Chapter 5

Truesight

Edwin’s eyes shot open, and he tried desperately to focus them for a moment before he remembered. He’d gotten frustrated with Gwen, and so he’d gone onto the front porch to clear his head. The sunset had been casting fire into the sky, and he’d taken off his glasses to wipe his eyes.

Someone had grabbed his wrist.

Ed took a deep breath, taking stock of what he had. Phone, wallet, pocket screwdriver. He sat up, squinting his eyes at what little he could make out. Trees, most likely, and a fuck ton of them, all still green like it was summer. The sky was a dull, shifting gray, and the air smelled like rain, so he would have to stay beneath the canopy to stay dry. A small stream, tripping over rounded, moss-covered stones.

He wiggled his phone out of where it was jammed between his ass and the ground, unlocking it. As the screen lit up, he felt the circuit board behind the plastic shell of the phone begin to sizzle and pop, and white smoke began pouring out of the charger port and the cracks in his screen. He threw his phone as hard as he possibly could, and it burst apart in a quick snap of silver light before it hit the ground. He hissed quietly in pain, biting his lip as a shard of the screen lodged itself in his bicep. He looked at the small gash for a moment, pondering fishing the glass out with his fingers, but he figured leaving it was a better way to avoid infection.

He got to his feet slowly, noting with some despair that he was missing his shoes. Those had cost him an entire paycheck. He shook out his hands, trying to think of a course of action. If he followed the stream, eventually, he’d find a larger body of water, and hopefully, civilization.

He began walking, trying to keep his breathing even. Freaking out wouldn’t help him right now, especially not if he was where he suspected he might be. He tried to remember if he’d ever researched the fae. His mom had talked about them so much that he had to know more than just where and what they were.

He continued forward, lost in his own head, trying his best to search through the piles of information he’d accumulated through the years to find something, anything useful. He was so deep in thought that he didn’t see the root that caught his foot until he was already hurtling toward the ground. He hit the grass hard and immediately lamented that Gwen wasn’t here. She’d make fun of him, for certain, but at least he wouldn’t be by himself. He rolled onto his back. Gwen probably had no clue where he was. Hell, he wasn’t entirely sure himself.

He looked up into the blurry branches above him, catching glimpses of the sky in the spaces between the leaves. He smelled them before he saw them, a scent sweet enough to make him forget his own name. Glistening in the trees above him, tugging lightly on the branches as they swayed in the breeze, was an abundance of deep, wine-red fruit.

He stood, dusting off his jeans, and pulled one down off of a low-hanging limb. The fruit’s skin was spiderwebbed with thin, deep blue veins, all pulsing like some pitted heart sat within its core. It appeared to be all at once sweet and sour, crisp and soft, ripe and rotten. It shifted like a water balloon in his hand. There was no way in hell he was going to eat it.

But then, he couldn’t be sure when he’d encounter food again. He was nearly certain that this fruit was safe to eat, it was just a little overripe, and it looked close enough to a plum that it probably tasted about the same. He could feel his stomach twisting in hunger, just at the smell of it, and he realized all at once that he wasn’t sure how long he’d been unconscious. He may not have eaten in days. It would be better to eat this now and deal with the consequences, whatever they may be, than to be driven mad by starvation in a place he didn’t recognize. Besides, he couldn’t think of a single poisonous tree fruit on the planet.

Cautiously, he took a bite. The skin of the fruit broke under his teeth like the casing of a sausage, and his mouth was immediately flooded with sickly sweet juice. His jaw tensed and ached at the flavor of it, and he chewed the pulpy flesh for a moment before swallowing.

His throat erupted in sharp, shooting pain. As much as he wanted to drop the fruit, to claw at his throat, to cry out for help, to do anything but take another bite, he brought the fruit to his lips again, hand shaking. His vision began to swirl and shift, colors that hadn’t been present before dancing across the grass. He took another bite, and his stomach twisted. He gagged, and he swallowed. Another bite.

He ate it ravenously, gorging himself as the blood-red juice of the fruit ran down his arms in hot, sticky rivulets. He finished the first fruit like an animal, some deep satisfaction running down his spine that there was no pit inside and that he ate it all. He felt somewhere in the back of his mind, a pleading, a cry out to stop there. His eyes practically rolled at the implication of his own thought. The idea that he could eat another.

Before he could stop himself, he found himself reaching for another. He felt the skin of the fruit against his teeth, catching in a way that it hadn’t before. Ed took a reverent breath after swallowing, looking up into the trees again as he ate.

He could almost ignore the twisting in his gut, the fire in his throat as he lasciviously swallowed bite after bite. His eyes were pulsing to his heartbeat, light and deep in his chest. His eyes were closed, as best as he could tell, and the light was blinding. Something caught between a growl and a whine left his near-breathless lips as he reached for another.

He did not remember collapsing, but he remembered waking up. He felt the cold, first, and then the rawness of his tongue, like he’d bitten it one too many times. His eyes opened unwillingly against the dim gray light that filled the air like a fog, and he noted with displeasure that it still appeared to be the middle of the day. Then he felt the wrenching pain in the joints of his knees and the small of his back. The juice, all across his hands and face and bare chest, sticking in cracked lines and half-dried pulp.

He sat up slowly, his muscles screaming as he moved. He looked around, taking in his surroundings, and after a moment he realized that he was in the same place he’d been before he fell unconscious. Had it been the fruit? He looked hopefully up into the tree at the thought of it, but it’s branches held no sign of ever having borne fruit in the first place. He took a deep breath and moved to get himself up, placing his sticky hands in the long grass. He looked down to make sure he wouldn’t put his hands in anything particularly nasty, and his stomach turned, refusing again to allow him the relief of vomiting.

His hands were pitch black, all the way up to the wrist, where the color stretched further up his arms in jagged, asymmetrical lines. He glanced quickly at his feet, realizing with dismay that the darkness had spread there too, working it’s way up his ankles. Ed watched it for a moment to confirm what he thought, and took a slow breath. It wasn’t moving fast, but it was moving. He pushed himself to his feet quickly, stumbling to the stream and kneeling by the water, quickly plunging his hands in and scrubbing at them furiously. The juice and pulp came away easy enough, but the pitch dark rot stayed, clear as day against the pale stones along the bank.

Ed pulled his hands out of the water and took a breath. He needed to wash himself off, and he needed to keep going, no matter how hard his head was beginning to pound. He was certain of where he was now, but he wouldn’t even think of the name. Amy had drilled it into his and Gwen’s heads since they were very, very young that names held power.

He stood, dusting off the knees of his jeans, and rolled up his pants legs, stepping into the frigid water and wading in up to his knees. He began to scoop up handfuls of the water, scrubbing the fruit off of his arms and chest, trying to ignore the feeling of wet denim against his hips as the water soaked the fabric.

He didn’t even have time to react when a smooth hand wrapped around his ankle and pulled him down into the water. His head bashed against the small stones on the stream bed, and he opened his eyes under the water, his already blurred vision nearly indiscernible with the added murkiness. He saw something pale covered with mottled spots of green, a long, shifting mass of black obscuring what might be its face. It was smaller than him, certainly, but it was by no means small. It dragged him deeper into the stream, and a small part of him mused the fact that the stream had seemed a lot more shallow from the surface.

The creature pulled him into a small cave in the rocky base of the stream, and only then did Ed begin to consider why this thing had dragged him down in the first place. He was its lunch, and his lungs were beginning to cry out for air. He looked around, panicked, and noticed four more of the shapeless green things, differing in shade and size. Through the rushing of the water, he could hear them speaking to each other, and though it was dark, he could see their lamplike yellow eyes looking at him. He began to squirm against the hand on his ankle, determined that now would be when he learned to swim.

The thing released his ankle, grabbing with its webbed, flat fingers for his face instead, and as it got closer, he could see its wide, flat mouth bulged with far too many sharp teeth. He screwed his eyes shut, waiting for… something. The thing pressed its mouth quickly and forcefully against his, then twice again against each of his eyelids before shoving him away from itself.

Ed’s eyes shot open as he floated back, looking the creature over. Her wide eyes scanned him, and her mouth opened, bubbles floating from her lips as she spoke.

“Do you see?” Her voice was muffled by the water, and the sound was flat and broad, like the croaking of a frog. Ed screamed, the water muffling him, and tried desperately to dog paddle backwards. The creatures behind the one that had grabbed him laughed in a chorus of throaty sounds, and the one who grabbed him shook her head, her long, plantlike hair shifting in waves around her.

“Boy, do you see and listen?” She spoke again, reaching a hand out for him. He looked at the webbed hand, a pale moss green with flat, padded fingers, before cautiously taking it and nodding his head.

“I can’t breathe.” Ed spoke quickly, and despite knowing that he was speaking in English, in the only language he had ever spoken, the shapes his mouth made were sharp and melodic, and sounded like how the creatures had been speaking to one another before. The creature nodded her head and kicked off of the cave floor with her thin, bent legs, long toes dragging behind her feet as she pulled Ed up and back to the surface. She deposited him in the shallows, barely peeking above the water, her hair floating on the surface like a clump of algae.

“You were going to eat me!” Ed scrambled back and away from her, gulping down lungfuls of air.

“Yes.” She said, voice muffled like a child trying to talk with half of their face in their bath. Ed examined the way she was looking at him, playful, but not hungry or angry.

“Why did you stop?” He asked, running a hand through his wet curls to get them out of his eyes.

“Stopped wanting to.” She paused, head tilting to the side a bit. “May I have your name?” Ed paused for a moment, thinking of how to respond.

“You may not have it, but you may use it to speak to me. It is Edwin.” He stood carefully, keeping his eyes locked on her. She laughed, tilting her head back and exposing her throat as it expanded like a balloon to capture more air.

“Edwin is clever! Buaf is clever too, Edwin. We did not eat you because you are tainted.” The creature, Buaf, blinked owlishly at him.

“What is tainting me? Is it this?” He held out his arms, indicating the slowly spreading rot.

“It is not not that, but that is more than just that. We did not want it, so we did not eat you.” Buaf shrugged, and Ed dropped his hands.

“Would you tell me what it was if I asked you?” Ed crouched in the water, meeting Buaf’s eyes.

“No.” Buaf smiled, it’s yellowed teeth catching the light. Ed stifled a shiver at the thought that mere minutes ago, those teeth could have shredded him.

“Will you tell me a place I can go to where people will answer my questions?” Ed watched Buaf carefully, looking for mischief in her eyes.

“What will you give me in return?” Buaf rose out of the water a bit, its eyes somehow growing still wider. Ed took a sharp breath in. Fuck.

“I will give you my thanks, and… the memory of something I constructed as a child, which shaped my life until now.” He hoped that would be enough to satisfy it. Amy had told him never to give something that held power over him, but the memory of a simple tin robot shouldn’t be too much.

“I will accept this.” Buaf looked at him expectantly, and Ed cleared his throat, trying to figure out how to explain a robot to this thing.

“I built a tiny box of tin, and carved out the shape of a face. I filled the box with lights that flashed when I pressed on a small lever with my fingers, and I have built much more complicated boxes since.” He watched its brow furrow in confusion, and it nodded.

“Thank you for the memory of your tiny tin light box. You can go to the King’s Capitol, and your questions will be answered there.” Buaf disappeared under the water, and Edwin felt his chest tighten as he realized that he’d only asked to be told about the place, and not how to fucking get there.

He sighed and stood, looking around for any indication of a path to anywhere. There was nothing but the woods, now crystal clear around him. The leaves were strangely shaped, and no two were the same shade of green. The sky above him was covered in a sheet of pale gray clouds, giving him no hint as to the cardinal directions or time of day. He looked down aimlessly before remembering. He had a watch.

It was a simple magnetic calculator watch, and it ran on magnets, so he was at no risk of blowing his wrist apart, but it wasn’t the watch he was interested in. It was the small compass that sat above it. He quickly held his wrist as level as he could, clambering onto the grassy shore, and oriented himself to be facing due North. It was the opposite of the way he’d come, and he’d stay alongside the stream. With a deep breath, he steeled himself and began to walk. It was as good a bet as any.