Part One of the Thorned Court Series

Volume I: The Secret Lives of Rain Dappled Butterflies

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Chapter Two

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“Het”

My spirit had been treading along the eaves of the once-grand, Gothic stone building that was the Shepphard Reft Insane Asylum. (Home of the Criminally Deranged and Psychologically Ill). Where I had lived, if one was to call my convoluted existence here life, ever since… Well, as long as I could remember, really.

No. Just as long as I was willing to. Remember, that is...

I had been a “Patient” here at the old, corruptly governed Insane Asylum ever since I was… Little.

I’d been locked away in solitary confinement. Inside of a tiny, brightly lit, chamber of a rubber room...

For most of the time, anyways--I had been alone--My neck chained to the floor.

I had been old enough to already know how to use the toilet when I was first committed. I know this because I remember the shock and the mortification I’d felt when it had become all too abundantly clear to me that I was not to be allowed such luxury as a modern toilet...

I had been expected to piss and shit in the same bucket.

A bucket which had been changed out with sometimes distressing irregularity… I must have been at least four or five.

I have no willful recollection of any time, places, or people in my life before that. My childhood of imprisonment and--dare I even admit it to myself, now--Torture, was all I could remember.

All, that I was really up for remembering--

Yes, I had been alone… Except for when he had come to--When...

There were still the unbidden, disconcerting moments when, seemingly out of nowhere, something I was thinking, feeling, experiencing or witnessing would trigger my frayed memories about those other times with no warning. And, I would remember… Things…

Things better left forgotten. Things I could never really forget. Just pretend… Sometimes, it was all I could do just to remember to pretend...

Those were the times when I most liked to extend my spirit.

To leave my body behind, nothing more than a homeport to touch down on whenever it fitted my choosing.

The body stored more than deep emotions inside it, after all, that’s where the impression of many foundational and intrinsic memories lay, decaying throughout time, but, even still, I knew, it was, there, somehow, magically maybe, but there it was kept: The memory stored in the body.

Whole. Subconscious. Murky. Amorphous.

There were a million and one ways to begin to understand it—But, there were only a few viable ways to escape it.

The memory of what happened between my legs and in the palm of that always present, constantly hovering presence of authority and avarice that was the man who had become the secret bane of my wilting and entombed existence, here, at Shepphard Reft…

His name was always being said around me. To me. About me.

I hated the way rumors spread. What had started as a defiant outcry, not for help, but for the sole purpose of expressing my inveterate spirit of youthfulness--

Through the artistic license of what was really and truly only this: I had been tagging in the Lower Halls of the Eastern Wing of Ward I. That is, making the old graffiti art with my own personal paper stencil cutouts and cans of black-market spray paint…

It wasn’t exactly legal, my late evening activity which I’d taken on for myself. But, I hadn’t exactly been hurting anybody.

I hadn’t deserved… It hadn’t warranted such...

Aside from the obvious choice of suicide (which I’ve always told myself is just something I’m not ready to fully understand until it’s time), there were several ways around it.

The very thought of what had happened to me last night.

There were: Drugs, Remote Viewing, Running… Running and running and running the endless loop of miles that was the 400 meter dirt path that served as a track behind the Gothic building--

--There was StoryTelling! All of the airy Fables and Fairytales I liked to have one of my best friends, Tooth, read aloud for me and the Boys before lights out every night. Masturbating (in silence, and only back when I could afford to have any alone time without being afraid of… Nevermind, best not to dwell on that)

There was thinking of song lyrics! Stupid and well thought out verses of shitty or, I imagined to myself, quite witty lyrics that I would whisper sometimes at night into the round ear of my other best friend, Nail, as he lay in bed beside me, and...

And, that was just the beginning of my diverse array of interests--That I was able to get my half-Human, half-Fae hands on, that is...

Call it what one may, but leaving my Body and casting out my Spirit in a sort of transparent essence of my Energy--and Will--and something else I don’t quite understand yet. But that is, it’s all that I know to do when I’m under attack…

When fighting doesn’t work, that is… Not that I enjoyed the fact that, most of the time, anyway, I tended to enjoy fighting… At least, not to the point where someone was really hurt, that is.

No, I was more of a scrapper than a killer. And, I was just as, if not more comfortable, outside of my Body than I was inside it and having to defend it from… From...

--This tenuous understanding of the balance between the corporeal and the ethereal was simply a part of my own intuitive knowledge that I had been born with. Part of being half-Human, and half-Fae, I guess. Sometimes I felt a bit the autistic, genius-savant.

But, that was just part of deciding to accept myself.

Or rather, part of growing up in a Mental Institution… It was no hidden knowledge, from me or anyone who had ever seen me fight another in earnest, that I was not exactly sane...

Realizing that my thoughts had begun to drift, I refocused my Spirit’s Inner Eye and sent it rolling madly this way and that, before it landed somewhere near the front of the old, imposing stone building that my physical body was imprisoned in.

The Shepphard Reft Insane Asylum...

I floated through the night sky and, for a fragile instant, my consciousness whirling up above the towering, layered boughs of the old, forbidding Oregon forest surrounding the weathered, old Gothic building, I felt free. For a span of seconds that could have been an eternity, they were so blissful, my consciousness melted like butter against the weeping bellies of the bruised looking storm clouds. I allowed my sense of self to dissolve.

Lightning split the foray of self-dissipation in two.

Jagged blue, glowing hot like the creeping tendrils of poison in the veins; razing open the dark sky.

I floated down, down, down in my Spirit’ Inner Eye, surveying the front of the old, dark, and Gothic structure.

Taking in its familiar flying buttresses and spirelike pinnacles; its rose-tinted stained glass windows--each and every one of the pointed frames barred with vertical black iron bars-- and its forbidding cobble-stone Courtyards with their small stands of Red Alder trees on either side of the long and tapering, grey-stone plodded, front walk.

There was a fine swirl of mistral, hanging about the chipped, greying columns of stone that made up the entrance to the old institution. It was from there that I first heard the wary, tentative, and distinctly feminine footsteps of a stranger enter the building from outside.

...

Someone new. And, altogether unfamiliar. Unlike the scents and auras of anyone I’d yet met...

The faint shadow that was cast by the secret extension of my spirit gasped. There was the sudden and fleeting scent of pale-throated lilies. Lilies! Of all things--White Lilies hung invisibly suspended in the gloom--Just beyond Shepphard Reft’s Main Entrance!

Like a wake in the Ocean, the floral scent of the foreign woman who’d just passed my Spirit’s Inner Eye unspooled in diaphanous waves throughout the chilly, predawn air. It mingled with the falling hush of the rain.

I was instantly entangled by the purity of her scent. But, there was another recognizable note too. Tangible as it was acerbic, harsh as it was warm, toxic as it was tempting--

--Cigarette smoke. She smelled like white lilies and cigarettes.

My resting Body, bundled up in my tiny cot, locked inside the Boy’s Dormitories, deep inside Ward I, twitched. My dark brow furrowed slightly. My slanted face crunched its freckled nose. Something was mumbled inarticulately.

Well, shit.

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Part One of The Thorned Court Series

Volume I: The Secret Lives of Rain Dappled Butterflies

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Chapter One

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“Het”

I wandered the grounds in my sleep.

Extending my spirit beyond the fetal curl of my slim body, nestled into the scratchy, grey blanket and starchy, white pillows of my cot, I kept my physical eyes closed as my inner eye traveled deep into the drizzling realm of night.

That’s how I knew it before she was coming.

That’s how I knew it was all going wrong.

Well, even more wrong.

(They were planning on transferring me from the Boy’s Ranks into the Men’s today. Before anyone else was awake, so that no one could protest my leaving.)

I’d heard Dr. Doht, known amongst the Patients as “Dr. Don’t”, talking with a Tech Aide as they stepped out of his Office a few minutes before our biweekly sessions, yesterday.

He’d said something about someone not being ready for Transfer—and, you bet, I’d confirmed it was me when he’d told me, dismally, at the beginning of our session, that he would be handing me over to the care of a recently hired Nurse.

“Eventually”, he’d said, “Don’t worry about it too much.”, he’d also added, patronizingly.

He’d refused to tell me the name of the new Nurse. Point blank. With that same exasperated and yet, somehow, unspeakably bored look on his bespeckled face that he had worn only everyday that we met.

Had met...

I’d been under the care of Dr. Don’t since I’d first come to, well, under anyone’s care at all it felt like.

It was him, if I remembered correctly, who had been the one to release me from what still quite honestly, felt like ages of solitary confinement. I kid you not.

As soon as he’d been hired, he’d taken me under his wing, becoming my own personal psychologist as well as the only true father figure that I’d ever known…

The fact that he, for all intents and purposes, seemed to find me only as revoltingly lucky as he found me exasperating was of little consequence to me. I loved him. In a completely non homo-erotic way, of course!

I say this because, yes, in fact, I do know what homo-erotic feelings feel like. As, I am something or other of a sexual… Was there a word for how I felt about my own sexuality?

I knew I was gay. A lot of us, the boys in Ward I, happened to swing that way. But, it didn’t take away from my appreciation of everything to do with women. I just had never really gotten the opportunity to do anything remotely sexual with a female.

So, I guess that meant that I was straight, too? I didn’t really know, and, to be honest, I didn’t really care. Up until this point the majority of the sexual experience I’d managed to accrue had been unplanned and, if I was being perfectly and painfully honest, somewhat confusing, and even, maybe, just a little unwanted…

There. I’ve said it.

I’ve admitted it to myself, again, for what? Maybe only the first time tonight, or this soon to be morning? That wasn’t so bad. Not so bad for dwelling...

I’ve been sexually assaulted pretty much on the daily, week after week, month after month, and year after fucking year by a man who…

By a man whose job it was to not only enforce his authority over me, but to, at the heart of his occupation--It was his duty to protect me, and every Patient under his jurisdiction.

He was supposed to be protecting me. Keeping me in line, yes, but…

This is Security Officer Tierney Shelbie, otherwise known as Officer “Tyranny” amongst the Patients, and even some of the staff, here, I’m talking about.

Who else?

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed man who hailed (loudly and proudly) from “the Norse gods Thor and Odin, himself”. Who, many a time after… after a--

--I don’t even know what to call it, those helpless hours which, behind the flutter of my darkling eyes, only seem to pool together, skipping from frame to frame like a spinning reel of nightmarish contortionment and sweaty squirming, cringing and shaking beneath those dry, smooth hands of his.

Those hands that rubbed and prodded and clawed, that scraped and pet me almost in the same moment they shredded my golden, sparsely freckled skin to bloody caprices.

Bruises. Bites. Scrapes and sometimes even--

--“Lovemarks”, he called them, but these were the times when he left peeling, itchy scabs.

Never anything anywhere visible or even very deep. But, there’d only been a handful of times when Officer Tyranny had used more than his hands on me. I felt a little queasy just thinking about it...

And, but oh! Oh, the fucking bruises…

I still felt them, pulsing with each strained and battered quake spill rush that was the pumping of my alien blood through the tiny network of capillaries connecting my veins beneath my chafed and throbbing skin.

It was almost too much to bear thinking about.

It was, altogether… something or other, that… It made me feel so much that…

It felt like nothing at all in the way only every single thing seemed to and to not matter--but, only ever to me, only ever sometimes, even then--It felt closer and closer to the absent gaping maw where a heart towards me should be, wherever a care should’ve been tenderly placed, but yet, in its stead, there was simply nothing…

Nothing and nothing and nothing at all. He didn’t care that it hurt me. He liked that it hurt me and, the way it hurt me when he so much as told me this was… It was like I was nothing.

Always, back to nothing. Cut down. Stripped down. Forced. Held. Ravaged with eyes as much as with hands or teeth or tongue...

I was nothing. I was nothing, over and over again, no matter what I told myself--till I felt like breaking. All at once.

Simply for the return of sensation, it would be such a thrill just to…

To find some place far up in the sky, where it would be all but inevitable to fashion the pull in one’s stomach as you imagined what it would be like to leap from the edge and--secret of all guiltiest, pervasively childish, little dreams--

That I wanted to fly away like Peter Pan did with his fairy friend, Tink; to make like the wind and get up hide, swinging wild and unhindered by absolutely any and everything--Straight up in spirals--Up, up, up through the land’s smothering garments of mist and fog, higher now, pumping, pulling myself barreling up through the clouds; perpendicular to the stars of an infinite and teeming sea, far, far, away from everything I’ve ever known and chose to, in some roundabout way or fashion, consign myself to create…

I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to die.

I didn’t want my life to be one great ode to pain.

I wanted to grow wings and fly far away from all my troubles and my torment, here. No, I didn’t just want to--Iwas going to make it happen because I--I needed to.

There was literally nothing else for it. I wanted to grow wings and jump from those tapered pinnacle Spires, from one of the steepling Towers. And, fly away.

But, then again--now, that I’d gotten my wish…

Now, that I was actually growing the very wings I’d so silently and naively and spiritedly and fervently wished to myself, night after endless night, and blaring, unapologetic day after suffering day--

I just wanted someone to hold me.

I wanted Nail to hold me down, like he liked to do sometimes when I startled him awake with desperate and needy touches along his chest and the tops of his thighs when we lay there, nestled together in my lower bunk like two birds in a filmy nest. As we so often liked to spend our nights.

But, we were fighting tonight.

I needed to sleep alone tonight… There had been the most indescribable sensation--

A pinching and an itching, a crunching and a grinding of bones lengthening and budding new growth from between my shoulder blades--It had taken me hours before I’d really noticed it.

It’d been hard to notice anything but the feelings of my first penetrative rape at the hands of Security Officer Tyranny…

Why he’d waited till last night, after years of molesting and tormenting me with his sick and perverse little “games” in which he’d bargained, bullied, and… when it came right down to it: coerced me into… crumpled me into… Again and again and again— After so many years…

Ha. I had actually come to believe that it would never happen. That he would always be content with stripping and touching me.

That he wouldn’t need to move on to penetration…

I mean, I’d been held back from graduating into the Men’s Ranks three times now. That was three years past some indefinable point, upon which, I guess the Board had (without my knowing it) seemingly decided that I was, all of a sudden, to be regarded as twenty-one years of age.

I had fooled myself. I’d been naive. Childish…

Officer Tyranny had just been biding his time. Waiting till I was “legally” considered an “adult” before… before he’d…

I thought about Dr. Don’t.

Thought about how, never, not once in all my years had it ever occurred to me to tell him about the sexual abuse.

How, for years, I’d even thought it was normal to have to hold inside me such a corrosive and ever-deepening secret.

The shame of even thinking about it was intensely personal to me…

I didn’t want anyone to know.

Of course… I knew, already. People knew. Or at least suspected—It was already sort of a rumor amongst the other Patients of the Boy’s Ranks.

Officer Tyranny wasn’t exactly as discreet as he might’ve imagined himself to be… No, it wasn’t that nobody knew.

It’s just that no one who could do anything about it actually cared. At all.

Or maybe they thought that I wanted it…

I ran my black tongue along the inside of my teeth, focusing on the slightly jagged pain of my inhumanly sharp incisors grazing the forked tip.

It grounded me when there was the faintest tinge of metallic blood taste spurting into my closed mouth…

I thought about how, now that he was going to be giving me up to some… some new Nurse’s care--it must mean that what I dreaded the most was surely coming.

Today.

I was being transferred to the Men’s Ranks. Within a handful of hours.

My body would be roused, manhandled, stripped and sprayed with scalding hot water at what could only be a dispiriting and downright humiliating velocity, poked and prodded and made notes of.

And, then I would be introduced into the General Populace. And, because of who I was--what I was rumored to have done--I would then be, summarily and decisively…

Murdered.

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Part One of The Thorned Court Series

Volume I: The Secret Lives of Rain Dappled Butterflies

…

“Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”

~ Pat Barker

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Prologue

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“Het” Heron Harlowe Huntson

One thing my mother never really told me about being half-Human, half-Fae was that nobody would ever trust you.

Human or Fae—it didn’t matter: To be of mixed race was contentious enough, to be a curious hybrid between two species was a whole different sort of limbo.

With a whole different set of rules and expectations to the dance. Forbidden fruits that dangle just out of my, and only my, reach. In addition to nature’s dormant bounties...

A sense of being somehow both blighting to others upon sight, as well as an awareness that my natural self can be of such primal, carnal allure to them, that most will instantly hate me for it.

But, Hate is easier to understand than Love--As it turns out…

But, then again, maybe only at first… Maybe only if you’ve been really hurt by someone who was supposed to unconditionally give you Love. But, never did. Or maybe only occasionally, or seemingly by accident or for their own personal gain...

And, then there’s the dismal and utter loneliness of it.

Of, simply being me: a mixed being pinched out from two distinct classifications of terrestrial life—Human and Fae--forever braided intrinsically between the two polar identities of what is known and considered to be Human—

—And, that which, quite simply, just isn’t…

That, being my Fae ancestry (which is not known to me) and heritage.

The somewhat, at least I had always thought, diluted bit of magic and persuasion that I had always found myself to have, coursing, marching to the beat of my heart, through the tapestry that was my veins...

Another fact that Mommy either didn’t know about, or had somehow forgotten to mention entirely, was that only five female Fae were supposed to grow wings at a time.

“Supposed” to: As in, only female Fae have ever grown wings, since all of recorded history. And, then, only five at a time.

And from these five females, who each grew a resplendent pair of colorful wings, the next leader of the Fae Monarchy would be chosen. The Fae Queen; the only Fae with wings who ruled the Hive through a direct psychic link.

The other potential rulers either voluntarily had their wings severed annually for the rest of their lives or they were defeated in combat during the Royal Tournament for the Fae crown.

Never, before, had a male Fae ever sprouted wings for himself.

And never, before, had a half-Human, half-Fae creature sprouted wings before either.

Never, that is, until that one fateful day, I suppose, in 1966.

Let’s see, I think it was a Holiday, wasn’t it? That one with all the cupcakes and pink confection icing? And, all those lonesome and pitiful, broken hearts?

Ah, that’s right. Yes. I remember now.

It was Valentine's Day, 1966. It was a motherfucking Monday. Oh. you’d best believe it, love. That was the day that I first, unwittingly, and completely and totally by accident, made History:

The day I first started to grow my wings.

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