Fairy Stories & Other Tales

 When a man from a Faerie court, and thus 'man' in name only, came to power, it did come as a shock. Not coming to power. If men aren't coming to power, they're leaving power, and if their not leaving power, their being executed. Thus is the way of men. Even in Faerie.       No, the surprising thing about all that power was the particular other thing that came with it. Not the privileges - those were anticipated favorably - nor the pomp - an expectation devoutly to be wished. And it was not the meetings, as such. Surely he must have known, he told himself over breakfast and again after teatime, that there would be meetings. It couldn't all be waging wars and making profound statements designed to appear clever at first glance before the second thoughts of the public, those intelligent little moments that, like bindweed, could not be eradicated. But surely there didn't have to be so many meetings. There were the regular meetings to make decisions, the meetings to...

 I set sail once, aboard a ship, bound for unknown waters, as many had done before me. Perhaps they too expected mermaid lagoons and the caves of water dragons. Monsters with all number of heads. I expected, as well, an island run by the spells of sorcerers and a fruit, maybe, that surpassed all my prior tastes. I anticipated storms and calm and to meet several mad people. I wondered when we would come upon islands sodden with the victims of witches, where we would, of course, make a clever escape. Surely it was not too bold nor too strange to expect an island haven where heaven might have come to lay its head. Nor to expect sun-drenched sands bordering a haunted forest, nor chilling winds that carried nightmares. Naturally the ship would break, wreaked by storm and magic and its own hubris in thinking it could plunge through a tempest. Not long after, almost certainly, we would be thrown upon an island with the necessary timber for repairs, where I expected such repairs would make...

 Once upon a time there was a prince who would be king, save that a usurper did as usurper's do and took the crown from him. The prince had been a boy at the time, always an easier job for a usurper to levy, and so the prince found himself thrust into the wide world with only a horse and a bag of gold.      The prince wandered, and as he did, he grew heavy with it. From each town and each village he took away with him far more than a usual passerby. For a prince that would have ruled, he saw the failures of the usurping monarch's reign as did no one else. At first, he bemoaned his lost throne with a sorrow and an anger that filled him with a rage that had no where to go. And then he set his hand to the till, and worked.      As the prince worked, he improved, ever so slightly, the form in which he worked. Agricultural yards gained steadier yields. When such improvements spread, he turned to mill wheels, and to villages and their small communities' comm...

 Once there was a creature filled with lost dreams. She knew they were there. Somewhere. But whenever she tried to grab a hint of one, there it slipped, right through her fingers. Still, she searched and grabbed. Until she was too exhausted to try any longer.      Which, of course, is where she found them.      Wrapped up in slumber and waiting for her to sleep. 

 Once upon a time there was a fairy queen who lived in a fairy castle and did fairy royalty kind of things. She cut the ribbons, and said the speeches, and did the wave, and visited the places. After half a lifetime of this, she was bored out of her mind.      So she moved to the countryside, planted an herb garden, and became a witch. She lived the rest of her days as content as a fairy who was once royalty could be.      As to the crown, it fell to someone else. They always do.