Fairy (Notevember 2022, #24)

We had travelled for a day under the Fractured Reaches, finally emerging from the tunnel onto the mountainside. Our vantage point offered us a view of the entire valley. The view was breathtaking, but grim.
   I had visited the Valley of Growth once, as a child, and even though the memory of it was decades old, it was vivid. The battlefield now before us was its very antithesis. The river ran more with blood than water, despite the hours that had passed since the fighting ended. In the distance, the sea was faintly visible – and just before it, the town of Highspring. Even this far away, the devastation was clear. The fires were still raging, likely because there were too few left alive to get them under control. For now, a few glints of green told me that not all of Highspring’s spires had been razed to the ground, but it would not be long until the place was a blackened ruin.
   Closer to our position, the once lush meadows and fields had been traded for carnage and carrion. This late in summer, there should be a vibrant mat of breadroot, or the muted silver-green of half-ripened cantery corn. Any soil not covered in crops would instead be a mess of grasses and herbs, rabbit warrens and gopher burrows. I doubted any animal out there was alive – that is, if there were any animals left at all. If they hadn’t fled in time, they likely drowned in the bodily fluids that flooded their burrows, or else were eaten alive when the Fairies needed sustenance.
   I could see one now; a Fairie scout sitting on the desiccated corpse of a Nightmare Beast, like a hunter posing on a trophy kill. I was glad that we were a half-a-mile or more from its perch, and so nowhere close enough to feel the otherworldly aura it emanated. The uncanny sensation would ebb and flow with the Fairies’ fluctuating connection to the Fae, but I knew from experience that even at its lowest, it was enough to make me nauseous. I had no intention of going anywhere near it if I could avoid it; the aftermath could hopefully be surveyed well enough from on high.
   The Fairies were marvellously fierce fighters, without exception, and I understood that there had been no other way. But even so desperate as we had been, I wondered if the decision to engage their services would be judged kindly by the generation to come.
   The battle was won, so too the war. On the one hand, I was happy to be alive. On the other, I dreaded the price we would have to pay for this victory. Come sunset and moonrise, we would all be toothless.