While it is often that the case that prejudice allocates good people to potentially evil, by appearance only, evil can sometimes present as benevolence. While some applaud what is presented as the wholesome overthrowing of a despotic regime, others will know as fascism. Or religious supremacy. Or moral superiority. History often eventually births evidence of a greed-driven fallacy.
MERCY RILEY is thrust into life in the cramped, cold little room down back of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Mother and Baby Home. In the rarely-visited coastal village of Weary Bay. A place of shame, Mercy is born and raised a secret. Never permitted to know her mother, her name concocted for expedience by strangers. While social acceptability is not her destiny neither is obscurity and around the age of thirteen she escapes. Lost and vulnerable she is discovered and aided by Black Annis, not even slightly mortal. Taken in by the Travelers she is sequestered, for her protection and education, with Maisie Raith the Weary Bay's generations-long practitioner of witchcraft, where she learns some semblance of what it means to live beyond a walled, barred institution. She learns to heal and foretell a person's death through tarot cards, but she is also taught-maybe randomly, maybe by design-to kill with precision.
RAVEN, a wild faerie with the terrible curse of empathy, loves Mercy uttterly is reclusive, busted, dangerous and lost, has his heart brokenagain and again by injustice. The cop, HENRY WABAUN, who initially thinks nothing of his enquiry into Raven's bashing is drawn into the inevitability of the Great Mystery's plan for what is right.
In the style of mixed folktales Mercy finds herself a piece on the chessboard of a brutal story. Her reason for existence woven into a tapestry of seeming confusion.
At the very close of winter, the city of New Rathmore is rendered powerless beneath the frozen discord of a late season arctic ice vortex. The metaphor of From Winter, Spring is Born, is sung in folktales the world over; is anthropomorphized, of necessity, for children and should change as a youngster becomes adult but... What of truth? What is the game and how serious are the players? And where are the rules?
Almost everyone underestimates Mercy Riley. Most do not realize she is not-and never will be-like them.
WHO DONE IT?
Characters are woven into THE CHANGELING in such a way as to confuse an opponent, or a reader, into believing they have answers that they do not. Each, however, is integral to Mercy's revenge, even when that revenge liberates her true nature. When springtime finally comes...?
Is justice done? Who really knows? Because of the obscurity of possible violation presented, saccharned, by Disney? And is that real? How does santa claus, a tooth fairy and an egg-laying rabbit prepare a child for the reality of danger? Or love? Doesn't justice also depend on an individual's viewpoint? How can a person make meaningful choices when fed on fiction that always ends with a kiss? We are told so many things, as children, that are lies. Falsehoods dressed up in tutus, with wands topped with starlight. Tinkerbell castles. No one explains that castles were built from the ruin of indigenous peoples, do they?
THE CHANGELING is not a pretty faerie story. It breaks the rules. It confuses and disturbs. Mercy fulfils one part of her destiny, when one part does not make a whole in a storytelling that is, hopefully, never ending.
There is no redemption. No happy-ever-after. Just more.
Author Biography:
Writer, psychic, initiator and master storyteller, de Angeles has been in print since 1987."I am a twig upon a vast tree within that forest. A medicine woman in this body, I re-skin your bones in my one way. Ancestral way. Truthteller way. I am Celt. A priteni (inked) person whose ancient lineage is a thick, gnarled tap-root, unbroken through the ages, beyond bus drivers, and women institutionalized for speaking their spells, from workers dying of the lung disease from the linen factories, or the coal mines, to tillers-of-the-soil and landed gentry through necessity and greed. Down the roots of the blood in my veins, like the spiders in the caves beneath the World Tree..."de Angeles Brave for the Unclaimed PeopleDe Angeles is a scholar of linguistic anthropology and holds a post-graduate degree in Professional Writing. She teaches the rewilding of consciousness through both spoken and written word, and a technique of deep listening. The "English" language is a tapestry of many past/extant language sources, some religious, some political, many misrepresented in modern relationships, both personal and professional. The correct useage and understanding of communicationn allows for the recognition of propaganda, cultural theft and consciousness-programing: Gaslighting.There usually tends to be a power dynamic when gaslighting happens, explains Dr. Robin Stern. The manipulator holds enough power that "the target of the gaslighting is terrified to change up [the relationship] or step out of the gaslighting dynamic because the threat of losing that relationship - or the threat of being seen as less than who you want to be seen as to them - is quite a threat," says Stern, author of THE GASLIGHT EFFECTBACKSTORYFormerly known as LY DE ANGELES, Lore is the name chosen, upon being released from being an owned human, in 2020, by the Supreme Court of NSW, Australia; Lore is not so much a name as a function. De Angeles was trafficked as an infant, and experienced natal alienation due to the calculated ignorance of the strangers to whom she was sold. She is an advocate of many practices from tarot to articles and immersive trance/shamanic-style workshops.NATAL ALIENATION, usually affecting those known as First Nation peoples, also denies those with pale-pelts a true identity through denial of ancestry and cultural identity through forced adoption and trafficking.REWILDING CONSCIOUSNESSDe Angeles is an elder, an scáthán draíochta, wild medicine practitioner, wordcrafter and scholar. She is director and advisor to Albion & Arctic Indigenous Alliance, a not-for-profit confederacy promoting awareness of both modern and intergenerational affiliations and culture, promoting joy, recognition, and information relevant to all those who are almost lost, and as a means of sharing with those of other indigenous groups.ANCESTOR LORELore de Angeles is an indigenous Celtic/Scandinavian knowledge-holder, drú-wit trained, and maintaining strong genealogical taproots to an Irish and Breton ancestry. She is learned in the landscapes and story of these living people and species; is a scholar and a defender of culture, language, freedom of speech, gender diversity, equality, parity, homeland and right-to-respect.De Angeles is descended, also, from peoples erroniously called Irish gypsies. A Traveler culture known as na lucht siúil. Through circumstance and theft of her animal body she regretfully does not speak her native tongues.ACCOLADESCOVR, USA. Visionary Fiction for The Quickening (1st in the Traveler Series, novel)Byron AllShorts (Flickerfest), Australia for The Redemption of Joe Frame (film)Byron International Film Festival, Australia for The Redemption of Joe Frame (film)Byron International Film Festival, Australia for Wings (film)Tahiti International Fim Festival, for The Redemption of Joe FrameGritLit, Canada for Comeuppance (short story).Jesus Christ Superstar 2000, 2001 (live stage) Director
