A New Beginning

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Wren’s parents had insisted on her visiting her family in Stonewall that summer. She had begged them not to make her go. She wasn’t particularly fond of her cousins. But her father insisted.

“It’s your mother’s family,” he said, “you should get to know them.”

Wren didn’t know why her mother’s family even lived in Stonewall. It was Zenxon’s first great human city, so why sprites would choose to live there was a mystery to her. But she knew she couldn’t argue. She thought about asking her mother if she had to go, but chose against it. All her life, Wren had fought against her mother’s culture, going so far as to dye her bright red hair black, as if it would hide her heritage, as if the students at Queensville high couldn’t tell by the tree-bark like lines lacing her brown skin that she was mixed. So Wren relented. And that was how she found herself arriving in Stonewall by bus.

The city looked a lot like Queensville, only… more. Where Queensville had wooden houses mixed in with stone and brick, Stonewall was mostly… well, stone. “I guess they don’t call it that for nothing,” she said as she looked up and down the street around the bus station. In Queensville, she had been used to parks, filled with enormous trees, almost like miniature forests. But here there were no parks in sight.

“Wren!” Wren turned around to see a small woman, about her own 5'2" height, walking toward her. She looked like her mother–long red hair, blue eyes, and golden colored skin with the same tree-bark like markings that graced Wren’s own. It was her aunt, Willowmist. Wren tried to put on a smile as her aunt reached her. “It’s good to see you!” She hugged the girl.

“It’s good to see you too, Aunt Willow.”

“Long trip on the bus. You must be hungry. Do you want to get something to eat?”

Wren shook her head. “I’d rather just go to the house.” More accurately, she would like to get back on the bus and go home, but that wasn’t an option.

“Excited to see the family?”

“Something like that.” Wren tried to match her aunt’s wide smile as they walked to the car. They drove down the coast road–Wren’s aunt said she might like to see the ocean. Wren kept the window down so she could smell the salt and listen to shop bells all chiming over the sussuration of the waves against the old sea wall. The sound was nothing like Queensville.

They turned away from the coastal road, as if heading out of the city. Here, the stone houses were at last replaced by wood. Those that weren’t had ivy growing on them, and other plants growing from holes in the mortar. Instead of fences, trees outlined yards, as the neighborhood had been built in the middle of an orchard. They pulled into the driveway of a house that, by the looks of it, had been built around a large tree. Wren stared.

“Do you like it?” Aunt Willow asked, “You were a baby the last time you saw the house.”

“It’s beautiful.”

As she stood on the front lawn, gazing up at the branches coming out of the roof, three people came out of the house. First was her cousin, Sapphire, seventeen years old, who leaped off the porch and landed with the grace of a cat. She looked much like her mother, only taller, and with piercing blue eyes rather than green. Following after was her brother, Tideflame, one year her junior. His eyes were as blue as hers, but his hair was lighter, more of an orange color. Her Uncle Dusk followed. Slightly taller than his children, he also had blue eyes, set into dark brown skin with reddish-brown hair. He put his arms out as he greeted her. “Wren. It must be near a decade since we saw you last. How old are you now?”

Wren had to clear her throat before she spoke. Her memories of her mother’s family visiting Queensville were not her favorites. “I turned fifteen last month.” Tide and Sapphire gave each other meaningful looks when she said it.

“Well come on in.” Uncle Dusk waved the family into the house. Wren had to catch her breath when she stepped inside. The family had gathered the living room furniture around the trunk of the tree in the center, and one smaller branch held a swing. The tree also held a ladder going to the second floor, and everywhere throughout the house were plants. Her mother had told her some about her childhood in the northern forests, but somehow, Wren had never quite pictured this.

Wren was sleeping in Sapphire’s room, upstairs. Fortunately, there was also a staircase to get to the second floor, as Wren didn’t think she could carry her suitcase up the ladder. A cot had set up for her opposite Sapphire’s bed, and after Wren stowed her suitcase, she joined her family for dinner.

The kitchen furniture, unsurprisingly, was primarily made out of wood. The table and chairs were quite beautifully carved with designs that looked like woven cords. Wren’s parents had a few chairs with similar designs. She knew they had come from her mother’s parents, but she had never realized they were sprite designs. She tugged at one of her black curls, guilty for what little attention she had given to her mother’s heritage.

They had a light dinner of salad and assorted fruits, which Wren guessed were all grown locally, if not in her family’s garden. They talked some about Queensville and her parents and what kind of things she might want to do in Stonewall the next day. Then her aunt and uncle went to bed and she returned to Sapphire’s room with her cousins.

Sapphire immediately picked up a basket of yarn in the corner and began to finger weave. Wren’s mother had taught her when she was small, but she hadn’t kept up the practice. The older girl paid her cousin little attention, but her brother hopped on the bed and said to Wren, “So, you just turned fifteen, huh?”

“Yeah.” Somehow, Tide’s tone of voice reminded her of when she had been small and he had tugged on her pigtails. “So, did you go to the forest?”

“Of course she didn’t go to the forest, Tide.” Sapphire didn’t look up from her finger weaving. “Her parents probably didn’t even plant a tree at her birth.”

“Yes they did.” Wren knew the sprite custom and felt a need to defend her mother.

Sapphire looked up now, as if surprised, but Wren knew it was pretend. It was the same face the human girls as school made after she had dyed her hair. “They did plant a tree? Where?”

“In… the back yard…” Even as she said it, Wren felt that she was saying the wrong thing.

Sapphire and Tide both laughed. “Well of course she didn’t have a tree vigil,” Sapphire said, “what’s she going to do, spend the night in the backyard?”

“What’s a tree vigil?”

Sapphire rolled her eyes. “Auntie Star really did go human, didn’t she?”

Tide explained. “Sprite coming of age. You spend the night with your birth tree. Though it ought to be in a forest. We both did ours in Young Wood? Just east of here?”

Sapphire paused in her finger weaving. “I know where she could do it.” She directed herself to her brother. “Cedar Grove.”

“Cedar Grove?” Wren asked.

Sapphire turned those deep blue eyes on her. “You do know what forests are for sprites, don’t you? They’re cemeteries.”

Wren went cold at that, and Tide laughed. “Oh no, she can’t do that. She’s afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” Wren lied.

“Then how about we go tonight?” Sapphire suggested.

“Fine.”

***

They waited for Wren’s aunt and uncle to go to sleep before absconding out of the house. Then they climbed down the ladder, and Sapphire grabbed the car keys from the hook by the front door.

“But isn’t it too late now?” Wren asked as they left the house, already second guessing her decision.

“Are you kidding?” Tide asked, “The sun hasn’t finished setting yet. We’ll get there right around midnight. It’ll be perfect.”

“She’s not really worried about the time,” Sapphire said, “she’s just afraid of the ghosts.”

“I am not.” Wren held herself up straight, hoping to prove herself to her cousins. “Ghosts are a bunch of hooie.”

Sapphire spun the car key on the ring around her finger. “Well then. We don’t have anything to worry about, do we?”

“Besides,” Tide added as he got into the back seat, “it’s summer, so you’ll only have about four hours of darkness anyway.”

Wren made one last-dtich attempt. “Well, what if your parents wake up?”

Sapphire opened the driver door. “Then we'll tell them the truth. That you wanted to do your tree vigil, since you didn’t get to at home.” She looked hard at Wren. “You do want to do this?”

“Yes.” Wren set her mouth and climbed into the car.

The drive to the cemetery was short and in the last of the fading light, Wren could see the tombstones sticking out of a variety of overgrown plants. It was the closest thing she had seen to a park since arriving in Stonewall.

“Wow.” She couldn’t help but gasp at the sight of it. It didn’t look anything like the cemeteries in Queensville, with their perfectly kempt lawns. “Doesn’t somebody take care of it?”

“The Cedar Grove Cemetery Society,” Sappire said. “They took it over after the previous owner let it grow wild. But people liked it like that, so they mostly left it.”

“It’s basically a botanical garden now,” Tide added. He laced his fingers together and put them down towards the ground.

“What’s that for?” Wren asked.

“To get over the fence. Unless you think you can climb it.”

Wren took one glance at the wrought iron fence in front of her. It was at least a foot taller than her, with only one horizontal bar at the bottom and another at the top. She looked at Tide. “If you stick me on the top of one of those spikes, I’ll be the one haunting you,” she said, and put her foot in his hands. Tide lifted her to the top of the fence while Sapphire helped her balance. Then she grabbed two bars and swung her legs over. She dangled for a moment, about a foot off the ground, and then let go, landing on the other side of the fence. When looked back at her cousins, she had a feeling they were not going to follow her.

“How am I going to get back out?”

“Oh that’s easy,” Tide told her. “They have tours tomorrow. So you can slip out when someone comes to open the gate.” And that was that. There was definitely no going back now.

“Go to the east side of the cemetery.” Sapphire pointed. “The louche corner is more your ambit.”

“What?” Wren got the feeling Saphire was using fancy words just to make her feel stupid. As if getting her to spend a night in the cemetery wasn't enough.

Sapphire smirked. “It’s where they buried the half-sprites.” Wren followed Sapphire’s finger and saw it. It was more overgrown that the other areas, though she supposed that if the people buried there were half-sprites like her, they might have preferred it that way. The graves weren’t as nice either. There weren't raised coffins, or even decorated tombstones, just simple ones with a name and a date.

Wren picked her way through the grass and found a brick path that led her to the east corner of the cemetery, divided from the west side by a low wall. She stepped over it and looked around. Up close, she could see that the garden was well-tended. But it was also clear that many of the plants had grown their of their own accord. Some of the headstones had ivy on them, and the roots of a large tree nearby had cracked one of them.

Wren decided that tree was good enough and took a seat in front of it. “Mind if I sit here?” She asked the tombstone when her hip brushed against it. When no reply came, she said, “not very chatty, are you?” Happy as she was that there was no evidence of ghosts, without them it would be a long night. At least she wasn’t cold. The southern coast kept the weather more temperate than in Queensville, even if there were fewer trees. She leaned against the one behind her and waited.

The first half-hour or so passed much as Wren expected. The last of the light faded from the sky, the streets quieted, and all she could hear was the rustle of the wind in the trees. She could feel her heart beating faster, but reminded herself this was all silly. Her cousins were only trying to scare her, as they always did. And maybe if she stayed here for the night, they would stop. It wasn’t like she could go anywhere else anyway.

At one point, she heard a sound that might have been a cough, but when a twig fell on her head, she realized it had merely snapped in the wind. In the distance, a clocktower chimed midnight. She felt that the changing of the hour should signify something, but she didn’t know what. And then came a second cough, louder this time, and a clear voice off to her left. “Ahem.”

“Stupid,” Wren muttered under her breath. Then she smiled, knowing that she would get to gloat to Sapphire and Tide for not knowing the cemetery had a night guard. But when Wren turned to face the voice, the person didn’t look like a night guard. It was a young woman, dressed in an undyed gown finger woven in a common sprite pattern. Sapphire had herself been wearing a skirt much like it earlier. The woman was clearly a sprite–she had long red hair and the tree-bark patterning on her skin. She was tall for a sprite though–at least six inches taller than Wren herself. “Are you the night guard?” Wren asked.

“The night guard of what?” Asked the woman.

“The cemetery.”

The young woman looked around her. “What cemetery?” she asked. Just as Wren has decided she was locked in a cemetery overnight with a total whack-job, the scenery around her rippled like a heatwave. The tombstones and the neat paths faded until she was sitting on dirt and pine needles, rather than grass. Wren jumped to her feet, and almost ran into a tree as she did so… a tree that had not been there a moment before.

“Who the hell are you? And how did you do that?” Wren had been in a transportation station once or twice, but it didn’t look like that. And it didn’t feel like that. If this person was an illusionist, she was damn good. She wanted to run, but she didn’t know where to go. She didn’t even know where she was.

by Artbreeder

“I’m Mary Wilde.” The woman said it like she was surprised Wren had asked the question. “I thought you wanted to speak with me.”

“Uh… no,” Wren said, “so if you could just take me back now.”

“No.” Mary spoke forcefully, and suddenly, without walking, she was in front of Wren. Wren took a step back, but Mary grabbed her arm tightly. “You have to see. You have to understand.”

And just as suddenly, they were in another part of the forest. This time, though, there was something about it that Wren recognized. “Wait,” she said, looking around, “are we at Pine Hill?” Pine was a two hour bus ride away from Stonewall, and the famous forest could only reached on foot—this part of it, at least. But there was no mistaking that tree. When Wren’s grandmother had died, her mother’s family had come to bury her ashes at the base of that tree, to help it grow. And Wren and her mother still visited it once a year.

“They’re grave markers,” Mary said, gazing out at the trees, “all of them.”

“Well, yeah,” Wren said. She’d have thought that a sprite would know the sprite custom to bury their dead in the forests.

Mary’s grip on Wren’s arm grew tighter. “No!” She screamed. “They’re grave markers!” The forest rippled again, and Wren jumped backward as she realized that she stood on the edge of an enormous hole. Inside were vehicles unlike any she had seen. None of them had wheels or wings that she could clearly see, although most looked to be smashed.

“I wanted to find our origins, to find why, of all the races, the sprites were the only ones who lived apart from humans.” Mary stared straight ahead as she spoke, though her grip on Wren’s arm stayed at tight as ever. Wren saw motion out of the corner of her eye, but Mary shook her. “Look!” She screamed.

Wren turned her eyes back to the pit. She realized that people stood on the other side of the hole. They were short, stocky figures, and taller lankier bodies lay on the ground. She watched as the bodies were pushed into the hole on top of the strange vehicles. “It’s because they killed them,” Mary said, “We killed them.”

“Okay,” Wren said, “We killed them.” She hoped that Mary would let her go and take her back to the cemetery. Instead, she pushed Wren into the hole.

Wren screamed as she fell against the strange vehicles. Her hands clanged against the metal. It felt unusual somehow, too smooth, perhaps. But she didn’t have time to dwell on it. Dirt began falling on her. “Hey!” She yelled, “Stop!” She stood up and tried to walk to the people who were now filling in the hole. She stopped when her foot squished. She looked down and screamed. She was standing on a body. A human body. And above her, the people filling in the grave, were all sprites.

“We killed them!” She heard Mary scream, and Wren ran to the other side of the hole, holding her hands up to protect herself from the falling dirt. She stretched her fingers upward, not quite able to grasp the top of the hole. She could see Mary’s feet in front of her, but Mary did nothing. Then an arm grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her forward. Wren set her elbows on the forest floor as a hand pressed a cup to her lips.

Wren looked up. Two young men stood in front of her. They were tall sprites, like Mary. And they had her same sharp chin and tiny nose.

“We’ll take care of this, sister,” one of them said to Mary.

The other looked at Wren. “We don’t want the humans reciprocating, after all.” He titled the cup up to Wren’s mouth. Warm liquid trickled down her throat. Then the brother dropped her back into the grave. Wren tried to scream, but no sound game out. Her head bounced against metal and dirt fell in her face. She tried to push it away, but her arms felt heavy. She couldn’t move. She could barely keep her eyes open. The weight of the dirt on her chest grew heavy. She could feel it filling her mouth. No, she told herself, you have to wake up. Wake up.

“Wake up.”

Wren opened her eyes with a gasp. Her body was stiff and someone stood in front of her. She grabbed the person’s arm, determined to pull him into the grave with her if he wouldn’t save her. Then she saw the blue vest he wore. On one side was embroidered Cedar Grove Cemetery Society. On the other was a nametag that said Dave: Tour Guide. Wren blinked and looked around. She was in the cemetery again. It was daylight. She was sitting on the ground with her back against a tree, in the same spot she had sat down the night before.

“Oh good,” Dave said with a cheerful smile. “For a minute, I thought you’d been taken my Midnight Mary.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice told Wren this was meant to be a joke. But it fell away as she latched on to the last two words. “Midnight Mary.”

“Yeah, she’s right there.” He pointed with his free hand. “Uh, can I have my arm back now?”

Wren realized she was still hanging on to him and let go. Then Dave helped Wren to her feet and led her to the front of the gravestone that she had slept by. “Mary Wilde. People say that if you visit her grave at midnight, a terrible fate will befall you.” He laughed.

Wren couldn’t bring herself to do the same. “What happened to her?”

“Oh, she was a time wizard. She wanted to go back and see how Nideon began–meet God or something–anyway, she fell asleep and never woke up.”

“She died in her sleep?”

Dave picked up a fallen twig from the ground. “Not exactly. See, her mother had this dream the night she was buried. She imagined Mary screaming for help from her grave. It freaked her out so much that she had the body dug up the next morning.”

“And?” Wren’s stomach turned over.

“And she was dead. But… her body was in a different position. Her fingernails were ripped and bloody, and the fabric in the top of the coffin had been shredded.” Wren said nothing to that, and she was grateful when Dave changed the subject to something more mundane. “What were doing, sleeping out here, anyway?”

Wren shrugged. “Tree Vigil,” she told her shoes.

Dave nodded, then paused. “Isn’t that… usually done in a forest?”

Do you know what forests are for sprites, don't you? They’re cemeteries.