The Whispering Hearth of Oberiah Finch

Lord Finch was man with no values beyond his possessions. That included his farmsteads, his manor, and his lovely, daughter Oberiah. When Lord Finch was not bragging about his wealth, he amused himself by exhibiting her to anyone with daughters only half as lovely. So when he received an invitation to a dinner party in Faerie did Lord Finch pack away everything he would need to make an impression, including his Oberiah.

While Lord Finch was boasting about his small plots of land, Oberiah found amusement with a fairy named Vilonia. They gossiped, and joked, and laughed, and as abruptly as they entered each other’s lives, were they separated. Oberiah went back to the human country (Lord Finch embarrassed about the fact his daughter was socializing out of turn), while Vilonia stayed in Faerie.

Their chance kinship did not die away however, as Vilonia spent that night composing letters to Oberiah, sending them off just as the sun began to rise. Oberiah was delighted to read the letters and corresponded that day. The exchange continued for months, with Oberiah locking herself in her room and fawning over every letter received, until her father intercepted one for himself.

“You shame me,” Lord Finch reprimanded, and tossed all the notes into the manor hearth where they were consumed by the hungry fire. “Every letter will follow hereafter,” he warned.

Oberiah almost crawled into the blazes after them, but wept instead.  She fell asleep in front of the hearth, wondering what Vilonia had written her. How was her day? What thoughts had raced through her pretty head? Did Vilonia dance with her seventy-odd-some sisters today? Did she trick John St. John to do his own chores? Had she visited the court of Faerie with all its kings? Oberiah would never know now. The fire crackled and its smoke lifted, whispering through hectic stammerings the words that had been penned by Vilonia.

“She loves you very much, very much,” the fire said. “She wants to take you away to her country someday, someday.”

Oberiah was so thankful for the fire’s kind whisperings. She rediscovered the strength to write back to her Vilonia. Even though Oberiah would not be able to read her lover’s letters, she would still know their contents. Their correspondence continued, and for months letters would be fed to the fire, and Oberiah would sit close to hear Vilonia’s words. Then the messages stopped coming.

Couriers came with less frequency, pages were not thrown into the hearth, and the fire burned low. No word, syllable, or punctuation penned by Vilonia’s delicate hand was seen in the house of Finch. Oberiah felt abandoned. She had heard stories of the whims of fae; how they would be enthralled by one thing only for their focus to shift to something or someone else.

Oberiah’s heart was broken, thinking how the pages and pages exchanged were made inconsequential by disinterest. Some days Oberiah would sit by the unignited hearth and never leave, hoping that a stray spark would be waiting to whisper Vilonia’s words. Of course, none of that ever happened, for Lord Finch had gotten wise to his daughter’s scheming. He kept every correspondence, tucking each letter away from Oberiah and her fire.

The heartache and sense of abandonment proved to be too much for Oberiah’s spirits. On a gloomy morning, she fed the hearth one last time, igniting her own body and letting the fires take her. It burned away her loneliness, then burned away the bricks. It swallowed the house of Finch and ate through all his farmsteads, stopping just at the borders of neighboring properties. While far away in Faerie, the letters piling higher and higher, wrote Vilonia waiting for her lover’s response.