AN: I've got a heart for folklore and my own especially, and since I wrote these over on tumblr I thought I might cross-post them here. The chapter title is from the song Sjå attende by Gåte, the English translation being something like "look behind you".

hulder: (alt. "huldra") forest creature from Scandinavian folklore; a beautiful and seductive woman, her characteristics in Norwegian lore include a cow's tail and lynx-ears. She's known for bringing both luck and misfortune, and for luring men into the underworld.

Disclaimer: Fairy Tail and its characters belong to Hiro Mashima; I own absolutely nothing. The hulder is part of Scandinavian folklore, and also not of my own creation.

Huldra

by Miss Mungoe

sjå attende

The morning mist curls cold and white around his ankles, and his breath is lost in the air, vanishing like smoke as he turns his gaze around – always looking back, wherever he steps. The ground underfoot is soft, yielding beneath the soles of his boots, but the water soaks into the leather despite his efforts. Around him the forest rests, soft and quiet. A fae realm of dark looming trees and odd lights beckoning the weak heart closer into–

–danger, it's danger and he's walking right into it with open arms–

He hears her laughter, her mirth the trickle of a brook but deeper, lovelier, and he spins around, only to find the edge of her tail disappearing around the curve of a fir tree. The mist hides her, and the sound of her soft footsteps fade to old memories in his ears, until he's not sure if he's heard her at all. She's a trick of the light and the dark, a flicker in playful shadows – the sensuous sway of a tail and the lure of eyes not of this world.

He stops, and for a moment he considers his folly. His breath comes quick to his lungs; cheeks flushed with exertion he doesn't understand. It seems harder to breathe here, harder to think, and he wonders if he's somehow crossed over between his realm and hers without knowing.

A hand trails soft along his shoulder, and Laxus jerks, but when he spins around she is gone again, her laughter following in her wake like birds in flight. A flash of bare ankle, and he turns again–

–to find her right in front of him, plain as day and tangible as the earth.

She smiles, wicked mouth curling soft and alluring beneath her eyes, and he can't move. Her dark hair spills wide over slim shoulders, tangled with leaves and other strange things but it only adds to her foreign beauty – her lynx's ears peeking up amidst the thick, dark strands, and her cow's tail held between her nimble fingers. She swings it, teasingly. The tattered hem of her rough wool skirt lifts up, and her bare feet dances, light along the soggy mire.

"Cana," he breathes, the name she'd granted him for a wreath of flowers, weaved from the apple-trees of his grandfather's farm. She wears the crown still, swinging at her belt, the flowers fresh though it's been months, and a cold winter no less.

She hums as she approaches, a song low in her throat, the tune like that of a milkmaid's call for her cattle, and he can't move his feet, caught and held by her strange spellwork.

"Oh, here, come here, come ho-ome," she sings, eyes dark and clever in the cold morning light and his breath leaves him at the sight.

She sidles forward, tail swinging smoothly before she lets it drop, reaching instead for his jaw. Her fingers dance, light along the curve of his chin, and she leans in to offer her breath where his has left him. To her toes she lifts herself with ease. Her mouth slants over his, the gesture sure as though they've been doing this a thousand times, in lives before and after.

Her nose is cold like the morning, and her unnatural ears twitch as she presses closer. His hands find the swell of her hips, tentative at first – she's skitterish like an animal, and might slip from his grip like the mist at their feet – but then he grips with surety, and her softness yields pleasantly beneath his fingers.

She's warm to the touch where the air is cold, and when she draws back his heart hammers wild against his ribcage.

"You're a long way from your kin," she tells him then, in that throaty voice that had so beckoned at him all those months ago, when he'd been chasing a lost sheep and stumbled upon the little clearing in the forest under her claim. "A long, long way."

"I said I'd come back," he responds, gruffly. She smiles, the corner of her sweet mouth curving sharply upwards.

"So you did. But are you married now, I wonder? Last you came to see me, there was another."

He remembers. Soft hands and a smiling face, cheeks flushed by the hearth-fire. A promise made when he'd been a lad, and young in the ways of the world.

Laxus shakes his head. "I've cut my ties," is all he says, as she walks a smooth circle around him. The tip of her tail twitches.

"Have you now," she drawls, as she comes to a stop. A portion of her hair slips over one shoulder, and his eyes are drawn towards it – the moon-pale skin, and the freckles dark against it. She looks at him from over it. "And has she cut hers?"

He doesn't offer an answer to that, and she dances around him on her quick, bare feet. "Come home, come home," she sings, the song a mockery to the practices of his world, of calling the cows home for the night. She'll call them wild beasts, and scoff at the notion of humans directing them as they please. She'll speak of a time they weren't under such spells, when the void between the worlds was not so stark and her kind walked as freely amidst the fjords and the mountains like his does now.

He's told her humans work no magic, not like her kin does, but she only laughs and laughs and sings–

–oh innocent man, my innocent man how little you kno-ow–

"My world is not like yours," she tells him again, repeats her words from their first meeting, and their second, and their third. "Fae things dwell in the dark. Are you prepared for it?"

Are you prepared for it, young shepherd. Do you know what you're leaving behind?

Laxus regards her closely, and offers a moment's thought to his home – the little farm snug in the shadow of the mountain, a lone house beside the sprawl of green and the blue of the fjord. He thinks of the apple-trees ripe in the spring, the tinkle of cow-bells in the hills and his grandfather smoking his pipe on the front steps.

Then he nods. "I've made my choice," he tells her. The words are heavy, a promise that binds even as she winds her tail round their clasped hands – a playful act that carries more weight than it implies. He is hers, now.

Her smile curves true. "Then let me show you," she tells him, and winds her fingers with his, her hands so alike his own he forgets the tail and ears that mark her as something else.

She continues to sing her song, and as she leads him through the mists, away from his simple world of good things and warm hearths to spirit lights and creatures wrought in the dark,

Laxus follows.

AN: Cana in this particular role was too good to pass up.