The Hedge

I'm a big fan of urban fantasy, and I thought I'd throw this little introduction/short-story together. I don't necessarily have plans to continue it, but I was in kind of a writing mood. I might continue it, if anyone likes it, but no promises. I'm a busy mouse!

Introduction

It seemed to claw its way up toward the sky, some great skeletal hand reaching for the clouds with almost tangible strain. It was bone-white, that huge old birch tree, all but dead save for a few lonely leaves on the highest, loneliest branch. The bark was peeling away in places, strips of paper-thin skin fraying out like paint peeling in an old house.

Something about that lonely old tree - nestled into the center of its clearing like an ancient sentinal, just a few dozen yards from the perpetual and oppressive howl of the nearby freeway - drew the old crow like a moth to the flame. It was hard to find the perfect balance of nature and urban order, so close to the city. This place, this lonely sanctuary, was the best he could do.

He perched amongst the highest branches, just beneath the cover of the sparse leaves, and ruffled his feathers. There he waited. The sky was a cold slate grey, almost as though in pure spite of the noonday sun, managing to turn a summer's day into something much more foreboding.

It looked like rain.

The wind rattled the bare branches of the old birch, and sent a rustling whisper through the leaves of the trees that surrounded the clearing, a whisper that mingled with the rumbling howl of some semi truck passing on the freeway, out of sight, but not out of mind.

As though carried on that breeze, awash on the waves that ran through the leaves, a small creature flitted out from the shadowed trunks and shrubs near to the ground, graceful and yet somehow predatory in its precision and tension. The old crow's eyes found it immediately, the dull glimmer of its silvery feathered hair more than sufficient to catch his gaze.

The thing saw the old crow too, little ink-black eyes on otherwise featureless face, gazing up from the low, patchy grass that covered the rocky, branch-strewn earth beneath the huge birch tree. It cocked its angular head in recognition; it was the colour of the birch, bone white skin and just as rough. It was a wooden thing, all twigs and silvery feathers, tendrils of green woodmoss snaking from its long arms and legs. Little silvery feathered wings sprouted from its back, somehow beautiful and haggard at the same time. It was all but a few feet tall, and thin as a whisper, but there was something menacing about it.

Though it had no mouth to speak of, the old crow heard it speak, and knew its voice well. The creatures of the forests are all too familiar with the dealings of the Wild Fae.

"You have heard my call," came the thing's voice, seemingly a mile away, and yet a whisper all the same.

The old crow might have narrowed his eyes, if it were the sort of things that crows do. Instead, the irritable flap of wings and a shrill caaaw bore sufficient irritation to the fae's attention, but the wooden little creature only cocked its head in the other direction. A perfect image of apathy.

"You owe me a favour, old friend. In fact, you owe me many favours. But for now, just one will suffice," came the Fae's distant whisper, and unbidden into the old crow's mind's eye came a vision of a garden, like something from a dream.

Too beautiful to be real, too magnificent and wild and glorious to be the work of men. And yet there was something dark about it, something primal and dangerous. Too many thorns, too much foliage, and too much -mist.- Tendrils of the murky white mist seemed to creep like living things, curling around branch and tree, grasping at the stems of wild roses such that they might pluck them from the earth.

"The mists," came the Fae's whisper, a ghostly addition to this ethereal vision, "Are spreading. It will not be long before We cannot contain them in our Hedge, let alone from the Dreams beyond."

The Hedge. Where the myriad tribes of the Wild Fae make their domain, and the barrier between the chaotic world of the Dreams and this world of order.

Although men in their logical thinking minds have severed their ties with the primal world of magic beyond the Hedge, it is the mists that truly distorts and twists truth into myth, distorting time and reality, making gruesome cautionary tales for children out of true nightmares borne of that world.

The mists, they make men forget what they have seen. But not the old crow. Oh no. The old crow had seen much. Too much. And the vision made him shiver despite the humid warmth of the this bleak summer's day.

"I bid you travel into the man's domain. Find the Fae kinsmen amidst man's citadels, and pass this message on to them. With haste, old friend. It is of the utmost urgency." The Fae would have gone himself, the old crow knew, but the Wild Fae had... something of a fatal allergy to the cold, iron-and-steel world of men.

Nonetheless, it brought no joy to the old crow to carry out this 'favour.' While the Wild Fae have a magical connection with nature that makes them seemingly ever-present when needed by the birds and the animals and insects of the forest, the city-dwelling Fae are secretive, buried away in the subterranean world that man has built. The sewers and subways and drainage systems are the domains of the urban Fae outcasts. And though these Fae have developed some connection with the rats and cockroaches, even the raccoons that make the city and the underground their home, they pay little mind those city creatures who never venture beneath the streets. And so the old crow had no idea where or, indeed, how to find them.

It was then that the vision faded, the primal gardens of the Hedge and the thick mists dissolving, and soon there was naught but the rustling leaves, washed out in the grey light of the overcast sky. The old crow lowered its head and scanned the grass and the treeline for any sign of the Wild Fae, but it seemed to have vanished along with the vision, with nary a word of parting. And without giving the old crow a chance to decline the request.

It was just as well, thought the old crow as he let his wings free to flutter in the breeze and carry him up into the air, it was never wise to decline a favour owed to the Wild Fae. Within nature, all things were threads of a single tapestry, and that tapestry was the mantle of the Wild Fae. If it was their wish to remove one such thread, that was more than within their power.

A scent of prey carried on the wind by an unexpected breeze to a nearby hunting coyote... while some Fae watched from the shadows with primal, vengeful glee glimmering in those dark eyes... the old crow had seen.

He had seen too much.

And owed too many favours.

The forest far beneath the old crow ended abruptly, and the domain of man began with paved roads and concrete citadels, webworks of black wires and lights. So many lights. The concrete seemed to spread out as large as any forest, and the old crow felt despair set in.

Where to even begin?

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