Hermes
Courtney Harvey
The wise words of my mother flash through my mind: Nothing is as it seems. As a child, it felt like a riddle I needed to solve, a puzzle I never could quite find all the pieces to. But as I’ve gotten older, I find it to be almost pessimistically real. Especially when it comes to the elves.
Her now-lost voice echoes in my mind when I see the glint in my periphery. It is long after close at The Dirty Beetle Tavern, and I stand with a bin filled with shattered-glass bottles hoisted up onto my hip and a handheld lantern emitting a faint glow at the doorway. I squint through the near-dark, not sure how it’s possible for me to see any shimmers from so far away with only the lantern’s light. But in the corner of the room, on the floor under a far wooden table, a green and gold bottle rocks lightly back and forth, as if nudged by a gentle breeze.
But… there shouldn’t be any wind in the tavern. Not at this hour, with the windows tightly closed and no drunken elves running around like unstable children.
Curiosity getting the best of me, I pluck the bottle from the floor and look it over. There’s no label—just green glass and a gold wrapping. It’s unlike anything we carry here, not a familiar bottle in the slightest. Probably just something left by a patron.
But what on earth even is it? I can’t see any liquid through the glass, yet it feels… heavy. Heavier than an empty bottle. And the cork is securely in place with a gold wax sealing it closed. Symbols I don’t recognize are scratched into the wax. The bottle couldn’t possibly be opened and drained. I pick at the edge of the label, peeling it back just so…
And throw it back into the corner away from me.
Scrambling away, I rush out of the tavern, closing and locking the door shut behind me. Without sparing a moment, I start walking home.
There is no way I saw eyes in that bottle, I think. And not just loose eyeballs—that I could almost accept more than this—but eyes peering at me through a darkness. Assessing me. Seeing me more than some of those damn patrons seem to.
By the time I reach my door, I convince myself that I’ll feel better once I’ve slept, that a long week of work must have exhausted me more than I realized. Only an exhausted elf would hallucinate eyes in a bottle. I drop the bin of glass by the door and place the lantern on the entry table for a moment to decompress—
Delusional.
I must be completely delusional.
There is no way for me to be anything but completely delusional when I see the very same bottle sitting upright in the center of my table.
And I certainly must be losing my mind if I think I hear it… humming.
It’s a low tune that reminds me of a deep, slow song on cello. It’s as intoxicating as the ale I swing to patrons for hours upon hours each night. A warmth bursts in my chest, a fuzzy feeling that reminds me of doomed teenage crushes.
Then numbness. In my chest. Blossoming farther, throughout my body. The muscles in my legs loosen, then lose feeling. My body is propelled forward, like cello strings weaving through my ribs and tugging. And through those strings, the humming enters deep into my body. My eyelids flutter, the bottle blurring, lights manifesting where they shouldn’t be.
I blink.
When my eyes open, I find myself seated at the table, the bottle in my hands. The lantern is behind me, but it seems as though there is a second light source in the room. As though the bottle is emitting a soft glow, illuminating the pale skin of my rough hands, my arms, the tattered and damp ends of my graying sleeves. In any other scenario, my heart would be beating fast, faster—but it’s slowed, like the singing lights are some haunting lullaby from my childhood.
Wind rustles through the trees outside—a gust stronger than what normally passes through here. It sounds in harmony with the bottle, its melody still pulling me in, its strings curling around the bones in my fingers, begging me to lift that label once more. So I do.
This time, when my gaze locks on the eyes in the bottle, I stay still. The humming fades out until all I can hear is the sound of the wind and my breaths.
I’m not sure what urges me to do it, but I draw in a deep breath and blow gently on the bottle, as I would a dusty book.
And it’s as if a fog lifts from within it. The gold label crumbles and blows away like ashes from a fire. The green coloring flakes off, showing translucent, smooth glass underneath. The dark mist and eyes swirl away until all that is left is a man dressed in green and gold. A low-hanging tunic fastened at one shoulder and fitted to his hips. The rich green color like that of the bottle, but brighter, more inviting. It’s brightened even further with golden accents: metal wristbands, a staff with intertwined snakes and topped with wings, winged shoes, even golden hair.
“My lady,” he bows deep, a smirk dancing across his face.
My breath catches in my throat.
“I’m sure I require no introduction. You’re familiar with me,” the man in the bottle says.
No—not man.
Fae.
Hermes.
I jolt from my seat, the bottle clanging to the table. Sideways, it rolls lightly back and forth, but Hermes stands tall inside it, as if unbothered by the rocking of the bottle.
After hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, I’m not surprised to find him used to it.
Generations ago, the elves sealed the fae away, but the artifacts they’ve been trapped in have been lost to time. That never stopped the stories from spreading. The elves hated the trickster fae for longer than I can remember. The humans called them gods, but elves would never give them such credit. Known for their pettiness and cruelty, they were not worthy of the term. At least according to the elves who evolved from them. After all, the fae were simply… wrong. And in the ways that fae were wrong, elves were right. The elves rose above the pettiness, the trickery, the evil nature.
It’s a nice story for elves to tell themselves.
Though I refrain from voicing the thought, I see just as many fae-like traits in my fellow elves every day. As a quiet barkeep, I see deception, lies, ridiculous feuds. Drunkards who steal from one another, secret-keepers who kill for money, adulterers with double lives. We are no better than the fae. Maybe we once were, our discipline lost to time.
Just as the fae are supposed to be.
“What is your business, faerie?” I don’t need to force the venom in my tone when I spit the words. In spite of my general skepticism of the stories elves sell, I am no fool. I know the fae are tricksters—Hermes the most notorious.
“As you can imagine, it’s been a little lonely in here over the years. I thought I’d seek… a friend.”
“A friend?” If my incredulous tone bothers him, he doesn’t show it. “The fae are no friends to the elves, nor the other way around. As I’m sure you know.” His own capture, after all, would’ve been at the hands of an elf. An elven princess named Calanis who seduced him when he was attempting to intercept a message between kingdoms.
“I’m not so sure the elves are even friends to the elves,” he says, not even bothering to look me in the eye.
No defense of my kind comes to my tongue. I know he’s right the moment he says it.
But my hesitation to respond appears to encourage him.
“Betrayal runs deep in elven blood, Bottle-Breaker. This is something I know quite well.”
He says those words like a title, like a prophecy. But he isn’t the first to call me that. At the tavern, I’m known for how I break bottles open by slicing the neck off with my dagger instead of simply popping the cork. It’s an entertainment for the patrons, who began begging for me to do it that way every day after I did it once in order to use a bottle as a weapon when someone was being attacked in the bar. Many of the drunkards were fascinated by a woman who chose brute force over magic.
“Betrayal may be one of your sins, but yours aren’t exactly paling in comparison.”
“You’re right,” he said. “But I think I’d be able to help you. In a way elves can’t.”
“There’s nothing you could do to help me.”
“Isn’t there?”
I let the question hang in the air. I know what he’s trying to pull me towards.
My mother. I didn’t get a chance to speak to her one last time before she passed.
I might not agree with the title, but the humans didn’t call Hermes a messenger god for nothing.
“What sense would there be in believing you?” I asked. “You’re the trickster of tricksters. Known even to the idiotic humans as a trickster even as they revered you. Why should I believe any differently?”
“You of all people should know that the message is only as good as its messenger.”
There is nothing for me to say. He surely already knows how I eavesdrop at the tavern, storing all the dirty secrets of the townselves. And every last one of them is at least half the liar Hermes is.
And, really, am I not one too?
“What are you planning?” I ask, knowing it’s a futile question.
“Like I said, I’ve been lonely. And though I’m sure you don’t believe it yet, I really do think we could be friends. We are… I’d call us kindred spirits.”
“Kindred spirits?”
“Yes. Two sides of the same coin. Listener and—”
“Repeater.”
“Something like that. Though I’d say perhaps there’s a little more to it than that, Echo.”
He clearly chose to use my name on purpose. He’s an echoer. He would have me release him just so he could return to that very task: echoing. What other purpose does he have? A messenger in a bottle, unable to send messages, only receive? A fitting torture for a faerie, no doubt.
“And perhaps you’d then listen to the real story.”
“What real story?”
“My capture. The so-called heroic act of Calanis. The wench who would have the elves believe her to be a savior, but who was really just a betrayer.”
I furl my brow. There’s no reason for me to believe that he’s feeding me anything but a rehearsed falsehood, that he’d really be willing to send a message to my mother. But he’s also right: the elves are no better messengers than he is.
My eyes drift, finding a scrap of fabric torn from one of the dresses she sewed.
My hand floats midair, uncertain whether to grasp at my chest or pull the dagger from my belt. For a moment, we linger in limbo—both choices seeming equally possible. Hermes says nothing, doesn’t try to plead his case any further. And something about that… that ability to choose silence…
I pull my dagger from my belt.
The next moment, the bottle is in my other hand. The humming begins anew.
“Thank you, Echo,” Hermes says preemptively. Confidently.
The cello strings seem to twist around my fingers, connecting me to the bottle.
I hold my dagger to the bottle’s neck. With one deep breath, one last moment to reconsider—
I strike.
Her voice rings in my head once again: Nothing is as it seems—and I believe her.
Courtney Harvey
Courtney Harvey is a graduate student in the online Creative Writing MFA program at the University of New Orleans. She received her English MA from East Tennessee State University and her undergraduate degrees in English (Writing) and Psychology from King University. Her fiction appears in King University’s 2021 edition of The Holston, ETSU’s 2021 and 2022 editions of The Mockingbird, and in Sigma Tau Delta’s 2021 edition of the Rectangle.