"It’s said that ‘Only the good die young.’ Ever wondered why?"
Her breath is just a whisper now, her heartbeat thin and hesitant. She’s hanging by a thread now…barely a pulse….
I can feel her coming to me now, slowly crossing the Diamond Bridge that separates her world from the Fairy Kingdom. The doctors and nurses are hovering over her now like a cloud of insects, rushing around her, calling to her…. And the parents… as always they are there, watching through the glass. They are begging God, sobbing quietly for their little golden haired girl…..
She can’t hear them though. She’s slowly moving to another land now, if only they knew.
Didn’t they know that she was just the perfect pixie bait?
No, they didn’t. That old wisdom was lost now that people don’t believe in us. They used to be able to protect their children.
Not any more it seems.
Tsk, tsk…silly, silly little girl. You shouldn’t have broken your promise to me.
Because you see, that… I can’t tolerate….. A promise is after all, a promise….
The Wise Ones used to know. How to ward us off, how to keep us away from the beautiful ones, because they knew us well and knew what we are attracted to. Little girls with golden hair, big blue eyes and perfect smiles. Little girls with natures sweeter than honey, whose parents watch them sleep and smile.
But Fairies love them too, and seek them out.
Like this little one, whose spirit now has reached the other side and where she stands now like I once did, bewildered and naked in the Faerie Lands. She will learn though, now she is one of us.
She sees me now, walking towards her, as tall as her, dressed in gossamer and diamonds and gold and she remembers me and cowers from my touch. She’s crying for her parents. She’s screaming to go back.
Too late I say. You shouldn’t have been false to me.
She says she wasn’t, she says she loved me. She says she always loved me.
I wag my finger in her frightened face.
Nonono I say. You loved me? Then who was that other little girl? The one you said you loved forever? The one from your class at school? The one you played with every day and traded bracelets made from daisies?
I can see that she remembers now. She starts to cry, she stamps her little foot and wails that she was just a friend….
But that’s when you stopped coming to the fairy dell, wasn’t it? I asked her. That’s when you just ‘grew up’ and simply deserted me…. After all I had done for you…. After all the gifts of poems written on rose petals, of thimbles full of freshest nectar that I brought to you. After all the sunlit afternoons we spent together? And all the stories of our folk I told you?
And the little golden chain you told your mother that you ‘found’…. That was from me… wasn’t it? A symbol of our love, I told you that.
She nodded, sobbing…. She says she didn’t mean it. She would be a better friend next time….
No, I tell her. There won’t be any next time. Not with me.
No. Not for a long time. Not until she has learned to fly and not until her heart has turned to granite. Then she can to go back to the world, drawn to beauty and to innocence like a wolf to a blood trail. Where she will one day meet another little girl, just like her…. Then she’ll understand what it feels like, I tell her. What it feels like to be in love. And to be betrayed. What it feels like to be forever alone, forever beautiful.
To have something, and then to have it taken away.
Then she will know our fairy nature, for it is full to the brim like a wine cup of jealousy, of spite, of cold anger, and of pitiless desire for what we own.
What we own. For what we own is ours. Didn’t you understand that, I ask her?
Oh yes, I tell her. You will learn, my pretty one. For when you promise to be ours, then… one day….
We always take the beautiful ones, you see. To make them just like us….
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