Fanny Fae

Close your eyes and think about what you’ve been missing in your life lately. It could be a person, pet, place, thing, occasion, feeling. Anything at all that you miss dearly.

~*~*~*~
I lay my head against the cairn. It was just a pile of rocks, under an oak tree that was at least four hundred years old. The sharp edges of the limestone pressed uncomfortably into my tear-stained cheeks. I pulled the dusty folds of my veil about me and whispered into the evening, wondering if Sebastien’s spirit could hear me, and yet deep inside I didn’t care. My lamentations were as much a balm for my own soul as they were an entreatment to my dead husband.

I always told him how much I missed him. I whispered to him of the children I never bore to him. I knew he wanted them, as much as I ever did. I was certain in that otherwhere, somewhere in the Universe, he knew that we must have born them in that other place.

Of all of those in my life before, it was him that I missed the most. I think that I barely spoke for nearly a year after his death. Sebastien was to me not only my husband and consort but everything I had ever imagined in a way that a man would treat me. His face would light up the instant I entered the room, and I could feel my own face illuminate just as brightly when he approached me. Ours was the perfect relationship that could be considered the stuff of legend.

But my heart, on the other hand,on the day of his death, had been broken. I had worked the magic, entreated the gods, worked the spells to bring his once-immortal self back to where I was. I tried to stack the deck of the cards of Fate in my favour so that I would never have to be without him. Whether or not the magic succeeded, was immaterial. I was here, he was gone, his body resting under this pile of stone, entombed, and nothing could ever change that. In the whole of existence. I could never begin to find what it was that I had held so dearly again. In the depths of my heart, I knew that I could never replace what I had lost.

The Fae or the Wytch from the very beginning of his or her life, learns how to live between the Worlds. It is something that we have always done. From time to time, in the whisperings of the wind, I would hear what I could perceive to be Sebastien’s voice. At other times, even with no breeze, I would feel the slightest touch, as if his fingertips were brushing my face. I would lean into the perceived touch, and for a moment, just a fleeting fragment of a moment, I would feel that love that surrounded me so often before enfold me once more.

A single tear rolled down my face, and dropped onto a piece of limestone that jutted out further from the others.

“ I miss you, mon amour,” I whispered to the wind. I continued to tell him how every night I would light a candle in a shrine that I keep to him. Did he see from wherever that he was that I would lie awake at night and my body ached to feel that same warmth that I felt at my back all of those many years ago? If I could do it over, I would have never have left his side, no matter what anyone said. My tears flowed now, steadily and I bit back choked sobs.

“I’d have stayed by your side and taken out the first person who’d even remotely looked like a threat, “I whispered, “had I been there sooner, I know you would never have lost.”

And yet, my heart manages to whisper things which I do not want to believe. All that I want, have ever wanted in the whole of existence, was him.

I closed my eyes once more, and felt the softest caress, and with it a whisper, a whisper that I could have sworn, was saying my name. I wiped my eyes and drew myself up, re-arranging the folds of my sari.

I bent toward the tree by the grave, and pressed my lips to my fingertips, then to the base of the tree.

“Gráím thú,* I whispered in Scots Gaelic, knowing that if Sebastien’s Spirit could hear me, he would know this phrase that we had between us. It was the one phrase that I had taught to him in my own language.

* “I love you.”