Tags
dark fairy stories, faerie, Faerie Arcana, Glamour, high preistess, magician, myth, poem, poetry, tarot, the fool, vignettes
Okay so I’ve written a set of very tiny, very dark stories, based around the tarot major Arcana. They’re very much inspired by Neil Gaiman’s “Fifteen Painted Cards From A Vampire Tarot”, but just with faeries instead. The mean ones, not the nice ones. Some of them got pretty bleak, or a bit scary, and that’s always fun, and i’ll be putting them out on the blog in sets of three over the course of the next couple of weeks, then probably all together as a set at some point as well. I’ve put them into the order they should be in, rather than the order i wrote them in, which was awesome, and although these first three are a bit dark and scary i think one or two were actually quite nice in the end! Well, they are supposed to be spooky and sinister, after all…
The Fool
He had waited for so long, and watched. They had all taken him for a simpleton, but he knew all their tricks – it’s never wise to underestimate someone.
They laughed as he danced, until they started choking…
It’s easy to play the fool when all your enemies are dead.
The Magician
What was unusual was hiding the real magic with enough pronounced stage trickery or false slips and sleight of hand.
The woman he brought back was not my daughter. I mean, she looks the same, mostly. Everything but the eyes.
She even acts like her, speaks in the same voice, so similar but not quite right, somehow. I took her home, I didn’t know what else to do.
I am a coward, I know. This … thing … sits at table and all I can think of is my daughter. My real daughter, locked away, somewhere. In a magic box. In the darkness.
The High Priestess
They danced on the hillside, revelers in flowery shirts, and She danced amongst them. People strummed at guitars in the summer evening haze. She rejoiced with them in a fog of magic, of nature and marijuana smoke. The walls were weak, this time of year, and these young things were … Irresistible. They might not know the names of her people any longer, but they still made sacrifice.
She eased the boy, blonde and stoned, into slumber at her feet. stroking his hair back from his sweat lined forehead, she gently daubed his face with earth. Another hippy casualty, as she slowly and carefully muttered secret words that would carry his soul across the threshold into her world.