A Fairy Story

         The wind was scarcely more than a whisper as she made her way to the thicket and passed within the sanctuary of the forest.  The moon was half full yet the sky was free of clouds and it proved more than ample light for her to see.  Its pale glow kissed her bare skin as she plunged into the woodlands that had once been her home, before the war, before her bitter defeat. 

         She moved with extraordinary grace her bare feet little more than a whisper upon the leaf strewn forest floor.  No twigs broke beneath her; no leaf crunched as she passed atop it, only silence marked her passage.  She paused a moment, her gaze settling upon a small oak sapling.  The tree was tiny compared to the mighty giants whose leaves created the canopy she hid under.

         Hiding, she thought to herself, the word echoing through her mind.  How could she have been reduced to this?  Fleeing into the woodlands hoping they might provide protection even if for only a brief moment.  She had been a queen once.  Then there was the war, the usurpers had come with their spells and their magiks.  They had sung their spells and had defeated her.  All those long years held in that prison.

         She watched the small sapling and smiled to herself.  It was a bitter smile and one filled completely with malice and contempt.  What had her world come to?  They had usurped her rule, cast her into a hellish prison and held her there for an age; hundreds mayhap thousands of years had passed.  Eons and millennia might well have dwindles away while she lingered on in that nightmarish realm of dreams and madness. 

         And they had done it over them.  They had betrayed her for mankind, for the humans what possessed no magiks; the most pathetic of the gods’ creations, that dolorous lot of wretches.  Now she was reduced to hiding in a thicket in hopes that she might find some measure of safety there.  Her eyes flitted about.  Nothing was the same anymore; the wood seemed to have an ill feel to it as though the very trees and the soil itself wanted her to be quit from them.  She could hear the soft whisper of the trees though she could not make out what they were saying.  She knew they spoke ill of her and protested her presence within the wood.  She knew they hated her and they feared her.

         The thicket was by most standards unremarkable, little more than a clump of trees that swayed with the slight breeze, their leaves nearly blotting out what dim light the half moon gave off.  She took a soft step toward the sapling she had been spying. 

         A voice called out, soft and lilting and yet commanding just the same, “Hold there,” said the voice.  “By what right have you come into my wood?”

         She turned toward the sound.  It was the first voice she had heard since having been released from her nightmarish prison.  The figure which stood before her was a beauty that rivaled her own.  Her hair was dark like the bark of an oak tree, her face round and soft.  She was nude, as the fey had no need of clothes.  “The spell singers have stopped their song.  I am free once more.  I have come to enlist your aid, dryad.”

         “My aid,” spoke the one that had been called a dryad, “I serve your will no longer.  I am no longer held as your slave, we are free of you, why would any of us aid you with aught?”  She waved her arms about gesturing toward the entirety of the wood.

         “Did you not once proudly serve me?  Was it not I who kept you safe and free of harm?  And you would call that slavery?  You would speak of being held in bondage?”  She took a step closer toward the dryad stabbing an accusing finger at her, “’Twas you and your kin what betrayed me and yet I come to you still for your aid, and you would renounce it?  Are the mortals your new master now?  Is it they whom you serve?”

         The dryad was quiet a moment, hers eyes flickered about the wood, she stepped close to a tree and then in a loving gesture she caressed its bark, she rested her head against the tree’s massive trunk.  “Much has changed since last we met.  Even by our reckoning much time has passed since the war was lost.  Things are different; those who followed you unto the ending have become the Fallen.  They have become twisted on the outside to mirror the blackness in their hearts.  They shy away from our ancient places and they linger in the darkness.  They make their homes in holes beneath the bridges of men and in the mountains far removed from the forests and glades they once called home.  They are twisted and evil, such was the command of the gods when you’re gambit was lost.  We few who are still left unchanged fear them.  ‘Twas only your imprisonment which saved us from sharing in their fate,” she said her face growing ever sadder.

         It was her eyes which displayed her melancholy the most.  They held a distracted quality to them, almost as though she was remembering somewhat which was unpleasant, like as not she was.  The dryad stepped away from the tree she had been caressing closer toward the figure which had entered her wood.  She topped in a shaft of moonlight which had filtered through the canopy of leaves revealing her form to the interloper.

         The one which had entered the wood paid her nudity no mind.  She was beautiful that was to be certain.  Her hips moved with an easy sway as she walked, her breasts were almost flawless with small pink nipples, her stomach was flat with a small indention marking her navel, but she had seen beauty such as this countless times over in her lifetime and she was not distracted by it.  It was a trick that mortals might fall for, but she was no mortal.  “Will you aid me,” she asked it pointedly, “your realm was once great and mighty, you were a queen amongst the dryads and the nymphs paid you homage and loved you.  They fought and argued among themselves as to who could bathe with you in your sacred pools and the springs and the falls.  Now you are reduced to this pathetic little clump of trees with no stream nor fall to bathe in.  The sacred pools are lost to you and so too is the love of the dryads and the nymphs.  Aid me and once again you shall have that glory.”

         “What aid is it that you seek of me, that I might regain what I lost,” the dryads face was indeed sad, she knew well what had been taken from her and being reminded of it was a painful blow.

         “We were once the favored of the gods.  Now they have turned their backs to us.  They have named man as their preferred creation and we the Fey have been told to pay the mortals homage.  The time has come to punish the usurpers and to put the mortals back in their place.  They should serve us.  We, the Fey, are the true masters of this world,” said the one who had fled to thicket of wood, the one who had been imprisoned. 

         “I do not wish to become one of the Fallen,” said the dryad softly her voice thick and bordering on tears.

         “You already are,” said the other.

         The dryad fell to the ground then, she began to weep.  Her cries were soft yet desperate and full of despair.  The other, the one whom had entered the thicket to enlist the dryad’s aid turned her attention back to the sapling she had spied earlier.  She began to approach it again.  “No,” whispered the dryad, “’Tis but a sapling with much life still in it,” her voice was quiet almost to the point of being inaudible.

         “Yes,” spoke the other, “I’m so hungry, and I’m weak one small youthful tree shall not be missed.”

         The dryad only wept harder for this.  The other wrapped a set of delicate fingers around the tree’s trunk.  The tree gave a violent shudder and then its leaves began to whither, the green turned to black.  They became as though they were ash and they fell from its limbs, disintegrating in the air long before they ever made it to the forest’s floor.  The tree’s limbs bent and twisted, at first they sagged downward as though the tree itself had heaved a great sigh.  Then they began to fall, they snapped off one at a time at first.  Dry and brittle the limbs broke, their snapping noises sounded like thunderclaps in the thicket. 

         She could feel the other trees shuddering with fear; it was in their boughs and their roots.  She felt it from beneath her feet from within the very ground itself.  She smiled at this, a small simple little smile, but one filled with contempt and hatred.  It was intoxicating how it felt when the tree’s life was devoured by her, and when it was done there was nothing left of it save a blackened clump of ash in her hands and a pitiful wizened stump where the sapling had once been.  They were right to fear her.  She gazed about at the other trees, she wanted more.  Oh, how she longed for more.

         Her heart beat within her breast at a rapid pace and she felt younger and stronger and more beautiful.  She could see a faint nimbus light glowing around her hands she was stronger for having devoured the tree’s life and essence.  Her smile broadened.  She turned her attention back to the dryad, who still wept.  She had pulled her knees up to her chest and she hugged them as she wept for herself and the tree that had just been lost. 

         The other crouched down beside her.  She looked at the crying weeping dryad with obvious disgust at the weakness.  With a single finger she wiped the tears away from one eye then the next.  “Why do you weep,” she asked.  Then she kissed the dryad full on the mouth, the kiss of lovers.

         The dryad kissed back releasing her knees and pulling the other closer to her.  When they broke their kiss it was the dryad which spoke answering the question she had been asked.  “I weep because it begins again.”

         “Yes,” said the figure that had devoured the sapling oak, the one that had come uninvited into the thicket.  “Yes, it begins again.”  She took the dryad then, there on the forest floor while the trees watched and howled their protest at their union.