Gone With The Harp's Echo by Narya

Chapter 1

There was once a young man who could move between worlds, and he fell in love with a fairy.

His name was Robin Lewis. He was the sort of boy who never quite seemed to fit in – a daydreamer, as one teacher wrote on his school report. Other children liked him well enough; he wasn't bullied or pushed out, and yet somehow he always seemed to be left on his own.

“It's common with adopted children,” his teachers assured his mother. “He'll settle down soon enough.”

In truth Robin remembered very little about his life before he moved to the house on Greenberry Crescent. He knew that his mother had not given birth to him, and accepted it, in the way one accepts that the sky is up and the grass is green. It was not something he gave much thought to.

He discovered his gift at the age of nine, quite by accident. He crawled through a hedgerow one lunchtime at school, knowing he was breaking the rules, but with every intention of being back in the playground before a teacher spotted him. He didn't mind going after Harry Martin's ball, although how the silly clot had managed to kick it from one end of the football pitch to the other and into the churchyard on the other side, he hadn't the faintest idea.

“I should leave it, if I were you,” sniffed May Jones, a skinny girl in Class Four with freckles and pigtails. “Serves him right.”

But Robin didn't believe in “serves him right” - or, come to that, in perfectly good footballs being left in the graveyard for ghosts to kick around after dark. And so into the hedgerow he went.

When he emerged on the other side, he blinked.

He was most certainly not in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Clifton.

There were no headstones, for one thing. Around him the air was wholesome and sweet, yet he'd left on a muggy July lunchtime, with the smell of hot tarmac and dust in his nostrils, and not a whisper of wind. Out here the breeze sang through the grass, and everything felt strange and wonderful, as though the land around him was alive – and ahead, gleaming in the sun's white-gold light, the sea stretched out to the edge of the world.

When he crawled back through to tell the others what he'd seen, the playground was deserted and the sky was a deep, dusky pink. Puzzled, he crossed the playground and tried to get back into the school, but the door was locked, and inside he heard the thin blip...blip...blip of the burglar alarm. The road that ran past the gates was quiet, and the usual afternoon hubbub from the streets was absent.

He eventually walked home; he knew the way well enough, turning right by the church hall and going past the Black Horse, then taking a left down to the Crescent. He couldn't understand why the police were at his house, or why his mother was so angry when he explained where he'd been.

“But I'm telling the truth,” he protested when she sent him to bed, her face still streaked with anxious tears.

And so, despite being an honest boy at heart, he learned through the years to lie carefully each time it happened – to spin stories to his teachers about doctor's appointments and family emergencies, and invent birthday sleepovers and after school clubs for the benefit of his mother. It didn't always work; it never felt like he was gone for long, but sometimes he'd come home to find that in his world it had been days. Sometimes the police were called; once or twice social services came too, and he would be referred to a counsellor, who would talk about empathy and trust and communication, and he would nod and smile and continue to lie.

“I wish you'd tell me where you go,” his mother said once, when he was fifteen.

Robin refrained from pointing out that he had told her, once, and had not been believed.

He wished he could tell her. He wanted to speak of the places he'd seen – great mountain ranges with winds that screamed to the starlit night; haunted marshes with strange lights and whispering air; frozen seas where whales sang under the icy floes. He wanted to tell her how he'd walked through the woods at dusk with a troop of mead-drunk Dwarves, and argued ethics with centaurs as a pair of twin suns sank through the sky. He longed to describe the great feast-tables at the University of Myrrmyki, or the colours of a mermaid's tail – or to sing her the songs of lost Revontulet, gone from all mortal realms.

“I love you,” he would say to her instead.

She would squeeze his hand, and smile through a shadow, and Robin wished that his love was enough.