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The moss at the north end of the pasture was the most comfortable to lie on, Leilani had decided. It was spongy and soft and carpeted the ground in a thick, lush layer of beautiful green. It smelled like wet earth and little worms and crawling beetles liked to bask in it in the same way that she did.
So she assumed that it would bring the human woman comfort to wake up in such a soft bed.
When instead the human started to scream upon waking, lurching up on her hands and knees and trying to scoot away from her, wildly shaking the beetles off of her bare arms and legs, Leilani was confused, to say the least. It seemed awfully ungrateful of her.
“Now, what’s all of this about, then?” she asked, not moving from where she knelt at the edge of the mossy patch. Her long, reddish-brown hair hung in curls over her breasts, her bare torso absorbing the sunlight like so many of the plants that she adored. “There’s no need for all of this noise, dear.”
The human turned to look wide-eyed at her, big blue eyes wide and wavering and teary. Leilani cocked her head in confusion as the woman’s breath hitched and shuddered and she gasped and sneezed twice in succession. She couldn’t help but feel a bit of disdain for the woman. Why were humans so weak that they always sneezed around her?
“W… what are you?” the human asked her in a shaky voice, and Leilani quirked her head again, regarding the human with fascination. She’d stopped screaming faster than a lot of the other mortals that she’d encountered - particularly the human ones. This was interesting.
“Your people call me… Blodeuwedd, I think?” She shrugged her freckled shoulders, and then shrugged again so that she could relish the feeling of the warmth of the sun trickling across her skin as she moved. If Gods were real, then nature would be the closest evidence to it. Utterly divine.
The human was looking at her blankly, and Leilani rolled her eyes. In response, the human sneezed again, this time louder, her whole body shuddering with the motion. “I’m of the fey, dear. That must mean something to you, doesn’t it?”
The screaming started again, and by now Leilani was sick of it. “Stop with that, now,” she admonished, reaching out to take the human’s chin in one hand. The screaming stopped immediately as she drew the human toward her, replaced with a shuddering whimper and a sniffle that was probably the result of the sneezing. “Am I hurting you? Do you not appreciate the gifts of this planet that I have allowed you to share? Why be afraid?”
The woman didn’t answer first, reaching one blocky hand up to squeeze her nose as if trying to stop the intrusion of the pollen that always seemed to radiate off of her. Leilani rolled her eyes again, then closed them for a moment. The bountiful dust of the earth that cloaked her subsided, and with it would the sneezes of the human, she’d learned.
“Better?” she asked as she let go of the human’s chin. “Now we can have a little chat, yeah?”
“Wh… what do you want with me?” The woman asked cautiously, rubbing her face with the backs of her hands.
Leilani sighed. “Now, why must I want anything with you?”
“You… you kidnapped me. There has to be a reason,” The human answered plainly. She sounded almost surprised at the question. Leilani laughed in response, and the sound made the creature cringe away from her like it was painful.
That was an interesting response. Leilani made a mental note to investigate that further at another time. But for now, she let the laugh finish (she’d always thought she had a beautiful laugh, she wasn’t sure what this human was on about) and shook her head. Amusement rumbled in her throat.
“I didn’t kidnap you. I just took you away from that other human!” She couldn’t help the laugh that pushed its way out of her throat again, and felt a flicker of annoyance in her chest when the human put her hands over her ears. “You were fighting with that man human, were you not?” she asked.
The woman looked like she was trying to think. Or she was in pain. Human expressions were always so difficult for her to judge.
“I… think I was…” she said finally, squinting her eyes like she was trying to see something very far away. “We were arguing… where is he?”
The human cowered this time at Leilani’s (admittedly raucous) laughter. “Why, he’s dead, of course,” she said around the laugh. “I think, anyway. You humans are awfully fragile.”
“What?” The woman asked her in disbelief.
“In my experience, humans usually don’t survive falling off of a cliff, dear.” She managed to suppress the giggle that started in her throat. “He had no regard for the life all around him! He was dragging you somewhere and he wasn’t paying attention to were he was stepping! Then he stepped on one of my favorite flowers, so I told him to walk away, and keep walking until he couldn’t.”
She felt the scowl settle itself across her features, and the woman crawled backward away from her a few feet. She noticed that the woman took great care to be sure there were no flowers in her path, which told Leilani she’d made the right choice in taking her.
“He… you killed him?”
“Well, no, he walked off the cliff of his own volition.” Leilani chuckled again, the scowl immediately lifting. “You humans are so strange.”
“How are we - hang on, you said he was dragging me?” The human’s painfully slow brain had finally caught up to Leilani’s story, and she hummed as she nodded. “Yep.”
“…tell me more.”
“I watched the whole thing,” she said cheerfully, relaxing back into the lush moss. “Humans are so strange, every time I see you, you do something new. You were yelling at each other, see, and then he slapped you!” She tried her best to tell the story in an exciting way to keep up with the human’s short attention span. “And then he was dragging you through the pasture here. You have dirt all over you, and I didn’t even have to put it there!”
“Why would you… never mind, not important.” The woman sighed into her hand. She had that look on her face like she was either thinking or in pain again. “So all this, my clothes, my weapons, you didn’t do any of this?”
Leilani shook her head proudly. “Nope!”
She hadn’t expected the human to start leaking - crying, they called it apparently. It meant they were sad. But Leilani felt like that was a weird thing to cry about. “What’s so sad?” she asked, quirking her head again much like one of the prairie dogs that lived on the other end of the pasture.
The woman sighed, looking down at her lap for a long time, one stubby finger trailing along the bare skin of her thigh.
“You wouldn’t understand, I don’t think,” she said finally.
Leilani didn’t like the way that statement sat with her.