A Faerie Tale Of Twin Queens - SCP Foundation

LORDXVNV

A Faerie Tale of Twin Queens by LORDXVNV

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As told by Olivié Gwyneth, of the Fae Lodge of Esterberg

Once upon a time, there was an Empire ruled by Twin Queens.

It was the First Empire, though they did not call it that, for they had no reason to dream it would ever fail and that others would rise in its stead. To them, it was simply the Empire, forever and eternal. The Empire of the Fae, the Fair Folk, the Children of Eternity.

In those days, it was said that there were neither stars nor gods in the heavens, and the Earth had not yet been sundered into the nations of the world. There was only harmony, under the glorious auspices of the Queen at Peace, the Inventor, and the Queen of War, the Undoer.

In those days, the Slumbering Ones had yet to slumber, and so the lines between waking and dreaming, Real and Unreal, were but waves breaking upon a distant shore, ebbing and flowing with every thought and breath. In every hour of every day, the Inventor danced between reality and fantasy. She would dream up wild stories, of men who had no fur, of cats that stood on four paws and could not speak, of worlds beyond the earth and stars that loved and hated, who sent messages of love to the Makers of Music and twin weapons bound to destruction. In her wake, her sister followed, restoring the world to dreary imperial mundanity.

The Fair Folk were formless then. They were spirits in a joyful adolescence, one that seemed like it would never end. And like children, they explored who they were and who they might become without any heed for the grim and heartless cruelties of the world.

Some spent lifetimes as trees, living the centuries of sequoia or the meager decades of bonsai, embracing the fungal decay that consumes dead wood, before returning to life to do it all again.

Some took the forms of creatures beyond the mirrors, faces twisted and made grotesque, and danced between the homes of early man. For Thinking Men were but children then: those of them free were huddling in the savannahs and crafting their first tools out of stick and stone, while far more lay in bondage, to the Descended Ones or to Ur-Daevon or to the Undoer herself. They stole, hunted and gathered food, appeared in the surfaces of water and haunted nightmares; and on occasion they would switch the destinies of a human child and one of their own, in a sick game to see which would grow into greatness.

Some saw wonder in the animal kingdom, and sculpted their forms like the beasts of air and darkness:

Some embraced fur and fang, for in those ancient days the Undoer had not yet cast the fourth of her curses upon the Fair Folk, and being an animal was not seen as being any lesser than being a thinking man.

Some wore gossamer wings and great big eyes, probosci in place of teeth, and armor atop the flesh instead of bones within. They spread and multiplied, as fecund as the insect kingdoms themselves, armies of drones swearing allegiance to the Twin Queens.

(And of those, some carved out faerielands behind the rainbows and made there their homes, where they spun strands of liquid luck from the split fiber of the colors.)

Some chose to diminish their statures, so the world and all its glories became ever more grand, so that even the youngest sapling might be a pillar that pierced the sky, and that a single mushroom feed a family for a moon, and that mice and magpies might be ridden as mighty steeds. They were light enough to float upon the winds without aid, and small enough that they had cause to fear the beasts of the wild, should they venture far into the wilds. So they remained among the grand self-cities of their sibling Fae, and saw them as ever grander through tiny eyes.

Some forsook the real to dwell within the realm of dreams, becoming tricksters and riddle-folk, who emerged at crossroads and turning points to offer hope and peril. In later ages, their Names and their stories would become the gods of mortal man and fae, and they would live second lives, bringing their ancient kind with them.

Some set themselves in the heavens, becoming the stars, descending to earth to silver cities and playing games of petty kingdoms, pretending for lifetimes that they were masters of their own destiny and not subservient to empire.

And some delighted in function over form, devoted themselves to the study of the forces of the universe, sought to plumb the depths of being, tearing the universe apart at the base and reassembling it to bring forth fortune and light. For they saw a future where they would not share in the bounty of eternity, where the cornucopia of the Inventor would run dry.

For the Inventor looked upon each of them with pride and shared with them her power — save the scholars, who sought to know the firmament without molding it with stray dreams. With her blessing they were the people of sea and sky, earth and air, wonder and whimsy. They danced up and down the great chain of being, profound in one life and debased the next. It was a time where death meant nothing.

And the other Twin looked upon this world and thought it a waste.

For she had gazed into the past, and knew it hardly stretched back a hundred million years. She had seen the Ur-Time, when time itself was timeless, and all things were stories, happening in parallel harmony, over and under, a tapestry of possibility, when gods and names were but masks elemental forces swapped between one fight or romance and another.

She saw her sister’s bounty and thought it folly, thought it a wasteful attempt to give an undeserving people a taste of what the world could no longer be. There was no reason to give these creatures, mortal and descended, a taste of forever. Eternity was over; the Empire was to take its place.

The Inventor had shared her power across a million souls and selves, violet wisps gleaming on the horizons of all being. The Undoer saw these stars-before-the-stars and wanted them for herself. Yet she knew that her sister’s being was scattered, and that any such theft would take a hundred thousand years, one soul at a time.

(I think it wise to note that the stories say the Undoer alone brought the Empire, that she alone ended the days of wonder for those of power — yet that cannot be. A tyrant cannot rule alone, not even one as powerful as she. Those who played at petty kingdom in their silver cities upon the seas, those who treated mortal men as playthings, and those who clothed themselves as wolves to hunt — I think it likely they welcomed the Undoer's reign and saw, in the shadow of her power, a chance to grow their own.)

She made her way to the heart of the world, beyond her sister’s gaze from the heavens. In the deathly furnace at the heart of the world she bade come forth Sa’tn, Yeren Smith-Slave, he of wine-red fur and cleft foot, and set to him a task. To this devilish smith she spoke of a weapon so cruel and lethal none like it had ever been dreamt of: the Irrilite Tuner, a tool that would bind the harmonies of the Fae into a single tone, a two-pronged fork by which she could pin her sister’s wings and bring the heavens crashing down to earth.

Sa’tn Smith-Slave would not make her this weapon for free, and demanded from her a kingdom of his own and freedom for his people. The Undoer promised him this, knowing she would not deliver; he accepted, knowing she lied.

In the heart of the Earth he forged the Irrilite Tuner, a two-pronged fork. He beheld it, admiring it, imagining that he himself might wield such a bident, and let it sing of his hopes in the core of the earth, before giving it to the Undoer.

So the Undoer left the underworld and made her return to the sphere of Air and Darkness.

The Undoer did not merely hate her sister and her follies — she coveted her power for her own. She spent so much of her own power restoring the world to imperiality, calming the storms of wonder and imagination kicked up by fae dancing through clouds and music. But all that power remained hers, bound in the foundation stones of the Imperial Palace, in the Throne of Faeburg and the Royal Jewels.

And so it was that the Inventor came to the Imperial Palace, thinking nothing of the meeting. She was clad in iridescent memory, her garments gossamer and lace, her face a thousand points of light constantly rearranging from one guise to another. The Undoer sat upon the True Throne of Faeburg, that held the power of the Queen, and bade her sister welcome.

There are many tales of what happened on that day. None agree. Over the past hundred thousand years of ancestral memory, there have been countless tales of why the Undoer hated the Inventor. Countless tales of venom spat, of magickal duels fought, of sister against sister. But there were only two witnesses of that day, and neither of them can speak of what occurred.

We know only this. In the end, when both had fought to exhaustion, when the Royal Jewels no longer glistened with power and the Imperial Palace had fallen into ruin, the Irrilite Tuner pierced the Inventor, and pinned wings that had not been solid a moment before. The world shuddered and gasped, as the power of the heavens was grounded to earth. The people of fur and fang, of gossamer and chitin, of mirror and lie, of silver and science, froze, unable to shift their forms any longer. I imagine the Undoer must have smiled in triumph, thinking that her sister, in her weakened state, would call her power back to herself, beneath the twin prongs of the Irrilite Tuner, where it would be suited for the harvest and the restoration of glory.

Greed cannot understand generosity, for in those moments, the Inventor simply… ceased. She did not call back her power, but let it pass from her, flow into the world that she loved so much, let herself become part of the beating tides of time and nothingness. And to that, the Undoer had only impotent rage.

It is a simple story, of one sister betraying another. It is not as simple as the tale of Eden, or the breaking of the Mechanical God, or of even Cain and Abel. But it is simple enough that there are a thousand tellings of it.

But those are stories of ages long past. These days, we know of Type Greens and Humes and have a formal study of Ontokinetics. We have mapped the genetic relations of the various peoples called Faerie. We have unearthed the palaces of the First Empire and studied its artifacts. The distant past is no longer the study of myth, but history. We grow ever closer to pulling nuggets of truth from the fantastical.

Yet it is said that even now, the Inventor’s power dances upon the shores of being, from the boundaries of the Unreal at the base of creation to the Oneiric worlds of Dream and Nightmare. Sometimes, her power returns to the Real, granting children the power to shape the world to their whimsy. Perhaps, with every telling of her tale, a part of her lives again for just a moment.

Perhaps the gods were once Fae, who stood hand-in-hand with my own ancestors, parted at a crossroads they knew not of. Perhaps, if I had been born in those timeless days, I too would choose to live a life as a mortal, not knowing the gravity of my choice. Or perhaps the Irrilite Tuner is just a story to explain why humans call so many different beings — pixies, nymphs, sylphs, Sidhe, elves, and more — fairies.

Burdened with inevitable mortality, only through our stories may we dance upon the winds.

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