Going Home

Chapter 1

Sent from somewhere far away, Silvia emerged into this world like any seemingly human girl would, screaming, kicking, and flailing about. But she was not in fact entirely human, she knew it, her fairy mother knew it, everyone in the village knew it, however, all but Silvia knew that before long, she would be shipped off to live with another family. You see, Silvia is a changeling, a creature from the faerie world, born of faerie parents, but the twin of a child in the human world. Human infants do not grow older in the faerie world but instead stay young for all eternity, faerie mothers long to take care of infants for their long lives so they ship their young off to live with humans and kidnap the human baby in its place.

The only way to prove Silvia was in fact of another world was that her seemingly hazel eyes glinted silver from time to time, and what should have been rounded pink baby ears were a pale blush pointed ear that stuck out of the thick hair she was born with, jutting out like a rock from the sea. At birth, Silvia was swaddled in the biggest leaf found on the biggest Mulleins bush and tucked into a hole in a tree to sleep until the morning dew came. Life couldn't get any better, her mother was kind and gentle, her smile in the shape of a crescent moon, and her eyes as green as the bog.

All of the pleasantries ended when after being put to bed in a hollowed out log during the second moon after her birth, Silvia woke to the cold cotton sheets of a human crib. She wailed and wailed for her mother but no one came, well no one she knew. Unfamiliar, rounded faces peered at her, concerned and tired, behind dark tendrils of ruffled hair. Fairies loved music, these humans must've known that because the woman now curling Silvia in her thin frail arms, sang a beautiful melody that whisked her into sleep once more, the sound of her voice crackling and whooshing like the sound of a forest at night. The song swayed her to believe all memories before that one moment had been dreams.

Clare, which was incidentally her human name, had a lonely childhood, the kids at school were never very nice to her, but when she came home from school, she had two loving parents who would steal the moon from the sky if it'd make her happy. After her father left Clare's mother 12 or so years after Clare was born, Clare was miserable, she was unable to make friends, and the few friends she once had, faded into the abyss that was middle school. Most days she would come home from school and lose herself in the music she'd play on her mother's thousand dollar stereo.

Clare, at age 18 lived the life of any teenage girl, except for the pointed ears, that still had a tendency to stick out from underneath her still monstrously thick black hair. Her mother, now a well-known doctor in their town, had paid for Clare to get countless plastic surgeries to fix her pointed ears, for her "poor daughter had been tormented enough, it was the least she could do". But all the procedures had done is result in countless ear infections that left Clare almost entirely deaf. Clare's father was no longer around, he surprised Clare with the news on her 13th birthday, he was to move to California to marry a 20-year-old model. Clare was lucky to get even a Birthday card from her father nowadays.

One day after Senior classes, Clare disappeared into her room once more to collapse into her music. The music was now mere vibrations to her, but that was better than complete silence. Ready to crawl under the warm covers of her bed Clare became distracted by a rock the size of her thumbnail that fell out of her boot, how it got there she didn't know, nor did she know how she hadn't felt it. Clare picked up the rock, it was cold and damp in her hand as she turned it over in her fingers. A small pea-sized hole was drilled into the side of it and a piece of white paper stuck out from the edge, frayed and dark. She pulled into her desk drawer and reached inside, fetching a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass. The tweezers managed to come in handy, they grabbed onto the frayed edge of the paper and it fell out of the rock with the slightest of tug. The white paper was drier than regular printer paper and had variations of black and white lines across it, like that of Birch bark. Scrawled across the bark was writing, its ink a nearly black royal purple color. It read: "Crawl home through the forest bog, take care while stepping over the boisterously croaking frogs and mossy logs. P.S. We have the one that you call mom."