The Tale of the Fey

PROLOGUE

The Fey was hallucinating, hearing voices. Lying on his back, he tried once more drawing breath into ragged, decaying lungs. The host was dying. This would be the sixth death in ten months. How long could he keep this up before his essence simply evaporated into the Ether?

It had not always been like this, he knew. He was... from somewhere else, he was certain of it. And then somehow, he had found himself here - in this nightmare world of chaos and disorder. He was still not sure how. He knew he did not belong, but beyond that was a grey haze. He possessed self-awareness and knew what he was capable of, but he could not recall where he had come from. Was this all he was destined to do - move from one decaying body to another?

Sounds of life drifted to his ears again. Definitely voices over the small mound to the east. With a grimace, he turned his rebelling body onto its stomach. Clawing his way up the mound, his legs dragged ineffectually behind him like boneless fillets. Sunlight shone through gaps in the trees in a dappled array, casting blotchy shadows around him as he inched toward the top. The summit was further than he'd thought. He lost three fingernails by the time he crested it and blood ran from his fingers in sluggish streams. It didn't really matter. The host was nearly at its end. He tried to focus his filmy eyes on the scene below.

A group of people had gathered round a campervan a hundred metres down the valley. The van had been stopped on an overgrown road winding through the elbow of two sloping hills. A group of men formed a rough semi-circle around it.

Why hadn't he heard any of this? The answer came on the next gust of wind from the valley. Their voices had only come in bursts on the breeze. He'd presumed earlier that the sounds had been part of his hallucinations. Not so. The men's eager, expectant faces had the ugly stamp of reality all over them.

He could see a man and a woman in the front seat of the van. They looked frightened and desperate. The men closed in around the van and one of them stepped closer to the driver's side, his hand resting on a holstered revolver, large and grey.

This place was barbarous, the Fey thought bitterly. Billions died in the cataclysm that had somehow brought him here, and yet they continued to kill each other. For what possible reason had he been cast into a world such as this?

PART 1

Eight Weeks Later

Lucinda plucked Gracie from the ground, desperately holding the child about the waist with one arm and sidestepping quickly through the underbrush beside the road.

The motorbike roared past, centimetres from her ankle. A lead pipe swung viciously through the air and smashed through the vegetation just above her ducking head.

Lucinda sprang across the deep overgrown gutter on the other side of the bushes, eyes wide in fear. A wisp of light brown hair from the tight ponytail at the back of her head fluttered, ignored, in front of her eyes. Gracie hung like a rag doll under her arm, vacuous eyes blinking slowly. Lucinda flung the child bodily over the wire fence that bordered the gutter, vaulting over as soon as the child hit the ground.

"Just ride through the fucking thing!" she heard one of her pursuers bark from the road.

Picking up Gracie once more, she bounded through the tall grass on the other side of the fence. She headed for a small forest a short distance to the east, just as three trail bikes exploded through the bushes behind her. Lucinda allowed herself a small smile as the crash and grind of metal came to her ears from the deep gutter. She did not allow her pace to slow.

"It goes beyond taxes now, you bitch," one of the men screamed from beneath his flipped bike.

As if taxes had anything to do with it in the first place, Lucinda thought. She doubted the gutter would slow them down too much. She kept running.