After Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
There’s never true daylight in the Shadow World, but the misty days are lighter than the pitch black nights. Enough to wake me and tell my sleepy eyes it’s morning. The silvery half-light glances off white sheets and high marble walls. I stretch. Yawn. And then I remember why I feel so well. Yesterday I killed again.
I sigh happily, and picture his face. There have been so many over the centuries, but still I can bring every one clearly to mind. Well, most of them. I don’t tend to dwell on the past much, though it’s pleasant on mornings like these to relive the most recent act of love. He won’t be here yet, among the pale knights, but soon. Very soon. But then he’ll be of little interest to me, just another ghostly figure among the hordes.
I like to think of them as they were. So young, so beautiful. They stay that way forever, preserved in my memories. It’s far better for them, I’m certain, than mortal aging. They’d all die anyway.
Up there, I suppose, he had a name, but if he told it to me, I’ve forgotten. They have no names here. I shall call him the Knight, just as I have every one before. Not that there seem to be proper knights in the World of Light these days. Not like there were when I was young. Of course, I look as youthful as I ever did, but sometimes such changes make me feel the weight of my long life.
He called me the Lady, and that was fitting enough. There’s too much power in a name for me ever to let them know mine. That’s a secret I keep to myself.
When I first came to the age of Need, I pitied these men and the bittersweet end I brought them. I’d hold out as long as I could when the yearning came. I used to hide myself away in the darkest chambers of the Shadow World to withstand the draw of the Seeking. But I see my foolishness now. We Faerie-kind must seek our lovers in the World of Light. If we don’t, we corrode so quickly. To starve myself of them was to subject my body to terrible destruction and my mind to madness. If, out of this misplaced sense of pity, I withstood the urges even for a few days, it showed in lines on my young face and a fatigue so great I could barely stand. Were I to continue to deny the Need, the other Faerie women told me, I would first begin to age, then lose my beauty. Eventually I’d fade to nothingness, but not before insanity had engulfed me.
And so I learned to accept that this is the order of the worlds, and mercy has no place in it. Now I think of my dying lover, but I feel nothing for him. So it must be, between higher beings and lower.
Let me tell you about him, though. He truly was one of the most beautiful I can recall. It matters that the knights are beautiful. It’s best if they are virgins, too, but they can be hard to find. If they’re flawed, the Need is never truly met. A full cycle of the moon will pass before the Need returns, but if a lover is unsatisfactory, we suffer for those weeks. For me, it tends to be aching and stiffness, all small signs of aging, but the depression is the worst. It settles over me like a swarm, and lingers relentlessly until the month passes and the Need is fulfilled again.
My previous lover had been acceptable, I suppose, but hardly Michelangelo’s David. I didn’t get the dreadful soreness in my bones, but still my mood had been low after him. I knew I’d need to find an excellent one this cycle, but sometimes I can be so impatient and don’t bother to take enough time over the Seeking. This month, as it happened, I proved remarkably lucky.
The gateways between the Shadow World and the World of Light are many, but all of them are in the ancient places, and mostly such sites are deserted these days. The odd rambler or tourist is unlikely to fulfil the requirements of the Seeking. That means long travels across the upper lands, and, if you’re already exhausted from the Need, it can be draining and miserable. I expected this to be one of those times; I was already steeling myself for a tough Seeking when I emerged between the great grey stones and into the sunlight.
We have no seasons in our world, but in theirs it was summer. The sunlight never ceases to surprise me with its hot brightness, even after so many summers before. So little of it filters down to the Shadow World that it becomes easy to forget. It beat on my pale skin, and I felt its warmth hit my long dark hair. For a moment, I just stood there, basking. But the Need doesn’t wait. It struck me with its sensation of overwhelming desire, pulsing through my breasts, my clit, my head. I began my quest.
I found my knight within a day, lying in a meadow, of all places, his eyes closed and his skin growing brown from the sun. I could sense him before I saw him. It’s a little like catching a scent on the breeze, but it’s more than just a smell. It hits you deep in your insides, like an anxious summons that you must obey. This knight felt strong and pure, a youth entering manhood. I could already imagine the taste of his skin.
When I saw him, I had to stop for a moment to catch my breath. His hair was so blonde, his skin brown, his body lean. He wore just shorts and a polo shirt, and I could see the curves of muscles in his calves and forearms. His feet were bare, his shoes set carefully alongside him. I stood a while and drank him in with my eyes, the Need pulsing through my body. I knew its powerful aura would be spreading through the air to him, even at this distance. By the time I approached, he would be ready to receive me.
My kind are more beautiful than any human. It is, to be sure, a cold hard beauty, but it lures the eyes beyond imagining. He opened his as I took gentle steps towards him across the drying grass, and I saw the moment when it trapped him. As knights always do when a Faerie approaches, he could only stare and stare.
It may seem strange to you, the hours we spend in lovers’ play, before the final deadly act. Our knights become like children, so eager to please. For them it really feels like true love, whatever that is. The beginning of something exquisite and beautiful. Deadly. The acts we do as an overture themselves begin to meet the Need. To take life from a knight without this delightful prelude would leave us only partly fed. Yesterday, with the sun, the light breeze, and the beautiful countryside, it was all so easy.
I magicked golden champagne and the most perfect wild strawberries, then we lay on the sun-soaked grass and fed them to one another. There is no taste better in the world than that sweet intoxicating honey of entrapment. I saw the twitch of his lips as the bubbles touched them, the roll of his tongue as the fruit’s sugar coated it. We shared a line of cocaine, as toxic with magic as with its own mind-altering essence, and I saw his wide eyes fill with only me.
Beyond his impassioned expressions of love, there were few words: words are too dangerous. Nor were they really needed, for I could tell him everything I required through looks alone. From the moment I sank down beside him and took his elegant hands in mine, we both knew how this would end.
My Faerie food and drink are laced with the power to bind my lovers to me, and once he had eaten and drunk of them, there was no turning back. Nor do the knights ever want to leave. I sense they know, when they kiss me, that they are welcoming death itself, but it is as compelling as desire. When I kissed him, his lips were red with berry juice that looked like blood.
I guided his uncertain hands to my body, and his touch was like electricity, charging my tired limbs. The press of his mouth against mine breathed life into my tired soul. When I led him to a hidden spot, he wanted everything that I wanted. I lowered him to the shady ground, and unwrapped that warm, smooth flesh like it was a gift. I laid myself upon him, skin to skin, and drank in the scent of his arousal. At last, I took him inside me, and when I’d used his body to reach heady climax, I knew the Need was more than fulfilled.
He sank then into a deep sleep, and I foresaw what he would dream. I could not stop the pale faces of my former lovers from appearing in his mind, and telling him what fate awaited him. It mattered little, for always they are far too late. The deed was done and his life was mine. Only thus can I live on.
The Knight will have woken to find me gone. I know that his face will already have taken on the first vestiges of shadow that presage his eternity among the pale ones. He will search for me, I do not doubt, for the thrall that draws them to me lingers on. Sometimes death takes hours, sometimes days or weeks. He will not sleep or eat, nor find comfort in anything other than the memory of our lovemaking. One way or another, his body will renounce him, and he will come into the Shadow World to take up his place among the others.
I have heard that in the World of Light, two lovers will come together in their youth and stay together until decay and death part them. It horrifies me to think of it, two aged wrinkled bodies entwined, watching each other change with the years, as all fading beauty is cut away by mortality’s cruel knife.
I save my lovers from that. I see in their eyes their two certain desires: my body and their own death. In one brief moment of bliss, I give them everything they wish for.
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