three years since I was new here.” I corrected.
“Ah. Well, time has always passed quite slowly for me.” She said distantly.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Caitria Veline?” Mr. Serious said incredulously. “You mean the Cursed Caitria the Witch?”
“Please don’t call her that,” I pleaded quietly.
“Well, that’s what she was, was she not?” He countered.
“No. She wasn’t. She was no more a witch than I am. Although she was perfect in my eyes, there was no doubt she made mistakes… it just breaks my heart that that’s all she’s known for.” My voice cracked, and I cleared my throat. I would not cry. I had already shed my tears.
He was shocked. He hadn’t seen me lose my composure or comedic talents before that moment. He waited for me to continue.
“My name’s Keenan Aled.” I replied.
She smiled at me. “You’re funny.” She giggled.
“Are you thinking about me craning for that book again?” I said, embarrassed.
“And when that piece of paper slammed you in the face.” She covered her grinning face.
She was referring to when I was carting a paper of business from Castor’s house to another. I have butterfingers, so I accidentally let go of the paper and the strong wind that day blew it right back in my face.
“You saw that, huh?”
She nodded. “I must say, you are very short even for a Pixie.”
“Well, I did mostly live on vegetables for most of my youth. Tiny diet, but healthy. Not like your junk-food out here that makes you grow to seven-feet-tall.” I said jokingly.
She giggled again. “You are so funny.”
“You must not know many funny people…” I said, leaning over the rail again.
“I know hardly anyone. Least of all Pixies.” She said.
“Don’t you have a slave? Or at least some friends?” I was amazed. Every Elf in the village had slaves.
“No. I don’t have either. A little embarrassing, after two-thousand years of living…”
“Two-thousand?” My mouth fell open.
“Yes? I am an Elf. We do not age, though I must admit I’m an elf from a different time. A time when we were a bit more—um—respectable. Not so primitive. The Elves in this village are only four-hundred.” She sighed.
“I’m surprised they even live that long, it’s so dangerous out here…”
Yes, it is.” She murmured despondently. “And you are… eighteen? Twenty?” She changed the subject.
“One-hundred-twenty.”
She smiled. “It’s always so hard to tell with you Pixies. You’re all so cute.” She frowned again.
“You really don’t have any friends?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I used to… when I was in my four-hundreds.”
“Why not anymore? Because you’re so much older?”
“For the most part.” She didn’t elaborate.
There was a long pause. There were leaves blowing everywhere. The hood that covered my head was blown backwards.
“Ah, so you Pixies do have faces under those hoods,” she said. We Pixies always kept our hoods up to strangers. It was part of tradition. The Pixies in the village probably kept their hoods down because, regardless of how long they may have lived there, they were not friendly with anyone in the village.
“Oh!” I realized it was blown down. I hiked it back up.
“Oh, but you have such nice ebony black hair. You know, I’ve always wanted black hair.” She said thoughtfully, elbows leaning on the railing. The way she said it was odd, like she knew what it might be like to have black hair.
I put the hood back down, thanks to her compliment. “But your white hair is so beautiful.”
There was a distant look on her face, but I still dragged a grin out of her. “Heheh,”
After a moment, I asked, “do you want to go out somewhere?”
“You’d want to go out… with me? But my people enslaved you…” She said confusedly.
“You aren’t your people,” I stated.
She paused, seriously considering my offer. She knelt down towards me and tilted my chin up, her hair draping down over her shoulder. “You’re so sweet to even offer… but, I don’t like company.”
She stood up and went her way. I wondered what it was she did. She always seemed so busy.
Caitria Veline was driving me crazy. I swear I saw her everywhere I went while running errands for Castor. Sometimes she would look my way, other times she would keep walking. Whatever she did, she would not talk to me. She was always busily running from place to place.
But what was truly upsetting was that she really did not want to speak to me. Sometimes, when she saw me, she would smile and take a step my way, only to frown to herself and turn around. Why, I wondered, was she so hesitant? Was it because she was shy and used to her isolation? Was it because I was a Pixie? Was there some taboo against Elves and Pixies? Or… something else?
But I did run into her again. And this time, I forced her to speak. I was taking a midnight walk to clear my mind—which Castor had assented to—when I saw her on the bridge yet again. But this time, she was using dark magic. She grabbed the shadows from nearby, and very carefully put the tendrils of the shadows into a tiny mixing bowl.
I approached her once again. It was bitterly cold, and the moon seemed so large that it was right in front of us when I stood next to her on the bridge. She was so engrossed in her spell; she did not notice me for a moment. When she did, she began moving away.
“Caitria,” I said, stopping her. “Why is it you feel you have to shy away from people?”
She didn’t even turn. She was gone in an instant.
Castor was not altogether unreasonable, and he wouldn’t treat me overly poorly unless he had a reason to, so the next morning, I asked; “Do you know Caitria Veline?”
He froze. Then, he gave me a look. “You should not ask about Caitria Veline.”
“Why?”
“Because. She leveled her whole village.” He answered.
My eyes widened. Caitria Veline? That quiet, withdrawn, sweet woman I had spoken to just the night before? It didn’t seem plausible. It had to be some sort of misunderstanding. “Are you sure?”
“Are you questioning me, Keenan?” He raised an eyebrow.
“N-no.”
“Look,” he said with a sigh, “if you want to stay out of trouble, stay away from her. She’s done things with dark magic that even I could never dream of doing. She is a ghost,”
I thought of her the night before, taking power from the shadows-- storing it in a mixing bowl--with that shadowed look on her face. Suddenly, maybe it was plausible.
But as time went on, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Later in my life, I realized there are some people you only see once in passing—and there’s something so mystical, so memorable, and so lovable about them that you never forget them. The girl, Caitria, was not like this. She was so much more. She was the type of person you only meet once. I was enchanted by her that first time I saw her. It was not love at first sight—it was fascination. Fascination, the far more enticing bewildering emotion. I would never forgive myself if I never spoke to this girl again.
So, whenever Castor gave me a day—he would do this a bit more often now—I would set out to find Caitria, and if I did, I would attempt to get her to speak to me. She never would. She would look my way, sometimes almost longingly, then she would turn away and not look again.
My mind was a mess because of her. I sat out in the village beneath a tree on a bench and sighed. Perhaps I should give up. But something in my heart wouldn’t let me. It was the fact that she wouldn’t talk to me that made me all the more psyched to speak to her. It was like trying to fix something, and even though you know you have a next to zero chance of actually managing it, just the thought of being able to have th
e broken object fixed once again was enough to keep going.
Suddenly she came to me while I was sitting on that bench. She sat next to me. I gave her a sidelong glance, wondering if she was playing with my mind, sitting so close and planning not to speak to me at all.
But she moved her graceful, slender fingers, and, without looking, slid her hand on top of mine. Slowly, I turned my head to look her way.
She was crying.
Her face was emotionless, but she was crying passionate tears. “I don’t want to die alone.” was all she said.
I was tempted to ask her what was wrong—why she was suddenly such a mess. But I had a feeling she would not have answered. Really, I didn’t know what to say. So, I thought it was appropriate to say nothing at all.
“She just up and decided to be with you? Just like that?” Mr. Serious questioned.
“One thing you have to understand about Caitria Veline, is that she acted on impulse all of the time. She made reckless decisions without thinking about them, choosing to act on emotion rather than sense. She was a ball of emotion all the time—if you got to know her. Caity was more than One-thousand-years-old. She had lived too long and seen too much. I thought just trying to fit in with modern times was too much a challenge for her. She suffered from something all of us old souls in young bodies do; loss. Caity, I thought, was finally tired of being alone, and was ready to risk loss again.”
Even after that, I still did not see Caity often. We were both very busy all the time—although I still had no idea what she was so busy doing—and every time I did see her, I still learned next to nothing about her. I told her everything about me.
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