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It Was All
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After the Apocalypse
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Beautiful Purgatory

Beth Einspanier

    When the faeries returned to Earth, humanity thought it was the greatest thing in history. After all, we’d just about convinced ourselves that magic didn’t exist and that we were alone in the universe, and then here they came to prove us wrong on both counts. The Fair Ones arrived in magnificent golden palace-ships lined with shimmering lights that captured and held one’s attention like bug zappers, and they landed at various places around the globe. They had timed their arrival perfectly—the Age of Iron had given way to the Age of Silicon, and that rusty ferrous metal was just about on its way out.
    The beings that exited these palace-ships were beautiful, alluring, and charismatic with alabaster skin, long, pointed ears, and dark almond eyes that seemed to hold whole universes of knowledge in their inky depths, and they brought gifts to prove their benevolence: newer, stronger building materials so our buildings would last forever; clean-burning fuels that didn’t harm the environment or release harmful radiation; alchemical formulae to scrub the pollutants from our air and water and soil and keep it clean; beautiful pieces of jewelry that calmed the moods of the wearer; amazing fey-metals a thousand times stronger than anything else we had; exotic, magical plants that produced enough food for everyone in the world, and whose influence inspired similar bounty in nearby mundane plants. Of course, we asked them about the secrets behind these wonderful things, and they offered to teach our younger generations these amazing things, if only we would give over our best and brightest children - so we did.
    Few people today remember why we were so willing to do this, because what we got back... was different. Oh, they looked like our children, and they had new knowledge and abilities, but it was like they no longer really understood human behavior, or like whatever the Fair Ones had done had changed them in ways that we did not yet understand. Looking at them was like looking into an emotional void; there was no empathy, and no social connections developed between normal humans and these Changelings. We were disquieted by this, but our world was recovering from the centuries of pollution and we were no longer on the brink of an energy crisis that the experts had predicted would cause the downfall of civilization, so we adapted. With the help of our beautiful, mood-calming jewelry (which was now all the rage), we adapted.
    Seven years of improvements later, the Fair Ones collected the price for their wonderful gifts: The Wild Hunt.
    Some prefer to believe that we never saw it coming, but others insisted they knew it would happen eventually. Like everything else, it seemed like a good thing at first: genocidal dictators who refused to bow to the supplications of the Fair Ones were taken out, driven from their opulent mansions by hunting elves on unicorns—which, far from docile equine creatures made of rainbows and faerie dust, were essentially homicidal horses that came with their own lance—only to be torn apart by the Elf-Hounds, intelligent creatures that were canine in name only and otherwise were about a hundred pounds of fangs and claws and rage. People celebrated the deaths of those they saw as monsters, as people are wont to do, but then the Fair Ones set their sights on other flaws and, with the businesslike brutality of a battlefield surgeon amputating a mangled limb, removed them from the world. The terminally ill. The deformed. The physically and mentally disabled. All these were targeted by the Wild Hunt and summarily erased.
    We complained of course—how could these benevolent beings turn on us so suddenly, especially since science had found ways to improve that quality of life for these people? They smiled and informed us that all perfection had a price, that even heaven required a passage through purgatory. That was when we finally started to fight back, sending our military forces to their wonderful palace-ships to try to destroy them or drive them off. We threw everything we could at them. Our bullets skipped off the Palace-ships’ hulls and passed right through the defenders like they were made of smoke. They laughed merrily as we dropped bombs on them without effect, and mocked our use of poisons and bio-weapons; even the elves we apparently vaporized were simply back the next day, happily slaughtering our decidedly underequipped forces like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass. If anything, they seemed vaguely disappointed—though not overly concerned—that the dead humans left on the battle field didn’t wake up the next day.
    The Queen of the Fairies let us rage on for three days before she announced that she’d had enough of our little tantrum and that we need to learn how to behave ourselves. To enforce this, she simply snapped her fingers. Nobody really remembers what exactly happened in the next few hours, except that whatever she did flattened everything that wasn’t made of iron or that wonderful magic stone they’d given us. Our great cities were razed. Millions of humans died, while those who survived fled to rural areas. There the Fair Ones found them and offered another gesture of double-edged benevolence: Be our servants and pets in this new era, and we will let you remain on this planet; refuse and we will erase you without a backwards glance. We had no choice. We had no way to fight back. Human supremacy over the world had ended. The age of the Fair Ones had begun.
    That was fifteen years ago. Humans are still around on this planet that the Fair Ones renamed Gaea, but most have pretty much figured out that we are here only at the discretion of our masters. The Wild Hunt every seven years rather tidily removes any troublemakers that make too many waves, and for the most part the world is enjoying global peace.
    Let us regard one of these humans left behind in this new world of magic and wonderment. His name is Matthew Perkins. He is a builder and craftsman, one of the privileged few allowed to use iron tools because iron is the only substance that can shape the otherwise impossibly hard fey-metals like mithril into useful shapes. He wears a modulation bracelet etched with beautiful and intricate runes and glyphs that indicate his owner, and goes to work every day to make beautiful and useful things at the request of the gentry. He is paid a generous wage commensurate with his level of skill (which has made him quite sought-after amongst the Fair Ones), and lives quite comfortably with his wife. Said wife, named Brigid, is a beautiful Changeling woman with dark eyes like those of a doe and small back-curved horns like those of a goat growing from her forehead. She is slender and graceful, and completely compliant towards her human husband, cooking him any meal he desires and ready to give him sex whenever he is in the mood—the Fair Ones have high hopes that this pairing will result in talented offspring, though previous attempts have been largely hit-or-miss.
    Matt goes to work every day in contract jobs assigned by his owner, Madrigorius, an elf of modest ranking whose job is to make sure that Matt is kept busy and happy. For the most part, he seems to be successful: each day, Matt produces his wonderful metalworking pieces of art or furniture for twelve hours barring meals and then he goes home to his obedient wife for a hot meal and intimate companionship. If you looked at Matt, you would see a hard-working human with a bland expression of vague satisfaction on his face, and you might think that the arrival of the elves was ultimately a good thing for humanity—after all, nobody seems to be complaining that much anymore. People have jobs, homes, food, and everything they could possibly want. However, if you merely looked at Matt, nodded at his evident happiness, and then went about your business, you would never know that inside his head, in that part of his mind that has been carefully locked away by his beautifully etched bracelet, Matt is screaming.



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