The Blue Faerie

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You and Asha were both eighteen-year-old girls at the time, and you were in love. But you had to keep each other a secret, because your society had no tolerance for anything other than heterosexual relations.

Though your love for Asha was strong, this constant hiding, pretending to be just friends, and letting men court you to keep up your disguise, was wearing you down and filling you with despair.

One day, as you were preparing to go to bed, a faerie, sparkling blue and beautiful with forest-green eyes, appeared to you. The creature looked like a foal, but it sounded human when it spoke. It told you that it had much sympathy for you and Asha, and that it had the magic to let you live happily, freely, and openly with your lover without fear.

As wonderful as that sounded, you weren’t born yesterday. You asked for the bargain price. The faerie only requested a bouquet of flowers, as your family had the finest blooms in town.

One thing led to another, and though you were determined to stay on guard against the faerie, you were also desperate. You didn’t want to hide your love forever.

A few days later, you followed the faerie out past midnight to a distant field. The blue sprite stated that you just needed to go into the faerie ring for a while, and dance with the other fair folk. When the time came, they would lead you back to the human world, and nobody would get in the way of your relationship anymore.

Even though you had your doubts, you decided it was worth the risk. You were terrified that you and Asha would get found out one day and be sentenced to death. Walking into a faerie circle was a reasonable path if it could free you.

But you hadn’t calculated just how that path would unfold — and unravel.

They coaxed you to have some faerie wine, a bluish-purple concoction in a glass goblet. Despite your hesitation, you didn’t want to upset the faeries. You tilted your head back and drained the glass. The drink was strange and sweet. It was the most delectable beverage you had ever had.

The next thing you knew, you woke up in a luxurious bed, and that foal-like faerie woke you, saying it was time to go. You didn’t realize how much time had passed. Villagers said that one day in faerie was equivalent to one year in the human world. You had dismissed that as a mere tale to scare children, until you experienced it yourself.

After your departure from faerie, the human world you stepped into was vastly changed. You asked people around you and discovered that it was now the twenty-first century…In a way, the faerie had kept its promise, because the era and society you emerged into, was much more accepting of love between partners of the same gender.

Yet, since you and Asha came from the nineteenth century, your lover must be dead by now…Yes, you were free to love her, as openly as you wished, at her grave.

But you had no courage to visit her tomb; you felt too ashamed of abandoning her. How the faerie wine had made you unconscious, yet kept you alive, for two hundred faerie days, was beyond you.

Eventually, you pushed yourself to look for your parents’ graves, though you still had no courage to search for your lover’s.

Your father’s coffin was in a mausoleum. And to your surprise, he had left you a letter in a box. You read it with tearful eyes. Your parents had figured out that you had feelings for your female best friend, even before Asha told them about your disappearance.

A blue faerie had visited Asha and invited her to come to faerie to find you. Your parents did not object. And though they feared what the church might do to girls who liked girls, they also loved you and wanted you back home.

Yet, Asha never returned to the village. No one knew where she was, but your parents thought that she might be dead.

Grief consumed you at the words. And over the next five years, you worked hard to suppress these memories.

Now that this old woman, who claims to be Asha, has made you restore all your memories, you ask, “But how are you still alive? Are you — Asha’s descendant?” You choke up at the thought of the girl you loved being betrothed to someone else.

The old woman shakes her head. “Nothing so — conventional,” she says bitterly. “But shortly after you vanished from us, a blue faerie appeared to me, explaining what you did that night behind my back.”

“I had sworn not to tell!” you protest. “It said that it can’t help me if I share the secret with you.” The light is too dim, but aside from the amulet you once gifted Asha, you can recognize a bit of your old lover in her face too, especially in the shape of her eyes and the sweep of her brows. The ache in your heart is almost too much to bear.

Asha sighs, and her facial expression softens with pity. “Oh, my love. What wouldn’t I do to find you? I couldn’t live without you, at least that was what my younger, more foolish self believed. The faerie promised that, if I just made them a bottle of perfume, they will let me follow you. And they promised that the next time I see you, the world would change and become kind towards women who love women.”

She laughs before continuing, “I didn’t realize just how they would keep their promise. When they let me leave faerie, it was in the mid-twentieth century. The faerie reassured me that you are not dead, but I’d have to be patient and wait till you came back to me.” Her mouth hardened. “But I didn’t think that I’d have to wait fifty-two years!”

This is all too much to take, and you feel as though you’re about to faint. But then you catch sight of the other woman’s hand lingering near the door knob, as if she wants to bar you from the room with her body. You clear your throat. “Wait, then what’s the story with the foal? Surely it isn’t a faerie — ”

Asha sneered, a cruel expression that had never crossed your beloved’s face back when she was eighteen. “Faeries can take on any guise. We’ve trapped this faerie in a room surrounded by iron. It’s not the same faerie who played us back then and gave us that vain hope. No. This foal is her son.”

You gasp in shock. “So the black mare — ”

Your former lover cackles, her voice like poison barbs. “Yes, yes. She is the faerie who had bargained with us and got us into this tragedy. But you see that she’s taken on a somewhat different appearance-–black instead of blue, perhaps to better reflect the blackness of her heart.”

Asha’s face is savage and angry as she rails on, “The black mare is clearly trying to get you to save her son. But this colt is no better than his mother. He led so many poor mortals astray like she once did to us. There’s no way we would ever let this little monster out alive! We’ve reinforced this whole building with iron too, but she wouldn’t risk hurting us anyway, since her son is completely within our control. If she makes a wrong move, we will kill her darling son!”

Your stomach recoils at your former friend’s harsh words. Surely, no matter what the colt has done, he is too young to be held captive like this. He is just a child!

What do you do now?

1. Insist that you will free the foal. You can take care of him to wean him from his mother’s influence.
2. Agree with Asha and leave the colt. As much as you sympathize with him, you don’t want to fight with Asha, especially as she is already an old woman. No matter what she has become, you don’t wish to hurt her.