Pixies and Fairies

            The damp stench of mold and decaying wood wafted its putrid fingers around the shivering, minute form as she rattled the small, iron bars of her cage. The more she clung to the iron constraints, the more power was sapped from her feather quill thin arms, resulting in only a pitiful sway of the cage from its chain link mounted to the collapsing ceiling. Her futile shakes and trembling gasps only enticed her captor upon returning to his abode.

            “A tad restless, are we? He sneered in a voice smooth and sickly like spoiled molasses. Stirred in with the bitter intoxication of the rotted atmosphere, his voice sent her to wretch upon the floor of her cage which then spilled in golden droplets which pooled and seeped into the cracks of the flooring a good five feet below where she knelt. Her captor’s nose wrinkled in disgust at the sweet aroma of marigold pollen and nectar. Even their vomit reeked of flowers.

            “Don’t waste way all of your energy, now,” he crooned darkly, his pale, cracked lips pulling cruelly against his gray teeth. But it was already far too late for those words of wisdom to take any affect. The metal bars she had clung so frantically had leeched her power from her and into a source most susceptible to capture. Giving the cage a patronizing tap, he sent the minute girl to tremble into the corner furthest from his hand. “You are all I’ve caught this week. I have to make the most of you.” His menacing tapping was only returned with erratic breaths and silent sobs behind pupil-less amber eyes.

            Her eyes were large and round, a peculiar shape for one of her species, and were planted on a soft, fair skinned face. Framing her face was a pure white veil of hair which was cropped in bangs over her eyes and settled in straight locks across her quivering shoulders and around her fragile knees. On her back rested soft, flattened wings like those of a moth and spotted with tones of being and tender browns. Any half-good thing would be susceptible to her fair, although peculiar, beauty. But to this malevolent captor, the only beauty he could sense was her fear.

            “I don’t often find luck in capturing fairies,” he said, reaching a long white finger to the back of the cage to stroke her hair behind her abnormally long and feathered ear. Her throat voice d a pain induced squeak at the icy shock of his touch. He recoiled his hand slowly, his sinister sneer still plastered on his wrinkled and broken face. “So you do have a voice,” he enticed.

            “How do you know I’m a fairy?” she whimpered, her voice echoing softly as if she were a spirit and not the physical mass she was. The man raised a silver eyebrow at her question and relished in another sneer.

            “Your wings, ears, and the opacity of your eye décor have led many to mistake your appearance for that of a pixie. Now this goes without mentioning that your mannerisms as well as your preference to evening and night life are also not ones to correspond with your alleged species,” the man droned, stating what was already apparent to his slowly arousing victim. “But your eyes conceal an origin of light and a heritage far too pure to be that of a common pixie,” he continued, now pacing around the cage, his footsteps wearing further upon his warped floor. “You are an estranged being; a misfit, if you will. As a fairy you were born into the light,” his pacing ceases as his eyes locked onto hers, “but your lifestyle leads you to a fate only in the dark.”

            The fairy stayed tensely poised on the bottom of her cage as her lip quivered in fright, anguish, and livid angst. As a fairy she was instinctively a prideful creature, and his sharp words left smarting scars upon her already tremendously skewed self-image. However, the matter that had left the most harmful indentation in her mind was his placid foretelling of her fate.

            With scornful eyes she met his silver irises and asked in a cautiously livid undertone: “How do you know of my fate?” he returned her scowl with a self-righteous grin.

            “It is a simple matter,” he remarked, “for I control it.” What was once anger scrawled across her face had now returned to an expression of terror in one swift motion the index finger and thumb of the man shot through the space between the bars of the cage and clasped onto one of the fairy’s hands, crushing it in his grasp. A shriek reverberated from her once pursed mouth as she writhed and bit and beat against the pads of his two fingers, sending only feathery sensations up the fate-teller’s hand. In only a twist of his wrist he ceased her flailing by positioning her with her arm bent over her head so that any movement on either one’s part would snap her wrist and elbow.

            Sobbing under her captor’s hand, she uttered a quiet plea.

            “What do you want from me?” she gasped between sobs of helplessness and pain, “I’m nothing special. I am not even a house fairy. I have no special powers. I know no spells. I am an outcast to not only the fairy world but to all sprites as well. What am I to you?”

            Still applying pressure to her already demolished hand, his fingertips became coated in the warm, milky white substance that is fairy blood. High pitched cries now rang in his ears as he pushed further down on her arm.

            “That is just it, you foolish creature,” he snarled, baring his teeth and plaguing her with the stench of death on his breath, “Your energy is wasted on you lesser creatures. You do not matter. You are an insect anyone can crunch between their fingertips, like I am right now. You power in your body does no one any good. You make no difference in this world, at least not in this form. I require it a vast amount more that you.” With his sentence finished, he reached his free hand into the cage and pressed the tip of his extended finger into her stomach, causing her to vomit once again, now upon his flesh. The hot, golden liquid scalded his sking, but he continued to press as he chanted:

            “Gaiši līdz tumši, dzīve līdz nāvei. Lai jūsu spēks ir mans.” As the words snaked from his lips and into the fairy’s weakening body, her muscles tensed and her eyes glazed. Just before the color drained from her buttermilk toned face, her eyes cinched themselves closed and her petal shaped lips gaped. From them came a noise; a noise that would send any half-good thing into a maddened fit and spiraling spiritual collapse; a fairy scream.

            The sound, so high pitched, did not even appear to reach her captor’s eardrums, and with good reason. His kind was no good.

            As her power drained and color disappeared, it reappeared in his fingertips and escalated to the length of his arm, warping his gnarled, veined, liver-spotted hand into that of a smooth young man’s.  As her eyes turned from a liquid amber to a dull beige, his turned from a dead silver to a glimmering gold. The browns in her flaking wings were replaced by grays and her snow white tresses became ashen. As the last of her color dwindled on her now hushed lips, she gasped her final hearsay.

            “But… Orion has seen me in the stars,” her faint voice echoed. Closing the gap between himself and the miniscule sprite, he pushed his breath upon hers.

            “Well then Orion is a damned fool,” he hissed before stealing the last of her breath. He released her brutally fractured hand and she fell limply to the bottom of her cage with a sickening, silent thud. Her dead eyes stared into nothingness as her murderer unlatched the opening of her cage and lifted her up by her crumbling, ashen wings. Lifting her to the moonlight, all of her radiance had blatantly been transferred upon him. With a final malicious sneer formed upon newly un-chapped lips, he callously flung the deceased creature out the window of his dilapidated estate. Upon the soil she landed there bloomed a permanently foreboded marigold from her deteriorated form, which forever marked her conspired fate.