There were no villages like hers, no houses made from fallen trees, no gardens of juniper bushes, no ice blue streams running through bright glass. Even from her window, she had noticed the beauty in her world, and now it was gone. Out there was only cement, cars, trains, and other things she had never seen or heard of before. The edge of the forest had come abruptly laced with a highway and screaming teenagers leaning out of car windows. For the first time in her life she could remember there were other people around and for the first time she was all alone.

She followed the highway for hours until her entire body was tired, and she had no choice but to stop and rest. She fell asleep without her mother's soothing touch, and missed it in ways she never thought she would.

When Pip awoke she was in a strange place. Her eyes shot around trying to orient herself to her new surroundings, but she could not figure out where she was. It was only after touching the concrete that she remembered why she was sitting there so exhausted. Walking down the strip of white painted on the side of the street, she finally came to a smaller intersection. She veered off sharply to the right as though she knew where she was going, and fell into a sprightly skip trying to forget that she had never seen anything as horrifically ugly as a stucco salmon painted house or a jet black SUV. She skipped and skipped until coming along a fairly rundown park in the middle of a residential area. Feeling home at last, Pip stretched out on the fading grass waiting for someone like her to show up, but they never did. The people who came up to her, though, were as different from her as she had ever seen.

A group of boys circled around her, peering at her hair and commenting on her body. The first thing she noticed was that these boys wore things that had never shown up in Nihlom. Their baggy sweatshirts and jeans were as foreign to her as her eyes were to them.

"Look at her, she's so weird." One boy grunted.

"Yeah, she has purple eyes." Another butted in.

"And look at her wings." Said a third.

Pip looked at them more intently. She noticed with a startled explosion of expression on her face that these people did not have wings at all. They were not concealing them, they simply did not have any to conceal. For the first time in her life, she felt self conscious of her wings. They shot out of her shoulder blades in a flurry of pinks and blues and purples weaving in and out of each other in a light mesh like a tapestry and then fluttering off into the wind in a coat of gray shimmer.

The boys talked about her for some time until it became dark when they hurried off behind a tree. They spoke in low voices about how the faerie could no longer see them, but she was watching and listening intently. In her years at her window eavesdropping on the villagers she had picked up quite the ear for far off conversations. In hushed voices the boys spoke of following her back to her hidden glen and finding eternal life from their water. They thought that the faeries could give them power, that they could return to the human world with superhuman strength and invincibility.

Pip could not believe her ears. She stood up and scampered over to the horrific strangers to tell them the truth. In a voice like a harp, she explained that faeries do no grant gifts, that they are mortal, and that they all end up with Keilil in the end.

But the boys could not listen. Her voice brought them closer to her body but further from her message. She had captured them under a spell she did not know she possessed. They threw themselves at her wings, plucking off parts of her wings just to have a tangible relic of the beauty she shone. Pip screamed the cries of all dead faeries for they were ripping her essence from her body, but her sound only made the boys more violent.

And so she fled. Her one gift as a faerie was running at the speed of the wind, and though she had never known her ability, it was clear as she out-sprinted all of her followers that she was gifted by the air to help her flight. But eventually the wind died down, and her burst of speed diminished. All of a sudden, she was on the side of the highway again with the boys following behind her. They were bridging the gap. She would not be able to keep her distance for long, and she did not. Within moments, the boys caught up with her and dragged her down again. Pip waited desperatedly for the wind to pick up again so that she could run away again and save herslf, but it did not happen until sunrise. When the breeze blew in the morning, Pip jumped up from the ground as though the boys were not on top of her, as though they had not stripped her of her attachment to her past, and rushed back to Nihlom, the only place she could be protected by her mother's hand and her wings could grow again.

The wind was not strong enough for her to lose the hoard, but she kept ahead of them the whole way into the forest. When they entered it she could hear the boys complain that she would know the woods better than they would since her glen must be there, which made her nervous. It was edging on nightfall, and she had no way of knowing which way her village was from where they were. She curled around trees, and with each unsure step the crowd got closer. By the time she heard the rugh of the familiar stream that went by her house, it was pitch black, and only the purple threads of her wings were visible against the moon.

continue