Elemental encounters

The north wind's crescendo was matched only by the howl of a lone wolf.
I see an apparition  at my window, peering in at me, her dark hair slick against her delicate, pathetic, sad features. As the little urchin taps softly against the glass and raises her timorous eye to mine a shudder passes through my soul - she looks as if she hasn't eaten for days. But I am determined not to let her in. Letting her in would play havoc with memory, twisting it and obscuring lighter humor of day's gone by. No sense allowing entry to play upon my weak will in my darkest hours , I beg the nymph take leave.

I know these creatures. They come on the thin Grey wind, starting their lives as tenuous threads of drizzle that gradually put on limbs and features of mist and dirty crystalline sleet, flakes of wind blown snow able to mold themselves to the shapes of drifting dreams and the ghosts of unfulfilled desires that rise up from sleep or continue briefly to roam the Earth after their souls have vacated their bodies at death. Thought forms of the lowest order, finding refuge in the small pond, the dead tree stump, ....

By the time they have reached the forested Worlds and the tiny towns and villages strung like semi-precious gems along the silver ribbon of the winding  River they have already attained arms and legs, and fuzzy features ready to assume the favored forms of men and woman's imagination.


Possessed of a natural prescient telepathy they intuit the features of our loved ones and carefully mimic them. Not exactly of course. That would be self-defeating. Men would throw up their arms in horror, recoiling from such obvious mockery. No, they choose subtle nuances and casts of the human form - the turned up nose of a lost daughter, the sloping cheeks of a sister who died in her infancy, the eyes of a brother or friend, the curving lips of a sweetheart we have never forgotten - putting them together with meticulous and terrible artistry to produce a form that is both familiar yet unfamiliar, that causes our intellect to question in cautious puzzlement but compels our inner hearts to open their doors unreservedly in welcome and joy.


How many men and women, seeing one of these creatures of mist and innocent malice at their door (for despite their hunger and vampiric need to feed on human emotion, they are merely elemental forms of nature, as cold, yet no more terrible - at this stage - than the grim North Wind they ride on) have opened their hearts and homes to them, taken them in and succoured them? It is only later, when they have imbided enough of their compassionate hosts energy and life-force that they begin to exhibit the first real stirrings of any independent identity, becoming more solid inside, as those that have taken them in become paler and weaker, older and less able to fathom the nature of what is actually happening to them. They are torment pure and simple, created out of the sadness of what never was.

As the human hosts approach a premature senility - usually benign and accepted as the natural way of things by the rest of unsuspecting society - the wraith creatures begin to exhibit the traditional aberrations associated with the fully mature Changling: the tantrums and fits of unprovoked malice, the inexplicable cruelties that begin as mischief and spite but often lead to acts of deliberate torment and suffering. They possess the mind of memory, the heart of broken promises.....

But because of the Age-old Ban on discussing or even admitting the reality of the Faerie Worlds that lay adjacent to ours, people hold their tongues and turn their eyes aside, unwilling and unable to admit to the full extent of the horror they have admitted into the houses of their affections. Perhaps their vehemence in denying the very existence of such things is the greatest proof of all that deep in their drained and betrayed hearts they know the terrible truth.

I am the last of a dying breed of wise wizards because people have feared the knowing of things veiled in the mists of time. is it because they fear our magicks and spells, our learning and easy familiarity with arcane esoterica?


No! They come to us readily enough when they need simples and remedies for their ailments and afflictions. They are ready to part with jewels and gold that we might see into the future for them, to locate missing heirlooms, or officiate in the annual chanting of the Heart Songs in the open kirks of Hill and Forest.


No - they despise us because when the North Wind blows and the thin grey rain is falling we will not open our houses to the pale-faced little urchins that come tapping at people's doors and scratching at their windows.


And when they crumble into psychic decay, when their bodies and minds no longer continue to serve them, they secretly or openly curse our haleness and longevity. Sometimes I have even heard them whispering that it is us who are responsible for their premature aging and deaths.


But in truth it is the inevitable and tragic result of their own misplaced compassion in inviting the children of the wind into their hearts and forgetting about the persuit of happiness.


Many times I have wished it might be otherwise, that we might speak openly of the truth of these things - but the ancient edicts forbid it. And, I know, assuredly they would not listen.


But there it is again, the feeble scratching at my window, the pitiful mewling and whimpering as the creature becomes progressively weaker - for once, of course, it has assumed its given set of features borrowed from its potential host's mind, it is only with the greatest expenditure of energy that it can (if at all) change them. It is doomed to woo the mortal it has chosen as its surrogate parent or perish back into the mist from which it was once formed.


Alas, my little sad-faced fae of crystal and mist, in this case you have chosen unwisely. I recognise enough of the features you have borrowed from my mind to incorporate in your artful and ruthless disguise: the sad smile of Margiel my mother; the arch of eyebrow of a young woman I knew when I was a novice at Wizardskeep; the colouring of hair identical to my sister's as she lay dying of fever so many years ago in our tiny house in the Shawnee Hills.


Where have they truly come from? these impossible Children of the Wind, that feed upon men's imagination and the joys and sorrows of our hearts?


Certain wizards say they are the offspring of the Ice Queen in her Castle of Diamonds and Frozen Tears far away in the uttermost North; others aver they are the children of certain jealous stars who envy men their simple lives beneath blue skies and warm yellow sunlight.


They are the forgotten ghosts that lay in the mist of time, becoming solid by way of the elements that are willing to form them for a moment, or a lifetime depending on our weakness.

Ah, but now it has grown quiet, the tragic, heart-rendering whimpering has finally ceased. even the rain has stopped and the wind is but a remorseful sighing that blows fitfully down the cobbled streets and twittens...safe from the cobwebs and dark corner's, the cerebral hemorage stops.....