hidden forest glade
king of the elves holding court
romance and intrigue
By Aeronwy Dafies
To Ask the King of Elfame
By Scott J. Couturier
Into darkest woodlands must you wander:
Bracken crackling bone-like beneath your tread.
Leaves will conspire with rustlings sombre
As you mind paths which have no human led.
You must gaze straight ahead as one transfixed:
Nightshade taken in rare tincture before.
What you seek cannot be found without risk,
Nor mastered by mere mortal means & lore.
Shadowy forms flit beneath greening boughs:
Deeper yet must you reverently proceed,
Past overgrown grove, grave, & wose’s howe,
Past abode of faun, & den of faerie’s greed.
At last, at Oberon’s ancient tumulus of turf,
Where sacrifices come of their own will,
You arrive, drunk on wine of rarest earth:
Your riven vein pours profoundly in rill.
To ken that which you wish to learn,
You must go forth, never to return:
Into woodlands wild that with darkness burn.
king of the woodland
protector of elven realm
lumberjacks beware
By DJ Tyrer
The Fae Equations
By R.C. Mulhare
James Oldham-Jaquith sighed, running his hand through his already tousled dark hair, brushing chalk dust onto the lightly pointed tips of his ears. He blinked, trying to refocus his tired eyes on the equations written on the chalkboard before him. If Drs. Einstein and Rosen had expressed their bridge theory rightly, it might enable him to open an immediate passageway between his current location in a lecture hall of Harvard University to a building on the opposite of the campus. So far nothing had happened.
His study partner, Marcus Pickering, shifted sleepily in his chair. “Hmm? You say something, Jim?”
“I sighed. I’m certain I calculated this correctly,”
“Perhaps your parlour trick abilities failed you tonight,” Marcus stifled a yawn. “Thought of getting a good night’s sleep to better analyze them?”
“If you want to turn in, don’t let my ruminations keep you up.”
Marcus rose, arching his back and stretching his arms. “Perhaps you should follow my example and revisit your equations in the morning.” He examined his fob watch. “Or later in the morning. It’s so late, it’s nearly early.”
“You head off. I’ll turn in after a little while.”
“Don’t stay up too late, Prometheus.” Marcus went for the hall door.
“You accidentally cause a small fire due to a miscalculated bit of mathemagic, and your companions won’t let you hear the last of it by slapping a Titan’s name on you, when you’re only a man,” James mused.
“If the moniker applies to someone who burnt a dictionary by accident, wear it with delight,” Marcus retorted, closing the door behind him.
Once alone, James scanned the numbers and operators and algebraic notations, looking for the place where he had failed. He sighed, rapping the board with the flat of his hand. He decided to follow Marcus’s example and take counsel with his pillows.
The chalkboard rang oddly hollow. He blinked, staring at the board. He knocked on it again, causing a sound like a door than a board on a wall.
On a fourth knock, his knuckles passed through the board and through the wall as if through a mist. He felt moving air flow over his skin. Pushing against the wall with his forearm, he raised one foot and toed the wall, pushing through it.
He stepped through into an open space, a void beyond or behind the wall. He gazed about him. A shimmering wall of golden and silver glyphs hovered where he had entered. He turned away to assess the space. Dry soil or sand gritted underfoot. A dim gold light shone on the softly rolling landscape: hills devoid of most vegetation, except for stands and spinneys of tall, sapling-like trees with a bare mist of budding leaves.
Something rustled on the sand behind him. He stopped still, listening. Something flitted at the edge of his vision. He turned toward the cause, spotting something that flitted toward the nearest spinney.
“What is this place?” A dry scent filled his nostrils, like a previous winter’s leaf mould in early April. A laugh like a curtain of crystal beads shifting or a shaken dry seed pod replied.
“Who is there?” A figure like a winter-bare tree flitted behind him. “Please, what are you? Where is this world behind the world I know?”
A figure taller than his lanky form by half stepped from the air beside him, looking at him with obsidian eyes and a face like the inside of yellow birch bark. “You stumbled into the fae realm, child of two worlds,” they said.
“The fae realm? Do you mean faery-land? It doesn’t look like an illustration from a child’s storybook.”
The figure tilted its head, the twig-like protrusions from its scalp shaking. “A story book?”
“A collection of tales told to very young children; they usually have very colorful and sentimental painted artwork of faeries who look more like idealized humans with butterfly wings, rather than… you.”
“There are some of us who resemble humans, but that is because they were born human.”
“Changelings?”
“Yes, unlike you, who are a child of two worlds.”
“You keep calling me that: why? I am a scientist, not a poet, though I appreciate the work of the poets.”
The fae, perhaps a dryad, leaned down to his level. “Because you are half-fae. You are the son of the queen of this realm, who passed to another and left it to you to shape and populate with plant life as you will.”
“I am the son of Emory Oldham-Jaquith and his wife Lavinia.”
“Yes, you are Emory’s son. But your mother appeared to him in the guise of a lovely Irish woman, during a jaunt to the Emerald Isle, a land that still lays close to our domain. He tarried with her, then they parted. He returning to this ambitious land that thinks itself younger. Seven years later, he took a wife who could not give him a child, till she cried out a wish for a child on May Eve. And so we brought you to their dwelling and laid you on their door in a basket of woven grass lined with oak leaves.”
“How then did I linger for seven years in this place with no recollection of it?”
“Time does not work as it does in the human realm. A minute may have passed there and seven years here, while seven years may pass here and a day has passed there.”
“Like Rip Van Winkle idling for a night with Henry Hudson and his crew, awaking to find twenty years had passed.”
“Your Washington Irving heard the tales of our folk and retold them for the lubberly folk of Columbia.”
“And so I am the king of this place? It sounds too easy.”
“You would be correct: it is not. Would you claim this realm?”
“I suppose this explains the strange powers I have manifested. But I will refuse this crown: I have my studies.”
The fae tilted its head. “You would refuse such power? I took humans for ambitious creatures. You have conquered much of your world.”
“You told me I’m part-fae. Perhaps that aspect has subdued the human side. If it is as you say, then perhaps I should quit this place before another second ticks by.” He turned to depart, and found his passage blocked by a ring of fae, most resembling trees, some covered with moss, others with flowers blooming from their heads and backs.
“Oh, no, young prince. You’ve only just arrived.” The faery band pressed closer, reaching for him, murmuring words in languages he barely recognized, likely welcoming. He stooped and working from memory jotted the Promethean equation that had caused him such trouble.
“I’m afraid I must refuse.” He jotted the last symbol, jumping back. A gout of flame flared. The fae dropped back. James dashed toward the curtain of golden glyphs, falling through them….
….He sprawled onto the lecture hall floor, daylight shining through the windows, his professor, Dr. Emerson Yates standing over him. “Please tell me you spent the night here studying, Oldham?”
“The night passed without my noticing.” James rose, reaching for the felt chalkboard eraser…
Ends
The Elf King Conspiracy
By Simon MacCulloch
So I’m down at the Elf King’s Court that night
(Just a hunch, never ask me why),
When the whisper comes on the pale blue smoke,
And I laugh at first, but it ain’t no joke,
Cos the word is out that it might, just might
Be the Elf King’s turn to die.
Well, I go round back and I bust straight in
To the room where the deals get done;
And he’s there all right, and he looks real sick.
“The King needs a doc, not a two-bit dick.”
But he lets them know I’m as good as kin,
And he hands me the smoking gun.
And I start to sweat, but the King just grins.
“You’re a guy who can stand that heat.
All the cold sly truths and the honest lies
And the fast hits turned into alibis,
All the labels stuck on the horse-meat tins,
Just a part of your regular beat.”
So I take the piece, and the old guy croaks,
And the world turns round the same.
Cos conspiracies are the damnedest things,
Where we all shoot holes in the secret kings,
And the corpse stays warm and the gun still smokes,
But the bullets take the blame.
View From Atlantis 