Beyond the Gateway (Cranksepticeye)

Four

"Ethan!"
He turned at the sound of his name to see a fellow Jade emerging from the trees.
"Maddox." He held out a hand and they clasped forearms, smiling.
"How goes the day, Eth?" Maddox asked, as light warm lilt to his voice.
Ethan shrugged."does it feel different to you yet?"
"Nah." Maddox shoot his head. "Feels just like every other year. Calm, serene, peaceful . . . well. That'll soon change. In less than an hour's time, the cracks will start to show in the Gate. And every night after this one, for the next eight, there will be more cracks. Bigger ones. Until Halloween, when all hell breaks loose. Face it, Eth." Maddox lowered his voice even there was no one who could possibly overhear them. "Nine nights of the Gate opening eider and wider, and only a handful of Jade to protect it. There's a lot of Folk, mostly the nastier ones, who are willing to take that risk."
Ethan grimaced. He didn't understand why any of the Fair Folk would want to live in this world. He certainly didn't. The noise alone was almost enough to drive him mad.
"Do you ever get used to it, Maddox?" Ethan asked, a bit hesitantly. "This place I mean."
"I'd be the wrong lad to ask," Maddox grunted. "For one thing, I don't think I've been here long enough. Even just the concept of electricity gives me the willies."
"After three years?" Ethan asked, surprised.
"Aye, well. We may have both been, you know . . . taken . . . when gaslight was still in vogue, Eth, but I was old enough when I was, when it happened I actually remember that world. That time. I just try not to think about it now."
Ethan thought about that for a moment. He had only been a baby when he'd been taken. The only life he'd ever known was the one the Fair Folk gave him. It must have been difficult for those like Maddox . . . to have known right from the start that the shining, glorious people who raised you were not your own. That you weren't one of theirs. And worse, knowing that your own world was no longer, and never could again be yours . . . Ethan felt uncomfortable. It wasn't something he liked giving deep thought to, though he couldn't have explained why.
They stopped near the park's Bow Bridge, which spanned the Lake just west of Bethesda Terrace, linking to the relative windedness of the Ramble to the more formal, manicured gardens of Cherry Hill. The bridge struck Ethan as an apt metaphor for the Gate itself. They stood silently, gazing out over the water for a long moment.
"And after all," Maddox shrugged off the suddenly somber mood and waved a hand at the beauty before them, "this place does have its charms." He clapped Ethan on the back. "Come on, then. We don't want to be late for the opening."

All around Ethan and Maddox, the air thrummed with tense anticipation ad they reached the summit of the Hill and were welcomed into a loose circle of their Jade brethren. There were thirteen of them, changelings all.
There was Fennrys Wolf, legendary for his berserker-like rages and sullen temperament. According to Maddox, the cradle Fenn had been stolen from sometime in the ninth century had been that of a Viking prince. War craft was in his blood, or so he declared every time Ethan saw him.
Camina and Bellamy were twins, sister and brother. Slender, graceful, and quiet, they'd been Jade Guards since almost the beginning and were notoriously efficient.
There was Goldwyn, genial, handsome . . . ruthless.
Bryan and Beni, one light, one dark, different as night and day. Insanely competitive, and utterly inseparable, "the lads" could usually be found engaged in some sort of contest, be it darts or pool or just punching each other in the arm to see who could take it the longest.
There was Ghost. Thin and silent, with dark eyes and a pale face, more haunted than haunting, Ethan had always thought. He didn't know Ghost's real name, or even what part of the world he'd been taken from. An odd young man, but then . . . he'd been taken by Queen Mabh.
Beside Ghost stood Aaneel, the oldest, who had ages since left his home in India and was one of the only a handful of changelings who had lived long enough in the Otherworld to have aged well into adulthood. His black hair had begun to silver at the temples, contrasting with his deep coppery complexion.
Next to Aaneel was Perry, the youngest, save for Ethan. Perry had been taken in 1719 from a tiny hamlet in the north of France that had suffered failed crops year after year. In exchange for Perry, Titania had granted the place mild weather and fertile soil, so a town that had almost died didn't.
Finally, Selene, pale and pretty, with fox-brown hair and a smattering of freckles, and absolutely lethal aim with a long bow; and Cait, skilled in more forms of hand-to-hand combat than anyone else in the group, she much preferred to cast spells and warding enchantments instead.
Together they watched as the sun finally dipped completely below the horizon and Central Park slipped into darkness. The first of the Nine had begun. With a singular purpose, the Jade moved, spreading out to cover the four corners of the park.
Splitting off from the others to travel south, Ethan ran along the treacherously rocky terrain of the Ravine, reaching deep in his mid, feeling past the delicate, obscuring mists of Auberon's flawed enchantment to where the walls between the worlds were so thin they became doors. He felt for which of those doors might just open that night . . .
There.
Thirty yards east, maybe thirty-five. Ethan crept uth the path and stood, loose limbed and at ready, his blood warmed from running and anticipation of the coming fight. Some of the Fairy that tried to cross would retreat back to the Otherworld at the very first hint of a Jade in the vicinity. But the timid among the Fair Folk were also less likely to cross in the first place.
Ethan reached into the leather messenger bag slung across his body and drew the forth a bundle of three short, straight sticks, tied with red leather cord: a branch each oc oak, ash, and thorn. Ethan murmured an ancient secret incantation, and a silver-bladed sword appeared in his hand in their place. He held it ready by his side.
Suddenly the granite wall in front of Ethan began to waver like a mirage, and then cracked. A ghostly, iridescent light seeped through the split in the stone, and Ethan could see diminutive figured silhouetted in the glow. A tiny, wizened face peered out at him. When the creature saw the Jade standing there, it did not turn back to the Fairy lands. Instead it gave a nasty, high-pitched giggle.
A piskie-fae.
Ethan tried not to roll his eyes as he reached back into his bag and withdrew a handful of rock salt. He threw the salt into the piskie's leering face. The thing squealed and disappeared back into the rift.
That was far too easy! he thought, grinning. He might not have to use his blade at all.
His reflection was interrupted by an angry buzzing. It was though Ethan had just thrown a stone at a nest if hornets. Scrabbling at one another and the edges of the rift, a swarm of tiny, blood-lusting piskies came rushing at him, pale thin bodies glimmering like knives in the darkness.

It took Ethan the better part of an hour, and the carnage, on a piskie-scale, was considerable.
As he cleaned the green, glowing piskie blood from the blade of Hus sword and veiled it once more, Ethan felt no remorse. The piskie-fae that attacked him got what they deserved. Piskie weren't all nasty. Some, back home, were even occasionally useful, although their malicious pranks made them annoying as hell.
But these had been positively homicidal, and in far greater numbers than Ethan had ever been warned about.
Maddox would give him a very hard time about how long it had taken Ethan to defeat such minor fae. Ethan wondered how Maddox himself was doing. Or any of the others, for that matter. Because there were only thirteen Jade, it was unlikely that their paths would cross much over the next nine nights. They had the whole park to cover.
The ground at Ethan's feet was littered with rock salt crystals and flattened by his own boot prints in a rough circle that spread about three yards wide all around him. He hadn't, I'm the frenzy, realized, just how big the swarm had been. He paced the diameter of the circle. Really big. Especially for creatures with an outside height of only six or seven inches.
Ethan stared at the trampled earth and frowned. It didn't make a ton of sense.
Piskie weren't necessarily the smartest fae, but they were usually pretty crafty. He would have expected them to have spread out. Come at him in staggered waves. Find more than just one rift. Instead it looked as if they had launched a massed assault at this spot to keep him busy and anchored in one position.
Ethan swore explosively and spun in a circle on his heel, casting out with his Jade perception, so heavily preoccupied until now. A sudden, blinding crimson light shot through his mind. His insides went cold. Something was terribly wrong somewhere south. He struggled to focus, to pinpoint the blazing light map in his mind . . .
There it was. Or, rather, there it had been.
Ethan started to run.
But he knew, in his heart, that he was already much too late.

Crouching near the edge of the Lake, Ethan put his cheek to the cold ground and peered along the surface of the water, still swirling with iridescence, evidence of recent passage through the Samhain Gate to this realm from the Otherworld.
Something other than piskies had come through the Gate, very recently. Maybe half an hour earlier. Ethan lay with his cheek to the ground for a better view and stared eye-level out over the obsidian surface of the lake.
There.
There was a faintly glowing trail leading out of the water. Ethan sprang to his feet and ran over to investigate.
The soft ground at the edge of the lake was churned to mud. It looked as if there had been some kind of struggle, or as if something had been dragged out of the water and onto the path. Here and thee Ethan saw the elongated circular impressions of what could have only been footprints. He crouched on the earth for a closer look.
It was Central Park, after all. Horses pulled cartridges through the park, and wealthy equestrians rod their mounts along the bridle paths. But these prints had come from unshod hooves. And the water pooled in the impressions had the same telltale iridescent sheen.
A kelpie? Ethan turned over the clues in his mind.
In one of the prints, Ethan found strands of course black horsehair and three blue glittering onyx beads carved in the shapes of stags' heads.
He pocketed the hair and beads and stood, looking around. From the corner of his eye, Ethan saw something pale hidden in the reeds. He retrieved the object, brushing damp vegetation from its surface. It was a script, held together with brass fasteners through the punch holes. The don't cover was gone, but the Dramatis Personae was mostly intact, although marred by a hoofprint that looked as though its edges were slightly scorched. Handwritten notes were scribbled in the margins, and at the top of the page a note in marker read Jack's Script. Ethan frowned, fanning through the play, until a smattering of dialogue caught his eye.
"Out of this wood do not desire to go," began the speech, and Ethan almost dropped the pages in surprise.
He'd heard those very words not long before.
Ethan scanned the lakeshore one last time and knelt at the edge of the path. Buried almost completely in the mud lay the trampled remains of a single peach-colored rose. Ethan plucked a bruised petal and held it up before his eyes. The script. The boy from the Shakespeare Garden.
His firecracker.
Jack . . .