To Vernon

[IamLEAM1983]

What do Mantles feel like? What's it like to Choose so late in life?

[IamLEAM1983]

"I Chose in the midst of a particularly difficult period of my life. My wife and daughter had died almost a year prior, and I needed no social encouragement to adhere to Victorian mourning standards - I still felt like wearing black several months later. All I had left was the drudgery of my office hours, the platitudes of the Court, and a pervasive sense of weariness. If I sat down almost anywhere, I nearly always fell asleep. Of course, modern psychology would have recognized that as a depressive state, but I was outwardly behaving in as stolid and restrained a way as the social mores dictated. As far as my associates were concerned, I was the spitting image of health. My gaining weight was merely seen as old age settling in, and my constant exhaustion simply stood as a lovable point of eccentricity. Sleepy Vernon, as I was called, nodded off at dinner or early in the morning. I dozed off during the pastor's sermons and could scarcely read my client's files in my office. I slept like a log at night, but found no restoration in it. My hair was greying and my features were turning flaccid... In retrospect, I was ripe for a stroke."

March was lazily unwinding, the last of the winter's larger storms had covered the city, and I awoke in my armchair, feeling more exhausted than I had before nodding off. My mind swam with lurid dreams of Josephine and Emma's walking corpses rapping on our door incessantly, and my mouth felt terribly parched: I'd been snoring loud enough to wake the help two stories above me, my housekeeper coming down to berate me as she had in the weeks past... I remember trudging or crawling to the bathroom, almost - and spying a look at myself in the mirror.

I was horrified. I looked nothing like the man who had loved Josephine Wickham or fathered Emma Haskill; I stood as this flaccid imitation of the real thing, melting wax stretched over a vaguely bloated frame, with empty eyes that failed to show that spirit my wife had so loved! Revulsion rose and I briefly thought of retching - but then I felt it. My core as a Fae, my stubborn glint of hope amidst a life I had no interest or passion for any longer...

I closed my eyes, and I touched it from within. Fresh, almost Arctic air seemed to radiate outwards from my chest, filling me with renewed vigor and energy. It raced across the tendrils of my mind, and I felt the invigorating cold tear away at my pervasive gloom. My mind was filled to the brim with Josie and Emma's laughter, with their perfumes and flashes of holiday gowns they'd worn; I remembered Josie's strong and silent love for me and, well-

I fell to my knees in the bathroom and wept with gratitude even as my wife and child's laughter rang out like carol bells. I felt loved and supported as no man had ever been before or since - and that love, that soft, gentle winter breeze - surged across my face. I felt my scalp, nose and ears fiercely itch for a few moments, but could barely focus on them. My heart was a raging storm made up of rowdy evenings spent in good company, and I felt myself burn at the heart of my own cold, as if a hundred thousand fireplaces were all warming me while a blizzard raged outside. I felt a wild joy surge up from deep within my gut, carried upwards by all of Brightest Winter's English and Celtic pride. I heard drums and flutes and wild chants in Gaelic, I saw the whorls of via across my body behind my closed eyelids like Celtic knotwork - and three words burned themselves in my mind, carrying more joy than I'd ever thought possible:

I am Sidhe.

I remember standing up clumsily, unused to the feeling of having earned back a lifetime's worth of strength and stamina. When I could see myself, I saw what you see now before you; all dark hair and long, emotive ears and a hooked and proud nose that had only been a suggestion only moments ago. My mind felt calmer, but that fierce joy of earlier felt almost achingly close. It felt as though a part of me that had been silenced in my youth could now speak to me - and it spoke of ribald, raucous things I dare not repeat here. The Change had been taxing, however, and a new kind of hunger rose in me. I felt as though I had ridden on horseback for an entire day across miles of ice and sleet, and desperately needed warmth and meat and the juices of cooked flesh to fill me. I raided three pubs that night, spent dozens of pounds on a hunger that felt almost impossible to satiate. For each bite, I remember thinking I should have killed that stag, and somehow knew exactly how I would have thrown that spear or pulled my bow's string. The food tasted like everything I'd ever hoped food to taste like, and I bitterly welcomed satiation.

Of course, there were reasons for this. My body now had an entire set of muscles to rebuild and recondition, and this required fuel. I spent a month in what almost feels like a second puberty, eating like a whale and sleeping it off whenever I simply wasn't marvelling at how the world had changed. Colours were vibrant, now, more lively than ever, and everyone else looked so... fragile. Pitiful, almost. The darkest corners of London beckoned, and I longed to see it all. I almost thanked my first three or four cutpurses, as novel as was the experience of being accosted by ruffians to me. I remember spending a week running everywhere and ignoring the city's coach services, and another paying for dance classes. What Josephine had failed to introduce to me now interested me greatly, as the notion of movement was fascinating.

My father assured me that I would return to something approaching mortal norms of sustenance and interest - my body and mind were simply in need of a period of adjustment. By the time the first two years had passed, the Mantle had receded to that abovementioned nugget of wild joy in my chest, and I no longer felt forced to cater to overblown urges. I knew the breadth and depth of my strength, knew the limits of my celerity, and had left the lofty heights of a superhuman's existence to descend to the more productive levels of quasi-human functionalities. My strength and speed were always there, coiled and ready to spring forward when needed - but I was now free to apply rational thought to them.

My Mantle and I have been as such ever since."