Send us a comment -- click on the check mark and visit the forum

Ok, a summary, in case I never get around to writing these stories up.

There were two cousins whose households had long contact with the elves, due to a local elven hill near the home of one of them.  A boy and a girl, 14 years of age and 13, they were good friends.

The boy was asked to deliver something to the elven home.  What he didn't know was that they planned to make unfortunate use of him to bear cold iron in their wars.  They intended to wrap him into that use without his consent, without warning and without alerting his parents.

His cousin, as close to him as a sister, overheard two of the elves speak of it and ran to warn him.

He had already passed into the hill with the package he was carrying, so she followed.

She was trapped within a fairy ring, just inside the hill, to keep her from alerting him.  He was given a sword, a cloak, a ring and a footwrap as gifts.  The sword's story is up on this page.  The cloak was an elven cloak, cut in the wrong style for the court of France, but one he could sleep inside of in any weather and feel safe and hidden, one that let him pass unnoticed and almost invisible and one that provided a measure of protection.  The ring gave him guidance, though it was prone to lead one to the nearest strong source of chaos (in order to fight it) which meant that if used for other purposes it was likely to lead one astray.  The footwrap (kind of like socks -- the Russian Military used them instead of socks in the 1960s) kept him ever clean and scentless (meaning dogs could not track him) and let him walk on the air or water as if he were walking on ground.  His footing was always secure.

He fought in a long and fell campaign, which resolved, letting him return to the elven home.

During that time his cousin was trapped in the fairy ring, with mist and moonlight, and gained a mastery of those powers, though she could not escape, though she was dispersed, almost dissolved, in the magic of the ring and mist.

She gained a variety of magical powers that involve obscurement, mist, moonlight and starlight, and the ability to dissolve and reform.  She is dressed in magic.

But she stayed trapped, in an almost meditative state, until he walked through the ring, with the iron on him disrupting it.

When she came to, he had returned to mortal realms, and she followed, the two of them looking for each other.

First, they discovered that significant time had passed and that the France that they were in, was not the France that they had known.  I also played a little with the military and military technology (e.g. Rapiers in the time of Agincourt, etc.).

A Sun King.  First they both were trapped in the "toll booth" and both escaped in their own way, he by seeming not worth taxing (baubles and tripe, that is all he is carrying, they said, not knowing the power or the usefulness of what he really had) and she by slipping their sorceries.

Agincourt.  They then participated in the battle of Agincourt.  The forces behind the French throne had compacted with chaos demons, but with the use of rowan wood arrows, the English were able to pierce the sorcery and France was saved from a fell fate.

The Tower.  The two of them then tangled with a sorcerer.  The hero using his ring to draw him towards his cousin, only to be diverted by the strong chaos of a sorcerer in a tower.  The plot worked out (as did the last two) in parallel, with the two of them just missing each other as the evil power was overcome and the tower overthrown.

Milano.  The quest to find each other led them over the Alps to Milan (Milano in Italian).  One had been transported into the bowels of the earth, the other had traveled overland.  As they worked their way towards each other, they also neutralized a threat involving creatures from deep within the earth, giant beetles and other things.

Respite.  At the end of Milano the two found themselves re-united, but trapped in a sorcerous bubble outside of time (so that for them, time would pass very slowly).  Physically they are currently 17 and 16 years of age.  Emotionally they are somewhere between 11 (preadolescent) and 18 (teenaged) -- the time in the Elven lands not being one that gave them much emotional development in a normal sense, but both of them also having unusual levels of certain kinds of experience.

The kicker in each of these stories was building them in interweaving threads.  Each story was actually two stories that had to mesh and work with each other, yet also stand independently.

Will they be rescued?  Stay tuned.

Heather Stories