• A man of averages; he has never been called tall, or short, never too fat, too thin, too strong, too weak. From his short sensible brown hair to his green eyes and fair skin, nothing about him is remarkable, but you would never find anyone who had met him that would describe him as ‘normal’. Something about him lingered in the mind after a meeting.

    Raised as a son of a fisherman in the village of Ballycastle, Ireland, he had an unremarkable childhood. Much of his time was spent fishing off the docks with other boys his age, or running his family’s fish-stand for his father. It seemed so sudden then, when he fell in to the world of the Faeries

    It started slowly, faintly even, as he came of age. He would catch a flicker just outside his view, and it would be gone when he tried to focus on it. Gradually though, he would see more and more, clearer and clearer, though he dared not tell anyone for fear they would call him mad. Upon reaching manhood without calling any undue attention to himself, he took on his father’s business. He would go about his days, catching fish with just a little more luck than the other men. The water always seems a bit calmer and a bit more bountiful when his boat was at sea, and none of the other fishermen had need to complain.

    One day out at sea, he noticed a light shooting out from under the water, just before the horizon took the world from his view. Curiosity gripped him then, tighter than he could remember, and he followed it. It seemed to be leading him (for lack of a better term, since he never was able to gain a noticeable amount of distance on it) and as he followed it a fog settled in. The fog seemed to want him to come closer, keeping close to the water at first and teasing his boat with its fingers from time to time. Before he knew what had happened, it had covered him and his vessel with its cold mist and he could see no more than a few meters in any direction except forward, towards the light that reached from the waters to the skies. With no way out (the wind had long since died) and what was no doubt a long journey ahead of him, he slept.

    When he woke the haze was gone, but darkness still hung heavy on the sea. The water around him was certainly no longer the waters with which he had grown so familiar over the years, yet somehow he still knew them. The sky was clearer than he had ever seen it, and the stars far more in number than he had ever dreamed of counting. He tried, and failed, to find a constellation he knew, so instead decided to continue where the current was taking him….