CROSSINGS
It didn’t always work so well.
Dôn tried to cross the border but instead of feeling the familiar sense of synchronization with the middle earth, there was only emptiness. A split second there was the horror of the nothingness that surrounded her… and then she was back at the meadow that she used for these purposes.
…Crossing from the fairside to the mortal lands.
There were ferns on the hillside. The grass swung on calming motion. Everything was as it was supposed. Nothing seemed to be wrong. Dôn could see the bonny path that she used in these crossings. It led where it was supposed.
Still. She couldn’t cross the border. It made her worry. There were motions around her, swift movement of soul that told Dôn of the others who were enquiring the same path. She didn’t start looking around to found out other disappointed faces. She didn’t remain there waiting.
There were other paths, paths that lead to the mortal side, but Dôn had little will to use them. Some of them were dangerous… some didn’t fit for the Queen of the fairies to use… some didn’t lead into the places she wanted to go.
The small pasture, Border Meadows as it was called, was the best of the all trails. It was not some straight path that always led to same place and same time in the mortal lands, but more like an intersection, place where one could choose various places, different paths and synchronize oneself into a every time one wanted. Dôn wasn’t sure, but sometimes it felt that the difference between this and there was more bound to the time, than to a place. Time was peculiar power that twisted itself in strange and unknown ways. It seldom led people to a straight passage…
Dôn walked there again. This time it took its time, but eventually she felt the familiar, if depressingly heavy toll of the mortal time when she was taken to the human’s side. It made her weary, it made her feel tired, but all together this was where she wanted to go. She had errants to deal, princes to tend. Thoughts of the young lad filled her mind as she passed through the velvet woodlands towards the castle in Porvoo.
"…Don't you see yon bonnie, bonnie road,
Lying across the ferny brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where you and I this night must go..."
But before she could finish the tune, the nothingness surrounded her. Everything froze. Not a leave in a tree would rustle. The singing of the birds ceased. Then the nothingness overtook her and split second the horror of vanishing herself into the raging realm of oblivion and perdition returned.
…and she saw the ferns and grass begun to rock gently around her.
Dôn begun to feel frustration. Her thoughts and ambitions urged her to visit the mortal lands but she wanted to be present there. Not just a tepid witness for past deeds or shaky experiences of the visions of the future. It was true that bonny trail in the border meadow allowed a skillful soul to travel into different times in the mortal lands…but to be present there…it only worked on one time.
Dôn didn’t quite know why it was so. Sometimes she felt that there were only differences between the times. There was the fairy time and then there was the human’s time…the mortal time. And those both rolled steadily onwards in their own beat.
Why it sometimes didn’t work, Dôn didn’t know. Actually she had little understanding over the overall concept of these travels. She just did them. She was the Queen of Fairies. She came and went. Seldom she even asked the question from herself: why? How? The space or time, whatever it was, the being between the two sides… it was concept beyond the words. Some called it the border…some called it the passing. To those who had the courage to explore it deeper, into other directions than into the fair side or mortal side it was a side of its very own…the wild side. And very few of those had came back to tell about it. But Dôn liked that name. She had no explanation for it, nor had she ever stayed there more than the necessary blink of an eye, but she still felt it worth of the glory for being called after something that offered at least change of future experiences. Another side… But how it still worked and how it fit for Dôn’s thoughts about the differences of the time, she still didn’t know.
It was just a custom for the fairy Queens to walk on that wild side.