author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

The Page of Wands in the Rider-Waite deck is described as follows: “A young man stands in the act of proclamation. He is unknown but faithful, and his tidings are strange.”It goes on to suggest an envoy or postman, someone bringing favorable news to the querant. Yet the card itself casts doubt on this interpretation. It shows the young man standing alone in a desert, facing that vast expanse, bringing his strange tidings to no one at all.

The desert was dry and empty of life, but it also lacked signs of death. In it May saw neither ruins nor corpses. She took comfort in that. So she continued into that barren place, looking for someone to whom she could deliver her message.

In some corner of her mind, May knew she was no longer, for want of a better word, sane. There was nothing rational about placing so much hope on a mission that, if that minority corner of her mind were perfectly honest, she had probably only imagined. But she had witnessed too much horror and lost far too much since the Fae Wars had broken out across the inhabited human world. She needed a reason to go on. If sanity couldn’t give her one, she’d take what madness had to offer.

“Tell them,” her mother had said, lying brokenly in what was left of their home.

May, supporting her mother’s suddenly frail body and feeling its rhythms already beginning to falter, had said, “Tell them what, Mama?”

But all she could remember was her mother repeating, “Tell them...” Then her memories devolved into a confused stretch of dreams, illusion, glamour, pain and grief, and yet more dreams. Her next solid memory was of picking her way through the rubble that had once been the Northside Library. Books sprawled open among the debris, their pages transformed into the skins of fantastic beasts, each still alive and mewling piteously.

May had been wandering ever since, carrying her mother’s message....

This has been an excerpt from the Friday Fictionette for June 30, 2017. Subscribers can download the full-length fictionette (1206 words) from Patreon as an ebook or audiobook depending on their pledge tier.

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