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Part 3 of The Fae Tales Verse
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2014-05-05
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The Nightingale and Terho the Mouse-Lad

Summary:

A story about the Nightingale - a gifted, power-hungry and malicious Unseelie shapeshifter - and Terho the mouse-lad, a chronically sick, lower class Seelie fae who only wanted to heal the sick. One was trapped in the underworlds as a punishment for his path of destruction, and the other was an innocent boy, determined to save what he thought was a wrongly caged bird.

This is the tale of how they both ended up bound to one another, changing the fae world they lived within - unfortunately, not for the good of all.

Notes:

Okay, people not familiar with this universe actually don’t need to know anything about it before reading this fairytale!

For everyone else familiar with Game Theory: This is the new canon that will replace the back-story of Jack Frost and Pitch / The Nightmare King. Obviously this is a very loose retelling, but you’ll see all the major points of FtDWR/ISWF that bring Augus/Gwyn together in Game Theory, retold here in a new format, with new characters.

There's no real shipping in this, the Terho/Nightingale and Augus/Nightingale pairings are both nonconsensual and exploitative, but the pairings are mentioned because I thought it would be remiss if I didn't.

Told from the perspective of Old Pete.

Comments, kudos, or any feedback at all is very appreciated, especially as this kind of marks the official launch into original fiction territory! And thank you for reading!

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Work Text:

Some of you have asked about Terho the mouse-lad, and so I present to you what little I know of his story. But, as Terho was second-best or even third-best at so much of his life – except, of course, locks and keys – he does not come first even in his own story.

Terho’s story is a story about the Nightingale.

Once, in the fae world, there lived a type of nightingale called the Mourner. A drab, pale grey thing with a song so exquisite that one could almost forget that it fed upon misery and despair. It sung such sadness that it wounded hearts already grieved to feed upon the anguished. Living around the world in the places that would have them, Mourners were at once sinister and appealing. They inspired fae poets, writers, allowed for the romantic embracing of grief. But they harried those who had lost their loves, they were known to follow aggrieved swan maidens, pricking their hearts with song until they could no longer move, wasting away to bones and a feather cloak.

No one can say what caused the Mourner nightingales to begin leaving their nests and roosts all at once, flying towards a single field in the thousands from the world over. Did some monumental loss happen there that called to them? Something the rest of the fae missed? We can’t say.

After thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, the Mourners all converged upon a single barren field. There they milled and flew and sang a cacophony of grief until the whirling of feathers and beaks and beady red eyes disappeared and in their place stood a tall, graceful creature: the Nightingale.

We all know what he looks like. Tall and bird-like, pale-grey all over like the birds that birthed him. His eyes a penetrating red, his mouth a charming slant, always ready to smile. Both were pinched at the corners, hinting at sadness or joy.

He was discovered and adopted by that seething darkness we know as the Nain Rouge. Unseelie down to his bones, with an appetite for misery and despair, the Nightingale was taught how to feed, how to live. Where he learned his Courtly manners, we know not – for the Nain Rouge is not thought to have any.

The Nightingale was not only a gifted shapeshifter – able to change into many night-birds and Mourners at once – but a gifted Mage. Perhaps too gifted. He suffered the curse of many Unseelie Mages – curiosity, recklessness and boredom. He became obsessed with the worlds to which the fae are barred. Or, perhaps, I should say that he became obsessed with a certain realm in particular; the underworlds.

We all know that through research, reading and spells that pushed hard at boundaries, he made his way into the underworlds, blowing open a portal between worlds that would destabilise both. It is still, today, destabilising both.

And we know that after an unfathomable time in the lands of the dead, he returned to us, aura bloated with power, having found magical ways of consuming underworld creatures and, it is suspected, a demigod or two. His nature warped beyond recognition, darkness staining his steps in a way that bothered even the Unseelie, he wreaked havoc upon the fae world all so he could feed his insatiable appetite for misery and grief.

This was so long ago many don’t remember it, but a council was called to discover how we could check his path of destruction. The most powerful Mages in the world came together to stop him: Davix and Olphix, Old Pete, even underworld Mages that had never before cooperated with the fae.

Together, we forced the Nightingale into his weaker bird form, then sealed that single Mourner nightingale into an enchanted cage down a forgotten corridor in the place we thought he should rot – the underworlds. We combined all our magic to make one hundred different doors, one hundred different magical and non-magical locks. We were not strong enough to kill him. But we were strong enough to stop him.

The fae world returned to as much peace as it could, with the equilibrium between the underworlds and fae world disturbed. We waited, bided our time, watched to see if the worlds would heal themselves.

Now, you see, we come to Terho.

Terho, a mouse-shifter, was born on the fae side of Finland to a humble, respected family. His father a tinker, his mother an assistant to a healer. Seelie, underfae, with a heartsong of curiosity, he was a cute little thing. He was leucistic – almost albino – a black stripe parting the centre of his tufted hair and running along his back, marking him as the striped field mouse that he was. He was, by all accounts, sweet and eager to please, a little more timid even than the average mouse. As a child he showed a knack at healing broken things.

I shall not bore you with the apprenticeships he underwent to try and become a healer. It is enough to say that Terho was also a weak little mouse, and prone to illness himself. In the end, Terho became adept at healing those chronic illnesses that rarely find the fae – those that come about due to curses or magical sicknesses – because of his own.

Terho only ever attained the rank of Half-Healer – even that achievement he’d struggled to attain – when he came across his Healer’s book on the underworlds, hidden in a chest, away from the rest of the Healer’s books. Here we’d best not forget that Terho had the ability to unlock any lock. His body and magic was a universal key, and his parents had learned a long time ago not to bother trying to hide anything from him. But the Healer, arrogant, or perhaps simply assuming that frail Terho was as second-best at this as he was at everything else, believed that book to have an unbreakable lock on it.

Of course his Healer was wrong. We all know that. We know that Terho opened that book. That he read through it, feeling more and more disturbed. That – accidentally – his fingers traced a passage that sucked him screaming into the underworlds.

We know he was trapped there, poor little lad.

The underworlds are a treacherous place. The energy alone wears at the innate nature of the fae. Not to mention that there are dark gods, disturbing creatures, demons and ghosts and ghouls, those of the dead who are lost. The very walls care not for one’s survival. No fae is truly equipped to survive down there. Oh, Unseelie can handle it better than most...but a Seelie fae? A Seelie mouse-lad?

Before he had even come of age, Terho was lost, spent wandering in the underworlds, eating alien fungi and grains that grew like warts from the sticky, damp ground. His sicknesses relapsed. He was dying. As sunlight forgot his bones, each step became a misery. Grief bloomed in his heart – he would never see his parents again, his Healer, the sky he didn’t know he loved quite so much until he could no longer see it.

Terho was attacked by an underworld demon – no oddity for Terho at this point – and he ran down a corridor, opening a door and locking it behind him, only to find the strangest thing – before him was another door, different in appearance. The demon pounded and banged and growled on the door behind him, so Terho made the easy choice. He went through the next door and locked it behind him.

He saw another door.

Curious and wanting to put as much distance between himself and the demon as possible, Terho made his way through many of those doors. He unmade our strong magic simply with his very nature, putting our Magecraft to shame.

Oh, certainly, it got harder as he went on. It took weeks and months. He had to return to forage for food, for there was none in the corridor. But he had a mission now, a task he had set for himself. He always returned and kept unlocking doors.

The poor thing thought he had nothing left to lose. He was sure he would die there.

Imagine his surprise when, upon unlocking that final door, he saw a gilt cage and a nightingale singing the sweetest, saddest song he had ever heard. And surely, surely, for such a beautiful thing to be locked up in a place Terho found so evil, it must be good. It must have been locked up by a demon, or god, and it needed to be released!

Hardly any fae remembered that Mourner nightingales had ever existed, and certainly one so young as Terho had never heard of the malice of the Nightingale.

But the lock on the cage was not so easy to break.

It took Terho a month, and in that time he and the small nightingale became friends. Terho stuttered his way through conversations, talking about his life and his sadnesses; and the nightingale listened to him, tilting its head, cooing appreciation.

The cage was unlocked, one nightingale became thousands upon thousands, streaming out and rushing back to the fae world, leaving Terho behind. But, perhaps remembering their debt, the nightingales returned, swirling around the collapsed Terho, transporting him back to the fae world.

Terho was ill, dying, he’d lost his apprenticeship, he was left behind with his Healer to convalesce. He could not take up his healing once more, and was alone and touched by so much darkness, so much of the underworlds, that all fae felt a strange repulsion to be around him.

A Mourner nightingale visited him sometimes, sang to him, listened to him; but that was the only one who seemed to care enough to pay any attention to him.

Let’s forget him again; as so many of us do, and return to the Nightingale.

It took time for the Nightingale to have the strength to return to his human-form once more; but once he found it, enough time had passed that many had forgotten his face and his story. Those who hadn’t, those of us who had even been the ones to lock him up, were deeply wary. How had he broken our magic? What was his secret? But the Nightingale was too powerful, too dangerous, and we could not get close enough to him to seal him up once more; indeed we didn’t know how to do it again, he’d foiled the magic of the most powerful Mages combined. We knew nothing of a mouse-lad unlocking him, we wouldn’t know of this until it was almost too late.

The Nightingale promised he meant no harm. He joined the Unseelie Court, befriending the much-admired Raven Prince. Did he start feeding on the Raven Prince’s deep-seated grief even back then? He wouldn’t have been able to help himself.

The Nightingale also knew that the tiny mouse-lad was owed a debt. Terho had saved his life. But corrupt and evil, a black pit incapable of love or compassion, the Nightingale thought not to pay back that debt truly but to possess the secrets of Terho. He stole the mouse-lad away, placed him in a mansion, left him behind. Terho was given food and water by faceless servants, but he was alone, and he was – unusually – locked up.

Terho couldn’t unlock this cage, and he didn’t know how, or why.

The Nightingale had him trapped, had found a way to thwart his magic. Terho was a prisoner. With no one else to talk to, he became dependent on the charming but cruel Nightingale, craving his brief visits over the decades, adoring his careless, callous attention. The Nightingale fed upon his sadness, delighted in the treasure that was Terho, but never paid back his debt. He intended to keep Terho for as long as his underfae life permitted him to live.

The Nightingale was polite and courteous to the rest of the world for decades.

But those of us who entrapped him waited for him to show his darkness, his plans, and show them he did.

The Nightingale wished to make a third Court. A Court that would bring underworld monsters and beings up into the fae and human worlds. A Court that would rule over humans, require obeisance from even the Seelie and Unseelie.

He was just strong enough to make it happen.

The Nightingale left the Raven Prince’s Court and began to create his own Court in the human world, reintroducing a sharp, awful awareness of the fae and those creatures of the underworld into human minds, turning the world to chaos.

Unbeknownst to the Nightingale, a desperate Seelie War General – fierce warrior, Gwyn ap Nudd – had started researching the Nightingale and in his travels abroad to discover details of this mad monarch, he discovered the existence of a small mouse-lad.

Terho had been abandoned when the Nightingale officially began building his third Court. He was alone, he knew not what was happening in the world and understood nothing of the Nightingale’s plans. He didn’t perceive his great evil, his desire to feed – en masse – upon the misery and grief and despair of the world.

He was alone for so long his love for the Nightingale began to dissipate, and that unlocked the lock in his heart, allowing him to finally escape the mansion. He journeyed to his old Healer, telling his story. Spilling words about underworlds and monsters and demons, locks and keys and cages, isolation and loss and the Nightingale.

The Healer, being Seelie, realised Terho was a part of the Nightingale’s plan and attempted to take him into custody. Terho, betrayed and confused, fled all the way back to the Nightingale’s mansion. He thought he would be safe.

But there, the Nightingale waited for him, a dead look in his reddened eyes, alerted by underworld creatures of his escape. Terho was punished for fleeing, relegated to a dusty tower with minimal rations. Locked up once more. Twisted into a trap by the love in his own heart.

So, after the tens of thousands of years of the Nightingale’s imprisonment, after the decades of Terho’s captivity...

The Nightingale began to enact his plans for power, further shattering the walls protecting the fae from the underworld. The Oak King retired and Gwyn ap Nudd became the Bright King, instituting a martial Court. Desperate to find a way to defeat the Nightingale, Gwyn ap Nudd tried everything, including visiting Terho many times, though he refused to help or leave the safety of the tower. For in this time, Terho had become reclusive and even more afraid of the world outside than the reliability of that small, stone prison.

Now we turn our attention – unexpectedly – to a once-beloved creature. The sixth reincarnation of the Each Uisge, an Unseelie waterhorse, had begun to rise to prominence in the Unseelie world. Going from favoured treasure of the Raven Prince, to trusted Advisor, here he entered Terho’s story for reasons we still don’t quite understand.

He visited Terho in his tower while the Nightingale was absent, using compulsions to force Terho to speak of how he released the Nightingale. Learning of how Terho unlocked the Nightingale, the Each Uisge became enraged beyond all measure. After all, he had a hatred for the Nightingale that was unparalleled by almost all else. We know he attempted to then attack Terho, but could not get into the tower without permission, bonded to those oldest of fae laws.

Then, abruptly, the Each Uisge became King of the Unseelie fae, the Raven Prince having disappeared to parts unknown. At the time, all were taken aback by this development, but many knew that the Each Uisge was perhaps more determined to defeat the Nightingale than even the Seelie fae, and so they allowed it without much question. In fact, his first order of business was to demote the Nightingale to underfae status, weakening him – if only temporarily, and rule that all Mourner nightingales be slaughtered on sight. At underfae status, the Nightingale was vulnerable to the Each Uisge’s compulsions – and so the waterhorse compelled him to remain in a cave, throwing force and repetition into his words, layering his compulsive magic until the Nightingale could not leave.

He was not defeated, but he was – at least for a time – rendered powerless. When he could finally break the compulsions, a year later, he was still hardly able to function. He fled to his mansion to recover, talking with Terho on occasion, rebuilding his strength.

Why, only four years later, did the Each Uisge return and offer the Nightingale a place on his Court? What compelled the waterhorse to offer him status, power, influence? It was a move almost none could fathom, and with the Unseelie Court formally backing the Nightingale, things became dire for the Seelie – for responsibility was on them to correct the imbalance between the realms.

King Gwyn ap Nudd returned to Terho’s tower to find him starving to death – the servants having abandoned their posts. He gave him Court status, fed him and healed him, stole him away from the mansion into the Seelie Court. There, the King realised he needed to not only defeat the Nightingale once more – for which he hoped to use Terho – but also overthrow the Unseelie Court of the Each Uisge, which was unstable and dangerous.

What a mess it became. What a mess it was.

Recognising Terho’s importance to King Gwyn, Terho was attacked by the Each Uisge, who wished to neutralise the one significant weapon that could be used against the Nightingale. After all, the Each Uisge knew very well how the Nightingale had escaped; he’d heard it from Terho himself. His attack was unsuccessful, and Gwyn rescued him from the Each Uisge’s clutches.

The mouse-lad, however, was broken, without a heartsong, traumatised from decades of captivity. He was tired, he only wanted to retreat from the world, from what he had learned of the world. But he was also resourceful. Allied with King Gwyn – a common sight in his Half-Healer’s robes by the King’s side – Terho revealed that he could lock the Nightingale up once more, if the Nightingale was trapped first in his bird form.

So it was that the Nightingale was lured by Terho the mouse-lad into the underworlds, and Terho betrayed his betrayer. Mages made the Nightingale into a bird once more – though I wasn’t there for it that time, I must admit – and Terho grabbed the bird with his mouse claws and thrust him into the cage, locking it with clever fingers, ignoring his song and locking all one hundred doors behind him.

The Nightingale was trapped once more. The fae world knew it had worked, for the Mourner nightingales disappeared from the fae world overnight.

No one has heard that sad song again.

As for Terho, well, he took on an integral role in defeating the corrupt and fractured Each Uisge. He came to discover that the Each Uisge’s unpredictable patterns were because he had been driven mad by the Nightingale, though how – exactly – we still don’t know, for the Nightingale never told his side of the story, and the Each Uisge is not known to volunteer personal information.

So Terho, along with the Each Uisge’s adopted brother, the Glashtyn, forced sickening underworld creatures into the Each Uisge’s body until he broke and rescinded his own Kingship. He was taken into Seelie Custody and...that’s another story for another time.

As for Terho...

Well what can we say?

Everyone knew by then that Terho was the reason the Nightingale had been freed in the first place. Terho was the catalyst, and all the damage after that would not have happened if Terho hadn’t found a bird and felt bad for it.

He was loathed. Hated. Attempts were made on his life. It mattered not that he was a hero, that he had defeated the Nightingale despite loving him and being terrified of him. It mattered not that Gwyn publically declared Terho a hero and champion of the fae.

People didn’t want his power to exist, and they came after him.

It was King Gwyn ap Nudd who found him a home in an unknown, isolated place, and warded it. But it was Terho who locked himself into that cottage and never came out again. The King paid a family of local sparrow-shifters to leave food for Terho by the door once or twice a week, and sometimes visited to talk to Terho through a window, patient with his stuttering, shy sentences, and his growing fear of the world.

Terho had once missed the sky when he was lost down in the underworlds. Now he couldn’t stand it. Even the fae world he’d once loved had betrayed him. Seeing clouds, the endless blue, the sun and moon and stars, it all mocked him. He lived in the dark, rarely lighting candles, and his thoughts turned to the endlessness of death.

The Nightingale was trapped again, but the fae world was in disorder, ruptured not only by the actions of the Each Uisge and the Nightingale, but also by those first breaches into the underworld that caused an energy to leak into the fae world that eroded it, changed it.

Terho was trapped once more in a cage of his own making. At three hundred and thirty six years of age, barely out of adulthood, he stays in that cottage and does nothing more than snatch a covered basket of food off the doorstep while he still thinks to survive. I believe King Gwyn ap Nudd nurses a great regret for Terho and how his life turned out; but what can be done? The world was saved as much as it could be saved. The evils were imprisoned, good triumphed, and in all ways, my friends, this looks like a fairytale where the benevolence of the Seelie prevailed.

I think of Half-Healer Terho often. When I see mouse-shifters, when I see mice, when I see clouds and sunlight and the gentle moon and fall in love with the wonder of our world all over again. I think of him hiding from the great bowl of the sky, living in the darkness he had feared and wanted to escape for years while he was lost in the underworld.

I can tell from some of your faces that many of you still dislike or even hate Terho. But he was like you or I, like any of us – his life is one of what it is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Except, perhaps, that he was in the right place at the right time for the Nightingale – and this was never really a story about Terho, was it?

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