Chapter Five

Between Fantasy and Reality

The first one to tell her the truth was Mari.

Mari was not one of the ones who nursed her, but she was one of the ones who had been present with Shin when they had given her and the others the cognitive tests. Elizabeth remembered her voice from somewhere else too, she was the one who had asked worriedly if she had been killed, the day she was released.

Mari was a small fey, with wavy dark blonde hair, who moved with a restless energy, as if her body was always on the verge of running to somewhere. There were two things that really stood out about her. She had long pointed ears, longer than most of the other feys... and she had hands with long claws, the skin of which reminded of birds of prey. She almost always wore a brown lamb's coat and long-skirted dresses.

Though at that point, given what she had seen in the past few days, nothing surprised her. Elizabeth knew that there had been something different about her too for some time and that, like the others, it set her apart from the normal humans in the place.

Five days after her arrival she was strong enough to walk on her own two feet and Mari took her outside, where the situation was explained to her. The others in the room were also being explained the situation slowly, but Elizabeth was the one who had shown the greatest degree of knowledge and understanding.

The place where they were was a green open plain, surrounded by a forest, the location of which had never been revealed to the rescued for security reasons. But there were several cabins like the one she was in, and other buildings of a different architectural style from those of her dreams and memories.

The latter were small buildings, more sober and by the look of them they seemed to be made only of concrete. Here and there there were a few soldiers and other people in different tasks. Chopping wood. Washing clothes. There was a large table and around it a few people doing what looked like weapons maintenance. A little further on, she saw a group of about six or seven in what looked like some kind of firearms training. Others were gathered in a group, where someone was playing a rickety accordion that sounded like a very hungry cat.

The wind blew warm from the forest, but on her skin it felt like it came from another time.

Elizabeth blinked in the weak gray midday light as she followed, step by step, Mari's light feet. The ground was damp, soft from the morning rains. In the air hung the smell of old gunpowder, of harsh laundry soap, of sweat and freshly cut firewood.

In that gray midday setting Mari told her the truth.

Mari turned around. Her pointed ears twitched slightly in the wind, as if they heard more than the world was saying.

'Does it tire ya?' she asked, seeing Elizabeth pause.

Elizabeth shook her head, though her breathing was heavy. Her voice, however, was slow to come out.

"No... just... a-air," she said, the word hanging from her lip like a half-broken leaf in autumn. "Weird."

Mari smiled and pointed to the grove to the south. "Yeah, it's got that smell of... time. Old dust. But it's not a bad place."

They walked together to a bench made of jagged planks, next to a post with a dangling rope where there used to be a bell. There was no one else around. Just the distant echo of the out-of-tune accordion, occasional laughter, shouts of military training.

Mari sat down first and waited for Elizabeth to do the same before speaking. "Are you sure ya're okay?"

Elizabeth nodded. It was harder for her to utter than to think. "Y-Yes... I'm f-fine…"

"Good," Mari said softly. "I was afraid you weren't ready yet."

Elizabeth looked down. Her fingers played with the seam of her coat. She stood like that for a long moment, then murmured, "W-where... here?"

Mari sighed. She looked out into the forest, as if searching for the words hanging among the branches.

"The place matters less than what we do here."

Elizabeth turned her head slowly. "What... do we do?"

Mari smiled, but without joy. One of those smiles scarred on the inside.

"We survive. We rearm. We go out on missions. And we took care of our own."

Elizabeth gulped, as if every word was a stone. "Our... o-our own... What... am I?"

The question came out clearer than she expected. Clearer than she felt prepared to hear.

Mari folded her arms. Her lambent jacket rustled softly.

"Ya're a fey. Just like me."

Elizabeth looked at her as if that word didn't fit anything.

"Fey... is… like fairy?"

"Yes. And no. It's… like a name for us. For those of us who don't fit into the story humans tell. You're not a myth. You're real. Those fated to die, yet alive."

Elizabeth blinked, confused.

"I... mermaid. Is that... fey?"

Mari nodded. "Yes. In some cultures. There are many words for what we are and the different types. In Japan they would call us marebito. In Italy, fata. In Ireland, bean sídhe. In Africa... well they have even more names. But what matters is that we exist. And because of that...some people hunt us."

Elizabeth closed her eyes. She imagined scalpels, needles. Torture.

Mari noticed the tension in her hands.

"But I don't want to talk about it," she said, and Elizabeth was grateful she didn't insist.

"Who's...hunting us?"

Mari looked around. She lowered her voice a little.

"Today, the Nazis. And not just them. There are other groups. Cults. People with money. With hunger. They want what we have. What we are. Our skills, secrets. They think that if they catch us and dissect us they can steal it."

Elizabeth pursed her lips. Then she murmured.

"They tried."

Mari nodded sadly. "Yes. Me too. But we're here now. I was a prisoner in another research facility, subjected to different experiments, though I don't want to talk about that. And I suppose you don't want to either, do you?"

Lizbeth nodded and then asked. "It was...a long t-time?"

Mari denied. "I was abducted when I had been on earth for a long time. In fact I was rescued not long ago."

"Who...you...rescued?"

"Who rescued me?" Mari narrowed her eyes. The wind stirred a wavy blonde lock of hair that seemed bent on always returning to her forehead. "The Armitage Initiative. They got me out of there. And now I'm here with them."

Elizabeth tilted her head to one side. That word...she'd heard parts of it in some conversation.

"Ar-mi... tich?"

"Armitage," Mari corrected, gently. "It's a secret alliance between a very old university in the United States and a British magical organization. We're the good guys... or as close as we get. I guess a war all depends on which side you're on."

A war. Elizabeth had been hearing about it for days.

The world had gone to war just a few months ago but, for those who had rescued them, that war had been going on for years.

Mari looked at her and patted her on the head. It seemed like a lot of people had taken to patting her on the head in the last few days.

"You look just like me when I was rescued," Mari said. Elizabeth just looked at her silently. "I didn't talk. I couldn't for several days. But I understood everything. I didn't want to be alone either. My brain was going faster than my mouth wanted to say. But I had a lot of little dark ideas a when I was rescued."

Elizabeth looked down.

She understood all too well. While her dreams had kept her sane, when she was awake they left her alone with her thoughts and it seemed that sometimes only the thought of dying was present. Like a hammer pounding on a nail that wouldn't quite sink into the wood.

"Can you, t-tell me...more?"

"What do ya want to know?"

Elizabeth blinked. "Magic. Is it...real?" Mari laughed. "Yes. Not like in the stories, though. It's more complicated. But it exists."

"I can use... m-magic?"

"I'm not sure... I think your abilities, from what I read, have more to do with your body. There are abilities intrinsic to the body you possess, like a special power, if you want to put it that way. But magic is different."

Elizabeth nodded. Her lips quivered for a moment, then she asked:

"Why... us?"

Mari was silent for a moment. She seemed to be debating between a thousand answers. Finally she said:

"Because the world is changing. For a century now, ancient roads have been closed. Whole communities of feys have disappeared. No one knows why. They just left messages. 'Terrible times are coming.' That's what they said."

Elizabeth repeated, like a broken echo, "Te-rrible....t-terrible times."

War. Feys. Magic. Powers. Organizations. Elizabeth tried to sort it all out in her head with the parts she knew, but couldn't say.

"Armita-ge... Can... you... tell me m-more about...it?"

In that way, Mari went on in her story in more detail.

The organization that had rescued her and Elizabeth was called the Armitage Initiative.

It was a secret force, created for one purpose: to rescue feys and keep them from falling into the wrong hands.

The Armitage Initiative was the result of an unusual alliance, between the secretive Armitage Foundation of the Miskatonic University from the United States Kingdom, and the United Kingdom Magic Organization.

The initiative in European territory was now under the protection of the royal household and a secret branch of something called SOE, which Elizabeth did not know what it was.

The members of the initiative were dedicated to the recovery of magical artifacts, saving feys, espionage, and shadow warfare against the Nazis and their occult allies. In previous years they had been agencies solely dedicated to the secret study of the occult world and the intervention, and sometimes eradication of certain dangerous creatures and strange cults.

They were now funded by the royal houses of the United States and Great Britain, which had become concerned about rumors that had been coming out of Germany for years. Rumors that occult organizations were traveling the world in search of objects of power.

And not just artifacts.

Feys.

Beings like Elizabeth.

Beings like Mari.

Mari invited her to walk a little further as they talked.

The trail stretched like an embroidered thread of earth along the margins of a sleepy field. The low hills swayed in the wind. Elizabeth walked at a slow pace, following the sure movements of Mari, whose boots barely left an imprint on the damp grass. The air was cold, but it didn't hurt. It felt clean. Alive.

And while the gray sky was just like her memories, like a strange book that opened without an index, she was now free and walking.

She knew things. Words. Structures. But when she spoke, everything stuck, as if her thoughts traveled faster than her tongue.

Mari spoke with a patient, almost melodic tone. As if her voice knew the rhythm of the unseen.

"The feys were... we are creatures of the old world. What humans called legend... they were just different ways of naming us. In every culture we had a disguise."

"Feys..." repeated Elizabeth, the word trailing off as if it had thorns in it. "We...are...all...the same?"

Mari smiled, barely tilting her head to one side.

"Pretty much. Ya like I told ye. Some called us elves. Others, djinns. There are dragons. Yokais and a myriad of terms. The important thing was not the name or the abilities that some of us have and some of us don't. It was...is, the origin."

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Elizabeth frowned, as if the wind was bringing her echoes instead of answers. Sometimes the words didn't sit right. They had edges. Or they slipped away from her like fish. But she wanted to know. She had to know.

"Where...where...did...I...come from?" she asked, her breath hitching. She had to be careful what to ask and say. "I...was...something? Before? From where?"

Mari was slow to answer. Not out of hesitation, but because she was looking for how to say it without sticking a wound.

"The problem is... none of us remember that place. That Other Side."

Elizabeth looked down. The mud between her boots seemed to have more memory than she did.

"There is no...memory. But...I...I...know things. Music. Books. Languages. S-stars. Is that... normal?"

"It's more common than it seems. Some arrive with knowledge. Others with forgotten languages. Some can't speak at all. But we all... we all have something in common."

Elizabeth looked at her, waiting. A bird took flight on a branch, and the sound of its wings seemed to give emphasis to the silence that came before the answer.

"We don't want to remember. We can't. It's like a deep fear. A...warning written in our bones and pounded into our heads."

Elizabeth shuddered.

"Why... what for?"

"We don't know," Mari replied. "Some tried. They searched, they dug. And then...they disappeared."

The word hung in the air like a sentence. Disappeared.

Elizabeth swallowed hard. She had more questions. A whole sea of them. But talking was like walking with stones in her mouth under which there were buried mines. Just as she feared, no one seemed to have any memories. That feeling of horror at remembering or saying anything had an origin.

"You... remember... your... arrival?"

Mari nodded softly.

"A part of it, not the arrival itself. In 1907. Miskatonic gave me the number three. I didn't understand anything when I arrived. Not even my name. They called me Mari because that's what I babbled when they asked me who I was. I was found by a goat herder. What a scare he got to find a naked girl in the middle of the mountain with goat's feet."

Elizabeth smiled a little.

"Me... too. I... don't... have a name yet."

"Maybe you do," Mari replied. "Just... it's asleep."

They walked in silence a few more steps. The wind combed their hair and lifted the smell of fresh grass and old earth. Elizabeth thought about her voice, how words were hard for her. Not from unfamiliarity, but from disuse. As if she had been silent for a long time. Just like her voice, slowly everything seemed to fall into place bit by bit.

Elizabeth didn't quite understand what it was. But she had figured it out.

Now she knew one thing for sure: there was indeed a different world. The world in which her parents had been involved in the past and in which she was now also a part of.

The wind blew cold at that hour, carrying the smell of damp earth, gunpowder and something older, something Elizabeth could not name but felt deep in her skin.

Days had passed since she was rescued.

Days in which she tried to understand, to rebuild her world, after having been nothing more than an object on a dissection table.

And in those days, she had learned a few things. But now she could put the pieces in order.

Feys was a way of naming creatures of legend. Folklore. Each country and culture had different names for them. Fairies, elves, goblins, dwarves, goblins, djinns, fatas, yokais, marebitos, dragons, werewolves, vampires, monsters of all kinds and sizes. They were all the same, the only thing that changed was the context. Different names to designate something from a world that modernity had relegated to the realm of legend, if not to superstition and absurdity.

Mari continued to tell her about what was known about the history of the feys and the occult world in general.

The occult world had begun to retreat with the advance of the industrial revolution. The call of the age of reason had come to uproot that which could not be explained with the nail of logic and the hammer of knowledge. But just because that had been attempted to be eradicated did not mean that the occult world had ceased to exist.

The feys and other creatures and objects were still there. Hiding more and trying to go unnoticed.

Only a few specialized and academic circles had continued studies in a more or less underhanded way, under the guise of anthropological and cultural study.

The same happened with magic. The few wizards and witches who existed withdrew to live in isolation, in places where the smoke from the factories of the industrial era could not reach them. Others, more daring, mingled and managed to go unnoticed, continuing their studies in secret.

Nameless cults began to disappear completely and to operate in secret, gaining followers and exerting influence in an even more sibylline way than they had done in the past.

That changed in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The feys began to disappear. The connecting links that had been maintained in certain parts of the world began to fade. Communities of hundreds of thousands of feys in countries all over the world vanished overnight. No clue.

Soon specialists studied the phenomenon, but found no answer other than a phrase that seemed prophetic and that certain groups of feys left behind before disappearing: Terrible times were coming.

"Considering what had happened in almost forty years of the twentieth century, perhaps they were right," Mari opined.

They say in other bench under the trees and the story continued with Mari recounting how, in the last years of the first decade of the twentieth century, new feys began to appear. Few. Barely twenty or so, she supposed. As she had said she had been number three in 1907. Shin, the man who had rescued Elizabeth, was number four, although he himself said he wanted nothing to do with it because he didn't want titles or anything like that.

In the following decade there were about three hundred around the world, although it was possible that more were living in hiding. According to the censuses that universities like Miskatonic kept, at least seven hundred could be counted with certainty.

Feys.

Where did they come from? Therein lay the question. And the strange answer confirmed what Elizabeth already sensed.

The few studies that secret groups had conducted had all come to one conclusion. A conclusion that had already appeared in legends around the world. The feys came from a world that was right next to the human world. A world of which the feys themselves had no knowledge. When they crossed over, they arrived with their memories of that place completely erased. But, due to some studies, some wielded the possibility that there was knowledge in both shared worlds. Languages, arts, although not all the feys who arrived did so with the same degree of knowledge as Elizabeth.

Some arrived with no knowledge at all and could not speak any known modern languages, but rather archaic ones that had disappeared years ago. Others were completely ignorant of theories such as heliocentrism and the most basic concepts of mathematics, but wielded incredible abilities when it came to fighting and survival, not to mention those who arrived with abilities that were different and unthinkable to normal humans. Moreover, all feys were quick learners once their interests were channeled towards education. Many could absorb knowledge like sponges in a short time, even though many arrived almost as small children in their minds.

The feys who arrived only did so with something they did know. And that was not an order or anything like that. It was more of an atavistic fear of trying to remember. There was something that gave them an inexplicable sense of dread at the thought of trying to remember. And it was not that some had not tried. There were stories of some who had tried and had disappeared.

Whatever that other world was, it must be a melting pot where anything could be possible.

At that point Elizabeth thought of her own memories and how she had memories in her dreams. Could it be that she was the only one who had them? Or could it be that others did too, but couldn't tell? Could she die if she said any of that? Just thinking about it gave her a chill.

She knew that her parents and other people in her inner circle had been involved in some sort of research group that had been related to the occult world and the feys. Elizabeth thought about the memory she had had in front of those two graves. When her parents had died, had she carried on the legacy? Could it be possible that, having been connected to that occult world, she had been drawn to that other world or Other Side where the feys lived and had returned transformed into one of them? If it was as the ancient legends said, humans could be abducted by entities from that world and, when they left that place, decades or hundreds of years had passed in the human world. But those were legends only.

She could only make conjectures. Conjectures that she could not share with anyone at that point.

Elizabeth watched the people and soldiers working with the feys. The vast majority looked just like humans, except for the pointed ears, though there were others of smaller stature like dwarves and hobbits. Beyond, she saw a pair of soldiers training with a kind of black smoke that moved at incredible speed. The smoke stopped and a slender naked woman, with skin as black as alabaster took shape, but with eyes of a white color as if they were glowing.

Mari took a breath and continued telling her stories, but now closer in time.

Among them, that it was the year 1939 and that when Elizabeth had been captured it had been 1937. She already knew this, but she let her continue. There were no exact dates of her arrival, but her transfer to that clandestine research center of the Ahnenerbe and the SS had been in May 1937. The center was a mixed research unit of the SS medical research branch and the occult research branch and few knew of its existence.

Nazi research with Elizabeth seemed to have included tests on her abilities and anatomy. The control of her transformation, her longevity, and how her unique biology could be used for warfare or to create new weapons. The Ahnenerbe had been interested in how the fey could be used to improve human health or soldiers, perhaps trying to replicate their abilities in normal humans, or even testing ways to manipulate their biology to create "superhumans" or hybrids. The Armitage Initiative itself had found several teams of magicians and psychics working side by side with the Nazis.

It had been through this group of psychics, which some called the priestesses of the Black Order, that Elizabeth had been captured. Apparently those priestesses together could somehow detect the arrival of feys from the Other Side in advance, but the exact method was not known. Those data were supplied to spies abroad, who were in charge of the capture and then another team was in charge of the extraction of the feys to take them to research centers for experimentation.

The memory of that rainy night crossed Elizabeth's mind and gave her a chill. She had no way of escaping it if it had somehow been prophesied that she would appear there. The guys who had captured her had simply been waiting in the vicinity until she had shown up.

"H-how...do we...show up?"

Mari shrugged her shoulders. "Everyone can be different. In fact there are hardly many witnesses. It can be a mist of different colors, an atmospheric phenomenon, a sphere of water appearing out of nowhere. We all share something, though."

"What?"

"We all appear naked."

Elizabeth looked thoughtful.

"It's not worth much thought. Unless there's someone around it's impossible to know. We ourselves have no memory of our arrival. There has to be a witness for that. I think the only exception is our boy."

"Boy?"

Mari smiled and pointed off in the distance where Elizabeth saw Shin, chopping wood with two other people. "That vertical railroad."

Elizabeth looked at Shin. He really stood out because of his height.

"Are you curious?"

Elizabeth nodded and Mari told her about him.

About the man who had rescued her, the one man Elizabeth seemed to cling to, even without fully understanding why. Looking at him gave her that sting in her chest that she couldn't explain. It was a warm feeling, but at the same time strange because she couldn't explain it.

"He... is a fey, i-isn't he? Mr. Shin?" Elizabeth asked, pausing.

Mari also stopped. "Mister, eh? Mmh... Well... for all intents and purposes can you say that he is?" Elizabeth looked at her blankly. "Shin, it's... how shall I put it? Different."

"D-Different?"

"Yes. He looks like a fey. But let's just say he's a little different."

Elizabeth looked at her with wide eyes, expectantly. Mari sighed. "He's one of us. But... according to certain psychics and clairvoyants, Shin... is not from our planet."

Elizabeth cocked her head slightly in confusion.

"I'm not the one who should be telling ya this, but Shin doesn't care. Ya see, what makes Shin different is... he can't die."

Elizabeth opened her eyes wider. "He...can't die?"

"Exactly. That's what makes him different from all of us. His regeneration is much more accelerated than ours. And on the other hand he can reach limits where we could no longer regenerate. For example, your regeneration is of optimal quality but, as ya know, ya were being fed just enough to keep ya alive. That added to the stress of the experiments was causing your whole organism to gradually shut down. It's possible that if that had continued in a couple of years ya would have become a Muryan."

"Muryan?"

"The Muryan state is when certain feys deplete their core energy. In some cases they gradually lose consistency until they disappear, shrinking in size until they look like a small ball of light that very few can see. In a normal state, hypothetically, a fey could live hundreds of thousands of years according to legends, but there are legends of a type of fairy called Muryan that, as they age and lose power, they shrink and disappear. That we already have proof that can happen with feys that have magical or special abilities and if they deplete their core they transform into Muryan."

Elizabeth paused and thought about it.

Muryan. The term rang a bell, it meant: ant. Was it a type of Cornish fairy? But Mari had just told her that there was an explanation in the hidden world for the original legend?

"Be that as it may, Shin has died so many times and damaged his body so much that he should have been transformed into a Muryan a long time ago. That, and added to the fact that he causes a certain creepiness in those who see him for the first time, has caused there to be a legend surrounding him."

"Creepiness?"

Mari nodded. "When he rescued ya, ya didn't feel anything? Like fear, when he grabbed you?"

Elizabeth thought about it, but refused to be sure.

"Are ya sure? Everyone who sees him for the first time gets a little scared. But then again, some weird things tend to happen around him. So he always tries to stay away a bit. It's also the reason why he always wants to take the most complicated missions, because he can't die. In short: he's a bit of a goofball, but that armor fits him well."

"Armor?"

"Ah... yeah. Ya haven't seen that. He's got armor that can even withstand a tank hit."

Elizabeth felt a bead of sweat trickle down her temple. Who was Shin Aogami, really?

"Shin has worked at the Foundation since 1936. He returned from the deserts of Africa recently."

That meant he had been involved in the secret war for years.

"There are rumors that he hid something there. Something the Nazis desperately wanted to find in Spain. But, before they could find the object, Shin took it to Africa and hid it. When he got back to Spain, he joined the others to rescue me."

Elizabeth tried to process the information.

"Y-you're from E-Spain?

"Yes. Doesn't the forced English give me away?"

Elizabeth shook her head and Mari ruffled her short hair playfully. Some clouds began to break and a weak sun began to filter through the leaves of the trees.

"If you come to Spain, stop by the Pyrenees, I'll treat you for a while. Not now, though. It's raining down spiky turds there too."

"The w-war... it's there too?"

Mari nodded and pulled a long pipe from the pocket of her lamb's coat. "It's everywhere for us. Let's hope our secret doesn't end up getting out and it's all over sooner. Imagine if it is decided that one of the sides reveals our existence to the world. Only a few governments know about it and they are trying to keep it a secret, so as not to start a new witch hunt in the middle of the war. Both sides have feys working for them. We are a unit of strategy and espionage many times, other times of sabotage and attack."

"Wh-what side are... you... you?"

"Us? The side that tries to keep us from getting our asses plucked like chickens. Imagine that. Everybody would see feys everywhere. It would be a return to the times of the Inquisition where everyone blamed each other for witchcraft. Leave us alone. We are not hurting anyone. At least most of us..." Mari added, finishing laying out the tobacco and lighting the pipe with a wick lighter. "For the time being we are going to help as much as we can and as many as we can, as long as we have the support of the British and Americans."

"England... is offering help…"

Mari nodded and, exhaling smoke, added. "In three days transport arrives for ya, so ya can go somewhere in the UK to hide and rest."

That made Elizabeth's eyes glare at Mari. "What do you... mean?"

"Everyone we rescue, along information, artifacts goes to the UK, or to the university, or to the Kingdom's special strategic services offices. There they are offered asylum. Those who are more qualified can even have a position within some secret department to help in the war. Although they need some training. In any case I would recommend ya to go to South Wales, West Wales or Ireland, the life in the communities is calmer. Many feys there are helping with farming and planting, because England has gone into developing a rationing program in case the conflict goes on for too long."

Elizabeth kept looking at Mari and then saw Shin in the distance. "I'll... I'll have to g-get out of here?"

"It's for the best. We're here for combat now. We do lightning operations to destroy Ahnenerbe installations and other occult branches of the SS. There are not many of us, but there are enough to be considered a small army. I can't tell ya where we are, but this is not permanent. These are special areas and as soon as there is any strange movement we have to leave if we are discovered."

She had stopped listening to Mari at the last part of the sentence.

She would have to leave.

No.

She didn't want to leave.

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