Het: The Monarch Fae Prince
Part One of the Thorned Court Series
Volume I: The Secret Lives of Rain Dappled Butterflies
…
Chapter Two
…
“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.
…