Changeling

Chapter 2

That night Sorrel found herself flipping through the local channels that seemed to be limited to a 24/7 town advertisement, Julia Childs making some kind of pudding, Antique Road show, and other elder beloved unmentionables.

She was being eaten alive by the intensely soft and very red recliner while she drank the only bottle of wine in town. It was Chardonnay, and she winced as she swallowed a mouth full of the stuff. She was bored out of her skull admittedly, and she decided to peruse the reading material provided by the hosts who staged the cottage. Sorrel tip toed to the rickety old book case. The selection contained well-known classics like War And Peace, Pride and Prejudice, and a lone gaudy romance novel for the single female tourist that no doubt frequented these cottages, though romance was the last genre Sorrel wanted to indulge. She found intrigue however, in the little green bound novel with the spindly gold bits at the spine. Sliding it out, her face screwed up in confusion when she read the title. "Aos sí"

At first she didn't plan on reading it, only wanted to rifle through the pictures. But found her eyes strangely drawn to the words. She'd flipped to a chapter labeled: "The Death of the Changeling".

"Long ago, in the time of St. Patrick, the tribes of Erin regaled the magic and tradition of Antiquity. The saying that St. Patrick lead the "snakes" out of Ireland, is actually an oral history detailing a more grim past that spoke on conversion, and the means of torture which were applied to accomplish this. With the death of this fabled magic came the genocide of what is commonly known as changelings. Changelings of the Iron age were honored as healers and entertainers, but the underlying truth of it was, they possessed a power which was the result of Faerie relations with mortal kind. This power was greater than what the fae possessed, as, the power of fairy kind was in combination with being born a child of God which the fae did not know. It occurred every hundred years that the fae blood would come to fruition, a dormant gene that had an awakening every new century. It spread through the cells and was a mutation of a different kind. This resulted in a pair of green eyes and strange occurrences in their youth, including a closeness to nature, the gift of foretelling, and an interest in the occult. As one can conclude, this became their downfall around the era that a million saints purged Erin of magic, and the changeling, like fae, fell to myth and legend. Or are they? And are they truly gone?"

"Wow." Sorrel exclaimed quietly, flipping through the pages to find a magnificent drawing of a beautiful man with sharp features. "Gancanag" the caption read:

"A handsome man who emits an intoxicating scent to lure his prey. Few come out alive."

That sent a chill coursing through Sorrel's body despite this being quite a corny aside. It was his smile more than anything else though, a little too wide, too many teeth. And his eyes... not human.

Hurriedly turning to the next page, there were a few drawings of little sprites with flower hats and delicate limbs. The caption explained that they ruled over pollinating the earth and kept nature itself alive. Small, but integral.

Sorrel turned to an illustration of what was clearly a Selkie lady, with her black eyes and water drenched hair, and she had to admit that an inkling of magic snuck up into her fanciful mind. She didn't dare entertain the possibility of fairies, hadn't since she was a child, but a part of her definitely wanted to. Who didn't? She wondered, slowly turning the page to discover a sliver of paper which was all that remained of a passage. It had been cruelly ripped from the spine.

"That's a shame." She said and continued to flip through. Absorbing every line, every character until being off of her medication was apparent to her as she blearily heard the loud grandfather clock strike 12 after the fourth gong. The spell was broken, she blinked.