There's nothing more furious than a fairy who'd just been outsmarted. Let alone by a human. A tiny, big-haired, puny human. A worthless mortal. The old lady spun, seethed, and writhed, but however much she squeezed, there was no loophole to be entered. The power of words bound her as if they projected not only shackles of speech but a semantic forcefield around the vermin of a girl.
Gillan smiled as she sightlessly stared at the hundred-limbed fae. So powerful those creatures. They could take away your very sense of being, your literal colour, and the literal memory of how to breathe. And yet, if you knew your way around words, you could get an astonishing amount of wealth and power. Even a friendship.
At last, the old lady gave up. The centipede wriggled away for some time, leaving Gillan alone once more, cherry trees whispering around her. She found the sound soothing now. Not in a magical way like before, she felt no inner connection to the surroundings, it was more like... like when she ran away from her fencing classes, to go to the hills and play with the fairies. There was no spell other than that of childhood upon her then.
Right here, right now, what she felt was just...quaint. The trees didn't fill her with mystical energy and she just enjoyed their presence. As if the orchard's magic had stopped trying to corrupt her. And who was that woman? Was she the queen of this domain? Was the thing Gillan set her up for cruel or unjust? Well, she did try to fool her into giving away her name for free a few times — then to give back a flawed product.
Was it justified, though? Time would tell, Gillan thought to herself. She tried peering over the trees in the distance, but she saw nothing. Almost like the area curved prematurely just to obscure its vastness to newcomers. She then tried scaling one of the trees. The moment her hand touched the trunk's wood, a shockwave of invisible force ejected her back onto the road. Gillan got up and told herself not to push it. She may have overstayed her welcome.
The old lady soon returned. Her many feet pounded the earth with an off-set melody, which was caused by one of them holding onto two small, red spheres. The creature approached Gillan.
"I agree," she began, "to the deal. Here are your blank slates," she handed her the two cherries. "What is your name?"
Gillan accepted the pair of fruit and hid it deep within a pocket.
"My name," she said, trying to keep a firm voice, "with the giving you of which I conclude our agreement with all its terms...is Gillan."
The old lady looked her over. There was at least one unspoken thought in her antlered head. There were probably many more unasked questions. Yet she said nothing. She accepted the girl's name and was just about to writhe away into the distance when something happened.
The fairy's leg fell off. Not in a blood-splattering manner, one could even say it did so very peacefully. Then another popped off. More and more of the old lady's limbs detached, the remaining ones failing to support her long body and it finally dropped to the ground too.
Her inveretebracy toppled, all of the ringed segments of her body now coming apart from one another. With each of them separating she screamed. Her wail, a human-sounding wail, still came from the mouth of an antler-riddled centipede. Well, not so antler-riddled now. At one point, even the creature's stinger tore off, lodging into the earth below it. She cried and writhed like that for a good while until so much of her came apart that screaming was no longer possible. All that remained of the old lady was now little more than a mute voice of the warm wind.
The girl came away from the scene unfazed. She didn't know exactly how that would happen, but now she was richer with that knowledge. It turned out — when knowingly dealing with a fae — they're not the only ones who can use magic. Magic, that when sealing a contract is more like a tornado of power encircling all parties involved. Free-flowing. Wild. It only needs directing. With gentle suggestions to push it into the channels of effect. Suggestions, such as little words. Tiny, itsy bitsy differences. Grammar mistakes. Misspellings. It's not so much about reading the fine print as it is about putting an additional vowel where it shouldn't be. Now that's magic.
Right as she — the girl, the one whose all bodily bindings hadn't loosened up — crossed the barrier between the Court of Orchards and the rest of Here, she felt something. Almost...a door, opening. A single stream, finally piercing the rock it had shot out for millions of years. A bottle, uncorking.
This, whatever it was she felt, was no immediate measure. No mind works like that. If it did, no one would talk to each other. It takes time and effort to process things, to do effective introspection. But it takes the right mind to do so first. A mind that loves the person it inhabits, a mind that continues to love them, and will help them get through it. But a mind needs to grow into that. It needs space, space to grow around whatever monstrosity must be tamed. And for space; the door, the rock, the bottle — the cage — needs opening. Hers just did.
As she laid her first step out of the Court of Orchards, the girl admitted something. Embraced a new status quo, the effect of both randomness and strong will alike. There was no name she could give herself now. No power to be bestowed upon this very new, very same person that had just disintegrated a fairy. There would come a time for that. At least she hoped. But for now, she was Ganainm. And that would be enough.
