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five-rivers · 2 days ago

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Changeling Chapter 4

Just realized I forgot to put this here! This and the other chapters can also be found on my AO3.

Chapter 4: The Dandelion and the Dragon

If Danny was going to use his new abilities for good, he had to understand how to use them. All of them. He sort of understood the illusions, the glamours, the way they almost seemed to bend the reality underneath him in a way they shouldn’t if they were just illusions. The locked door thing seemed pretty straightforward – he just treated locks like they didn’t exist. The emotions bit… Sam and Tucker were helping him with that.

But the paths leading away from the real world, into what might be the land of Faerie? That was something he had to explore on his own, something too dangerous to drag Sam and Tucker into unprotected. Or, rather, protected by nothing more than his parents’ research, which was frustratingly hit-or-miss. At least when it came to Danny, who probably wasn’t a standard example of a faerie. Probably.

He knew so little about what had happened to him. It was aggravating.

The… opening at home might have been the easiest to access, but Danny found himself unsettled by it. Touching it was like touching a wound. Whatever his parents had done hadn’t just shattered reality, it had left a scar on it, had broken faith with it.

Also, that opening was where the octopus men came from, and he was far from ready to face them on their home turf. He'd done what he could for their home, following his parents' research, but he didn’t know if they worked and most of them weren’t things he could bring with him.

So, he was out in town, wandering on his own, following along lines that he felt should bring him where he wanted to go. The feeling didn’t make sense, but very little about the situation did.

Sometimes, people would turn to look at him, an unaccompanied and rather small teenager walking through the oldest, most run-down part of town, but he pushed their attention away. It wasn’t easy, but it was good practice, too.

In other cities, this part of town might have been part of Amity Park’s historical district. The buildings here were old enough. But they weren’t, and never had been, nice buildings. The actual historical district was streets away. This road was almost in Elmerton, which… well. Amity Park was a nice place to live. Elmerton… wasn’t.

Now, Danny traced along a faint fracture in reality, feeling it out like a crack in the sidewalk. It felt a little like the awful hole in the basement, but… more natural, maybe? Less traumatic? Less? More?

He wasn’t sure. That’s why he was following it. To find out. To learn.

Most of the lots here were fenced off from the decaying sidewalk with towering chain link made opaque with a plastic weave. Banners proclaimed the properties to be under development by Axion Construction.

Axion, Axion… He’d heard that before, somewhere else. Different context. Where? Something to do with a classmate?

He dismissed the thought as unimportant when the fracture ran through one of the fences. The flaw in reality existed even in his normal vision, a long dirty zig-zag of frayed plastic bisecting the banner and cracking the plastic parts of the fence.

It was, Danny saw as he leaned forward, just torn enough to let him see beyond. His fingers picked at the plastic, and he tried not to mind the dirt.

(These days, he was oversensitive to dirt and grime. Sometimes he was alright with it. Sam had spilled some fertilizer on him the other day, and that had been alright. But whatever this was, it felt bad.)

Behind the fence was a rotting church and graveyard.

He’d been here before, if from a different direction. He’d noticed… something. There was something there, in the old graveyard, that didn’t fit in the mundane world described by the fencing and construction banner.

He shouldn’t be surprised, then, that there was a—a path here, too.

The roof of the church had caved in, all the paint had peeled off the siding, the graves were overgrown and the stones broken, and there were construction materials – probably intended for the neighboring lots – alternately stacked and strewn all over. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to Danny, but at least the graves themselves were mostly clear.

He took a step back and looked up. He could climb the fence, he was sure, but…

He held up one hand and imagined that it was covering a ladder. A good, strong one, like what Jack used when he was doing work on the house or hanging things on the eaves for wards.

When he dropped his hand, the ladder was there. It was an illusion, sure, and one that would disappear as soon as Danny stopped paying attention, but Danny could still climb on it. A ladder, after all, was a normal thing.

He went up and swung over the fence, making the drop to the other side easily.

Ahead of him, among the graves, was the gap in reality he’d been seeking. He took a step forward and almost jumped out of his skin when a dog ran forward barking.

The dog was big, black, and shaggy, its shoulders easily reaching Danny’s waist. Danny fumbled for a glamour, but the images slipped from his mind before he could solidify them.

The dog stopped several feet away, tail wagging furiously. Danny traced a rope leading from the dog’s collar out of sight behind some graves.

“Oh,” he said, “okay, then.” Now that he had the time to get his wits, the dog didn’t seem particularly threatening or angry. Rather than a guard dog, it probably belonged to some construction worker. “Good… boy?”

The dog bounced at the end of the rope and then dropped down, tail still wagging.

Danny eyed the… honestly, this close to it, it didn’t really feel like a hole. Door, maybe? Gate? Well, the exact name for it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that he could walk through it. He knew he could walk through it.

He looked back at the dog. “Wish me luck?” he asked. The dog laid down, dark eyes looking up at him expectantly. “Right,” said Danny, uncertainly.

Actually…

Actually, even though the construction stuff here was newer than the church and graveyard, it wasn’t exactly new. Nothing here seemed very occupied, not even as a worksite. In fact, if it wasn’t for the dog, Danny would call the whole place abandoned.

The dog was still there.

Danny turned away from the gate and followed the dog’s rope. The dog got up and padded beside him, eerily silent.

The rope became progressively dirtier and more frayed as Danny traced it through the maze of headstones and construction equipment. There were tooth marks in it, places where the dog had chewed it. Some places had been patched with duct tape or with desiccated brambles. On the whole, though, the rope was thick and sturdy, and even with the patches it didn’t seem likely to snap any time soon.

Danny stepped into the shadow of the church and stopped. The rope kept going, under the ground, under the corner of the building. Under, Danny would bet, the foundation, the cornerstone of the church.

No construction worker would repair a rope with thorns. None would bury the rope they’d tied their dog to, either. Danny took a deep breath and turned to look at the dog.

The dog blended into the church’s shadow as if it was made of the same substance, or lack thereof, but its eyes burned with a bright, inner fire. The rope around its neck, meanwhile, seemed to glow. As it stared at Danny, it was horribly, terribly still.

“A church grim,” said Danny. A church grim tied to an abandoned church that looked like it was moments from being condemned by the city. What would happen to it, then? Danny took another calming breath. “If I untie you, are you going to try and kill me or end the world or stuff like that?”

The dog yipped and sat down, tail wagging again. It felt like a promise.

Danny sighed and leaned forward. “Okay, then, Cujo. I’m trusting you not to bite.”

The knot was wedged tight and crusted over with something dark. He made a face. It’d probably be better to cut it, but he didn’t have scissors… Maybe he could conjure some out of glamour, but he didn’t think that would work very well, somehow. Biting his lower lip, he found a likely-looking loop, grabbed it with his fingernails, and pulled.

To his surprise, the knot came away as easily as breathing. He stumbled back a step as the dog reared up, then pranced around, frolicking like a puppy. Then he ducked when the dog leapt toward him. But it soared far over his head, right into the doorway that lead to—to elsewhere. To Faerie, maybe.

The church walls creaked and one of them, the one that faced the street, collapsed inward, sending up a plume of musty-smelling dust. Someone on the street shouted. Then, a higher-pitched voice essayed a question about calling the construction company. Or the police.

Aw, heck.

Danny didn’t want to top off his already weird reputation by being arrested.

He dove for the doorway.

Sunlight filtered through tree branches high overhead and Danny blinked at them from where he lay, flat on his back. He blinked. Once. Twice. Then he sat up.

He was sitting in the middle of a shaded forest path, carpeted with grass. The path’s surface was curved – concave up, if he was remembering his math class right. The space under the trees was crowded with rosebushes, each one laden with brightly colored flowers and sharp thorns.

Cautiously, he pushed himself to his knees, then his feet. This place… It felt… Bright was one word for it. Except also… Dark? Bolder, maybe. Everything he’d been feeling, about things leaking through reality, about things under reality, was summed up here. This was the place underneath places. The- The foundation reality was built on. All things rendered into their component truths and exalted to their ideal states.

But not.

It was more like a place pretending to be the foundation of reality. Or a story about the foundation of reality. Or even just a story about reality. It was removed from everything real, everything true. It was made up of nothing more than the glamour of the illusions Danny was becoming ever more skilled at.

But also not.

It was too real and too unreal to be anything but reality. It was just a different one than Danny was used to. A reality that was between the one Danny just left and some… other place Danny couldn’t name. One that he instinctively knew operated under different rules. One that a part of him felt very much at home in.

Were his ears ringing, or was that sound bees buzzing in the roses?

He covered his face for a moment, trying to equilibrate. Just a moment ago, he’d been in the churchyard. The graveyard. Shouldn’t there still be something of that? Or—No, that logic didn’t follow, did it? Was this a different universe, or Earth’s mirror?

He looked up again, peering into the golden and green shadows striping the spaces between the trees on either side of the path. Then, he slowly turned around, and, oh, a few feet behind him was a bend in the path, and at that bend the path forked, one part of it leading to a ruin covered in moss and roses. A tall tree grew through its roof in imitation of a steeple. Next to it, bushes grew in a way that vaguely suggested a low, stone wall somewhere beneath them, and, beyond it, an enclosed churchyard.

Danny would have thought that, given where he’d been on the other side, he’d have been in that yard. If the churchlike ruin wasn’t just a coincidence, or something conjured up because Danny thought there should be something there. Or maybe distance was also different, here. Or maybe Danny was focusing on details that weren’t important. He walked to the edge of the path, careful not to step over it, and looked at the roses.

They were full, multi-layered flowers, not simple wild roses. They reminded Danny of his attempts at glamour-roses, a little. Each flower, each petal, was perfect. Better than real. But, unlike Danny’s, each bush, each flower, was different. The way their petals cupped each other, the way the edges ruffled, how far open they were, the gradient of color—There was variation in all of these. Not always very much, they were still the same kind of flower, but—How many of them were there, anyway? Should he count—

“You there!”

Danny startled, pulling away from his examination of the roses and looking around wildly. Was he trespassing? Well, he had been trespassing in the churchyard, but he had the feeling that the same crime over here would be handled much differently.

There was a young woman rushing toward him on the path, her blue dress held up out of the way of her feet with one hand. Her hair was long, braided back, and the kind of vivid blonde that seemed almost unreal.

“You there,” she repeated, slightly breathless. Her eyes were yellow and slit like a cat’s. “Have you seen my pendant? It’s about this big—” She made a circle with her fingers. “—green, and ringed with gold, on a gold chain. Even for news of a glance, and where, I would reward you.”

“No,” said Danny, edging away. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” asked the woman, suspiciously. “Did you take it?”

“No. No, I didn’t take it. I’m just—It’s just too bad that you’ve lost it?” He cringed internally. This wasn’t a girl from his school – although she looked like she could’ve been, except for the eyes and clothing – she was a faerie or a goblin or something worse. Someone who, according to his parents, would do anything it could to twist his words into a bargain he couldn’t keep, or steal him away, or simply do terrible things to him because it could.

Danny watched the young woman in front of him, who looked only about as old and conniving as the seniors at Casper High, twisting her hands and picking at her sleeves and skirts, her face a mask of worry.

He couldn’t see it.

“Is it important?” asked Danny. “The pendant?”

“Very,” she said. “It was a gift from my parents, before… Oh, how could I be so stupid?”

“Did you lose it around here?” Danny asked. “I—” He cut himself off. He shouldn’t say anything that could be construed as a promise, even something as banal as a promise to help her look for the necklace or to return it if he found it. His parents had been very clear about the potential consequences of doing so, and they ranged from bad luck to being sold to literal hell.

“Yes,” she said. “I came to find flowers.”

“It seems to be a good place for it,” said Danny, encouragingly.

“No, it is terrible. My brother told me that if I could find him a flower unlike any other in all of the kingdom, he would let me hold my dance, but all of these…” She gestured at the perfect, and admittedly very similar, roses.

“Oh,” said Danny. “Why don’t you get a flower that isn’t from the kingdom?” As soon as he asked the question, he knew it was a mistake.

The woman had gone still. Her pupils narrow, she turned to look down at him. “You,” she said, slowly, inhaling deeply. “You are not from here.”

“I’m just a traveler,” said Danny, raising his hands and stepping away. He mentally reached out, trying to find the edges of the doorway he’d come through. “I don’t mean any harm.”

The woman, who had been leaning forward quite a bit, drew herself back up and smoothed her skirts. “It hardly matters. I must forget myself, talking to a human about this. You are human, aren’t you?”

Danny shrugged. “I don’t know what else I am,” he said.

She huffed. “Your suggestion has some merit, I suppose. But… you truly have not seen my pendant? At all? No sign or inkling of where it might be? It’s worth is not in the gold, but the memories, and by all accounts you humans have little trade in those. I could give you things you would find far more dear.”

Danny shook his head. “I’d tell you if I did.”

“And I don’t suppose you know any dances?”

“None that I think would interest you, uh, ma’am? Miss?”

“Never you mind what I’m called.” She half turned away from him. “I will simply have to find it myself.” She marched up to the roses, then stopped, glaring at them.

Danny followed her gaze. His earlier look at the roses had focused on the flowers, but there were thorns in those bushes. Long, blood-colored things. Not the best for walking through, especially with a dress like the girl was wearing. Especially if, like Danny suspected from how she was acting, she wasn’t really supposed to be here.

He shrugged out of his jacket. It was just a windbreaker, and it was kind of ragged around the sleeves, but it wasn’t like she’d be wearing it.

“Here,” he said, offering it to her. “I don’t know if you actually need it, or anything, but you can, I don’t know, lay it down on top of roses so you can step on them, or step over them without worrying about the thorns?”

She regarded the jacket skeptically, and took it from him, holding it by the very tips of her fingers, like it was a disgusting rag. Which. Okay. Fine. She was a faerie princess or whatever. Still, it wasn’t like it was that dirty. Danny had made sure of it. He couldn’t stand dirt anymore.

Then, she flicked it, once, with her wrists, and it… rippled, changed, until it was no longer a worn windbreaker but a length of shimmering fabric that pooled at her feet, similar to the jacket only in terms of the colors used. If it was the kind of illusion Danny could use, it was so much better than his that he couldn’t even see his former windbreaker beneath it. She tilted her head at it, consideringly.

“It will do,” she said, finally. She looked back at Danny, then raised her hand to point back over his shoulder. “There is a gateway to the human world, down the road that way. Let this be enough to void any debt between us.”

“Sure?” said Danny. “I mean, yes.”

“Off with you, then. You would not want to be caught by my brother, or the hunter. Not in this day, when things that are sleeping stir.” She looked away, back towards the roses.

Danny nodded, then, after a moment of hesitation, turned away to walk down the path. It was in the opposite direction of the maybe-church, and therefore the way he’d come in, but he could tell when he was being dismissed, and he didn’t want to be caught by any hunter.

If he couldn’t feel anything, he’d loop back around. Unless spatial relationships here were as messed up as temporal ones were supposed to be, according to stories like Rip Van Winkle.

He did feel something, though. Nothing as strong as in the churchyard, nothing he would have noticed without looking for it, but still something. Something more… solid… than the world around him.

Under a rosebush, something flashed gold. He knelt, looking. He hadn’t promised the girl anything about looking for her necklace, but if it was really just right there… The gold twitched, and before Danny could think twice about it, he lunged for the movement, catching the—Catching something. But it pulled sideways in his hand, slipping out from between his fingers, and the next thing he knew he was face down in very earthy-smelling dirt.

He was home again.

He sat up and brushed himself off. Ugh, he was dirty. Gross. And left over glamour or magic or whatever he should call it was caught in his eyelashes, dazzling his eyes. Where was he? There were trees and, appropriate to the season, wilting rose bushes, but other than that… Well, he could’ve been in Europe, for all he knew.

Maybe this trip could’ve been planned better. Probably. Most likely. Definitely.

He took out his phone and looked at the time – the same day, just a couple hours after he set off. That… He squinted, trying to remember when he’d gotten to the old church. Had he gained time? How long had it taken him to walk there? And the location… Good old Amity Park Park.

Was that normal? Could he expect this kind of thing, when walking around in the in-between? Or was it a fluke?

Either way, he should get back home. He’d pressed his luck enough today.

He put his phone back in his pocket, and that’s when he saw it, glittering under a rosebush. He glared at it for a second, expecting it to jump sideways, like the sparkles he’d seen before, on the other side, but it stayed still.

Danny frowned and looked around, carefully, trying to look more, see deeper, but although there was a pathway behind-below-between, there was nothing like that under that particular bush, and no sign of glittering, tempting emotions, either.

With a sigh, he got down on his hands and knees. He was going to have to clean under all his nails, after this.

Under the bush, next to a struggling and slightly crooked dandelion, was a pendant, just like the one the faerie girl described. He reached out, carefully, and grabbed it, drawing it out to look at it under the autumn sun. It was a simple enough piece of jewelry, but even Danny could tell that it was well made and it was heavy. The gold of both the chain and the pendant itself had to close to pure. Even so, what the young woman had said was right. The greater part of its value was that someone cared about it. It was important to someone. Very important.

Well.

Danny grimaced. He was under no real obligation to bring it back. He hadn’t made a deal or accepted payment. The girl had been so distracted and worried about it missing that she hadn’t even gotten out a whole offer. Going back might be dangerous. He might not be able to return to the here and now. The faerie might somehow take offense that he’d touched something of hers. Her brother or the hunter she’d mentioned might be there. She might not be there anymore, for that matter.

There were many reasons for him not to get up, turn around, and walk right back through the door. Most of them weren’t even related to greed or curiosity or the scraps of magic clinging to the pendant.

He didn’t get up, turn around, and walk right back through the door.

He picked the dandelion and then got up, turned around, and walked back through the door.

Immediately, he knew he’d screwed up. While not radically different to the path he’d left moments before, it still wasn’t the same path. It was darker here, the roses not as thick, the trees not as widely spaced. Even the scent of the place was different.

He turned again, having decided to just go home after all and worry about the necklace later, but the gate he’d come through wasn’t there. Or, at least, it wasn’t there in the same way it had been when he’d left through it before. Kind of like turning on a faucet and getting a trickle instead of a steady stream.

In other words, he wasn’t getting home that way.

Great. He was lost. Lost in Faerie, or something close to it, because he couldn’t leave well enough alone. That was going to be his epitaph. ‘Danny Fenton: Died Doing Something He 100% Didn’t Have To Do.’ All caps. Except no one would know that should be his epitaph, because he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing and they weren’t going to find a body anyway.

He shook himself. He wasn’t exactly in a different position than he’d been in when he went through the doorway in the churchyard, and he had neither panicked nor died then. It was just that this would be a substantially stupider way to die now, having come back, then it would have been to die then, when he’d never been to this place before. He just had to look around for another way back, maybe by starting with the impression of this doorway and tracing it…

A loud bark startled Danny from his thoughts, and he looked up to see two fiery eyes staring at him from a shadow just off the path. He yelped and jerked backwards as the shadow surged forwards, resolving into… The dog.

Okay.

“You gave me a heart attack there, Cujo,” said Danny. That joke was pretty cheesy, and he’d already used it once before, but he couldn’t think of any other monster dog jokes right now. Something to do with Clifford, Maybe? But this dog wasn’t nearly that big. “I don’t suppose you know how to get back h—” He paused, looking down at the flower and necklace in his hand. If he was actually asking the magic dog… “Can you lead me to the person this belongs to, maybe?”

The dog barked again and trotted off down the path. Danny hurried to keep up, almost jogging. Then definitely jogging. Then running. Sprinting, full out. Trees whipped by them as they ran, and they were no longer under tall straight trees among rosebushes, but sunlight-yellow trees with weeping branches, and then gnarled oaks with falling bronze leaves, spaces wide open beneath them, men, or men-like beings on horseback riding parallel to their run, then splitting off, then a kind of vineyard, strung between old fruit trees, then roses again, their perfume heady and pink, trees in and of themselves, and more roses, winding around trunks and ruined walls, and then—

The dog skidded to a stop. So did Danny, winded and not entirely sure if he’d seen what he had seen. His lower legs were striped with thorn scratches. The dog seemed unbothered, wagging it’s tail fiercely.

“Good—” gasped Danny. “Good boy. Good boy, Cujo.” That might as well be its name. Danny didn’t think that ‘Clifford’ would do it justice, anyway.

The faerie girl stared down at him incredulously. “What—”

“I found this,” said Danny, holding up the pendant. “And I don’t know if dandelions grow in your kingdom or not, but—” He shrugged, then tipped both the flower and pendant into the woman’s hands

The girl looked at the pendant and flower in her open hand, then closed her fingers. “You are not human, are you? But you are no goblin, either. Nothing of the borderland. But you would be known if you were—How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” said Danny, too surprised by the question to do anything but answer it. “And—And I’m pretty sure I am still human, at least a little…”

“Fourteen,” repeated the girl, apparently ignoring Danny’s second statement. “Fourteen.” She looked back at her necklace. “I find that I am in your debt, and there is no bargain between us. What would you ask of me?”

“Um,” said Danny.

“Surely, you had something in mind?” asked the girl.

“I—Not really,” admitted Danny. “Maybe, could you explain how the doorways work? And point me back at the one you told me about before?”

The girl put on her necklace and tucked the flower into her sleeves. “I can tell you what I know about the doorways.”

Danny nodded. He could work with that.

Danny managed not to fall flat on his face when he used the door back to the normal world this time, which did a great deal to soothe his injured dignity. He was among trees and plants again, and it seemed very like Amity Park Park, but he didn’t think there had been this many flowerbeds there… And his phone didn’t have a signal. He could hear cars and see multi-story buildings, though, so…

“Use the necklace on it, Maddie!”

That was his Dad’s voice. And—Necklace?

Danny rounded a tree and almost ran into his mother, who was carrying something in her raised and outstretched hand. Something that he did run into, with a yelp. That hurt.

“Oh!” said Maddie, both her eyebrows going up. She dropped her hand, and Danny saw that the ‘necklace’ was a horseshoe on a length of iron chain. Ugh. No wonder it hurt. “Danny. I didn’t-- What are you doing here?”

“Um,” said Danny, still not entirely sure where here was. Was he back in the park? It looked kind of like the park. “I was taking a walk.” Technically true. It’s just that he wasn’t taking a walk here, exactly. “You know. What are you doing here?”

“We’re researching disappearances in the area,” said Maddie, tucking the chain into her toolbelt. “How do you feel? Disoriented? Are you missing any memories? Where is your coat? It’s cold out.”

“I—How would I even know?” asked Danny, not sure which question he was answering. “What does a horseshoe have to do with it?”

“Well, if it is the neighbors causing the disappearances, it’s good to be prepared for them,” said Maddie. “Cold iron is a good weapon against them.”

“And I’ve got the bait!” said Jack, jumping into view with a fishing rod in hand. A doll hung from the end. A doll with gold-colored plastic buttons. The doll, Danny slowly realized, that he had lunged after. The one under the bush in the in-between. The Hedge.

Oh, that was embarrassing.

“Hiya, Danno! Couldn’t resist watching your parents work?”

“Uh,” said Danny.

“Well, I can’t imagine Danny coming to the rose garden for anything else,” said Maddie, with a tone of fond exasperation. She patted Danny’s head. “But you should really wear a coat out here. It’s cold.” Her fingers slipped down to tap his bare neck. “And some talismans wouldn’t be a bad idea…”

“Maybe next time,” said Danny, glad to know where he’d… landed? Emerged? “I’m not in the way, am I?”

“Never!” exclaimed Jack. “Oh! I know, you can operate the new and improved Fenton Fae Finder!” He pulled out a spindle-shaped pendulum on a piece of string and shoved it at Danny.

“Um, is this for dowsing, or--?”

“Yes!” said Jack. “You’ve got it! Now, onwards!”

Maddie patted Danny’s shoulder. “I really am glad that you came with us. It should be safer now that that one is gone, but that doesn’t mean that other ones can’t still do harm. Please, try to be safe, Danny.”

Danny swallowed. “I’ll… see what I can do.”

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five-rivers · 3 days ago