/ cliff edge
2,126 words
Shyshie should have been sleeping. But the Princess was calling her name and she would not be denied again.
So out from between her sheets the little cat slipped and down the hall she went, selkie coat pulled close around her and bare feet whispering against the wood of the floor.
She paused by her mother’s door for a heartbeat, just long enough to peek in and check to see the slumbering form with the blankets twisted around it.
Darkmoon slept, perhaps not entirely peacefully, but she slept and hopefully she would never be aware that her daughter had even ever left the safety of her own bed.
Sighing, she turned away from the door and slipped down the stairs to the kitchen door. Out the window was nothing but a blankness and as Shyshie turned the knob and opened the door, the mist rolled through to envelope her in its clammy arms.
Shyshie stepped out, closing the door behind her, onto the dew damp grass and the night and the water strung air erased her home behind her.
Several steps in the direction of the sea she was stopped by a disturbance in the thick swirling air. The immaterial took a form and a tall shape rose before her, coat thick and heavy and non existent all at once.
Blue light trailed off from blank eyes as they looked down on the girl.
“You’re here to take me to her, aren’t you?”
The wolf bowed its head and nuged Shyshie’s shoulder.
“I was coming,” She said quietly “You can see that, can’t you? You don’t need to bother my mother.”
It huffed and nudged her shoulder again.
“Alright, I’m coming. Show me where to go.”
It guided her on some invisible path that even had it been daylight Shyshie doubted she would have known to follow it. Slowly the world began to melt. The distant shapes of the trees, the houses, and all the other outlines that made up the white washed world first all faded into nothing.
Then the sense of walking outside began to fade. The mist began to fold in on them, stifling the sound of Shyshie’s footsteps, the breaths she took, the beat of her heart. It had the feel of pacing down a long hallway in a strange house, the doors all closed so if something came sprinting out of the unknown dark there would be nowhere to hide.
Without really thinking about it Shyshie reached out to touch the Princess’s messenger wolf. Logically she should not have felt anything other than cold air under her fingers but instead she felt long thick fur curling over her hand.
Coarse and heavy and cold, but somehow solid, somehow comforting as Shyshie walked down to an unknown destination.
She didn’t know how long they walked, it could have been minutes or it could have been hours, Shyshie had been lost the moment she’d stepped out of her room so it didn’t matter much anyway.
Finally though, her senses began to sharpen or the world began to come back into focus, either way Shyshie could feel the ground beneath her feet again.
It was rough stone. The sea was roaring nearby and the sky opened up above them, stars glittering through the fog.
The wolf stopped and the air began to clear and Shyshie felt like she could breathe for the first time since she’d woken up.
“Good,” The Ocean’s Princess said the word quietly but it still set an anxious ringing deep in Starwalk’s bones “You came.”
Shyshie crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her chin up “I said I would, didn’t I?”
“Yes,’ The Princess melted out of the last bits of mist to stand in front of the girl “You did. Very convenient for me. I would have been forced to resort to more desperate measures if you had not.”
“You can’t touch my mother.”
“No, true,” The Princess’s mouth lifted in a touch of a smirk “But you have a soft heart little girl, you care about others.”
Shyshie fought the chill that ran down her spine and settled like a heavy set of stones around her ankles “They’re out of your reach.”
“For now,” The Princess chuckled “But they won’t be forever and there is no deal that protects them from me.”
Shyshie felt her heart begin to beat quicker and her mind began to race, trying to construe some sort of angle that would shield all the others from The Ocean Princess’s meddling. Stepstone, Aunt Beth, Aunt Cress, Martin, Lily… No, there were too many! She couldn’t protect all of them.
“Come now,” The Princess’s voice was falsely sympathetic “You won’t have to worry about them if you just do as you’re told.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?”
The Princess nodded “That’s a much better attitude.”
She turned, her dress trailing over the ground behind her and Shyshie saw the rugged wide steps that led upwards towards the high edge of a cliff spreading out.
She followed after the Princess and the wolf moved to follow alongside her.
“Singer!” The Princess snapped over her shoulder “You may go now.”
Shyshie felt the wolf flinch, sending wisps of misty air dancing over her. Then with a gait that seemed too heavy for a creature made up of nothing more than vapor Singer bounded away, dissipating back into the night.
Shyshie watched them fade off for a moment, then followed the Princess up the stairs.
They were on a dais cut out from the old stone of the cliff, there were things, signs and symbols, carved into the face of the dais, but it was too dark for Shyshie to make them out properly and the Princess was gesturing impatiently for her to stand in the center of the circular platform.
Shyshie obeyed, earning herself a self satisfied smile from the fae being.
“I do realize it has been a while in mortal terms since your predecessor passed on so this may be a bit rough,” The Princess stood directly in front of her, eyes narrowing down to glittering slits “And you are made up of a quite different compostition than he was.”
Shyshie felt a flash of panic run through her “What if I can’t do it? What if I’m too mortal?”
The look on the Princess’s face did nothing to assuage her fear “Well, perhaps under different circumstances I would have been content to simply let our deal be considered resolved, you would have given me what I had asked for, but I think under these circumstances and all the trouble you’ve caused for me I will require some sort of recompense.”
Shyshie felt her throat tighten.
“I think your mother will do nicely, since it really was over her all this fuss and muss was about. Yes, fail me Shyshie Starwalk, I’ll take her. Succeed and serve me and she is safe.”
Shyshie nodded, she didn’t want this, didn’t want any of this.
But here was the hole she had dug for herself, time to deal with what she had unburied.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked, hoping her voice sounded steadier to the Princess than it did in her own ears.
“Well Stormkeeper what do you think I want you to do?”
Shyshie crossed her arms over her chest and leveled her best glare at the Princess “Its been two thousand years, according to you, since the last Stormkeeper lived. I hadn’t even heard the word until I had the pleasure of meeting you.”
The Ocean Princess met Shyshie glare with an unimpressed roll of her eyes “I suppose you’re correct.”
With a sweep of her sea blue cloak she pointed towards the ground at Shyshie’s feet “Pick it up.”
Relying on her sense of touch, Shyshie knelt, and her fingers wrapped around something smooth and wooden.
She lifted the staff eyes on the gem set in the tip as it glittered and caught the wayward beams of starlight sending fractured reflections across her face.
“Now child, call awake the storm birds and send them up. Bring up a ravaging wind, bring up a stinging lashing rain, bring up lightning to tear asunder the sky. Send it down upon the straights and scourge it clean.” The Princess’s voice rose in volume and intensity sending shudders down through Shyshie’s very veins.
The strength and strangeness of the words seemed to inject a seed of energy directly into her chest and that seed began to loosen its tiny tendril roots, spreading throughout her.
Shyshie didn’t even realize she had lifted the staff upwards until she saw the stone up before her like a too near star.
A rush of energy swarmed through her, her heart began to roar louder than the waves at the base of the cliff.
There was a rumble, not from the sky or from the sea but the piles of stones behind her.
They groaned and crackled and crumbled, Shyshie was rooted to the spot and could not turn her head, but from the corner of her eye she watched the rocks shape themselves into great awkward forms, then smooth down into sleek bodies, moving gracefully with massive wings folding and unfolding.
"Send them out," The Princess urged "They are at your command."
Her arms moving as if they were not her own, Shyshie extended the staff, the jewel, seaward and with a jolt of power the three great birds lifted upwards, the air seeming to fold and bend around their edges as if they were not fully grounded within reality.
Out, up, and away they swept, feathers cutting through the night and starlight, and a part of Shyshie fly out with them. An extension of her senses or a severance of them, she wasn’t sure, but she was no longer solely standing upon that stone dais.
She was storm and fury down on the dark waters, her voice thunder and the beating of her heart the rain that fell. At her command the winds drove up the waves to great heights and her gaze was lightening.
For a moment she was screaming in laughter and delight as the heady sensation swept through her.
Then it overwhelmed her and suddenly it left her and she sank to the ground, weak and drained. The staff fell from her grasp as she collapsed and hit the ground with a hollow ringing.
The last thing Shyshie was aware of before total
exhaustion swallowed up her consciousness was the rain pouring down all around her.
----
She awoke, in her room, soaking wet.
Sitting up, Shyshie found she’d been bundled awkwardly up onto her bed, the blanket tugged halfway up her legs while she was still wearing her wet coat and rain drenched clothes.
There was rain beating down on the roof and if it had not been for the cold cling of her wet garments Shyshie would have been tempted to believe that the nights events had been a dream.
But no, the storm was of her own doing, she was sure of it.
With a shudder she pulled the blanket over her head, unwilling to face the reality of trying to explain her state to her mother.
----
It was hours later, it had to be, for she’d dried out, when Shyshie felt a weight sink onto her bed and arms wrap around her, tightening the blankets into a cocoon around her.
“Good morning.”
“Hmm.”
Shyshie heard her mother laugh softly and felt the blankets being tugged down from her face “I said good morning.”
"No thanks," Shyshie grumbled, blinking blearily at the too bright world outside the safety of the sheets.
She tried to wriggle back down into the blankets but Darkmoon was relentless and stripped away the covers "When I say morning darling, what I mean is noon."
"Oh," Shyshie sat up, trying to shake off the heavy shrouds of sleep that still clung thickly to her.
"You feeling okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," and she was, barring the headache and the anxiety seeping into her stomach.
Darkmoon sighed "You hungry, baby?"
"Yeah," Shyshie held her arms out.
"Oh you're too big for that," Darkmoon said, even as she scooped Shyshie up and carried her down to the kitchen.
Darkmoon tried to set her down on a chair, instead Shyshie wrapped her arms around her mother and refused to let go.
"Oh baby girl," Darkmoon laughed softly and sank down on the chair herself, settling Shyshie into her lap “Sweetheart.”
Shyshie buried her face against her mother’s chest, breathing in the familiar comfort of Darkmoon.
“Love you.”
She heard her mother gently catch her breath, then her arms tighten as Darkmoon leaned closer “Love you too.”
