Stories of the Never-Never

Winter's Prince

The half-breed child of the Unseelie Court knew something was amiss when the same dream began to recur every night for almost a month. Though the child knew nothing of his Fey origins, he knew that something was going on which did not fit in with the normal of the human realm. As the night progressed, and the dream began to take place again, the boy's body in the human realm began to disappear and began instead to take form in the Faerie realm.

With a gasp, and a splash, the boy awoke, but instead of waking up in the usual place from the all too realistic dream, he woke up instead inside the dream, in a frozen fjord which was the only passage into the castle which he had glimpsed from a distance in the dream. In the moment it took to regain a clear thought, the boy had sunk into the frosty water beneath the thin ice layer, and began to freeze himself. But then, out of nowhere, a line fell into the water in front of him, and he was pulled out of the water with a great tug.

As the momentum carried him to crash into the side of something hard and wooden, the sound of rushing water suddenly filled the fjord, and shouts of alarm came from somewhere above the boy. The line began to pull him in faster, and he soon found himself on board a great ship headed towards the pale white castle and surrounding city at the end of the fjord's passageway. The ship was huge by the boy's standards, and he looked around with awe, almost forgetting that he was slowly freezing in his drenched clothes.

A rough blanket was shoved into the boy's hands as he looked around amazed from his position on the deck of the ship where he had fallen after being dragged aboard. He tried to find the person who had given it to him in the mass of people on the ship's deck, but their constant fast racing around to complete some task made it impossible to discern one person from another. So he instead stumbled to his feet, wrapping the blanket around himself as the sound of rushing water grew louder and louder in his ears. With stumbling steps, he walked over to the mizenmast of the ship, where there as only a brief reprieve from people, so as to watch and learn what was going on, and in turn figure out why and how he got here.

"Oi, you there, boy, who are you? What the blazes are you doing swimming in the kelpie waters? Unless you're one of them, which I doubt cause you're half frozen and their kind don't freeze, you ain't got no business doing in the Unseelie waters. So what's it to be, boy? Oi, I'm talking to you!" A tall grisly sort of man came over to the boy with fast, limping steps. When the boy just stared at the man in shock, he sighed. "Bloody hell kid, just tell me what you were doing. I'm not mad, just wondering, is all."

The boy bit his lower lip and lowered his head toward the deck of the ship before mumbling, "I don't know. It was just a dream, and then..." As the man shook his head there appeared to be a wall of water coming from the port side of the ship. The boy's eyes went wide at the sight, not knowing quite what to believe, and upon seeing his face, the man turned to the sight and cursed. With a quick glance at the boy as if to make sure he would remain where he was, which the boy had no intention of following, he raced up to the quarter deck and began to shout orders to the crew, who were all racing to outrun the wall of water it would seem.

A beam of light seemed to come towards the ship from the starboard side, while the crew was watching the wave from the port side, and when the light caught on the boy's peripheral vision, he was the only one to see it before it was too late. The light and the wall of water seemed to engulf the ship at once, and then everything was a swirling mass of water, light, wood, and frost beneath the boy as he slipped into the welcome darkness. As it started to fade out and he felt his lungs fill with water, the only thought going through his head where, 'This can't be real.'

As the Unseelie guards pulled bodies from the water, they came across the body of a boy lying over two planks of wood from the invading ship's deck, and were surprised that he was not dead. His pulse was weak, but still there, and the guards knew that if not treated soon, he would die from the cold. As the larger of the two guards was about to end the boy's life, believing him to be one of the invaders from the Seelie Court, he noticed a small mark on his neck, a mark which all royal Unseelie had. Wordlessly, he showed his companion who took one look before stating, "The Winter Prince has returned..."