The Pixie and the Professor: A Dark Academia Tale

She never meant to fall in love with a human. Seeing one at all was a rarity, this deep in the woods. But pixies were only supposed to concern themselves with the flowers they tended to and adored. Even under the thick branches of the old growth forest, tender plants still budded and bloomed and had to be cared for. And she did love the flowers, she did. In fact, that was why he caught her eye in the first place and wouldn’t leave her mind.

He walked through the forest a little more quietly than most humans. And when he saw her patch of spring bluebells, he didn’t reach down to take one or stomp through them uncaringly. He bent down and inhaled deeply, and then looked closely at a single bloom, touching its petals. He made her feel like an artist whose work was being admired. She felt her cheeks heat with embarrassment and something more.

As he stood to go, a card fell out of his pocket onto the ground. A friend he was traveling with called out for him, confirming the name typed in a bold font on the front. Even though the card was almost as tall as she was, she struggled to carry it home with her.

The other pixies teased her about her random piece of thick cardstock paper, tucked into the corner of her hollow. But she found herself distractedly tracing the shape of the letters. Soon she had to admit she was besotted, and she knew she had to do something about it. It was time to see the swamp hag.

The swamp hag was known throughout the forest for her powerful magic and her hideous appearance. No one came near her lair unless they wanted to ask her for a favor or a spell, or both. But she never gave away anything for free. Everyone knew that. So with a pang of regret, the pixie chose her most beloved possession from her hollow, wrapped it in a knapsack made from a green leaf, and brought it with her. It was a hagstone, but one that had been carved years ago by a troll with a pattern of spirals. The hole in the rock, naturally-bored, was clear of obstruction, easy to gaze through, and lovely. It was perfect in every way, and now the pixie was giving it up. Giving it up because she had to see her human again.

Anyone who wanted to ask a favor of the swamp witch knew to wait for her at the dark hollow tree. It just wouldn’t do to tromp right up to her front door and knock. Such behavior would certainly start any transaction off on the wrong foot. This begged the question of how the swamp hag would even know you were waiting at the hollow tree. But of course somehow she always knew. The pixie smelled her arrival a few moments before the bog hag appeared. The wind shifted, and the air smelled like bog and peat, sour mold and a hint of resin and spice.

“You needed me, child?”

The pixie huffed indignantly at being called a child. She was eighty summers old! But admittedly, judging from the way the swamp hag appeared as cracked and wrinkled as a mud pile after the sun dried it out, she suspected she was indeed a child compared to her advanced age.

“I need to be human-sized. I need to pass for a human person woman thing,” she explained. “There’s a human man. He looked at my flowers so kindly and gently. And I have to get to know him better.”

The swamp hag sighed and the grasses nearby swayed in the breeze of her breath. “Oh dear child. Are you sure? Quite sure?”

The pixie nodded, and handed the hag her hagstone as payment.

Spells aren’t always pretty. The next thing the pixie knew, she heard the swamp hag making a guttural sound deep in her throat, and she spat a glob of spittle onto a patch of mud near her feet. The hag reached a gnarled hand down into the muck and spread it onto the pixie’s wings near her back, muttering a spell in a language older than any now used in the forest.

It felt like splitting in two. It felt like coming apart into a million pieces and being reassembled back together. The pain made her scream inside her head, but she was too breathless to make any actual noise. The world warped and distorted, and she felt her wings slip from her back like water off a flower petal as she stretched and grew taller.

The swamp witch gestured for her to look in the mirrored reflection of the nearby pond. When the pixie peered in, she saw herself, but enormous. Just the oval of her face was larger than her entire body used to be. Her pixie garb had also somehow stretched and grown along with her skin and bones. The acorn cap she wore as a jaunty hat was still atop her head, and her brown leaf boots were still on her feet. She smiled at the swamp hag, happy and frightened at the same time. It is no small thing to change oneself for love.

The swamp hag waddled over to her, reaching up to hand her a tiny and iridescent gift. It was the pixie’s wing, now so small she could cradle it in both hands.

“I will keep one, and you will keep the other. You have a fortnight, little flower. Two weeks in which to find your handsome prince, and decide what you want for sure and certain. At the end of those weeks you will pay. One way or the other.”

It was a threat, perhaps, or just a warning. The pixie wasn’t sure, and she was too dizzy and distracted by her new body to ask. She just nodded, and started walking through the forest.

The business card the human man had dropped now fit, slim and light, between her fingers. She showed it to the first person she met in the first village, and they directed her to a bus stop. The bus driver took the leaves and stones she surreptitiously enchanted into coins without question, and after the sun had only shifted a little in the sky, she found herself climbing down from the vehicle, dizzy with exhaust fumes and iron, to see a campus of stone buildings in front of her. It was something called a “university,” a place where humans went to learn and to discuss ideas. Or so the grey-haired woman next to her on the bus had explained, looking at her a little oddly when she asked what the words on the business card meant. The man was something called a “professor,” which she had been told was a person of great knowledge and understanding who passed on his wisdom to young people who wanted to learn.

Of course, she beamed to herself. Of course he would be a man of great understanding. After all, he had admired her flowers.

Her first stop was the campus store, where she purchased a beautiful and buttery soft leather backpack, with a latch on the flap and a brass closure. She bought several story books as well, recognizing some of the titles, like “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” from fireside stories some of the older fey of the forest would tell out loud at the seasonal festivals.

It took a little more magic than glamoured pebbles and leaves to convince the man behind the desk at the admission office to enroll her as one of these humans called a “student” without seeing any identification or being given more than just “Pixie” as her name (she wasn’t about to give her full name away so easily.) Eventually she was successful, even though the magic she had to expend exhausted her even further. A short human male, barely out of puberty, showed her to a place called a dormitory room where she collapsed on the bed and fell asleep immediately.

The only class she would be taking was Romantics 101, taught by Professor Houghton. Professor James Houghton. With his dark hair that fell over one eye as he stooped to touch a bluebell’s petals. She knew that when he saw her, he would feel an immediate moment of recognition even though he had never actually seen her that day. She knew his soul would recognize hers. Making someone fall in love was beyond any fey’s magic, but she was known among the pixies for her stories and her creativity, her artistic eye and her intelligence. She would impress him with how much she already knew, and then he would see her as an equal, not as a stu-dent human, and they would be happy forever.

Oh dear reader. We all know that plans in life often go awry. Imagine our overgrown pixie, heart fluttering a hundred times larger than what to which she is accustomed, fingers clutched around the straps of her new backpack filled with fairy tale books and pencils and paper. Imagine her entering the classroom on the first day and sitting down in the front row, only to have her gallant professor, her beloved, walk into the classroom, set down his paper cup of coffee on the corner of the desk with a slam, and grumpily start his lesson without sparing one look at her.

It wasn’t at all what she had expected.

The professor assigned a paper on the Keats poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and when she read the poem, she was shocked and excited to realize she knew the titular faerie, personally. It was the story of Belleflower, the Sidhe maiden of the Seelie Court who sometimes would show up to the revels and tell the story of the rude and presumptuous human knight who tried, many many years ago now by human reckoning, to kidnap her away until she punished him by casting a spell and making him lose all sense of time and direction.

This she could do. The pixie set forth to write what the humans called an “essay” clarifying the errors put forth in the historical record as told by Mr. John Keats. She turned in the paper the next day, gently brushing her hand over Professor’s fingers as she handed it to him. A day later, he asked her to stay after class.

“I cannot accept this sort of writing in my classroom,” he spat at her, seething with anger. It wasn’t at all the glowing compliment or profession of love she had expected.

“P-pardon?”

“First, you cannot write your essays longhand on…is this parchment paper? You need to type your essays before I can accept them as submitted. And second, this is a college class on Romantic literature. It is not a creative fiction class. There is no place for this kind of ridiculous parody in my classroom.”

“But…it’s not a parody.”

“Pixie, was it? John Keats is one of the greatest poets in the history of our nation. And you say, on the second page of your paper, that he is,” he shuffled the pages and looked down his nose at the words, “‘a doddling imbecile who clearly has no ability to read the room or tell the truth of a story.’ I won’t stand for that kind of insult paid to a great man of literary history. Rewrite this paper or fail my class.”

Pixie stood, mouth agape, watching his eyes for any of the sparkle she had seen in the woods. Who was this person, and what had happened to the human she had spied in her forest, taking a moment to enjoy nature? He looked the same, his features and hair and the tallness of his body and the shape of his fingers, but he was different when he was among his human people.

“Tell me, Professor, do you ever go for walks in the woods?” she asked.

“I can’t afford to waste my time on things like that,” he said. “Now rewrite this essay. Typed. And with respect to the great poets of history. Or fail my class.”

Humans, she learned the hard way, could lie. This professor wasn’t a faerie. The fey could trick someone based on the semantics of what they may have asked for, but they could never ever tell a total lie. Humans could stand there and stare straight at you and lie to your face. As he had to her.

And also humans were so messy. They weren’t always just one thing. They didn’t have the honesty of one true core nature like most faeries did. They could be beautiful and unguarded in the woods, and cruel tyrannical egotistical chauvinists in the classroom.

What had she done? As the days went by, she continued to attend the professor’s classes, but with eyes unglazed by her innocent infatuation. Each day she would walk around the pathways on campus and reach into her smooth and soft leather bag, pulling out her delicate and shimmering wing.

She was not invisible, she would tell herself. She was not a fool, though she had been foolish. She had made a mistake. And she regretted it.

She missed her wings. She missed the way they would flutter when she saw the first golden sunbeam of spring, how the droplets of rain on them made her shiver with joy. She missed the power of them launching her through the air to the tops of the trees to welcome the birds as they returned each year.

And she missed her forest. She found herself standing close to the trees on the campus, touching them and leaning her head close to hear their secrets. She may have lost her wings, but she hadn’t lost her magic, and they whispered back to her. But the other human students who walked by would laugh or would give her strange looks at her uncanny behavior. Humans didn’t like things that were different. They didn’t celebrate something dark and strange.

And then, one day, she decided. She didn’t even want this world anymore. There was nothing here for her. No matter what payment the swamp hag might demand, she didn’t belong among the mortals. It was time to go home.

The bus ride was once again short but arduous. The petrol smell still burned her nostrils. But when she stepped off the stairs this time, she felt the pull of the old forest. She knew she was so close to home. Once she had taken a few steps into the shadows of the trees, she saw a stag, and convinced him to let her ride him through the woods. Together they leapt and darted, back to the dark hollow tree. When she slid from his back and gave him a blessing, she found her legs wouldn’t hold her. She collapsed to the ground as the deer darted away. They were both terrified, but the deer at least could run. Pixie had to stay and beg for mercy.

She had heard the old story of the Little Mermaid, and the terrible price she paid for her infatuation. What sort of punishment awaited her from the swamp witch? Would she survive this mistake of hers? Oh, damn the day she ever saw that pompous human in her bluebell field.

She smelled peat and bog, resin and spice. A voice softly said to her. “Was he all you wished he would be?”

The pixie lowered her head, still unable to stand, and murmured “he was all he could be. No more and no less. And much, oh so much less than even the least of us in the old woods.”

“Just as I feared,” the swamp hag said, reaching into her pocket and handing the pixie back her wing.

“But…what is my price?”

“You paid the price of learning what humankind can be. I see the pain you endured, the lesson that can only come with experience.”

“But…you don’t mean to change me into foam, or feed me to the living dead?”

“My darkling pixie, things aren’t always as they seem. Sometimes a monster can be kind. And sometimes a handsome face can be a monster.”

With that, the swamp hag made a guttural sound, and spat into the mud by the pixie’s left hand. Reaching out for the delicate iridescent wings, she slathered the mud onto their broken edge, and with a whispered spell, she pressed them onto her back.

It felt like breaking again, it was no less painful. She split apart and was hollowed out, and saw the world around her shrink smaller and smaller. But when she finally stood up from the ground, she was small again, and she felt her wings against her back, bending at her will. When she flew to the pond, she saw her reflection, delicate, hardly larger than the ripple of a thrown rock on water.

Never had her pixie hollow felt so much like home before. Never had she been so happy to see her flowers, still blooming, raise their blossom heads in unison at her approach. She was home, and she now knew what home truly was.

But she did ask the swamp hag to keep her buttery soft backpack for her, filled with books that told the stories of human fairy tales. And every so often, she would visit her friend, whose earthy aroma really was quite lovely once you grew accustomed to it. She no longer had to wait at the hollow tree, but would walk right up to the front door of her wattle and daub cottage and knock, asking her to please read her some stories again.

And she never presumed she knew exactly what the truth was to any of the stories she read on those pages. For stories change with time, with the telling. In the human world, the survivors, the winners, and the men got to decide whose side of things you were supposed to hear. The faerie world? Oh, dear one, the faerie world is far more complicated than that. It contains multitudes. Possibilities. Liminal spaces.

And she?

She was Faerie.