SORCEROUS SIGNALS
Written by Frederick Hilary / Artwork by Marge Simon
Faery Lands Forlorn






















There was a human child called Thomas, who never had to fear death. He lived in an undying place and
breathed deathless air, and because nothing around him ever passed away, neither would he. But even
though he lived in Faerie (for such was the land), he was unhappy.

Once an old fairy elder, counted amongst the wisest in that place, told him: “Your lot is a hard one.
Because you were born mortal, you desire. We immortals do not desire anything. Why should we? Desire
is born of loss. We cannot crave what we never lose.”

It was true: he was born with a nameless longing, a longing so strong it sometimes threatened to
overwhelm him. In that state, he would go wandering the woods of Faery (for Thomas was the only child
of Man who lived in the immortal realm), seeking something without knowing what it was. When the
desire took hold of him, it was like a hunger or a thirst that could not be sated, and even the fairy food—
the sights of beauty incomparable beneath the stars—could not satisfy him. Sometimes he would weep,
sometimes he would fall into a bed of grass, and often in desperation he would flee to the most
enchanting glades, trying there to glut himself on the perfection of the fairy waterfalls and on the music
of the streams. All to no avail.

It was on one of these desperate wanderings that he heard the nightingale. She was singing in a glade lit
by the horned moon, and because Thomas sought the comfort of beauty, as vain as its return invariably
was, he turned immediately towards the sound. Her song came floating through a gap in the trees; and
when it finally reached him at close distance, as opposed to the faint melodious music he first heard from
afar, he gave a trembling start. It was as if a shaft had penetrated his heart. Here at last was something
to fill up the hollow he felt inside. Here at last was meat for his hunger, and drink for his thirst.

There in the clearing, amidst a shower of delicate, golden notes was the nightingale, singing from a low
branch the most beautiful, melancholy sound the boy had ever heard. Nothing in Faery had ever moved
him like this music. What are the words of the song, he found himself asking, and listened intently to
catch them. This being Faery, all languages were one, and there were no barriers in understanding
between birds and beasts and immortal creatures; thus Thomas was able to pick up the meaning of the
words. This is how they sounded to him:

I once was a girl with golden hair, the sunlight warmed my skin
I ran with rosy cheeks and laughed, till mother called me in.
There is no time to play she said, for the sun has left the sky
But I heard the children’s laughing call
And with her would not abide.
Oh, mother, do not care, I said,
For the summer’s day is long.
So I went with the children and ran on the hill
And I joined their laughing song.

“Oh, I beg you, do not stop,” Thomas said, when the song ceased, walking up to the tree and looking up
at the plain little brown bird. “It’s such a beautiful song. I’ve never heard the like.”

“Thank you. But it’s a sad song,” the nightingale said. “By that I mean, it doesn’t speak of things that
are both beautiful and perfect. It tells of things that have been lost.”

“What does it mean, I once was a girl with golden hair?”

“The song is my own. I made it, because it is what happened to me. I  was once human. I’ve heard of
you, Tom. The fairies say you were born of mortal parents. So was I.”

“You mean you were enchanted?”

“Yes, it was a fairy’s spell. He cast it on me because I blew the stars out of the dandelion clocks, and
plucked pansies and red anemones from his palace gardens. To me, it looked like nothing more than a
pretty woodland meadow. Of course, it was too late then. I became a bird, and since that day I have lived
in Faery, and have never grown old.”

“Do you mean the king’s palace gardens?”

“The same, yes. In those days the earth belonged to mankind, and all that was left of the fairies lived in
little nooks in the trees and swards under the shadow of rocks. They were small then. Even his majesty.”

“They say I am the last son of Man,” Thomas said sadly. “I have heard the tale about the end of humans.
The fairies always told me that no other human exists in Faery, or anywhere on earth.”

“And aren’t they right? For what am I now but a little brown bird? I was once a girl called Philomel,
beautiful as a princess my mother said, though all we had was a little croft. I had wealth, of a kind—all
the riches of youth were in my hands. All is lost now. I shall never see my own land again.”

And she began another song that made Thomas kneel before its aching beauty.

In springtime you wove me a circlet of flowers,
In summer you wed me with a golden band,
The winds of the autumn couldn’t prevail against us,
Nor winter blanket our childhood land.

From that instant Thomas was enchanted, and that night was the first of many he spent in the glade. He
did not return just to hear Philomel sing; he also talked with her endlessly about the human world, for
his memory of his young years among people of his own kind was like a dim dream, and he yearned to
hear more. Also he learned about the girl the nightingale had once been, and in his heart there came
forth a longing to know what she had looked like, for he became increasingly convinced she had been
beautiful. The days went by, and Thomas began to realize he might be in love—not with the bird, of
course, nor with her song (as enchanting as that was), but with the girl she once was. He had fallen in
love with a mortal girl, without ever having seen one. Here, at last, was what had always excited the
longing that pricked him. Was it a memory of mortals? He did not know, but now his life changed
completely, and his nights of wandering ceased.

For a while it went on in like wise. His longing was sated, and he sought the same enchantment again
and again. But then something darkened within him. It was a sudden change, and it seemed to him all at
once the desire which he had so long held at bay now returned with renewed force.

All at once, everything seemed hopeless. The answer seemed plain: aside from talking with her, what else
could he do? The yearning for another’s spirit seeks the form that spirit naturally takes. Here he was,
kneeling beneath a tree, staring up at a small brown bird, in love with a figure he would never see, an
idea never to be manifest.

His mind tormented by the knowledge he could never see her as she truly was, Thomas resolved one day
to stay away from the clearing, and days passed where he wandered alone among the denser, lonelier
thickets, sick with love and hopeless. Philomel, worried by his absence, flew out of the glade at last and
went to look for him. She found him sitting on a green hummock in one the darkest, most shadowy
glades.

After she alighted on a low branch next to him, she asked him what was wrong, and he wept bitterly as
he opened his heart to her. “Can nothing be done?”

“The one who cast the spell can undo it, but he will not. He is the King of Faery. Don’t let your hope rest
there, even for a second—it shall never be!”

“Why not, Philomel? Why should his anger at you be never-ending?”

“You don’t understand. Indeed the spell can be lifted, but didn’t the fairy mothers tell you? If a mortal
boy and girl bear children, the age of Faery will come to an end, and things will return to as they were
before, when humans were lords of the earth.”

“How do you know this is true?”

“It is what they told me. And I do not think they lie.”

Thomas picked himself up. “I will ask the king myself.”

“It is as I said. But if you must speak with him, be careful. He will never lift the spell, but he may cast a
new one, more terrible perhaps.”

The nightingale did not sing that night, and come the morning the boy had set off for the Heartwoods.
He walked until it was night once more. Desperate, a child of man, he entered the forest glade where the
king had his throne beneath a roof wattled with oak branches, and beaded with summer stars. All the
time, his heart was pounding. What gave him the courage to face the Fairy King? The nightingale was
right, it was foolish. But there was no other way.

As the fairy courtiers watched, astonished, he came before the throne and knelt. He spoke of his love
with eyes closed, his fist clenched against his heart as if to steady his courage. There was silence when
he finished. He opened his eyes at last. The king, as the nightingale predicted, answered his plea with a
look of scorn.

“It would bring the end of everything that is here made. Would you ruin Faery just to feed your own
desire?”

All the fairies in the court were watching Thomas; there was no doubt that he was expected now to
leave, and in the silence that followed he sensed the king’s patience stretching taut.

“I did not ask to be brought here into Faery,” he said at last. “Who was it that brought me here?”

“You were a boy. Of course you do not remember—it was longer than many of your human lifetimes ago.
You were a boy who spared the life of a fairy, who returned the captured thing to the woods. Your
kindness reached my ear, and so I brought about your deliverance by leading you into Faery’s woods
before the age of mortals ended.

“Magic will go out of the place if you ever find a mate. You will bring the chaos of generations into this
land of the undying. We do not love because we bear flesh, nor do we grieve because we bury it. We
love all equally, because they exist. We never desire anything more, and we do not know loss. Would
you want all this to come to an end?”

“What happened to Men?” Thomas asked.

“They ceased to exist. The world remade itself, and was purged of the curse of generations. Immortal
ones inherited it. I have sometimes regretted my act in sparing you—but it pained me to see Man pass
away utterly. I allowed one to live, under the edict that no other shall be found to be his mate. And the
green world enfolded you, and covered those last traces of the error of your kind.

“I do not understand why you yearn for this companion. What could you desire other than this land and
all that lies within it? Are the water nymphs not beautiful to look at in their bathing pools? Do you not
every night glimpse dryads weaving dances between the trees? Can the beauty of a girl’s voice blot out
all that is miraculous in the world? Will it blind you to wonders?”

“I must see her as she was. As she should be,” he said. “I cannot help that. It is what I desire most in
the world.”

“Desire, again. We have no use for the word. In any case, I have given you my answer. Go your way
now, before I forget my kindness. Never will two humans walk in Faery.”

“Then what about two nightingales?”

The king looked at him silently for a moment through narrowed eyes.

“Do you understand what you ask?”

Thomas felt a great weight in his chest. He looked down at himself, at his boyish form, and said,
“Completely.”

“So you desire to be a mate to her in bird form. You would give up your nature for her?”

“If there is no other way.”

“Very well. Because I remember the good you once did, I will do this for you. Do you see that pool there
at the clearing’s edge? It is my bathing pool. And now it is enchanted.”

The fairy king muttered a few words and gestured towards the small round pool. Suddenly, and so
brightly that it was visible even from where Thomas was standing, its surface began to glitter.

“Walk towards it. Remove your clothing; bathe in it. It is enchanted with a spell of transformation. It will
turn a child of Man into a nightingale, and then you will find what you seek.”

Thomas walked across the clearing and up to the edge of the pool. It was glittering as if with millions of
tiny colored beads. The enchantment was beautiful to look at, and for a few minutes he merely watched
the effect on the water. Then he removed his clothes, stood naked, still a child in aspect, at the cusp of
manhood, frozen in the form with which he had left the mortal world.

Before he could extend his foot to step into the pool, a voice startled him. It was Philomel, the
nightingale. She had fluttered down from the clearing’s edge and landed on the banks of the pool. “Stop!
Thomas, do not do this thing for me. I have longed to be the mortal I was. As a nightingale, you will do
the same. It will not make you love me more. The girl I was will always haunt you.”

He looked at her with tears in his eyes, rounded the pool, and kneeling whispered to her: “What else is
there left us, Philomel? We cannot know each other intimately in any other wise. Perhaps form is not so
important after all, as long as like matches like.”

“I implore you. Step back from the pool.”

“I cannot.”

Thomas had been about to stroke the water with his hand. The glittering jewels dazzled his eyes. But
then something happened which he didn’t at first understand. He heard a splash. It sounded like a
pebble breaking the surface. And then something, a form, appeared out of the pool, glittering white. He
was still kneeling so he had to look up. Of all the beauty he had ever seen in the glades of Faery, nothing
could have prepared him for this. It was like looking directly into the sun, like being pierced with bolts of
lightning.

“Philomel?”

The girl was still a young girl, not yet a woman, but she was golden-haired and apple- cheeked, and he
thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful. Her mouth hung open in surprise, and after looking at
him for a few brief seconds she looked down at her own form, naked and white, and her eyes shone in
astonishment.

Thomas could only say. “Oh, Philomel.”

But his words were drowned out. No sooner had she emerged from the pool than a sound like a peal of
thunder struck the clearing. It was a kind of moan, like the mingled cries of many tiny voices, like
creatures which are suddenly blotted out by some terrible travail. It was a cry that ripped through
nature, that left the trees shuddering, that caused a boiling tempest on the surface of the pool. But
before it could split the earth asunder, it was gone, swallowed by silence, as suddenly as if it had never
been. A dart of terror had struck Thomas, but now, with the passing of the cry, it was gone, and barely
even remembered. He was enchanted; he was looking again at Philomel and only at her.

“What did you do?”

“I plunged into the water,” she said at last, raising her eyes from contemplation of her girl’s body. “Some
wild thought came upon me. A whim. I had the inkling that if the pool was a pool of transformation, that
the spell was meant to turn man into nightingale, the reverse might also be true, and the spell he had
put on me might be undone. I did not really think or believe it might be true. But I dove beneath the
surface, towards the jewels. And now…”

Thomas raised himself up, and at last the boy and the girl stood opposite each other, faces filled with the
enchantment of their own opposite selves. For moments or perhaps hours (it is hard to tell, for time
between lovers is not measured thus) they looked at each other, and gave each other the first tentative
caress, whose enactment had been rehearsed so long in their imaginings. And then at last, they looked
beyond their own bodies and their own eyes, beyond the spheres of boy and girl and young love, and
saw what had become of the clearing and the fairy court.

It was gone, of course. They were standing in a clearing at the edge of which there was a small brown
pool of water, muddied at the edges. There was no trace of the throne upon which the king had sat,
excepting an old mossy stump, and of the fairies themselves not a trace could be seen. All was empty,
silent. It was a moonlight night, and a cold wind rippled through the trees, bristling against their bodies.
Frost glinted on the edges of the grass.

Some impulse possessed Thomas to look up, and when he did, it was almost as if the stars had gone
out, as if the moon had been extinguished. But it was not so: they remained, though they were fainter,
their grandeur lost. All was diminished; those cool orbs now seemed far from the earth, indifferent.

“Will autumn now come?” Thomas said, as a mournful thought struck him. “And after that winter? Will all
things begin to wither? What have we done?”

Philomel looked into his eyes, and with that look his sense of the imperfection around them was suddenly
lost, as quick as the cry that had risen in the clearing when she was transformed and lasting no longer.
She took his hand and said, “We have chosen love above all else.”

And leading him, she went from the clearing, and they stepped out hand in hand into the wilderness.
Frederick Hilary studied medieval literature at the University of Wales.
Being read Enid Blyton's Book of Brownies as a child instilled a longing
for Elfland that has still not left him. He has been published in New Fairy
Tales, Fickle Muses and The Cynic. More of his works will shortly be
appearing in The Mythic Circle, WIldberries Journal and a Static
Movement anthology.

Visit his website at: http://frederickhilary.weebly.com/