Switching Hour
I race home to my mother. I can't shake the dreaded feeling of several eyes on me. Judging me. Labeling me as "Other." Mother would know what to do.
Inside our modest little grass hut, the familiar scent of mud walls and lavender flowers sooth me as I quickly kick off my slippers and race through the hut to mother's room in the back.
"Mother!" I choke. I hadn't realized I was crying until just then. She barely has time to look up at me before I am wrapped in her arms. She holds me close and gently smooths my chestnut hair as I cry into her neck.
"Hush, pet, it will be alright," she murmurs over and over again.
When I can breathe again and the world is no longer obscured by my tears, I lean away from her and stare at the floor. I need to ask questions that are too important for eye contact.
"Mother, why do I have to wear this special suit? You make me one every year out of wonderful and natural materials and it always fits me like a glove. But no one else wears a suit like mine, and I am not allowed to leave the hut without it. Why?"
She doesn't answer me. Sometimes she's like that, she gets quiet when questions are too hard or when she doesn't want to tell me something. Usually, I let it slide but, this time, it only confirms my deepest fears.
"I'm not like you... am I?"
She pats my hand and sighs deeply. From the corner of my eye, I notice she is crying. Her tears look like pearls and leave sparkling trails on her cheeks. The Fae are beautiful criers. I usually try not to cry because my face gets red and splotchy and my tears don't glitter.
"I knew it."
I want to run. I want to be far away from this terrible lie. I leave my mother to her beautiful sadness and numbly walk to my room. The green walls with lavender accents that I usually love feel like a continuation of a lie now. My collection of beautiful leaves in the jar on my desk seems to mock me. Even they belong here more than I do.
My sketch book is sticking out from beneath my mattress where I hurriedly tucked it before heading out for the campfire last night. As I reach out to grab it, horns begin to wail a distress signal.
I've only heard of the procedure for gathering because of an emergency before. Mother said she'd been through it only a few times but I know she'd know what to do. I race back out into the hallway and nearly collide with Mother. She grabs me by the shoulders and pushes me out the front door before lifting me up and flying me to the clearing.
All the Fae have gathered there. Wings and whiskers twitch in agitation, eyes glow with uncertainty in the moonlight. Snarkle wheezes from the effort of hurrying but finds the energy to glare at me as he did before. Like somehow this was my fault. Maybe it was.
Our elders gather in the center of the clearing and when they raise their hands for quiet, conversations die immediately. The chief elder steps forward, his green, pupil-less eyes flashing and his brittle wings clicking together.
"The Others," he proclaims in a shaking voice, "The Others have discovered that one of the Fae lives among them. They have taken measures to rid themselves of our kind yet again. It is time to reverse the Changelings. To bring our kind home and send back what is theirs to do with what they will. This is the decision of the elders and it is final. We switch the Changlings tonight."
I expect a dramatic NOOOO from my mother but it doesn't come. She simply sighs, lets fresh tears fall, clasps my hand and guides me to the elders.
I begin to panic.
As we get closer to the elders, I overhear snippets of their conversation.
"... longest time we've ever had a switch-"
"thought this one would stick this time-"
"burned her, I mean the barbarians-"
"she messed up the plan, tired of their world-"
Their whispers stop when I near.
"Come, Changeling. You will be going back now." The chief elder takes me from my mother's arms without so much as a pause for goodbye. He leads me to a giant Raven, the shape-shifting Fae named Ravina. He bids me climb onto her back and, before I know it, we're in the air. The force of Ravina's flight makes me pass out and I fall into terrifying oblivion.
Authors note: In a changeling story from Great Britain named "The Changeling," the people find out they have a changeling among them and throw the child in the coals of a fire where it begins to shriek. In moments the Fairies are outside the door and calling for their child back. In return they give back the human child they'd stolen in the first place.
This chapter is largely my own story but toward the end I hint at the Changeling story from the opposite side which, I think, is a little more dramatic. All the switches I've read about have been about babies and young children but I thought it would be more interesting and traumatic to have a longer switch that goes wrong when the children are teenagers. Oftentimes, humans that figure out they have a changeling among them resort to trickery or violence to rid themselves of the child. I want to implement that aspect in my stories though it's trickier with teenagers. In a future chapter, I think I'll change perspectives to the Fae that was placed in the human world. Maybe I'll have Ana's biological mother tell her about how she found out the daughter she'd raised for several years wasn't her real daughter. I'm still debating on which way to go.
If you've read the Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare, there's a switch that happens between a human and a Shadowhunter and no one realizes until it's way too late. I think that could work for my story, more elements like that will come out in later chapters.
I chose this whimsical raven as the image for my story because the raven's character will come up again later and she also serves as the link to the next chapter.
Image Source: Pinterest
Story Source: The Changeling