Althea

Prologue

I lived a pretty uneventful life. It was always just my mom Ariadne, me, and our sheep.
I never thought of myself as anything special. I was a typical teenage sheep herder, if that even exists.
I am no great beauty. My brown hair is wild and untameable, my figure lacks nearly all feminine curves. My freckles almost hide my thin eyebrows which are arched sharply and always made me look either surprised or angry.
I didn't mind my looks much anyway, there was no one around for me to impress and the two days a year we went to town hardly lended me much time to find anyone. The only things I really like about my appearance are my eyes. My eyes look like someone hadn't been able to decide whether or not I should have blue or green eyes, so they did both. My eyes were like stained glass, shards of blue and green mixed all together in two identical masterpieces.
My mom and I lived on our sheep farm in the ground floor of an old flour mill. We referred to it as our Sunshine Home, because it was painted yellow to match the dandelions that never seemed to go away, and because my mom thought the sheep liked it. We knew every one of those sheep by name and loved them like family.
My dad was never really in the picture, I never knew him. My mom never wanted to talk about him, and so I never asked. I didn't need to, I always figured there was not much point in dwelling on things I had no reason and no means to ever know. There was enough to focus on as it is, and those things wouldn't make me any happier than I was. My mom, instead, constantly told me stories of faye lore, told me that my swirl shaped birthmark on my back meant that a fairy had touched me. That it had marked me for some great purpose. What purpose I didn't know, and I never cared. I was happy. We lived simply but wholly. We wanted for nothing, and nothing ever happened.