Miranda’s Journal, Entry #5
My sister Roxie loved Faeries. To her, they were tiny winged people with wands, dancing on flowers and drinking from dew drops, and able to make people fly with one shake of their glittery dandruff.
She had a fairy doll that she carried around everywhere. When I went back to the house after the invasion, I found it lying face-down on the charred living room floor, its hair all tangled, candy-colored wings and petal-dress smeared with ash. My parents and sister where nowhere to be found. I spent the night on a broken couch, drinking water from a broken pipe hanging and dripping overhead, staring at a broken doll underneath the coffee table as I listened to gunshots and screams from areas of town not yet finished off. I picked up the doll, and felt a grim sense of irony – here I was, a Fae, hiding from faeries, comforted by a little winged doll. I thought about carrying it with me, as a keepsake to remind me of Roxie. But Roxie’s captors were Fae, so the idea seemed perverse. At dawn, I stuffed the smiling doll into the broken water pipe, and walked away from my ruined house for the last time.
I never liked fairytales, even before I knew that they were a sugar-coated misrepresentation. But the older stories about the ‘Fair Folk’ that Roxie had me read... those were way more true than I ever would’ve believed.
One of them was ‘The Faerie Queene’. It’s about a human knight, a faerie princess, and a dwarf, who go on a quest to rescue the King and Queen from a dragon. Standard stuff... if it were a fairytale.
The dwarf was a Gnome prince, an explorer and hunter named Pellinore. You might recognize him from the Arthurian stories – he was the guy hunting down the Questing Beast, like some sort of medieval version of Captain Ahab.
The dragon was a Salamander lord named Aillen, ancestor – or I should say, granddaddy – of my ex-boyfriend Axel.
The knight was the famous dragonslayer, St. George, whose shield my former companion Gordi now bears.
And even though Roxie was the one who wanted to be a fairy or a princess, it’s me who’s descended from Lady Una. Which makes me...a faerie princess. Ew.
If only I’d known that stuff was history... I sure as hell wouldn’t have read to her about Faeries.
YOU ARE READING
Changelings: The Novelization (Book 1)
AdventureLegends, folktales, and bedtime stories all spoke of creatures called Fae. But no one thought they were real - until the Fae invaded. Now it is up to a rag-tag group of teenage survivors to save the town of Hawthorne: Miranda, chronicler of the Fae...
