The satyr watched me from his veil of young trees. He did not reply nor grow closer despite my beckoning and promises of cake. He only watched with wide yellow goat eyes, curling his clawed finger at me, calling me deeper into the woods, deeper into the dark and away from where the sunlight touched the garden.

"Stop calling to him, Maristela. Not all my kin are the friendly sort." Tariel warned from his seat beneath the willow tree. The satyr fled at the sound of his breathy, low voice, leaping away on cloven hooves deeper into the forest gloom.

"It would be nice to have someone besides you to talk to every once in a while." I said, sitting down on the stump of a felled tree just outside the canopy of the willow. As long as I had known the shade that lived under the willow, I had not dared to draw closer to him than this. My father's warnings about the Serpent's Children made me wary enough to keep my distance though it was not enough for me to completely ignore their presence or quell my curiosity completely.

"That satyr wasn't after innocent company. They enjoy the flesh of young, pretty maidens. You would've made a good little feast for him. You need to be more careful. Didn't Saul teach you not to speak to strangers?" Tariel teased me. The wind blew the long, trailing branches of the willow around, parting them like a curtain and allowing me a brief glimpse of the form the shadow had chosen to take for me.

"You never wear the same face twice. Shouldn't that rule also include you?" I laughed. Tariel was what my father called a Trickster. He lacked any true form of his own and borrowed the faces and forms of others as he liked. Today he wore the face of a young soldier Saul had found dead of exhaustion by the road several years ago. Tomorrow he may come to me as the old lady that lives in the hut near the stream, or a bird or even a dog.

"Is there a face of mine you like the most? I guess I could stick to one when I come by for a visit. That would make me a little less of a stranger." He said in a voice as soft as the breeze blowing through my hair. I felt my cold cheeks warm. As sheltered as I was, I was not so innocent that I did not notice the suggestion in his tone. He often flirted with me. Sometimes I flirted back though I did not fully understand where such flirtations might lead me. I had never left my father's land, never ventured further than the beach that laid just down a path from the house.

"I am rather partial to the butcher's boy." I said, watching with delight as Tariel dissolved for a short moment into a form of misty darkness before taking on the form of the butcher's eldest son. I had never met the man and only knew his face by Saul's description of him. I didn't know his name, but the face Tariel wore now was a handsome one. I liked how his dark hair curled at the nape of his neck and the faint freckles dusting his nose.

"Better?" Tariel smiled, flashing borrowed teeth.

"Oh, yes, you're very handsome." I relaxed against the prop of my crutch as I watched the creatures traveling through the woods just outside the reach of the late afternoon sun. The Serpent's Children were a nocturnal bunch. When they needed to travel in daylight, they were careful to stick to the shade. I was as well. My black eyes were centered with a silver pupil that easily took in light. Direct sunlight was nearly blinding, so I tried to avoid coming outside at mid-day and wore large, brimmed hats in between the shaded spaces of my garden. "Are you ever going to leave the willow tree, Tariel?" I asked, absently, rubbing at the ache in my thigh from old broken bones that never properly healed. "Or will you always be like the others, content to watch me from a distance while I grow old?"

"That depends. Do you want me to come closer?" The butcher's son watched me the same way the satyr did. Eyes wide and fixed. He stood without stirring the grass at his feet and came towards me, stopping just on the other side of the willow's veil. So close I could reach through it and touch him without ever moving from the stump.

He continued to stare down at me as he stood over my smaller body. The form he'd taken was tall and strong. The sleeveless tunic he wore showed arms that could break me in two if he squeezed me tight enough. I took him in, marveling at his beauty in a way that should have made me feel shameful. I wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if I did reach out to him, if I joined him beneath the willow. But my father's warnings were too loud in my mind. Fear once again staunched my curiosity. "I don't know." I said, turning my eyes and mind away from his temptation.

"Return to your mother, creature." My father's rough voice announced his presence before he'd even appeared out of the forest. He trudged up the hunter's path, carrying the heavy weight of an empty net on his sunburnt shoulder. "Maristela, inside."

"The sea monster has returned." Tariel chuckled and I bristled at the shiver that went down my back at the sultry sound.

I got up from my seat in a hurry, wincing at the pain that shot up my leg and left the willow in a quick hobble before the Trickster could notice the darkening of my cheeks. "Goodnight." Tariel said softly, waving me away as he always did. When I left him, he was still there, staring at me through the willow's veil, a smile stretching a stranger's face.

"I'll need to go into town tomorrow for supplies. I caught nothing but a couple of small crabs today." Saul huffed, dropping a bucket on the table with a dreadfully hollow thump.

"It'll be a good supper for us at least. I was able to harvest a couple of my tomatoes and some herps. I'll get some water boiling for a stew." I got to work on cooking while Saul cleaned himself up, washing away the sun's heat and the stink of the sea with the fresh water I'd gathered from the well.

"You're still talking to that thing under the willow." He said, scrubbing at his thinning hair over a basin of water. "How many times do I need to repeat myself about avoiding them? The Serpent's Children have earned their reputation."

I dispatched the crabs with a sudden stab through its body. "His name is Turiel and he isn't a thing."

"Maristela," He snapped with his bushy eyebrows pushed together

"He's the only person I have to talk to here other than you. Besides, he isn't bothering anyone. He's never even left the willow in all the years he's been coming here. If he was going to hurt me, I think he would have done it by now." One of my earliest memories was of meeting him when he was a child himself. Just a small little shadow hiding under the willow. Too young to know many faces to mimic.

"I'm not worried about him hurting you. I'm worried he'll try to take you away where I can't protect you."

My cold skin warmed a little at the thought of running off with any man let alone Tariel. "I wouldn't go with him even if he asked me to. I know how important it is that I stay hidden here with you."

I understood why Saul was so protective of me. He had reason to be. From the time I was very small, he'd told me that I was special. I had been born of the sky. I was a star that had fallen from the heavens to grant his desire for a family. He said that when the star fell, it broke apart. My brother had fallen somewhere else, but the two of us could never meet. If we did, he might try to hurt me, but he'd never explained to me why.

"You need to be careful of those you trust. That's all." He went quiet and I knew I wouldn't get anything else out of him that evening.

I cooked the crabs he'd managed to catch. It wasn't enough to fully fill our bellies, but it would see us through to the next day. After we'd eaten, Saul fell asleep almost emediately and I sat alone in the dark little house. I'd already doused the flames in the fireplace and blown out my father's bedside candle. There was no source of light left and yet I could see through the darkness much more clearly than I did in the daylight.

Still in my threadbare nightdress, I slipped from the house and stood outside in the dewy grass. I left my crutch by my bedside and walked amid my garden without a limp. At night, my pain was gone, my body set free by starlight and nighttime gloom. Overhead the stars twinkled, winking hello down to me and over the tops of the trees I could seen a part of the Serpent's long body arching over them. Her scales shimmered as they caught the moonlight, her body forever moving, forever tightening the coils of her body around our earth.

Tilting my face towards the heavens, I closed my eyes and I listened to her. Her mumblings were too low for me to understand, but her voice had always been a comforting sound for me. A sound as welcome to my soul as that of my father. Hers was the voice of a mother, of safety, of home.

I wondered if my brother felt the same for her, if he ever stood outside in the bright silver night to listen to her sweet whispers and feel at peace. I often thought of him, despite my father's warnings. When I was a child, he was the boogeyman hiding beneath my bed, the current waiting in the deeper depths of the sea to pull disobedient children under the waves. As my curiosity about the outside world grew, however, I began to question if my father truly knew the truth of my brother or our relationship to each other. Was he really the monster he said he was or was I the monstrous one?

"You shouldn't listen to everything my mother says." Tariel said from the willow. It startled me so I jumped with a gasp. He had never seen him after nightfall. He always left with the sun and returned with it at daybreak, but there he was just beneath the willow with only her veil to separate us. He had taken no form. He remained in his true shape, a vaguely man-shaped being made of the same dark that separated the stars. His eyes were darker pits amid the void of his faceless head, but I could feel them on me, feel the intensity of his stare like a blade pressed to the back of my neck. Cold and sharp. Painful. "She mostly speaks the truth, but sometimes she lies."

"Are you saying she lied about me and my brother?" I asked, laughing at how sadly hopeful I'd sounded. I did not understand why my brother would want me dead. I wished and prayed that it was not true, that maybe someday we could meet and maybe be friends. I longed for that outcome.

"No. Everything, she has said of you is the truth, Maris." He cooed to me, and I smiled at the nickname. To my father, I was Maristela. A name that sounded far too regal for a girl whose entire world consisted of a fisherman's cottage and a small vegetable garden. To Tariel I was simply Maris, the same child he'd mimicked as she'd played on hot summer days. A misty hand reached through the hanging leaves and for first time in our joined lives Tariel reached out to touch me.

I moved back from him, flinching away from his fingers with an involuntary jerk. His hand vanished at once, his entire body gone like dissipated smoke.

I sank down onto the tree stump, my fingers digging into my leg as I shook with pain that seared through it like fire. Tears dripped from my eyes, streaming silver as my blood down my translucent cheeks. From the shadows of the forest around me, I could see the eyes of all the creatures that inhabited it, watching, waiting for something, something I could not name but that I feared was fast approaching.