Caffeine and Magix

writing-prompt-s:

write a story about how you became the world’s most powerfull person… by accident.

1. You learn about the butterfly effect in school. The concept is interesting, but not so interesting that you don’t fall asleep partway through the movie. You hear something distantly about a butterfly beating its wings and hurricanes. You think it will never apply to you.
   
2. You know now (not then) that power comes through and from favors.
3. If you had known that then you would probably not have done so many.

(This is where it starts.)

One.

There is a strange creature crossing the road behind the lecture hall. You stop on your bike and frown at it. It looks a little like a turtle, but it’s limbs are longer than any turtle you’ve ever seen. It’s stretched out on the hot asphalt, long, pale limbs clawing forward towards the small stream that runs on the other side.

 You hop off your bike and gently pick the creature up, hands under the belly of the shell like you learned from the internet.

Imagine your surprise when the shell slides off the creature instead, dropping a tiny woman onto the asphalt.

“Water,” she croaks, tiny eyes screwed shut.  Her eyelids are the size of yours which means they’re huge on her. “Please.”

(You will not know until later what exactly please means to the fae.)

You feel yourself move through your shock. You pick her up and take her to the water’s edge. She slips under the surface, pale skin flashing like the scales of a fish, and she’s gone.

You’d wonder if your roommate slipped you something this morning if she wasn’t back a moment later, pushing a small rock into your hands.

“A boon,” she says. Her eyes are large and black, suited for her underwater world. “For a favor.” She smiles, showing teeth jagged and sharp like a piranha.

When you blink, she’s gone.

You stare at the rock in your left hand. It’s smooth and worn from years in water, an interesting swirl of granite and quartz. “I wish I knew,” you tell it.

The rock ices over so fast that you don’t have time to drop it. The frost swirls across your skin, burning you where it touches, and you watch in horror as your skin turns a mottled black and blue.

 You fall to your knees from the pain and choke on a scream as the stone sinks into you, touching your bones and sending more ice through your marrow. It climbs up your arm and touches your eye, changing you vision so now that you’re see double, a strange, blue world juxtaposed next to the one you know and love.

In the next instant, the pain is gone, though your vision remains the same. You don’t hesitate and jump back on your bike, shakily peddling home.

It’s only later, when you’re chasing the last of the chill away with a hot shower, do you realize that the stone left a mark, a round, white and black mark in the center of your palm.

You freak out about that until you see your left eye in the mirror. It’s black, pitch black like the creature’s had been. When you close your right eye, the world turns blue and you can see shadows writhing behind you.

Memories, something behind your eye whispers. Nothing more.

“Oh,” you say out loud, “is that all?”

You go out to buy an eye patch.

Two. 

You leave cream out for the brownie in your apartment, feeling guilty that you never noticed them before. They, in turn, do something to your clothes that keeps them from wrinkling or staining.

And when your hand slips, dropping a knife into your lap, the blade doesn’t cut fabric or skin. You pick up the knife and continue chopping potatoes.

(You keep leaving bread and cream out after that.)

Three.

You’re an RA and you get caught with your eyepatch off. You stare at the freshman girl as she stares back. She’s got wings on her back, glittery things, and no eyes at all under whatever glamour she’s using.

“Oh thank god,” she says. “My room–”

“I’ll move you to south hall,” you say. You know the problem. Iron. “It’s enviro-friendly. Reclaimed plastics.”

A week later she presses a kiss to your forehead. This one feels like burning and the smell of flowers is nearly overpowering.

“For your next life,” she whispers and grins before skipping away.

When you look at yourself in the mirror, your eye whispers about healing and invincibility and an extra life (if you choose to use it).

Four.

You’re doing some community work for extra credit when you meet the troll. He’s stuck in the ground, the muck from the last rain binding his legs to the turf like glue.

“Answer my riddle,” he grunts at you, long arms arching to fill the tunnel you’re supposed to be picking up. “What is brown, has a head, a tail, but no legs?”

You think, black garbage bag in your hands. “A penny.”

The troll curls his lips up. “You may pass.”

“If I help you,” you say, not moving, “what will you give me?”

The troll keeps smiling and doesn’t say. You clean up anyway, clawing at the muck until he pulls himself free, sliding cans and debris into your bag until it’s full. You turn to go.

The troll smacks you so hard that you go flying, head over heels, until you hit a tree. Hard. If it weren’t for your enchanted clothes and the life the freshman gave you, you would be dead.

“My boon is luck,” the troll says. “Though you seem to have plenty of it.”

When you blink the stars out of your eyes, the troll is gone.

You never run across another troll again.

Five. 

You notice that humans are starting to avoid you. There’s something about the way you stand, the way you look at them that’s unnerving.

When you see a woman being harassed on the train, you creep up behind the man and breathe on his neck.  He pales like someone’s lit fire to his grave and scrambles away from her.

She smiles at you and your eye is covered, but you know.

She hands you an apple, appearance flickering between a young woman and a much, much older one. “For your trouble.”

When you eat the apple (hey, it’s late and you’ve lost the wariness you once had) you feel the chill in your aura fade. You’re able to switch between them now, your humanity and your otherness and you grin as you finish it, seeds and all.

Six.

 With the boon of the apple, you can be human again and talk to your human friends. You’re camping with two college friends, Elyse and Milton. They disappear from the campsite on the night of the full moon.

“Elyse? Milton?” You scan the treeline for any sign of your friends. Something behind is whispering to you, sounding urgent, so you take off your eyepatch for the first time in a month.

The world turns blue and your attention falls on a line of mushrooms leading into the trees.

Faerie Ring, the voice whispers to you, the Light court is hunting.

You set your jaw and follow the breadcrumbs.

You walk into Underhill, which, if you were human, means you can never leave. You let the humanity fade from your aura, let your gifts and boons and favors shine through.

You’re nearly sure that you’re not human enough for that to apply.

You find Elyse and Milton dancing, feet already bloody on shards of champagne flutes and crystal. There are so many different fae here, more than the water creature, the brownie, the life fae, the troll, or the old woman.

More specifically, there is a Queen.

She is beautiful in the way wild animals are beautiful, but with the intelligence that keeps people wary. More intelligence, in fact, because when she looks at you, her face twists.

“You’ve made deals, mortal,” she hisses. Her court freezes around her, some half off the ground, some with their eyes still sliding from you to her and back again. Elyse and Milton look like mannequins, grotesque smiles on their faces.

“Everything I have,” you say, “was freely given.”

That sets the court chattering, whispering through their frozen lips. 

The Queen rises, a terrifying movement that puts her far above you. She glides forward, the wind howling at her back but not daring to actually touch her. “What did you come here for?”

You meet her eyes without fear (an apple for your health) and say, “For my friends.”

“They walked in of their own free will,” the Queen says. “They’re ours.”

You know things, thanks to your eye. You know that she’s right, you know that there is no way to break such an enchantment. They must dance until sunrise and, if they’re alive, they will be released.

You see the shards on the ground, some of them bones, and know that no one is ever alive by sunrise.

“No,” you tell the Queen, “they’re mine.”

And you fight.

She is old and powerful, but her power is a taken thing, held hostage by her beauty and her own magic. Everything you have is your own, molded to your soul, at the tips of your fingers, but you are young.

You win anyway.

And the death of the Queen is such a favor that the earth gives you a gift. You beg it not to, beg it to hold back its power, but it doesn’t. It can’t, it’s not its way.

Power fills you, transforms you. It breaks your skin and sear along the mark on your left palm, embedding it further. Every part of you shifts and breaks over and over again as the power searches for the right form to house it.

When it’s done, you are the same but different. The light court watches as you scream over the body of their queen, a sound that’s too loud to come from a human throat. A few of them keel over, unconscious or dead, you don’t care.

There is no space for you among mortals anymore.

When morning comes, you send Milton and Elyse back to the campsite, wipe their memories of you. You are calmer now, resigned, and there is nothing here for you.

The light court tries to make you stay, saying something about taking over, but you won’t do that. You won’t become what she was, and you are not bound to anyone.

You set across the world and search for favors.

(Patreon)