Glass or Diamond: Fairy's Wish

Episode 1: Stumbled Upon

When someone says "I'll give you the world", what is the worth of the world? A lifetime of wealth? Of comfort? Of safety?

It is a thing that cannot be possessed, and so, has no value. Or so, it would seem.

Technology was not the be-all, end-all that it was meant to be. In fact, it led to the state of the world as it is. Similarly, magic was a tool of conquest, discovery, and power. But power inevitably leads to ruin. In order to survive, the pursuits of magic and technology had to be abandoned, and so, what remains is a broken world plagued by monsters in all forms; human, drakyk, fairy, and the colossi. Evil hides in the shadows of the survivors, while the colossi prowl the world.

It's how she ended up where she's at now. Lykha is a fairly young fairy, imbued from birth with some of the highest available magical power any living being has ever been known to possess. She's about the height of a human infant, though with adult human female features. This makes her rather easy to fit into specially designed capsules favored by despots, adventurers, and sorcerers hoping to capture one of exactly the type of flying, magical beings like her.

Lykha scratches listlessly on the inner surface of the capsule she's trapped in. It blocks her basic magical abilities, and the biggest irony of her magical wish-granting ability is that she can not grant her own wish. This has always been strange to her, since she chooses to grant the wish of anyone making a wish of her, which is why fairies have to be trapped to begin with. Often, the ultimatums of torture or death come up, forcing fairies to grant their captor's wish against their culture's mandate not to.

Lykha never got the chance to refuse or grant a wish. Her captor had been deliberating intensely since he caught her. He blew it off rather often, fearful of making a hasty wish and "wasting" his wish. Of course, this is always a risk. Fairies grant the wishes as they interpret their meaning, so a carelessly worded wish, even without malicious intent of the fairy, can lead to disastrous results.

Her captor was a technology pirate stalking the desert for discarded technology with his horde of minions, and basically living as lords of their own little kingdom of the great open desert.

And, in his fear of "wasting" his captured fairy's one wish, which could have been virtually anything, he died a gruesome death that he could have wished away with his dying breath. Lykha didn't get a good look at it, but the sand exploded around them, and many of his minions fell. Then, as her captor was trying to figure out what to do in his panic, Lykha found her capsule lying in the sand as he screamed in the distance; his arm still holding her capsule where it fell with her.

And now, she's stranded in the desert.

Trapped in a capsule that blocks her basic magic.

With no food or water.

In the desert.

She's pretty sure her last droplets of sweat evaporated hours ago, being the second day of her helpless isolation in the middle of a desert. Her saving grace from the freezing night's cold was the fact that her capsule is mostly submerged in the sand. But, it's still hot during the day, especially when the scorching sun is beaming down directly on her, and her throat is on fire, while her enraged stomach growls demandingly at her.

She's pretty well reserved to her fate. She's not sure if she did something to deserve this end, but there's nothing she can do to stop it. Her capsule is too submerged to be easily spotted by anyone, and she doesn't even really want to be found. Her rescuer will just keep her in the capsule until her wish is spent, and she becomes a useless, tiny being.

No one from her captor's party is alive, so there's no one looking for any of them, least of all her. It's a miserable way to go, but what can she do? She could scream her lungs out of her body, and no one will come.