A Last Fae

Iron has been what man conquers nature with. With iron axes man felled forests. With iron nails man raised barns. With iron plows man tuned fields. With iron man slew the deer of the forests. Iron, iron, iron. The fae were of nature, and the touch of iron was the bane to the fae. They would not be tamed, they said, though they would happily drink the milk of a domesticated cow and eat the bread of rye and oats. Man encroached further and further, iron always leading the way. Coal and steam began to spit into the sky, then iron tracks laid across the world, hemming the fae in.

That was nothing.

Eventually, the fae could not move from the old to the new world. The Redcap was bound to Scotland, Genoskwa to the New World, and so it would be forever by 1988 when the North Atlantic Gyre began to be the island of plastic.

The last fae died in 2016. They did not die peacefully, but in pain. Iron was no longer what conquered the world. Aluminum and steel were rare; now it was plastic and rubber. The bones of the ancient beasts turned to oil, and the oil to the bones of the new beasts, and the new beasts to shards and beads and drops and particles that worked their way into bone and blood and soil.

The last fae lived in a tiny patch of the wild, surrounded by concrete and steel. Perhaps, had this fae lived a thousand years before, it would have been a cruel being that spoiled milk and spirited away children. Perhaps it would have been a benevolent house spirit. It was never either. Concrete and plastic surrounded it, drawing tighter and tighter. It wasted and touched the grass around it, a monoculture of Kentucky Bluegrass and artful shrubs that poisoned the fae as it thought of clover and ivy and wild inedible berries.

It perished there, in the city park. It was not alone. It was surrounded by people. It would have given up its very power to die alone.

And yet even when the fae die, they spoil food and steal the sons and daughters. Faebane began to be found everywhere, the particles in every cell and every tissue of every living thing on earth. When nature is taken from the fae, they give it.