Zoe Reclaimed

From Changeling Venue

West Virginia is cold in the winter. Not the beautiful kind of cold with fresh snow and sparkling ice…the stark kind, with barren trees and bleak skies. The eye finds no relief, nothing pleasant to break up the dull grey landscape. The tombstones blended seamlessly into the stony sky as Zoe approached the grave.

Nathaniel and Gryphon both watched from a distance, neither aware of the other and Gryphon unknown even to Zoe, respecting Zoe’s privacy as she bid her mother final respects. Zoe had never been the sensitive sort and wasn’t now, but even so, some things simply needed to be done. Zoe stood silently at the edge of the freshly filled dirt, sable mantle wrapped tight against the chill West Virginia wind. For all that she wanted to say and all her skill, the accomplished writer couldn’t think of a single word. Not one, except for those she’d used to taunt her mother all those years ago.

“I’m sorry…”

Zoe knelt to place the single yellow rose she carried on top of the grave, her one concession to sentimentalism. She looked up at the twilight sky and noted again how very bleak the whole thing was. The purples and blues of that in-between time she usually loved so much were muted, washed out as if constant wear had faded them over so much time. The only point of contrast in the whole dull scene was the sunshine yellow of the half-bloomed rose that lay on the dirt. Her one concession to sentimentalism…

For the first time since she was sixteen, Zoe’s eyes brimmed hot with tears. Suddenly, she wasn’t Zoe Edwards anymore. She was Madeleine Dansforth again…and she was alone. That utter loneliness and the sheer weight of everything that had happened to her over the years suddenly became too much to bear, and she felt as though she were being crushed to the ground by it, closer to the damp, soggy earth, closer to her dead mother. Regret choked her as she thought of all the years she’d spent absorbed in her own career, her new life, neglecting her mother and leaving her in ignorance with a replacement daughter who wasn’t even real.

The torrent of sobs that followed shocked Zoe to the core. She had never known she could feel so strongly about something she’d put firmly behind her so long ago, but the tear-splattered dirt in front of her was visual proof. Her body wracked with the sobs, and there was nothing she could do to get a grip on herself. The cool, distant Fairest with little attachment to anything had suddenly become a soggy mess of uncontrollable emotion, and she hadn’t the faintest idea why. She’d barely even liked her mother…

By the time Nathaniel and Gryphon realized someone else was there, it was far, far too late. Neither of them saw him approach. They didn’t even notice Zoe was no longer alone until she stood up, and there was a man beside her, one arm laid gently over her shoulders. Zoe had bought her mother the best headstone that money could buy in West Virginia but her mother had already bought the plot years ago, at the far back of the old cemetery, away from foot traffic and out of sight of the usual vandals, next to her dead husband’s. A pleasantly secluded spot, shaded by gently swaying trees in the summer and surrounded by a neatly trimmed hedgerow of holly that sprouted bright red berries in winter. All three Changelings realized at about the same time—it was strange, the holly bushes here had no berries this year.

Gryphon sprang toward the scene in a smoothly practiced motion, covering swift ground in bounding strides and drawing down as she ran. With the trained eye of an expert marksman and a preternatural accuracy, she aimed and fired in nearly the same breath. The bullet hit its mark with precision, slamming into the back of his head…and then straight into the tree fifty yards ahead, splintering bark high into the air in mocking proof of .45 caliber power. The head of Zoe’s abductor remained intact however, and as it shed its cloak of humanity like a serpent’s skin, it turned to stare. Not at Gryphon…but at Nathaniel, with eyes that glowed a familiar burning red. A slow smile spread over its insubstantial face and it lifted one wispy hand to point in his direction. Nathaniel wasn’t sure if he heard the words, or felt them.

You do bring me the prettiest things…

It folded Zoe in the arms of its smoky form and they faded slowly together into the Hedge. Taunting, cruelly, it allowed Zoe’s head to fall backward, frozen eyes staring out into the night, glittering faceted emeralds cased in crystal ice. The last thing that Gryphon saw was the heart-breaking look of unutterable Sorrow defining her delicate features. An inhuman screech exploded in the evening air as Gryphon launched at the Other, sharp talons aiming for its throat and murder in her eyes. Impossibly accurate again, they should have closed round something she could rend, something she could sink them into, to help hold on to Zoe. She got a handful of holly for her effort instead, resplendent now with the missing crimson red.

Nathaniel disappeared as quietly as he had come into the sinking twilight. There was someone he needed to see. Right now.

The ice melted from Zoe’s eyes, warmed at last to tears again and they fell like rain down her temples. It was as though she had been asleep forever. She couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t been. Looking around her, she saw nothing but smoke and mist, could feel nothing but the ground beneath her. Was it the ground, or something else? She felt no pain, but her limbs did not respond to her command for them to move. Why did she feel so…weak?

The Kingdom of Twilight embraces you…

The sound of his voice was like a chorus of children whispering obscenities in her ear. She thought she felt a shudder move down her spine but her body disagreed, remaining still as death. She could not speak, could not move; she could only look, and cry. She could stop neither.

A smile slithered through the voice. No, you can not close your eyes. You can not dry the tears. You can neither fight me, nor beg me for your release. You are not a prisoner. You are not a guest. You are an arrogant godling who aspires beyond her place.

I must be dreaming, she thought. Please god, let me be dreaming.

No, Dream Witch. You are not that either… Not yet. Now, listen very closely…

Time was immeasurable in the Kingdom of Twilight. It became nearly impossible for Zoe to tell if she was awake or dreaming. Aftiel had many methods to manipulate both, and he did not need to be present to use them. In fact, she rarely saw him, or at least didn’t know it if she did. Held firmly by his magics, she could do nothing more than stare, and cry. She had all the time in the world, in fact, to consider Aftiel’s offer. An arrogant godling who aspires beyond her place, he had said. In reflection, if she were really, truly honest about it…he was right. Her ambition knew few bounds, and she had been gifted with power more strong and swift than most other Lost she knew. She barely even had to try…it just came to her like rain. And she loved every drop.

Pride goeth before the fall. Another of her mother’s ridiculous sayings, trite but damnably true, it would seem. She had grown so confident in her power, so flagrant with it. She was unmatched by any other Lost in her particular forte’, and she knew it. And, so did Aftiel. She did not know how she in particular had come to his attention, with countless other more important things to occupy his boundless time; it occurred to her once or twice to wonder, but she never dared ask. She only knew that he had, in fact, noticed her, and he had wanted her. He’d waited for her, he said. Watched her, and planned. He told her how much delight he’d taken in following her progress, waiting for just the right moment…just the right time to reach out to her with his offer, when she was most vulnerable.

He would make her True Fae, he’d said.

She didn’t believe him. It didn’t work like that, her brain screamed…you were either born True Fae, or you weren’t. He’d laughed softly at her naivety, the sound of a flight of angels’ wings with razor feathers… True Fae weren’t born at all, he chided. How exactly did she think the Others happened, then, if they weren’t Created? Why else would they search the globe for the worthy, to be bothered at all with Taking humans…or with reclaiming the Lost? No indeed, True Fae could be made. She could, indeed, become a god.

He left her with that. And with one other thing to shatter what tenuous hold she had left on her perceptions of the truth: she would not be the first he had Made. Aftiel had Made many Others…including the one who had betrayed her to him long before she ever knew, the one she called the Shadow.

For an unknowable length of time, Zoe drifted through the Kingdom of Twilight. Its denizens recoiled from her in fear and embraced her like family in equal numbers. Both an angel and a terror to them, she could make nothing of the truth from their reactions. She could not know if they were genuine or more of Aftiel’s manipulations, and finally gave up guessing. Aftiel was both the Lord of Truth and the Prince of Lies. She was both his guest and his prisoner, and neither at the same time. She dined with him and walked with him, loved him, hated him, wanted him, spurned him, danced with him and cried for him, all at his mercurial whim. She refused to believe him, and yet had no choice at all. Everything he said was both entirely true and utterly false, and there was no denying that the breadth of his true power was beyond her ken…which appealed to Zoe’s lust for the same. He played on that like a maestro at a concert hall, and she felt her will to deny him slipping away as surely as sand is claimed by the waves.

They had surely stopped looking for her by now anyway…

Some memories just won’t go away. You can’t be rid of them, no matter how hard you try…or how hard someone else tries. It was those kinds of stubborn, persistent memories that haunted Zoe throughout her twisted courtship with Aftiel. She was never sure if he didn’t notice or just didn’t care, but she kept them as securely hidden as she possibly could, just in case. When he was off and occupied with other things, then and only then would she explore them, trying to smooth out the rough edges and fill in the holes in Dreams.

As easily as a sculptor molds soft clay, she would reach out to the dreamstuff around her and craft it, recreating a bas relief of the past. Here a beer spills on a hardwood floor…there a statue moves and lives. A red swirl on a roughened cheek stands out against a blood spattered wall, a laughing girl holds a glittering gun to a doll’s head and a lion roars long against the night sky. Something tugged at Zoe’s heart…something she remembered, but couldn’t quite wrap her mind around.

She hid her hobby from the denizens of the Kingdom as best she could, but she knew it was only a matter of time. She didn’t think Aftiel would be pleased to hear of it, for some reason, but she couldn’t stop the compulsion. The more scenes she crafted, the longer they took to fade and she knew her power was growing even stronger. She pushed the temptation out of her mind and focused on what lay just on the edge of her memory, just past her reach. It seemed important.

Scenes spawned characters and characters had voices. Voices that spoke to one another in dialogue that Zoe didn’t remember writing, and one that didn’t speak at all…one that frightened her, and broke her heart at the same time. Not a person really…more of a shadow of a person. The kind of figure that you see in the dark when you don’t look directly at something, or out of the corner of your eye just before you turn your head. This figure was important to her, somehow, she knew it. She stared and stared, and tried to remember… By the time she finally did remember, she could feel Aftiel’s presence without even looking. She had stared too long…

Dear child. Such brilliant potential. But no, not yet. You must accept my offer before you can make your own toys.

“Is it true? Did he betray me?”

She thought she heard him laugh. Ahh, little one. It is always true. God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, here there be monsters. And the abyss is staring back at you. Does it make a difference?

“Yes.”

What difference?She hesitated. One breath too long. He knew in an instant that she had already refused his offer, even before she knew. He sighed, and for a moment she almost believed that she had broken his heart. She reached out to him, and faster than thought one ethereal hand snaked around her wrist. His grip was like iced steel and his wispy voice even colder.

I offered you eternity, Dreamer. Did you think rejection would come cheap?

For all her skill, in spite of how hard she would try, Zoe would never find the words to describe how it felt to be stripped. She could describe how it happened…she could tell how it was done, and even how she eventually escaped, but she would never be able to put to words how she felt. She knew that other Lost had been tortured in their durances amongst the Others, and she knew they had been changed for it, but in all the dreams she’d haunted and stories she’d heard, she’d never known of any Lost who’d endured what she had. None who had been…stripped. None who had been changed in quite the same way that she had, this time.

She believed him. She believed that he really could have done it, could have remade her, if she’d only said yes. She believed him because of how easily he did everything else, as though it were negligible to him, and cost him less than a nod of attention. She had a very long time to regret her decision if she were ever going to, while she was bound by bonds stronger than the world and her soul flayed from her. She could have changed her mind at any time…the process was slow, and she suspected it was for exactly that reason, just in case she came to her senses and decided to become a god after all.

But she *had* come to her senses, she realized. Not immediately, of course, but as the Wyrd was peeled from her in tiny strips and Contracts extracted with machine-precision, Zoe the godling came to terms with Zoe the Lost, and her overwhelming, driving, self-destructive greed melted away along with her power like snow in the spring. Spring…yes, seasons. She remembered them now. All the scenes she’d crafted from the ether made sense again…her friends, the people, the places…she had plenty of time to remember all the things she’d dragged to the brink of peril along with her, heedless of the cost and regret--yes she felt regret, but it was not for the most recent of the decisions which had landed her here.

She had no idea how long she spent in her bonds. Time was just as immeasurable now as ever during her lifetimes in Arcadia, but she knew that it was exactly enough time for her to make her peace with herself, to recognize it was time to make right what was wrong, before she could be used as a lethal weapon against her precious memories, and to prepare her soul to die. Now all she had to do was figure out how.

Zoe had never been any good at suicide. Not at writing about it, or at planning it, and certainly not at doing it. It was exactly what landed her in Arcadia the first time…so it was only fitting, really, that it should be how she would get back out. When the figure arrived, Zoe was certain that her desperation to end her own life had summoned Death, that he had come to claim her, as requested, and her gratitude was overwhelming. Then she saw the gleam of the blade it carried… Not a scythe…a straight razor.

Insanity can’t be talked down. You can’t reason with it, and it will have its way in spite of you. The poem from a Stephen King novel was what ran through her brain as she stared at the impossible. The straight razor glinted in the hand of a phantom, a thing that you could not look directly at, lest it be not there at all.

Do you want to die, Madeleine?

Did she? She believed she might this time, actually. She considered long before responding. Her voice was careful this time, controlled and mature…far from the sobbing gothling of her youth.

“I thought I did…”

A pause.

Do you want to go home, Madeleine?

Home? So different from before, this time home was like a photograph in her mind, a vivid image of what she’d left behind, what she’d nearly sacrificed in her dizzying climb to the heights of power. She didn’t deserve home…

Do you want to stay with me, Madeleine?

She remembered the last time it had asked… She had no less difficulty answering now. Her mind whirled with memories, of then and of now, and the question was spoken before she even really had time to think about the importance of the answer.

“Did you betray me?” An eternity passed.

Does it matter, Madeleine?

“Yes…”

She thought about Aftiel, and what he had said. She thought about the possibility that he was listening now…that he had set the whole thing up, or that he might return at any moment and destroy them both. And then, with as much certainty as she had ever known anything in her life, she knew that she needn’t worry for any of it. The truth was, Aftiel was through with her. His ritual would keep stripping her of every trace of Wyrd and Contract and strength and sanity until there was nothing left, and then he would never even think of her again.

She may not deserve home, but there was nothing in her whole, terrible life that she had ever wanted more.

Then you must die to get there. Are you ready to die, Madeleine?

She was. It didn’t take much, in her weakened state. The gleaming straight razor sliced through her bonds like water, and then through her veins just as easily.

Zoe doesn’t remember much of what happened after that. Later, Aaron would tell her how Nathaniel had come to him with the fact that she had been taken and the fight that had ensued, and how Gryphon had brought Zoe’s fetch to Aaron, in the hopes that the fetch would be able to tell them when Zoe crossed back over. He would tell her how her fetch had been changed by the Fae, and was now the spitting image of Zoe once more, and how Madeleine did, in fact, tell them the very instant that she returned. He would tell her of the tireless search for her, combing the hedge for even a trace of her. He would tell her how the water elemental Whitney had found Zoe, trapped underwater by the lake’s defenses and how sure everyone was that she was dead. He would tell her that she was dead, by all appearances. She had no color, no breath, and no pulse. She was stiff and cold to the touch. Only Madeleine insisted that it wasn’t true…Madeleine could still feel her. Aaron didn’t talk about what might have happened if Madeleine hadn’t cooperated, and Zoe wasn’t really sure she wanted to know. But one thing was certain. Her fetch had been as changed by her encounter with the Other as Zoe had. The fetch had been aged from 19 to 36 in a matter of hours, and was once again a dead ringer for the famous writer. Interesting…

What Zoe didn’t talk about was exactly how much she remembered of her second time in Arcadia. Being a Fairest, after all, people naturally assumed that she had forgotten most of the events in the fog that so often settles over that Seeming’s durance. She didn’t bother clarifying. Clarification would only lead to more questions…questions for which Zoe didn’t even have her own answers.

Like how Nathaniel’s Keeper had found Zoe there in the West Virginia winter. Nathaniel had been Zoe’s friend for half a decade…she didn’t want to think about how it looked. Why had Aftiel ever wanted her in the first place? Why her…? Why then? And, most importantly, why the Shadow had come back for her. How it had known she was even there, and why it had helped her. Again…

If Nathaniel’s involvement looked bad, Zoe’s looked criminal. A powerful True Fae had chosen her, said he would make her one of them…and then just walked away when she politely declined his offer? Then her first Keeper had found her, freed her, and parted the Hedge for her legendary escape from that land? How do you explain that to your Loyalist hunting Pledge-mates?

Well, she didn’t intend to. Not ever. Not all of it, at any rate.

The truth, in a Lost world of paranoia, will not necessarily set you free.

Especially when you don’t even know the whole truth yourself.