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She stood abruptly, and I took a shaky step back. She was taller than I had expected her to be. I was tall for a woman, but she was a few inches taller than I was.
She moved with a grace and confidence I envied, her silken skirts sweeping across the marble floor with a soft rustle.
“How long I have waited for someone to come,” she murmured. “And now that you have, you say you don’t even know me. An ignorant savior.”
I hesitated, then ventured. “Should I know you, Lady?” I felt uneasy, but reverent, too. I wasn’t sure why, but I was filled with a deep awe of this lovely woman.
She was the first full-blooded fae I had ever seen in my life.
The lady came closer towards me and I marveled at her beauty.
Her lips were a luscious pink like the petals of a rose. Her skin was moonlike, pale and luminous, so clear that I could see the faintest hint of blue veins running below its surface.
Despite her distracting ethereal loveliness, there was a sharp acuity to her gaze that made me nervous.
I could sense the magic radiating from her like a strong summer breeze. Her presence was a heady, intoxicating power and I was breathing it in all too eagerly.
She was the epitome of fae beauty and power and yet there was something about her that made me feel as if I were standing on the edge of a precipice.
Abruptly, I realized she was looking at me keenly, that hint of a smile never far from her lips.
“Ah, now I see. You have come here for the sword.” She waved a hand graciously to the rose blade behind her. “You may take it, you know. Blood calls to blood.”
When I must have seemed puzzled, she gestured to the cut on my wrist. “Take it and consider it a token of my thanks.”
I stood there, looking back and forth between her and the sword.
Slowly I stepped towards the platform.
“Go on,” she insisted, her eyes gleaming. “The sword is yours. You have journeyed long and fought hard for it. By right, it belongs to you.”
The words settled in my eleusia-addled brain. They seemed right. Yes, the sword was mine. Mine to take.
I walked towards the pedestal that held the blade.
There was something carved upon it, etched into the stone. I stooped down to read it.
Beware the dread curse of Three,
The sword, the spear, the grail’s mystery.
Blood calls to blood, the dark shall rise,
Forged by the gods under sacred skies
“Oh, ignore that stupid thing,” the fae woman called. “A foolish rhyme, written long before you were born. Take the sword. Nothing will not harm you, I swear it.”
I reached out my hands and grasped the hilt of the sword, then firmly tugged.
The sword slid out of the pedestal stone as easily as a knife from butter.
The woman gave a lilting laugh that made me think she may have been as surprised as I was to find the sword released so easily. “There, didn’t I tell you?”
I held the sword aloft, the blade gleaming beneath the orbs. It felt surprisingly light.
“The sheath is over there.” The woman pointed at the pedestal next to me.
A scabbard rested there on a marble slab, made of a fine supple leather dyed a deep shade of red that reminded me of a freshly blooming rose. It was embellished with stars made of tiny diamonds that twinkled like the night sky so brightly it seemed as if they were infused with their own magic.
