friend repeated, incredulous and baffled by your use of her first name. “Headmaster Silva said-”
“I don’t care what he said! If he isn’t worried about his friend than fine, but I’m worried sick and he doesn’t get to tell me I cannot search for her!”
“But-”
“Do not dare repeat to me that I have to go back to the Healers! I won’t abandon her, I won’t give up on her!”
Your friend straightened her back and said, softly: “Headmistress Dowling is missing in action, babe. We don’t know where she is, but everyone is whispering that she is probably dead.”
“No! No, I-”
“You know as well as I do that is probably true” she continued. “She would be here otherwise.”
“No. I don’t want to listen, I can’t-” you said, putting your hand over your ears as a little child would. Your friend gently grabbed your wrists and guided your hands down.
“I realize now you were more attached to her than we ever thought. I guess that’s only natural, with you being her assistant and spending so much time with her lately. But she’s gone, babe; and a lot of others aren’t. Our friends are alive, but some of them are lying on the floor in the main hall and they need us. They need you there. And the Healers could use a skilled magical hand like yours. Why aren’t you with them? You cannot help anyone out here.”
“I can’t…” you sobbed, bent double and falling to your knees on the muddy field. “I can’t leave her…”
“There’s no one here, babe. Rosalind is dead. Miss Dowling defeated her and probably was killed in return. She would want you to help your friends, wouldn’t she?”
You nodded, tears running down on your face, your right hand on your mouth to stop yourself from screaming all your pain out loud.
“Then wipe your tears and come with me. You will feel better, I promise.”
You slowly stood up and went with her, but you knew you’d never, ever feel better. You were not mourning a professor you admired; you were crying for the woman you loved more than life itself.
You helped taking care of the wounded, sat by your friends, talked to them and read for them from a book that, you felt a sword in your heart when you thought about it, miss Dowling had given you before the final battle.
You had started a little habit of discussing with her the books you were reading, and she had begun to recommend you new books, often lending them to you from her personal library. Those discussions and the brief moment when your fingers touched as you took a volume from her hands had become the highlights of your week.
And now you felt her loss every time you took a book in your hands. You smiled to your friends, pretended everything was fine, but your heart was an hollow, wrecked thing.
You had wanted to protest with professor Harvey and Headmaster Silva for using your friends to guilt you into coming back and stop searching for Headmistress Dowling, but when you had seen how prostrated they both had been when they had officially announced to the school that their best friend was missing in action you had changed your mind. Ben Harvey had been as pale as a ghost and had barely managed to speak a few words, and Silva had looked like a man who had just finished crying his eyes out. He had not said a thing, opening his mouth to speak and then abruptly leaving, as if he was too deep in grief to give any official statement.
After that speech, you had gone to her office to retrieve what personal things you had left on the assistant’s desk and you had found one of her rings lying on the wooden surface. You started to wear it all the time.
Alfea had slowly begun to go back to normal, with professor Harvey acting as Deputy Headmaster for fairies, but to you everything felt empty without her.
You pretended to be alright, but inwardly you had started to distance yourself from everyone, your closest friends included. There was no reason to tell them now that you had been in love with Farah – you didn’t want to be a burden. Outside of classes, you found yourself living a life far more isolated than you had done before.
You kept on dreaming about her. You dreamt of having tea with her in her office, talking about books; you dreamt of the one time she had put her hands on your shoulders and you had found the courage to briefly hug her, the day she told you you had gotten the assistant position; you dreamt about finding her in the forest, wounded but wonderfully alive.
One day, during one of the unbearable celebrations that Queen Luna of Solaria was bent on organizing at school, you failed to hold it together and bursted into tears when someone said Farah’s name.
A schoolmate held you, letting you cry on his shoulders without asking questions, and then proceeded to spend the evening alongside you. You went to his room with him that night, and in the morning you felt even more empty and desperate than you’d been before. You resolved not to make a mistake like that again. No darkened room or sweet words could replace the elegant hands, the soft voice, the golden hair you needed; and no sex could distract you from the pain of her loss.
You threw yourself even deeper in your studies. The only moments of peace you had during your long days were the ones you spent alone in the forest.
For some reason when you were under the trees you felt better.
You took the habit of going to sit on the bench in the cemetery, often bringing a book with you and staying there to study or read. When the warmer season hit Alfea you started to sit on the grass, and you soon discovered that a particular birch tree had the most comfortable trunk. You sat there, your back against it, and sometimes fell asleep while reading, a ray of light caressing your skin as a light finger. You always dreamt about Farah there, but they were never the kind of dreams that had you waking up screaming, covered in sweat. You always felt more at peace after a nap there.
So one day, when the school year was about to end, you decided to perform a small ritual to thank the birch for the energy it had given you. It was meant to give back some of that energy and to say goodbye, until next year. You did it, your eyes lighting up with magic as you said the final words of thanks, and then you sat against its truck as always, opening a book.
You fell asleep, and when you opened your eyes the sun was about to go down. You stretched and scratched your nose, for you had felt something tickling it. A moment later you realized that the reason you had woken up was that some of the birch’s branches had come to life and were surrounding you, their leaves lightly stroking your face and arms.
You stood up quickly, slapping the leaves away and trying to escape from the birch’s hug.
When you understood you couldn’t, panicking, you tried to turn to get a better look at the trunk instead of doing the sound thing – using magic to free yourself. You saw with horror that the truck was starting to show human features. Good gods, what had you done? What was this tree?
“Let me go!” you shouted, terrified. “Who are you?”
You stopped breathing when you heard a familiar chuckle. “I think you know who I am.”
Your heart raced, and you could feel the thump of your blood in your ears. That was Farah’s voice! But… how… what- this could be a trick. Months had passed, no one knew what had happened to her, this could be some evil entity pretending to be her to fool you into freeing them… you couldn’t allow your desperate hope to take control…
So “Prove it” you said, taking a deep breath and finally regaining a glimpse of sanity. “Or I will free myself, and it will hurt” you added, letting the tree see magic sparkling on your free hand.
“How can I prove it?” the thing asked with Farah’s voice, and gods how good it was to hear it next to your ear, amused as it used to be when you had asked an impossibly naive question.
“Tell me something only she would know.”
“You are the best student I ever had the good fortune to teach.”
You snorted. “Even if that was true, everyone knows I’m top of the class.”
The branches were becoming more and more human, and your heart was beating faster and faster.
“You like your tea unsweetened and have an obsession with First World literature.”
“That wouldn’t be hard to find out.”
You felt thin lips brushing against the shell of your ear. “The day I appointed you my assistant you were wearing the same light dress you are wearing now. You hugged me, and you had a faint smell of hazelnut in your hair because you had been secretly baking in the kitchens. You brought me cookies that evening with my tea and pretended they were a gift from a friend.”
You turned, trembling, and your eyes met hers. Farah Dowling was standing in front of you.
You let your book fall on the ground and felt your knees bending, you head spinning.
“Careful” said Farah, catching you from your waist and guiding you to sit on the bench, a few steps away.
You opened and closed your eyes, afraid to believe what you were seeing, but at the same time drinking in the sight of her and her impossibly dear features. Suddenly you chuckled.
“Something amusing?” she asked, smiling.
“Only I would dream such a ridiculous fairytale moment” you said.
Farah sat at your side. “Does this feel dream-like?”
You raised you right hand and brushed it lightly along her jaw line.
“Yes” you whispered.
“You are not dreaming, my dear” she said softly. “And I hate to break the news to you but we are, in fact, fairies. Fairytale is the only kind of tale we can inhabit.”
It was her humor, more than anything else, that convinced you that this was real.
“You really are here” you stated, full of wonder. “What happened? Where have you been? Were you trapped in tree form the whole time?”
“Yes,” she answered, “until your ritual gave me the magical energy I needed to come back. Everything is connected, as you know. When we casted our last spells I asked the nature to protect me from Rosalind. We both hit each other, and the land protected me by turning her mortal curse into a metamorphing one. I don’t know what happened to her.”
“She died” you murmured. “You defeated her.”
“So the school…”
“Everything is fine” you said. “Professor Harvey is doing all he can.”
“I’m sure he is” she smiled. Then she dropped her gaze and noticed a particular ring on your finger.
“Is that one of my rings?”
You blushed, pulling it off and handing it to her. “I’m sorry” you said. “I found it on my desk- I only meant to keep it to have something to remember you by…”
She didn’t take it and kept staring at it. “Does it have a… sentimental value to you?”
You hesitated. “Yes.”
Her eyes flicked to yours. “I see.”
“Don’t you… want it back?” you asked, shivering.
“A ring is a highly… symbolic magical object” she said quietly.
“I know” you answered slowly.
“And knowing that you’d want to keep it?”
“Yes” you whispered.
Looking into your eyes, so full of light and love that they were taking her breath away, Farah said: “Know that you’re wearing my heart and my soul on your finger, then” before bending her head and pressing a soft kiss to your lips.
You kissed her back, but she quickly pulled away to make sure you were okay with what she was doing.
You reached to stroke her face, her ring again on your hand, and said huskily: “Don’t stop. I’ve been waiting a long time for that kiss.”
She kissed you again, taking the time to explore your mouth with her tongue and properly taste you. When you broke the kiss she was already about to ask if she had gone too far when you swung a knee across her lap and sat on her thighs, straddling her.
You tilted her head with your hands and started devouring her, your fingers tangling in her hair, inebriating in the taste of vanilla and herbal tea of her lips.
She groaned and put both her hands on your bum, pulling you closer as she sucked your tongue as if she could not have enough.
When you pulled away, breathless, and took one of her hands to bring it on your breasts, she closed her eyes and instinctively squeezed, letting out a small moan when you arched your back and bucked your hips against her.
Farah opened her eyes and stopped, taking your chin and making you look into her eyes.
“As much as I’m enjoying this I don’t want to make love to you for the first time in a cemetery, my darling” she said. “Which means we have to stop before I am past the point of reason.”
You knew she was right, but now that she was here it was almost impossible for you to stop.
It took all your strength to let your hands fall and to stand up.
She looked up at you from the bench and she chuckled. “You’re pouting.”
“I can’t help it” you replied, and then, in a vulnerable voice: “We will resume this as soon as possible, yes?”
She stood up smiling and she kissed you tenderly.
“I promise, love.”