Welcome to Gaia! ::

The following posts are excerpts, pages if you will, from a worn old leather bound journal owned by one Aylin Rhys pixie of the air clan. This journal recounts past experiences, adventures, and stories told in the first person point of view to explain and explore a good chunk of the one hundred eight years of her life. In it you will find references to family members, the pixie clan, explorations of Gaia, a human husband, and one embarassing moment when she was just four years old.

This first page, or series of pages really, comes from a moment when Aylin was fifty and her human travel companion of five years, Orrin Stewart, was only twenty-five. This is just one of a few incidents in her life that Aylin refers back to quite a lot.





Mood: Complete and utter speechless shock mixed in with panic beyond belief

Reason: What I thought was fake and innocent yesterday turned out to be completely real and legal.

Maybe someday I'll look back on this and laugh at it all. I doubt that will happen anytime within the next few days, weeks, or months though. You see something happened yesterday on June 4, 1952 that changed my life forever and boy will my parents be angry about it. Let me go back about four days and set the story up right. It's only fair that the events leading up to what happened yesterday be explained as well.

Four days ago, Orrin and I were traveling from the regions around the old aqueducts towards Orrin's hometown of Barton. Orrin's father Mr. Stewart is the current head of the Barton Town Regulars, a group of dedicated individuals charged with keeping the peace in Barton. They're pretty much along the same lines as the Air Clan's military unit. The Regulars, as Orrin explained it, are a combination of modern day police tactics and old world knightly chivalry and dress. The Regulars wear full blown medieval styled armor, which would explain the chest plate and shoulder guards Orrin was wearing the day we met five years ago.

You see, Orrin is technically a Regular in training and his father let him have five years to go off and have one last grand adventure before returning home to take his place as a Regular. That's the reason for our visit to Barton. Orrin explained that once we reach Barton Town the time would come for him to join his father's side in the ranks of the Barton Town Regulars. However, Orrin didn't seem all that eager to return home. I knew there had to be a reason why he was intentionally delaying our journey back to Barton Town. That's when he told me about Celia, the daughter of the town's mayor.

It turned out when Orrin and Celia were little her father and Mr. Stewart struck a deal. If neither of their children had found anyone to marry by the age of twenty-five, a rather odd benchmark in my mind, they would marry each other. Orrin explained that Celia had a crush on him as a child and when he left at twenty to explore the Gaian countryside she still carried a torch for him. Celia promised to wait for Orrin to return so they could be married. In other words, Orrin was delaying his own wedding date.

I told Orrin to buck up and be a man so to speak and reassured him things would work out. He wanted out of marrying Celia more than anything on Gaia. If all he had to do was find someone to marry before he reached home Orrin would be out of his arrangement with the Mayor and wouldn't have to marry Celia. That's when I volunteered myself to pose as his new fiance. At the time I didn't think it would do any harm. At the time I didn't know just what pretending to be Orrin's fiance would lead to. At the time I set myself up for something that changed both of our lives forever.

Orrin and I arrived in Barton Town a day later to what we thought was a huge celebration in honor of his homecoming. What Orrin did return home to was actually a welcome home celebration for Orrin's closest childhood friend Matt. Matt had spent the last seven years in Durem studying philosophy and theology at a school connected to the Durem cathedral. Orrin explain, or at least he believed at the time, Matt was studying theology in order to work under the clerics at the Cathedral unlocking the mysteries of the ancient Gaian gods. Orrin was about to find out just how wrong that belief was when he introduced me to people as his fiance.

When his parents found out their son had found a woman to marry him and start a family with they were overjoyed. When they saw my less than statuesque nature, skin color, and very obvious wings they were a little more than speechless to say the very least. It took them a good solid thirty minutes or so before they came out of the den in the family home. It was at that point they decided to finally talk to me on a personal level. And, after an hour of questions about my background, family, education, and obvious interest in my fifteen year military career they were finally satisfied with their son being with a pixie when I mentioned that to my clan I was seen as a princess. That's when they said Orrin and I should be wed right away and set June 4, 1952, two days from our arrival, as the day of the wedding.

Orrin and I both panicked for, oh, all of fifteen minutes before we concocted what we believed to be a brilliant plan to be married without actually getting married. That's when we decided to fake our own wedding with Matt, who had full clerical robes with him (robes Orrin thought were a mere gift), as our officiator. That was the mistake to end all mistakes and we didn't know it at the time. We were totally clueless as to the real reason for the town throwing a party for Matt and why he owned full cleric robes from the Durem Cathedral.

We clued Matt and his younger sister Sarah in on our little plan. It didn't occur to us at the time why Matt kept trying to tell us something important and why Sarah was trying to hold in her laughter. The next day on June 4 in front of the town fountain and the entire town of Barton Orrin and I faked our own wedding. It was a grand affair to say the least. I was dressed in a beautiful white gown adorned with blue and green flowers and Orrin wore the dress uniform of the Barton Regulars. The fake service officiated by Matt had everyone believing it was was the real thing. And when it was over, Orrin and I thought we had fooled the entire town into thinking we were actually married. But, we were the fools.

After the reception had ended Matt and Sarah took us aside and broke the news to us. Our fake wedding was a real one. Matt really was a cleric at the Durem Cathedral. The robes were truly his. He was home in Barton Town to celebrate his becoming a cleric after seven years of higher education and post graduate work in theology. And we, we were his first official wedding ceremony. So here we are. It's the next day and we have to break the news to the two people on Gaia who would probably turn my best friend, traveling companion, and now husband into a toad, my parents. I am doomed. And if I survive telling them I got married in a human ceremony maybe someday I'll be able to laugh at all of this. Maybe someday.

This particular page comes from one of Aylin's more recent journals. Written eight years ago it chronicles one of Aylin's more difficult decisions in the recent years of her life. Having buried her husband only days before Aylin, still in shock over losing him, contemplates leaving her family home to mourn her loss and feel whole again. What she describes is going to be the Gaia equivalent of having ALS.





The tingle that overcame my body four days ago has finally left. The feeling that seemed to leave me has returned. My brain seems to be registering sound and light again. People said he wouldn't live as long as he did. They said he would be lucky to live for five years. He defied the odds. Sure it was possible for him to do but not many people do. At first it was just his arms and legs that slowly stopped working. Then in the last three years his mind began to go. He was so strong and alert and looked so young even though he was sixty-five. Ten years of illness changed all that. When he died he looked as though he were a human of my age. He looked one hundred and frail and weak and when he died he didn't know me as his wife but as an angel. The last thing he said to me in a weak was, "Are you an angel come to take me away?"

And so I sit here in our home. The bed that feels so empty without him. The kitchen that sounds so quiet without his laugh. And the home that smells so different without him. In anger and frustration I tried to use a spell to get rid of the empty chair he spent the last three years of his life in after the burial. That didn't go too well. I now have a rabbit's tail sticking out my backside.

So here I am sitting in this empty reminder of the last fifty years of my life. He hung around a month after our fiftieth wedding anniversary. I'm sitting here wondering what to do next. My family is preparing for my period of mourning. I don't want to go around in black from head to toe living in the widows' house until my father tells me I'm done mourning. That's for those who are eight hundred or more. The women in that house live that way because they need each other to care for them in their elderly age. No I want out of here until I'm ready to go back.

I've made up my mind. Tomorrow I'll pack up enough things to carry on my back, then I'll say my goodbyes, and the next day I'll leave. Where I'll go I don't know but I need to leave. I need to be on my own again and when I'm read then and only then I'll come back. I want this. I need this.