Sliding

The man landed with a muted thud.  The ground was mostly mud, but the small of his back had managed to find a rock to connect with in an intimate fashion.  Sharp, tingling pain shot through his tailbone and he gasped for breath, winded.

He had lost count of the times he had fallen, and the low light made it difficult to see exactly where each of these falls had taken him.  His goal, before each fall, was to climb the slippery spiral ramp that stretched up into the darkness like a giant, flat corkscrew.  It was muddy, like the floor he lay on now, and gave easily under his feet.  Somewhere far up above a light shone dimly.  That was the outside, he knew.  He had been attempting to get to it for many months.

The man felt around his wrist and found the tiny, silvery chain that was connected to it.  He pulled this out of the mud and followed it a short ways to find the tiny fairy.  She sat on a small stone, the end of the chain connected to her ankle.  Her elbows rested on her knees, and her hands supported her face.  She was crying.

The man pushed himself up on his side to examine her briefly, then rolled back to catch his breath.  She was never physically harmed, but he always checked just the same; no matter how often the falls occurred.  Turning into a solid statue evidently protected her until they reached the bottom.

This was a hazard of being a fairy, apparently.  The physiology of a fairy mystified the man, but what he had been able to glean from his time around her was this: happiness lightened, anger weighed down.  He had read somewhere that fairies, being of a small and magical nature, could only stably express one emotion at a time.  If more than one were to become trapped in a fairy, strange things would happen.  Fairies that experienced a full spectrum of positive emotions at the same time tended to transform into high speed projectiles, ricocheting off of any surface they encountered.  Restraining a fairy in this state would cause it to explode into a shower of light, only for it to reform a second later to continue zipping around wildly.

Pain, however, was an altogether different story.  If fairies were "excited" by happiness the same way particles were by energy, then the opposite was true with negative emotions.  A sad fairy would become weighed down and sluggish.  A fairy experiencing a wide range of such emotions became a solid statue, and impossibly heavy.

This transformation had occurred many times to the man's companion, each taking place at various levels of their progression up the slippery ramp.  When she was not in this state, she flew freely about him, as far as the silvery chain clamped to her ankle would allow her.  When an attack of heaviness overtook her, she became an anchor, the weight of which the man was powerless to stop from dragging him off the sloped edge of the spiral ramp.

The man checked the chain at his wrist.  It was loose, as usual, and had not tightened.  He wished it would.  He could have dropped it; indeed he could have prevented every one of the fairy's attacks of heaviness from dragging him down simply by letting go of the chain, but he had refused.  He was not going to leave without her.

The chain was something of a magical enigma as well.  It seemed to have a life of its own when he did not hold it.  If he were to set it down, the end would attach itself to whatever surface it came into contact with, and the fairy would be trapped at that spot.  If he picked it back up, it would come free, but it refused to tighten itself around his wrist of its own accord.  He had to hold onto it with main strength to keep it from getting ripped out of his hand whenever they were being pulled down to the bottom of the pit.

"Well," she said sulkily after many minutes of silence, "why don't you put that thing down and get out of here?"

The man had mostly recovered his breath, but did not move from where he lay.