Veritas Virumque/P2E7

"I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world." “Have you ever exorcised a demon? I’ve written code on it, funnily enough, about protecting the security of patients and people who have dealt with that sort of divine interference.” Sofia rambled on the way to the woods. “They store all the possessions in databases. If you have enough information on one demon, you might be able to find some formula for their activity - and get them before they get to their next victim.”

She decided not to mention how there was something similar for changelings, and other beings that possessed people’s identities or bodies. Even though these databases existed and the idea to use them to track movement was there, it didn’t mean it was a research topic of interest. For one thing, privacy was a concern. For the other, funding in that area was very minimal. Of course, the amount of paperwork put a lot of investigators off the idea, as well.

“Changelings are not demons. Demons still have the body of their host. Changelings? Their bodies are their own bodies. What you really want to destroy is their presence. I guess that’s our part in this scheme. The second half, where the stolen child returns? That’s all on Turnus.”

Orleans le Nouveau was doing his best to keep up with Sofia’s rambling.

The thing about Feiynman was that Feiynman was once Sofia, and was Sofia two years past. When one is in their twenties, personality between two years is very stagnant and consistent. Feiynman had lived her life, they had caused concern for her family and friends. In other words, Feiynman knew Sofia well.

In other words, Sofia's means of tricking Feiynman had to be something about her that she picked up after Feiynman.

Feiynman couldn’t turn down a good bet. They were also mimicking the body of a quarter-demon, and the earnestness to stay in character for that would have won over anything.

“No magic use, I promise,” Sofia had said, when she and Orleans went back up one day to confront the changeling and strike the deal. “I’ll even put up a concentration spell barrier. If I don’t surprise you - not this once, I personally won’t bother you ever again.”

Now, in the neck of the forest where she promised him to meet, Sofia waited.

Orleans stood off near the side. Externally, he was the most worried.

The changeling that they were looking for entered the woods, with a body not belonging to them. The dull purple hair blended in with the dark of the forest, that even Sofia had to squint to confirm that it was them.

“Feiynman. I’m here, Feiynman,” Sofia called out to him.

The changeling approached the two.

“Look, Feiynman, I just want to talk,” she continued, and from her pocket, she pulled out the deck of cards. “To you, in particular.” Fanning out the contents in her hand, she offered it to them. “Pick a card. Don’t show me.”

“Aren’t you a wizard?”

“Pick a Grimmdamn card, Feiynman.”

So the changeling did, the Sofia proceeded. The routine was closely based off one of Turnus’ that she had seen - Sofia hadn’t gotten invested enough into magic tricks to make one of her own. Small tricks upon tricks build on each other.

Feiynman was skeptical, was surprised, was impressed, was not shocked.

“Is this your card? No, of course it’s not your card. Check your pocket, is there a card in there?”

Feiynman did. Sure enough, there was. “It’s my card.”

“Great work. Repeat the name of the card back to me. Thanks. You’re still holding onto that card, aren’t you? Now, what’s this in my hand? Also your card. That’s because, this entire deck… appears to be your card.”

She would have brought in other things - a trick that involved a permanent marker and a cross, one with a watch that she was fond of, and one involving wine in an egg, but those required more props than she had available.

“Is this your card? Of course it’s your card. What else could it be?” Sofia turned it around, and Feyinman was face to face with a Joker. “I mean, it has to be your card. It’s anything I want it to be.”

At that, Feiynman’s response was nothing but laughter. “You really got me there, I’m out, I quit.”

“Repeat the last two sentences.”

“I’m out. I quit,” he managed to enunciate through his laughter.

“You said it yourself. Stop being my brother, Feiynman.”

But he wouldn’t stop laughing at the trick. Sofia knew the changeling legends - a bit too well. It was at these moments when a changeling would leave.

“Well, it’s nice to defeat you for real.” No bragging, no boasts. It was a simple statement, a clear declaration of humility in victory. “Orleans,” she called to the boy. “A touch of finality.”

Into her hands, he placed an egg and a wine-glass.

“Hold this,” said Sofia, handing the egg to Feiynman and holding out the wine-glass in front of them. “Go on, pour yourself a drink, I’m sure you’ll crack up -- as if you haven’t already -- over this.”

Without further prompting, Feiynman cracked the egg, and its contents spill into the glass. Wine… more classy than the traditional beer. The evening before, Sofia had punctured small holes at opposing ends into the egg, used gravity and air pressure to rinse the contents out, and sealed it with glue, filled it with Cabernet.

He drank it, but the wine had been left out overnight, and tasted like vinegar. Feiynman spat it out, and shook his head. “Well, I guess I’m homebound,” said the changeling, and disappeared into the woods.

~*~

On a day where Polyfaemus was out, Turnus went into the shop. Placing the statue upon a wheeled cart, Turnus escaped the shop with it.

"You're old," he said to it, as he wheeled the statue along. "Old as Westerwood. But I've bet you've never seen anything quite like this."

In the myth of Sisyphus, the king Sisyphus orders his wife to dispose of his dead body in the public square. Such disrespect, he would then say to Thanatos in the Underworld, I deserve to go back to scold her.

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus argues that persistent struggle was essential to human life.

Turnus Wyllt kicked the statue down off the cart, into the middle of the public square. Striking a set of matches he found in the kitchen of the Nursery, he was set on seeing that image burn. Soon, concerned fae around him seemed to catch sight of him. Let them watch, he thought. What better place to make a statement, but a forum itself?

While this was all going on, a changeling was making their way home. Feiynman resumed the body of Turnus Wyllt - there was no reason not to.

~*~

“All we can do is wait, as you say,” Orleans said.

On the way back, Sofia decided not to mention a few things. One of them was she had messed up one of the steps of the last trick, and pulling the Joker out of her back pocket (slashed there for its irrelevancy) was the only way she could think of to amend it. She didn’t even make it halfway through the planned routine. All of the good puns Potential had written were present in the second half.

They had reached the opening of the woods, where Brutus was waiting. He ran over and hugged both of them.

~*~

It didn’t catch on fire immediately, Turnus Wyllt soon realised. The fresh coat of gloss prevented it from doing so. If he could nick it on something, or break off part of it so the westerwood would be revealed. So Turnus brought his foot up, and snap down it went on the statue’s right arm. And he had taken Utility’s Swiss army knife off their bedroom dresser table before he left in the morning.

The townspeople realised what they were seeing was just a teenage breakdown, and walked on in their day-to-day lives.

For Feiynman, to get home to the Nursery required a walk through the town square. So imagine his surprise when he saw what was his current image fighting a statue of his current image.

"I spent good money on that," Feiynman said.

The sound of his voice alerted Turnus, who instantaneously turned his head towards them. “You! I… I don’t know which one of me I’d deal with first.”

But Feiynman was not stationary, was not merely object. In other words, a more immediate threat.

"Give me my image back. My likeness!" he said. "If anyone is going to capitalise on that, then it's me. No Princess Mayblossom, no Storybook of Legends, and definitely no changeling replacement. Turnus Wyllt is Turnus Wyllt's only!"

In the middle of the public square, Turnus Wyllt reached into the tote bag and threw the Nightmare Fog. The mason jar landed and smashed at Feiynman’s feet. When he had asked Utility for the jar, it had been a request in case of emergencies. But seeing the man who took his image had filled him with such an anger, that he had to have his retribution.

Nightmare Fog cursed one to live out the dream of their greatest fear, though the victim would merely appear asleep. The only indication of the substance would be the eerie dark fog that surrounded their body, that would eventually dissipate, waking them up.

Turnus kept striking matches at it, charring parts but never setting it ablaze. In some changeling stories, you could rid of the monster by throwing it in rivers, but there were none of those in this Fairyland.

Polyfaemus had realised the loss of the statue and his cart, and was running over, tracking Turnus’ location by the dirt marks left from the cart’s wheels. “Turnus Wyllt!” he yelled, hoping his voice was not drowned by the confrontation between man and fae. “I did good work on that!”

"I'll give you another face to carve!" Turnus yelled at he carved yet another scar into the mirror of his.

"Turnus!"

To set the whole thing on fire was difficult, without kindling or tinder, without sufficient oxygen, with the westerwood statue being so dense. He might not ever be able to make it burn with all the hell in him, but if he could disfigure it beyond recognition… if he could have someone look at the statue and not see it as Turnus Wyllt at all…

The next carve was across the eyes like Oedipus - those amber spheres falling from the sockets. Then, in furious repetition, at the hair.

Polyfaemus didn’t intervene, but Turnus heard quiet sobbing.

“Please… I hadn’t even been paid in full yet…”

That sentence was the one thing that caught Turnus’ attention. He pulled himself off the statue -- the statue with its disfigured face and hacked-off hair -- and forced himself to come eye-to-eye with the sculptor.

“You had all the right--” Polyfaemus began.

“I’m sorry.”

“You tricked me out of ownership--”

“This image wasn’t yours in the first place,” said Turnus. “But… the labour was, I guess. All the work to make it.”

He still had Polyfaemus’ name, and occupation, and property.

Turnus was, in his own right, some sort of artist. He wrote, and some of the content he wrote used to be original, until he started Veritas and finally started to find the real world more gripping than his high fantasy lands. Because of this, he knew empathetically, that Polyfaemus was innocently caught in the crossfire.

Was the image of himself mangled beyond recognition? Turnus looked at it, and didn’t see himself.

But, in a mist of Nightmare Fog, there was the secondary image to deal with.

He pushed the scarred and lightly roasted statue away. Turnus in his simple strength and few resources would not have destroyed it in full. Instead, he turned towards where Feiynman was lying.

He breathed in, and ran into the Nightmare Fog to roll Feiynman out of it. “Wake up,” he prodded him, waving his arms to dissipate the mist.

“Why…” said the changeling.

“Call it desperation, call it what you will. Are you awake yet?”

“Why am I taking orders from a sixteen-year-old kid?” Feiynman was still lying reclined on the ground, still with Turnus’ appearance. He decided the best thing to do was to cover his face with his hands, and roll to the side, away from Turnus.

“That sounds awake.” Turnus did his best to put on a stern voice.

Feiynman sighed, standing up after having been called out, and dusted themselves off. Turnus realised that he still had a Swiss army knife on him, and held it out in front, in defence. He made sure that none of the knives were out, so his movements could not be reasonably interpreted as a threat.

“First,” said Turnus, “I don’t know what you have against me, or my life, or-- I just don’t know anything. Start talking, I guess.”

This was how confrontation worked, did it not? Turnus remembered walking out on that first Gabriel meeting, he remembered walking off the roof when he talked to an ethereal and fake Fanfarinet in his dreams. He had addressed his problems in escapism -- in fiction, in writing, behind paper or a screen.

“Talk?”

“Or do better, like, I don’t know, take action against what you did?”

“I can act, you know that. Here, and I’ll take action as well.” Feiynman’s form had a backpack on, and from it, he pulled out a chequebook and a pen. “I’ll write two cheques. One’s labour. One’s image.” He signed in loopy handwriting, tore them out. The former, he handed to Polyfaemus. The latter, he held it out to Turnus.

The woodshop apprentice seemed more greatly comforted. With a stiff “Thanks”, he took the cheque, and turned to leave.

“Polyfaemus! Before you go!” Turnus called out to him.

“What?”

“Do you have a business card? Do you take human money? If I’m out of Fairyland, are you still contactable?”

“Yeah, sure. Drop by the store, pick one up.” Without another sentence, without even turning his head to face him, Polyfaemus left. His movements were not the smooth, dragonfly-like steps, but tense and firm.

Turnus had asked for one reason: he really wanted high-quality Dungeons & Damsels miniatures. He was a boy who still, at heart, loved his high fantasy universes and stories, but he was not an unrealistic boy. With Polyfaemus’ tone of voice, with the tearstained eyes, with what Turnus had done to him, there was little chance of amicability. When the time comes, he promised to himself, he’d apologise.

But this was a tense situation, and how could he just have lost himself in thinking about his hobbies? Then again, he was only human.

“Why did you do it?” he asked.

Feiynman, who was still in Turnus Wyllt’s form, who was still standing there, looked at Turnus with concern and guilt. “Why? I had to, I had orders, I had pay.”

“So it’s not personal, is it?”

“Does that matter to you, Young Wyllt?”

“Is it a thing for changelings, then? Like, replace a person for hire?” Turnus had accepted that if Feiynman was going to drag him into this world, into this way of questioning things, then some truth must be obtained through it. “Who paid you?”

“Once again, does that matter? You’ve been rescued, by your friend and your sister. That’s why I’m here. I’m telling you that you’re free to go, given the bounds of our laws.”

“Not before I get some information.”

“Fine, who I am to deny your questions? I’ll either give you an answer, or say that I’m unable to.”

At this point, the army knife and lighter had been stowed in his back pocket, and in his hand, was the pen and the pocket notebook. In the middle of the public square, by the statue that once depicted his image, he asked the changeling to sit down, and he transcribed as much as he could.

It was not a friendly conversation.

It was an interrogation.

They talk.

“What was the statue for?”

“It’s… it’s tradition. A Celtic one, specifically. Some changelings aren’t people, they’re objects. My friend and I were testing out something, a sort-of ‘speed-run’ of the process. Your image just happened to be readily available to the artist we wanted to hire.”

His image...

When Turnus looked at the changeling with his form, he didn’t see his own body.

The straightened hair, the plain attire, who was it for? The reason why he stripped himself clean of any motifs was not to display integrity for himself, it was out of shame for his role and story.

Remember, Princes like Turnus don’t bend, they break.

But your narrator has never said what gets broken.

Fairyland is like a Faeraday’s Page, enclosed from all external signals. It had become the eggshell of an incubating chick - a globular mess, distinguishable, maturing into recognisable, distinct form. But one will suffocate if they do not see the world, if they do not feel the sun or experience the freedom to move about.

Here, Turnus Wyllt breaks the eggshell.

“I’ll take my body back,” he said. “And I’ll properly make it my own.”

That evening, the fae security escorted him back through the mirror portal. It was dark, and Orleans with his early bedtime, was already asleep when Turnus tucked himself back into his own bed.

In stories, the stolen child returns soundly.

In practise, the stolen child never quite returns the same.