Old Earth Dwellers

We must have been here nearly a day. Like I said before, it’s hard to track time in here. The faery’s been unconscious most of that time. Early on I rolled it over – gently, just to check it wasn’t injured. That’s when I discovered it was a female. You can tell the females – they’re curvier. It – or I should say ‘she’ – was breathing all right, and there was no obvious sign of injury – so I left her alone and just waited, and watched. And remembered.

For a long time the world was their domain. In the raw days of charm, while the trolls made war and the dragons skulked in their shadows, the faeries found other places to live. Places between. They conquered dimensions, and diminution. They used charm to delve, to squeeze themselves small into realms which, as soon as you thought of them, became vast beyond comprehension. They even twisted time, and in time became known by another of their many names: Old Earth Dwellers.

For aeons they ruled in retreat. Fragile to begin with, they became more so. They shed their bodies and grew their wings and took to the elements. Corporeal once every hundred years, they moved through spaces you and I can only imagine. Of all the creatures bound to charm, their affinity was the strongest.

The turning of the world hit them harder than any of us. They had felt it coming for many centuries. Inside their elemental forms, hard skeletons had been slowly growing. On the day the magic went away, faery bones became real, and from yet another species of the old world was born something new.

The natural faeries grew thick skins and coarse hair. Their wings failed. They fell in love with fire. And, against the odds, they thrived.

I watched it all. You may wonder how I was able to do that. It’s a long story, one for another day. My vantage changed over the years, although there are huge gaps in even my memory. The biggest gap of all is the most recent past. That’s why I can’t remember how I got here – wherever here is. Nor why I should find myself in the company of an unconscious faery.

Except … she’s not unconscious any more. At last she’s waking up. She raises her head and opens her soft eyes. She speaks. She says a single word:

‘Dragon!’