John "Soap" MacTavish

The forest floor was a sodden mess, all rotting leaves and mud that squelched unpleasantly beneath Soap's boots with every step. Spring thaw had turned the trails between Hyoria and Aurdor into a proper nightmare—half-frozen in the morning, slush by midday, and treacherous no matter the hour. He'd been trudging through it for the better part of the afternoon, his patrol route taking him along the old deer paths that wound through the densest part of the woods.

"Could've sent anyone," he muttered to himself, ducking under a low-hanging branch. "But naw, send MacTavish. He doesnae mind a wee hike."

Truth was, he didn't mind it. Not really. The forest was quiet this time of year, the canopy still thin enough to let pale sunlight filter through in golden shafts. Birds were starting to return from their winter migration, and somewhere off to his left, a woodpecker was hammering away at a dead oak with single-minded determination. It beat being stuck in the barracks filling out patrol reports.

Soap adjusted the strap of his bow across his chest and paused to take a swig from his waterskin. That's when he heard it.

High-pitched. Rhythmic. Definitely not a bird.

He went still, head tilted. The sound was coming from deeper in the thicket, somewhere past a cluster of blackberry brambles that hadn't quite leafed out yet. It sounded almost like... crying? No, not crying. Cursing. Tiny, furious, high-speed cursing in a language he didn't recognize, punctuated by the distinct buzzing of wings.

"That's no normal," he said under his breath, and pushed through the brambles.

What he found made him stop dead in his tracks. At first glance, he thought it was a big dragonfly—something with iridescent wings caught in an old poacher's snare likely meant for rabbits or birds. The trap was a nasty bit of work, braided wire looped over a low branch and dangling into a thicket of thorny undergrowth. The kind of thing some desperate hunter set up and then forgot about. Whatever was in it was thrashing so violently the whole branch was shaking.

Then Soap got closer, and his brain scrambled to make sense of what he was seeing. It wasn't a dragonfly. It wasn't an insect at all. It was a person.

Tiny but unmistakably humanoid, with delicate features and wings that buzzed so fast they were nearly invisible. Their waist and one of their arms, their face was flushed with exertion and fury.

"A pixie," Soap breathed, and immediately felt like an idiot for stating the obvious. He'd grown up hearing stories about the fae folk in Hyoria—every elven child did. The old farmers would leave out saucers of milk and honey to keep the pixies from souring the cream or tangling the horses' manes. His gran had sworn up and down that she'd seen one in her garden when she was a girl, all dressed in spider silk and riding a bumblebee. He'd never actually believed it.

"Aw, shite," Soap said, louder than he intended.

The pixie's head snapped up. Their eyes went wide—whether with fear or rage, he couldn't tell yet—and they immediately redoubled their efforts to escape. Their wings buzzed frantically, lifting them a few inches before the wire yanked them back down with a jerk that made them cry out in pain.

"Easy, easy—" Soap held up both hands, palms out, and crouched down to make himself smaller. Up close, he could see the snare more clearly. The wire had looped around their chest and tightened when they'd struggled, and there was a faint shimmer of what might have been blood staining the fabric. "A'm no gonnae hurt ye. Jist—haud still a second, aye?"

The pixie was having none of it. They bared their teeth at him—tiny, sharp little things—and spat out something that sounded distinctly unfriendly.

Soap sighed and ran a hand over his mohawk. "Aye, fair enough. A'd be pissed too."

Carefully, slowly, he set his bow down on a dryish patch of ground and eased closer. The pixie's wings were beating so fast now they were creating a low hum that vibrated in his ears. Up close, they were genuinely beautiful—translucent things with delicate veins that caught the light like stained glass. The rest of them was just as striking, all angular features and colors that seemed too vivid to be natural, like someone had painted them into existence.

"Right then," Soap murmured, more to himself than to them. "Let's see aboot gettin' ye oot o' this mess."

The snare was a simple tension loop—pull it one way and it tightened, but there was a release catch on the knot if you knew where to look. Soap did. He'd dismantled more traps than he could count, both enemy and otherwise. The tricky part was going to be getting close enough to work the wire without scaring the pixie into hurting themselves worse.

"Gonnae need ye tae trust me fer jist a tick," he said, inching his fingers toward the wire. "A know, a know—big scary bastard, wee terrifying beastie, we're both very impressed. But if ye keep thrashin' aboot, yer gonnae lose that arm, an' a dunno aboot fae folk, but fer most people that's a bad thing."

The pixie glared at him. It was an impressive glare, considering their size. Soap felt oddly judged.

"A'm gonnae count tae three," he said, reaching for the release knot. "Then it's done. Aye? Wan..."

The wire trembled as the pixie's wings buzzed. Soap could feel the tension radiating off them—the coiled readiness to bolt the second they were free. He didn't blame them. Being trapped brought out something primal in everything with a pulse.

"Two..."

His fingers found the knot. Gentle now. One wrong move and the wire would cinch tighter.

"Three—"

He thumbed the release, and the snare sprang open. The wire dropped away from the pixie, and Soap immediately pulled back, giving them space. No sudden moves. No grabbing. Just a clear escape route and all the room they needed.

"There now," he said, settling back on his haunches. "That wasnae so bad, wis it?"

The Harvest Festival in Hyoria always came with a particular sort of chaos that Soap secretly craved. It was the loud, unapologetic kind—lanterns strung between the old oaks, fiddles screeching from somewhere near the town square, the smell of honey cakes and mulled cider thick enough to make a man drunk before his first sip. Families spilled out of their cottages and into the streets, children shrieking with laughter as they chased each other between the legs of adults who'd long since stopped trying to corral them.

It was home. Proper, aching, familiar home.

Soap had been back for three days now, granted leave from his joint assignment with the Aurdor knights. His mother had near about cried when he'd walked through the door in his travel-worn boots, and his da had clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to stagger a lesser man. The MacTavish household had since become a whirlwind of activity—aunts and uncles and cousins spilling in from neighboring farms, everyone talking over each other, plates of food appearing and disappearing with dizzying frequency.

But it was his younger siblings who'd been the most relentless in their attention.

"Go on, Johnny," Ailsa wheedled, her green eyes bright with mischief. She was sixteen now, all gangly limbs and inherited stubbornness, her pointed ears poking through the wild tangle of auburn hair she'd refused to let their mother braid. "Ye're a big brave knight noo, are ye no'? Cannae be feart o' a wee story."

Soap snorted, leaning back in his chair on the porch and propping his boots up on the railing. The wood creaked beneath him, familiar as breathing. "Feart? Ah've stared doon orc raiding parties, hen. Ah think ah can handle whitiver bogeyman ye've dreamt up."

"Not a bogeyman," his youngest brother Ewan piped up from where he sat cross-legged on the porch steps. Barely thirteen, still soft-cheeked and earnest, the lad had always been the one most likely to believe in the old stories. "The fae. Tonight's the night the veil's thin, aye? Gran always said so."

"Gran also said if ye made faces the wind would freeze 'em that way," Soap pointed out, taking a lazy swig from the bottle of ale he'd been nursing for the better part of an hour. "No' exactly a reliable source."

Ailsa planted her hands on her hips, a gesture so reminiscent of their mother that Soap had to bite back a grin. "Gran's no' the only one what says it. Everyone kens the fae come oot on the Harvest Festival. An' there's a tradition—"

"A tradition," Soap echoed, raising an eyebrow. "Aye?"

"Ye leave an offerin' in the woods," Ewan said, his voice dropping to something approaching a reverent hush. "Somethin' sweet, or shiny. An' if the fae like it, they'll show themselves. Grant ye a blessin' fer the year."

"And if they dinnae like it?"

Ailsa's grin turned sharp, all teeth. "Then they'll curse ye. Turn yer hair green, make the milk go sour, fill yer boots wi' slugs—"

"Cannae be worse than the barracks latrine after curry night," Soap muttered, and Ewan stifled a snort.

But Ailsa was relentless. She leaned forward, bracing her hands on the arms of his chair, getting right in his face the way she had since she was old enough to toddle. "We dare ye, Johnny. Go oot tae the woods. Leave an offerin'. See if the fae come."

"A dare?" Soap tilted his head, studying her. "Whit am ah, twelve?"

"Scared?" she shot back, eyes gleaming.

He should have said no. He should have laughed it off, ruffled her hair, and gone inside to help his da with the evening chores. He was a grown man, a knight of Hyoria, a soldier who'd spilled blood on foreign soil and watched comrades die in the mud. He didn't believe in fairy stories.

But he also didn't back down from a challenge. Never had. Probably never would.

"Whit's the offerin' supposed tae be?" he asked, and Ewan's face lit up like a Harvest lantern.

---

The woods beyond the MacTavish farm were old. Older than the town, older than the oldest living elf in Hyoria, older than memory. The oaks here grew thick and gnarled, their branches tangling overhead like the fingers of ancient gods, and the undergrowth was lush with ferns and night-blooming flowers that glowed faintly blue in the darkness.

Soap picked his way along a deer trail he'd known since boyhood, a small cloth bundle tucked under his arm. Inside was a wedge of honeycomb, a tiny glass vial of his da's best whisky, and a silver button he'd snipped off his own dress uniform—the shiniest thing he could find on short notice. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it properly.

"Well, this is daft," he informed the forest at large, his voice swallowed by the heavy silence between the trees. "Stompin' aboot in the woods at midnight like a numpty. If Ghost could see me noo..."

His lieutenant would never let him live it down. Actually, knowing Ghost, he'd probably have something deadpan and utterly unhelpful to say about it. Something about keeping things tactical. Soap snorted at the thought, ducking under a low-hanging branch.

The deeper he went, the quieter it got.

Not an absence of sound—the forest was never truly silent. There was the rustle of leaves, the distant hoot of an owl, the soft whisper of a breeze that seemed to curl around him like an curious cat. But the sounds felt... different. Closer. More present. Like the forest itself was holding its breath, watching him pass.

"Alright," he murmured, coming to a stop in a small clearing where a stream burbled over smooth stones. Moonlight filtered down through the canopy, silvering the water and turning the moss into something that looked almost magical. "This'll do."

He crouched down, brushing aside a few fallen leaves to clear a space on a flat stone near the stream's edge. The honeycomb went first, glistening gold in the pale light. The vial of whisky next, the amber liquid catching the moon. And then the silver button, which he set down with exaggerated care, as if he were presenting tribute to a visiting dignitary.

"There," he said, straightening up and brushing his hands off on his trousers. "An offerin'. Honey, whisky, an' a bit a' shiny. Noo whit?"

He stood there for a long moment, feeling vaguely foolish. The forest didn't answer. No winged creatures descended from the trees. No tiny glowing figures materialized from the shadows. Just the stream, and the moon, and the quiet rustle of the wind.

Soap let out a breath that was half relief, half disappointment. He wasn't sure what he'd expected—wasn't sure he'd expected anything at all—but a small, childish part of him had maybe hoped...

"Right then," he said to no one in particular. "Ah'll jist... leave ye tae it. Enjoy the whisky. It's the good stuff."

He turned to go.

And that was when he heard it. Not a voice, exactly—too soft for that, too delicate, like wind chimes made of crystal. But it was close. Very close. And it was coming from somewhere just behind his left shoulder.

Soap froze.

The sound came again, and when he turned his head—slowly, carefully, the way he'd approach a skittish horse—he found himself staring at a pair of eyes peering at him from between the ferns at the edge of the clearing.

The moonlight caught their features, the wide eyes that seemed to hold galaxies, the shimmer of what might have been wings folded against their back. For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.

"...Hullo there," Soap breathed, and for once in his life, he was at a complete loss for words.