January 26, 2000
The Tale So Far... (Part I)
(I've been meaning to write a narrative history of the Changeling game I've been running. Here's the first part. Once it's all written, I suppose I'll compile all the entries in the writing section.)
Faeries are everywhere among us. They hide their faerie souls in human bodies to protect them from the dream-destroying aspects of this world and to keep their true identities hidden. Once they were like gods, the true fae, the fae on which thousands of stories and myths have been based. Then with the rise of the Church, and the advent of the Age of Reason, the gates to the faerie realm of Arcadia slammed shut, and the true fae either took on mortal flesh or were dissolved by the rising banality of the world.
That was six hundred years ago. Now, in Seattle, the same ancient beings (born and reborn countless times, most of them) are still around, still living among mortal kind. Completely unaware of this, two ordinary mortals, a marine biologist named Jenny Nordstrom and an artist and erstwhile investigative reporter named Ed McLarren, went through their ordinary routines. Jenny did research for the Seattle Aquarium, while Ed was working there on an assignment -- as he put it, "drawing fish".
Their lives were both changed forever on the same day last June. Ed was in the midst of an artistic frenzy, suddenly caught by his aquatic subjects as he hadn't been before. Perhaps daydreaming about Jake, one of Jenny's colleagues, had helped inspire him as well, but whatever the case, the art just seemed to pour from his fingertips. In his haze, he slowly became aware of a new world around him: warmer, brighter, more alive. He looked down at his body only to realize that he now had the lower half of a goat, legs and horns and all, while a set of rather impressive horns graced his forehead. Before he had a chance to panic, he heard an amused chuckle from the doorway. "I thought it was nearly time for you," Jake said -- only she, too, was much changed, to his eyes, at least. The attractive woman he had seen before was now even more alluring, sleeker, the sea in her eyes and in her voice. Small changes, unlike the changes to his own body, but just as magical nonetheless. To his astonishment, she went on to explain that he was now one of the fae, a satyr, like those of Greek myth. Or, more accurately, that he had always been, but that his fae nature had asserted itself and awoke, transforming him.
That same day, later, Jenny was wandering along Alki Beach, a favorite of hers in town. Down the beach was a dark, motionless form, and when she came upon it, Jenny realized it was a human form, and he had been attacked by a shark. As she tried to save the man's life, he urged a talisman on her, a necklace. "Take it, wear it," he insisted with his last few breaths. To humor an obviously dying man, Jenny put the necklace on. Like Ed, her world changed. The sea suddenly seemed like home. The necklace changed to what could only be the pelt of a harbor seal, and it felt as if it had always been a part of her. She felt as if that part of her had been missing and now returned to her. As she wondered at the new world around her, her unknown benefactor slipped away and died. From behind her, she too, heard an amused chuckle, and turned to see a beautiful man with laughing green eyes and enormous angelic wings.
He introduced himself as Angeles, and also explained Jenny's transformation to one of the fae, in her case, a selkie, a shape-changeling fae, part-seal and part-human. Because of the differences between selkie and satyr, Jenny's transformation was slightly different in nature, but in both cases the end result was the same: a new (or really, reborn) fae come into the world.
And while all this earth-shattering, life-changing transformation was taking place, across town, Squire Michael of Cill Dara went about his usual routine, balancing his mortal life as a college student and his fae existence as a troll (from Norse mythology, of course, gigantically tall and strong with blue skin) and a guard to Baroness Joanna Mornim ap Fiona -- who was, perhaps coincidentally, known to most mortals as Jake Mornim, a marine biologist with the Seattle Aquarium.
Coincidence or not, the three fae, Jenny, Ed and Michael, were all about to meet and become very much a part of one another's lives.
