Tales of the Parodyverse

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CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Sat Oct 21, 2006 at 09:01:51 pm EDT
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Lost Girls (Tie-In to Untold Fairy Tales of the Parodyverse #294: The White Gate, and Other Fortresses)
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#294: Untold Fairy Tales of the Parodyverse: The White Gate, and Other Fortresses
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The Hooded Hood warns readers that this issue contains gratutious kittens in peril
Sat Oct 21, 2006 at 08:31:22 am EDT
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Lost Girls (Tie-In to Untold Fairy Tales of the Parodyverse #294: The White Gate, and Other Fortresses)

Elisabeth “Bettie” Barrie had aged well into her late fifties, while living in Faerie, but beneath her worn-in laugh lines, she still displayed the striking beauty of a much younger woman, with autumn auburn hair untouched by traces of ashen gray, faded jade eyes unclouded by films of milky white, and a slender yet athletic figure which admittedly bore the brunt of its fair share of sags, wrinkles and stretch-marks, but which nonetheless had developed more physical strength and flexibility than she’d ever possessed in her girlhood years. What made her enduring attractiveness all the more impressive was the fact that her actual birthdate, back when she’d been living on Earth, should have added nearly three-quarters of a century to her age, but then again, anyone who knows anything knows that the rivers of time flow with vastly varying swiftness, between Faerie and Earth.

Bettie’s most recently moved-in next-door neighbor had inspired the Victorian era-born Englishwoman to ponder how much time she’d truly spent in Faerie, since Whitney Darkness also hailed from Earth, but in the world from which the younger American woman had fled, everyone apparently now traveled in automobiles and airplanes, watched motion pictures with sound in theaters and in their own homes, and used telephones and computers to transmit their voices and words through thin air, across every corner of the globe. Hearing Whitney mention such advanced marvels as mundane aspects of everyday life in her modern era had caused Bettie to reflect upon her own life, and to call in a favor from Billie, one of the young girls whom Bettie had taken in, when they’d found themselves lost in Faerie as children, and who had since stepped up to assist Bettie as adults, by acting as fellow foster mothers in the older woman’s home for the orphans of Faerie.

With her adoptive family sorted out, Bettie wandered down the wooded path to Whitney’s cozy cottage, to pay her friend one final visit, before she set out on her own journey. Bettie was often haunted by how many traits the witch shared in common with her younger self, especially when Whitney let slip snippets of her last romantic relationship, the wounds of which she was still healing from, so after the two women had shared a steaming pot of honey lemon tea and traded the latest tales they’d heard from town, Bettie came as straight to the point as she felt comfortable doing.

“You’re not the only woman who’s used Faerie as a comfort blanket, to recover from having her heart broken,” Bettie confessed conspiratorially.

Whitney blinked in surprise. “I … had no idea. Would it be too forward of me to ask about it further, or … ?”

“Well, I did bring it up, didn’t I?” Bettie laughed consolingly. “Come to think of it, you might even have heard of him, albeit under a different name from the one I knew him by. Put it this way – he was the starring character in one of those Disney motion pictures that you’ve mentioned.”

Whitney squinted in speculation, before her eyes went wide with revelation. “You don’t mean – ”

“Oh, he knew the difference between a thimble and a kiss,” Bettie smirked saucily, even as her cheeks blossomed into a slow-burning blush. “In fact, he taught me a thing or three, about the fun ways in which grown-up men and women play. But at his heart, he always stayed every bit a Lost Boy, who never stopped seeking out girls to mother him.”

Whitney chuckled and shook her head. “I shouldn’t even be surprised by stuff like this anymore.”

“Oh, the truth of him was even more unbelievable than any of the tall tales that have been told about him since,” Bettie rushed to reassure her. “To be sure, he did dress like a particularly theatrical take on the Green Man, with his tunic and leggings done up in an even more lively color than spring grass that’s been freshly kissed by morning dew, but he also had this astonishing shock of ginger hair, beaming a brighter orange hue than harvest pumpkins and the setting sun combined, and his skin was such a golden shade of honeyed amber that, I swear, it almost seemed to glow.”

“Did he come to you in your childhood, then, like in the stories?” Whitney wondered.

“Just before the turn of the century, and every summer afterwards for the next decade or so, yes,” Bettie nodded with a wistful sigh. “He was so fantastical in appearance that, even as a small child, I could scarcely believe I hadn’t simply imagined him, but his enthusiasm was so endearing that I couldn’t help but be won over by him. He apparently had little-to-no formal education to speak of, and yet, he was remarkably literate, with a near-encyclopedic memory for the myths, legends and heroes of yore. Whenever we’d find ourselves in a tight spot, he’d start reciting passages from his favorite stories, but he’d often get so distracted by the details of the adventures that he was recalling, of long ago and far away, that I had to remind him of the real dangers at hand.”

Whitney giggled briefly, before daring to broach the topic they’d both been dancing around. “And … at the end? Was it like in the stage play, when … he left you?”

“When he dumped me, you mean?” Bettie rephrased curtly, a touch of rueful reproach creeping into her tone. “It wasn’t back home in London, for a start. I was almost to my twenties, which was actually considered adulthood in those days, but he continued to alight on my windowsill each year, until I told him that it was long past time for me to put away my childish desires and pursuits. I wanted to cry, when I saw how my words had stunned and stung him. He acted like I’d slapped him across the face.”

Whitney suddenly understood. “You felt compelled to comfort him, so you went to hug and kiss away his hurt feelings, but neither of you could resist what those touches led to.”

“I was still a maiden, the last night that he ever entered my bedroom, but when we flew off for Faerie together, never to return to the mortal realm, I’d become a woman in his arms,” Bettie disclosed quietly, swallowing against the lump that was welling up in the back of her throat. “The boy who would not grow up nonetheless proved to be quite precocious in that area.”

Whitney’s previous insights gave way to confusion. “But, if you joined him – ”

“Then why is he no longer here?” Bettie briskly completed Whitney’s thought, as she wiped away the unshed tears that had welled up in her own eyes, before offering a simple shrug. “I wish I could say, but I haven’t the faintest clue. Honestly, I never noticed him betraying any significant hint of unhappiness by my side. Don’t get me wrong, we fell prey to our occasional disagreements, but he always forgot about them five minutes later. One day, without any words of warning, farewell or explanation, he just … disappeared, leaving me and all the other ‘lost children’ he’d collected to fend for ourselves.”

“And that was when you began adopting the orphans of Faerie,” Whitney realized.

“By the standards of your modern era, I gather that I barely would have qualified as more than a mere girl myself, but I couldn’t just abandon all those other boys and girls, the way that he’d done,” Bettie insisted unhesitatingly, as Whitney recognized how much inner strength and conviction the older woman must have possessed, even in her younger years. “I went through a period of pining away for him, of course. For a while, I seized upon any scrap of gossip that alluded to his possible fate. Most of the popular rumors presumed that he’d finally dared take one bold risk too many, but some whispers circulated that his essence had somehow … transcended Faerie, in favor of a higher plane of existence.”

Bettie paused to bite her lower lip in meditation for a moment, before inhaling sharply and flashing a brave smile. “I can’t say whether he left me by conscious choice, or whether he was left with no other choice but to do so, as an unintended consequence of his actions. He was so infuriatingly thoughtless sometimes, he might simply have forgotten about me. Whatever his reasons, I’ve never stopped loving him, but I’ve long since stopped needing him. I’ve fought more pirates, swum with more mermaids and smoked more peace pipes with Indians on my own than I ever did with him. And that’s why I’m finally leaving Faerie.”

Whitney moved to protest. “But, your orphans – ”

“My original orphans are all grown and gone, and enough of them are taking in orphans of their own that I’m no longer needed here,” Bettie pointed out. “My heartbreak aside, I’ve lived as fun and as full a life as I possibly can here, but that’s rather the point, isn’t it? I’ve reached the limits of what I can do in this life, especially when compared to the wonders you’ve described as emerging in the world that I flew away from, so long ago.”

“Those modern ‘wonders’ notwithstanding, the mundane world still suffers from as much dreariness and drudgery as ever,” Whitney warned.

“So does Faerie, or anywhere else where people actually live their lives, day by day,” Bettie caressed Whitney’s frown-creased cheek, before gently pulling the younger woman into a motherly hug. “No, it’s been time enough for me to move on by now. Try not to stay here too long yourself. Unlike me, you still have friends waiting for you, back in that brave new world, and they must miss you terribly.”

As they broke away from their embrace, Whitney cocked her head curiously. “What was his name, anyway?”

“Robyn Reynard,” Bettie rolled her eyes. “It was one of his names, at least. I always suspected that he stole it from the folklore figures of Robin Goodfellow and Reynard the Fox. He was clever enough to be a fox, albeit equally prone to outsmarting himself.”

Whitney’s hands had clasped over her slack mouth, as the pieces of the puzzle fit together to form a picture for her mind’s eye. “Ginger hair … golden skin … a green costume … a crazy boy, named after a clever Fox, who catches dreams and creates Chaos … what was his other name?”

“It was an improbably pieced-together, tongue-twisting mouthful,” Bettie snorted in amused recollection. “PuerAeternusPuckAtreides!”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to run that by me again, only more slowly,” Whitney winced apologetically.

“Puer Aeternus, Puck Atreides,” Bettie repeated with a grin. “Puer Aeternus being Latin for ‘eternal boy,’ and Puck … well, to be honest, I’m not sure whether he was supposed to be a Puck or the Puck, but with a first name like ‘Robyn,’ it’s probably a safe bet that the title was more than a mere honorific. The Atreides surname came from his claims that his ancestry could be traced back to Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, as well as to the historically cursed House of Atreus, since ‘Atreides’ is the English translation of the term ‘Atreidae,’ referring to Agamemnon and Menelaus as the sons of Atreus. He had to write it all out for me, the first time he said it all at once, but what was almost as odd as the overly elaborate nature of his alternate alias was - ”

“The fact that he wrote it all together, as one word?” Whitney checked nervously, cringing in anticipation of Bettie’s reaction, once the older woman grasped the implications of her own inquiry.

Bettie stopped short, tilting her head and narrowing her eyes to cast a guarded, sidelong gaze at Whitney. “Well, he left out the spaces in between, yes, but he still capitalized the first letter in each word - ”

“And he always ended it with an exclamation point,” Whitney shut her eyes tight.

“You know him,” Bettie hissed her accusation, her voice quavering with urgency, as Whitney busied herself by clearing scraps of tangerine and lime rinds from her citrus juice-soaked wooden kitchen countertop. “Don’t you dare dissemble, to try and spare my feelings. I have a right to know what happened, to hear where he went and why he left.”

“I swear to you, I’ve never heard the fate that befell the young man you once knew, but I do know someone special, who might be able to help you find out,” Whitney clarified, pressing the scraps of tangerine and lime rinds into Bettie’s hand, and using their citrus juices to draw luminous lines into the older woman’s palm. “As you make your way back, to the world that we’ve both called home, search for the Fool who wears this symbol as his standard.”

Bettie stared in numb recognition at the indelibly glowing mark that warmed her skin, with a larger circle enclosing two smaller circles above, and the lower half of a half-circle below, in blinding hues of fluorescent orange and neon green. “It’s his smile,” she finally gasped. “He always said, as long as any pirate ship flew the skull-and-crossbones of a Jolly Roger as their flag, then he’d wear his own smile to terrify them in turn, on the center of his chest.”

“Go to him,” Whitney pleaded. “I’ll join you back home when I can, I promise.”


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