Ferral-Bell: The Feral Fairy

1)The House on Coal Hollow Road

The winter of 1951 came early to the hills of Pennsylvania, dropping snow on still burning coal dust and blanketing the hollers in thick silence. Tucked deep into a forested ridge near Coal Hollow Road, the Bauer house creaked under the weight of too many sins and not enough prayers.

Inside the drafty wood planked home, screams of labor rang out against the hush of snow. Roxanna Bauer, barely fourteen years of age, bit her lip until it bled as her mother held her down and whispered old country prayers under her breath. They were half German, half and mountain folk now, immigrants who’d brought their hearth sprites across the sea and into the belly of Appalachia. But no sprite had come singing to this birth. Not yet. For the fairies in the home heard of disturbing plans a foot.

Roxanna’s baby was born with a silent cry, tiny and blue in the lantern light. She barely had time to get a glimpse her daughter’s soft, aburn curls before Malik, her father, a man who carried rage like it was sewn into his spine, snatched the child from the ragged quilt.

“No,” Roxanna gasped, still half in the otherworld from pain and blood loss.

“You’ll not shame this house more than you already have,” Malik spat. He wrapped the child tight in an old potato sack, the same one he'd used to carry coal for decades and stepped out into the night. The baby gave one faint cry as the cold hit her. Then silence.

No one spoke of what happened after. Not for many years to come.

What they didn’t know, not the wailing mother, not the trembling girl, not even the cruel man who walked into the woods, was that the child wasn’t alone. She had a shadow. A twin of spirit, not of flesh. A sprite born with her, forged not from love or joy like her ancestors, but from grief, violence, and broken lineage. She should have been a hearth sprite. She should have been joy in the kitchen, laughter in the kettle, warmth by the fire.

But Malik snuffed the life out of the babe in the snowdrift. He never looked her in the face or said a word of comfort. She was never held, she was never loved, she was never wanted.

Her Sprite, still curled in spirit form, was nearly lost to the dark.

2) Vilora’s Last Light

The hearth was dim that night. Not just in the way firelight dims when coals settle and the fire dies down, but in spirit. The Bauer family had once had seven sprites: whispering, fluttering things that tucked into cupboards, clung to broom handles, and sang lullabies through cracked windows. Every birth in the home had summoned a new Sprite. Even those babes who never drew breath for long had brought a spark into the household. But the child born that winter night did not summon warmth. She summoned a scream from the land itself.

Vilora was the eldest sprite and keeper of the hearth’s memory, she felt the rupture before it happened. Her bones, long faded into near translucence rattled inside the breadbox where she kept her nest. The air burned sharp. The old magick, the stuff of first arrivals and sea-crossings, curled in alarm. She knew something was terribly wrong. She could not let the sprite from that childs spirit be born within the home. The fairies feared what she would become, and what that sort of energy would do in a household.

Vilora arrived just in time to see Malik vanish into the woods with the sack. Too old to chase him, Vilora did the only thing left she could do, she left the house and followed, knowing she would not make the return.

She sprite had left the Bauer homestead in over a hundred years. As an Elder, she was bound to the stones of the fireplace, to the ash lines on the floor, to the smell of stew, coffee, and home life. But Vilora, with her silvery smoke like hair and her tiny warped feet, stepped out into the snow. Her magick bled out, more faint with every foot forward.

She found the baby, stiff and pale, already more spirit than skin. There, nestled in the roots of a rotting tree, she found exactly what she was looking for. A dark budding glow, a spirit child, twisted in form, face blank, mouth gaping open as if born in a scream. Ferral-Bell. Vilora crumpled to her knees. She knew what this was, it was what she feared. A wronged birth. A fairy made of murder. Left to her own devices, she’d become a hag, a bone-thief, a wendigo in child’s skin. An evil that would always creep just outside her families hearth, her loved ones home.

Unless…

With what little strength remained, Vilora reached into her chest, where her flame had lived for generations. The flame of the Bauer line. Home of hot soup and prayers spoken in German under low beams for centuries.

She held the infant sprite close. She did not whisper words, for there were none strong enough. Instead, she poured everything she had left of herslef into Ferral-Bell. She gave her the sound of laughter on a stormy night. The warmth of bread dough rising in a worn bowl. The image of Roxanna as a toddler, swinging her legs from a kitchen stool while singing nursery rhymes. Vilora wept as she faded, still holding the new sprite close. The only warmth and love the new soul had known in her short life in this cold cruel world. Vilora had stopped Ferral-Bell from birthing in blood and bone. She had made her a seed, not a storm. What Ferral-Bell would become, was now up to her.

By spring, the baby’s body had vanished into the forest floor. Mushrooms rose in a ring, thick and pale. Maggots squirmed in the soil, and from them, something began to form. Ferral-Bell emerged, not evil. Not good either. Something new. Something lost.

3) The Hollow Years

Spring crept back into the forest, dragging moss behind her like a shawl. Ferns unfurled. Roots whispered. In the center of a rot-ringed clearing, something moved beneath the mushroom caps. Ferral-Bell came into the world again, not as a babe, not as a girl, not as a proper fairy with glitter or wings, but as a creature forgotten by both hearth and wild. She had a girl’s shape, soft-skinned and pale skin. Her hair was flame orange and thick with leaves, curling like smoke. Her eyes were gold, too gold. Her mouth stayed shut, because Ferral-Bell didn’t know how to speak.

She had no words. No teachings. No elder to tuck her in or show her how to light her hearth-flame. She had only what Vilora gave her: a seed of love, a memory of laughter, and a deep, aching sense that she didn’t belong. For thirty-three years, she wandered the woods near Coal Hollow Road. She was not spirit enough to leave the world, and not flesh enough to be seen. To birds, she was nothing more than a shadow. To squirrels, just a ghost. Deer avoided her. Crows called her "Witch-Thing" in their tongue, and most animals fled when she passed. She slept in tree hollows. She bathed in mud. She wept, though she didn’t know why. She never aged, nor hungered, but a deep hollowness carved her out from the inside.

Each winter, when the winds howled like Malik’s rage, she curled beneath the earth and waited. The mushrooms grew again and again. They remembered her, at least. They never forgot.

But she did.

She forgot the warmth of kitchens, the hum of lullabies, the gentle pulse of magic that other sprites once had. Her veins were silent. Her skin was cold. Her mind was a knotted thing. And yet… she feared. She feared the snapping of twigs, the burn of daylight, the smell of iron on the wind. She feared herself most of all. For every so often, she would wake and find that something around her had withered. Birds fallen from trees. Roots split open. Light dimmed.

One day, in the fall of 1984, the woods screamed.

A loud BANG cracked through the hills like a shotgun kiss. Ferral-Bell, slumped in her mushroom ring, blinked for the first time in a season. The trees trembled, and then… cries. Tiny, high-pitched cries. Pain. Fear. Hunger.

She was on her feet before she understood why. Her bare feet flew over moss and root. Her chest hurt with urgency. She came up over a ridge and saw only horror unfold.

Three teenage boys in camouflage jackets stood over the body of a dead mother raccoon. One boy clutched a gun. Another jabbed at the wriggling kits in the nest with a stick. One boy, Markis, stood back, looking uneasy.

Ferral-Bell didn’t know the words, but she knew this: pain. With a silent scream, she reached deep into the earth and pulled. The ground groaned. A massive sycamore shuddered, creaked, and tipped. It crashed down between the boys and the nest with a thunderous crack.

The boys screamed, dropped the gun, and the fled like little rabbits. But Markis… he turned back. Just once. And he saw her. The red-haired girl standing barefoot among mushrooms, eyes glowing like hearth embers.

A fairy. . . A little witch. . . A myth. . . ?

Whatever it was, it was a memory burned into him forever.

4)The Hearth That Had Fur

The tree lay broken, its roots exposed like raw nerves. The air full of the scents of bark sap and fear.

The raccoon kits, three in total, wriggled in the leaf litter, squeaking high and thin. One was already still, its tiny ribs crushed. Another bled from its hind leg, barely twitching. The third glared up at Ferral-Bell with wild, glassy eyes, hissing through milk-teeth like a thing twice its size.

Ferral-Bell had never held anything before.But her hands knew what to do.

She cradled the wounded kit gently and tucked the dead baby coon into the crook of a mossy root. She sniffed it, confused by its stillness. Her heart beat faster. Pain buzzed in her limbs. She didn’t know the word for grief, but it settled in her belly like a cold stone.

The third kit however, wouldn’t stop hissing until she curled around it, her warm body pressed into the leaves. It climbed onto her shoulder. Dug its claws into her tangled hair. And then, it was quiet. Like they’d decided something together. From that moment forward, she had a purpose. She nursed the injured one with chewed-up mushrooms and beetle broth. She sang tuneless hums she didn’t know she remembered. She cleaned the blood from their fur with careful fingers.

The forest watched, and for the first time, the wind didn’t flee from her. The roots beneath her feet didn’t shrink. Even the crows began to circle less warily. Something changed in her. Ferral-Bell had found her hearth.

It wasn’t stone, fire, or soup pots.. it was a pile of fur and bones and squeaking things that trusted her. They called her Mother. She didn’t know what the word either, but she felt it in the way they curled under her arms at night. How they cried for her when they wandered too far. How the seasons changed, but they always came back to her. The injured Kit never walked quite right again and he died after three summers. The feisty one grew big, fat, and clever. She birthed a litter of her own in the hollow of a lightning-struck oak tree Ferral-Bell brought down that day she changed.

And so it went...

The years passed like melting snow. Ferral-Bell stayed the same, ageless and odd. But the raccoons changed. They came and went. Some died, some grew mean and left, some stayed for a while and learned to bring her shiny things: bottle caps, spoons, lost buttons. Little treasures. Each one she placed in a hollow log where her heart used to be. A nest of memory.

But still… no magic returned to her. She had no flame. No spark. She tried singing to trees like she'd seen the other sprites do once upon a dream, but the trees stayed silent for she did not know the songs to sing to them. She tried dancing in moonlight, but the stars did not answer. She even tried carving runes into bark, but the marks just bled sap and vanished. Something was missing, but she didn’t know what it was until, twelve years after the tree fell, she heard human voices again. Children’s voices.

5) Ashes and Echoes

The year was 1996.

Ferral-Bell crouched low in the underbrush, her eyes golden and still, her flame-red hair catching glints of light between branches. She was playing with her newest litter, four kits with bright eyes and clever paws, when the forest rustled with their arrival. Her kits had scattered at the first sound of approaching humans, but she remained. She had grown tired of hiding. Tired of being the ghost of the holler. She had learned not to fear everything, but she had also learned to recognize danger.

Something was different this time. She felt something else. Something… pulling at her. She crept closer to the old trail, bare feet silent on moss and wet leaves. She could feel it, like a rope tugging at her chest, a hearth fire stoked in the distance. Footsteps and laughter.

Then she saw him, one of the boys. Markis. He was 0lder now, and a little weathered, but still bearing the face of that teenage boy who had stood frozen the day she brought down a tree with the weight of her rage. He looked down at the forest floor like it still held ghosts.

But he wasn’t alone.

Two children skipped ahead of him, little a boy and little a girl, both around six years old. They had auburn hair, not quite red, not quite brown, and eyes the color of wheat before the harvest. They spoke in their own language, fast and funny, tumbling over each other like water running over rocks in the brook.

She hadn’t changed at all, but the way he had gave her chills. He didn’t see her, not this time. He laughed, kneeling down to show his kids something, maybe a mushroom, maybe the place where the tree once fell. His voice was deeper, softer than Malik’s had been. But his laugh made something inside Ferral-Bell twitch.

The man who stood there in the golden light, pointing to the ruins of the past, had no idea who watched him from the shadows. Then he spoke words that made her bones hum.

“My dad never believed me. Said I made it up. But right here, when I was just a kid, I saw her. A little girl. Red hair. She pushed down a whole tree.”

The children gasped, and Markis grinned like it was just a story. But Ferral-Bell’s heart was pounding now. He remembered. He had seen her—and still, she was a myth. A footnote in a memory. Something told around a campfire, while she stayed twisted in the roots of forgotten trees.

But she remembered more, Markis had her face. Or rather… he had his mother’s.

Ferral-Bell suddenly remembered the night she came into the world in that moment. She also remembered Valora's sacrifice. Her origin story became clear to her, repressed memories from almost half a century ago bubbled up. No one would want to remember such tragic affairs.

Ferral-Bell stepped back into the darkness of the woods. Her hand touched her cheek, the same round cheekbones Roxanna had once had. Her nose, the curve of her chin, all taken from the babe who never knew love before meeting such a cruel end.

Only her hair was different, red like iron, like rage, like the fire Malik used to kill the warmth of the home. She wasn’t just a sprite, but part Valora. She was also the child. The one Malik smothered. The one Roxanna never got to name. Ferral-Bell felt something stir in her for the first time in a long while. Not fear, but power. Not the spark of a hearth fairy, no. Something older. Wilder. The in-between thing she was always meant to be.

Ferral-Bell's gaze narrowed. There were four of them!!

Trailing just behind the twins, darting from tree to tree, were two others, not human. Small, ethereal, barely visible to the eye. A boy and a girl, same age as the twins they followed, but with skin like morning mist and hair that shimmered like ash and flame. Their eyes glowed softly with the same gold Ferral-Bell had once seen in her own reflection. "Sprites"!

Not a wildling like herself. Not mushroom things. True hearth spirits.

The little girl-fairy reached out and plucked a bit of lichen from a tree. The boy-fairy skipped beside the human boy and mimicked his movements, step for step. None of the humans seemed to see them, but Ferral-Bell sure could, and she finally understood now.

They had a hearth. These children, these twins, had been born into magic.

Ferral-Bell’s throat ached. Her knees trembled.

Little did she know, the hearth had been cold for decades. She thought the bloodline must have been poisoned, ended, forgotten. But here they were. Two child fairies that both carried her eyes. She stepped back, trying to make sense of it all, but the pull toward Markis only grew stronger. It wasn’t because he’d seen her all those years ago. It was because he was the son of Roxanna, the very brother, by blood, of the babe Ferral-Bell had been born from. She didn’t know that. Not yet. But she would soon find out why she was so drawn to him.

But these twins had changed everything. She followed them quietly, through bramble and briar, as they made their way down the forgotten path leading up to a house cloaked in vine and shadow.

The old Bauer homestead. Her almost home, what should have been her home. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew, this was her hearth.

Ferral-Bell stepped across the threshold just as they left. The house was empty again. Quiet, but not dead. Inside, the hearth still stood, worn and cracked. She placed her hand on the stone, and it burned. A whisper rose from beneath the floorboards. “She’s come home.” Her eyes flicked toward the corner of the room, just in time to see a set of tiny muddy footprints vanish. Ferral-Bell turned slowly. At the edge of the woods, far beyond the window, the fairy twins stood still. Watching her with curiosity. They saw her, and the little girl sprite waved. The boy fairy smiled, and the hearth behind Ferral-Bell flickered, not once, but twice, then caught with a slow, crawling flame.

Ferral-Bell did not smile back. She wasn’t ready. Not yet. But she would be soon enough, for something had been set in motion again. Something older than shame. Older than silence. A fire.

TO BE CONTINUED...