The smell of the wind is sweet and crisp, and catching a ride on it are particles of dust, as if they were tiny fragments of obsidian, very very small, but sucking in moonlight and giving back nothing, and somehow, in this small act of arrogance and cheek, they are charming. It doesn’t hurt that they seem to have their own soundtrack, the song of tiny silver bells forged from the unseen centers of meteors and the soft hiss the Sun makes as it sinks into the sea. These things call to all of us; few hear, fewer answer.
But you can hear them, if you try; you can hear them on the wind.
And whatever you do, listen close to that wind, and if you must hear water, hear the cheerfully mindless babbling of sunlit brooks and streams, and forget that there are vast subterranean lakes, of peculiar and unmeasured depths.
Learn to remember:
There was a time when you were small and wide-eyed, and you believed wholeheartedly in the magic of pinky promises and stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. When you could draw doorways to other worlds in pink chalk on the sidewalk and bits of folded paper could tell your future if you just said the right rhyme.
Learn to forget: that pleasure is, at best, an opposite twin of pain, and more often, neither one really prevails; banality is the default state of an existence without enough effort. Leave the Fae their shining spires and bury the Goblins in the gravel undertow of their cavern-tombs, and you might look at many wonders…
…and never quite ask yourself when the pretty, pretty beings you see preening and posing found time to make the marvels of their magics and machines.
We long for a thing we sometimes call ‘innocence’, which is a thin-stretched period where we were so new to sensation that all pain was a romantic adventure. There was a time when a kiss was forever and heartbreak was forever, and another time when forever was too long to bear. Once you were tall and thin, once you were short and full, and once you were everything all at once and nothing you ever wished to be.
Those things were all true. Those things never began. Those things never ended.
The Fae say: Join us, dance with us, sing with us. Be born and live and die with us, and then do it all over again just because you can. Let us show you how to hold the sun in your hands and drink down its purpose and warmth like the rarest mead. We’ll toast the sundown with full glasses and roaring fires, and never for long will we be far from the fever-glow of day.
The Goblins say: We dance little, and we sing less, but that is because we do not confuse moments of pleasure with lifetimes of hard-won contentment. Dissatisfaction is our lot and our happiness; we can love what we do, but if we cannot rest in the comfort of the past, if we must drive ourselves onwards as the pick drives into rock, at least our vision is never dulled by the crippling narcotic of sameness. Let us teach you how to spin the nighttime into an absinthe so potent and deep that you are never sure what the next sip will do; and come, take the next sip with us.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
