A Story for an Olive
The recently renamed Nadal’ivae-- a pun so awful that only he could ever find it funny-- came bearing a stack of papers. Now, Olive had been told a host of stories with morals on how to live her life, as a child. Most of those morals were skewed toward a way of thinking that screwed someone else over, and if you ever got screwed over, you were a shame to the fairy heritage. All of that sounded like the suffocating expectations his own people had on themselves.
Perhaps, if Olive ever felt ready to raise a little fairy, she needed some new stories. So he wrote one.
“Olive. I wrote something for you.” He held out the parchments, all covered in recently-dried calligraphy. “A fairy tale, if you will.”
The Lonely Halfling
There once was a very lonely halfling. Born alone on the streets, his people despised him. They called him a drain on his community and they exiled him to the woods where they hoped he would die. For you see, the village was wary of the fairies who lived there. They were told such horrible things, how making deals with fairies would spell their deaths.
The lonely halfling, however, was never told those stories. Nobody cared enough for him to warn him of the dangers.
The lonely halfling fashioned tools for himself, and learned all on his own how to survive. He made spears to catch fish, from the fallen branches. He used rocks to kill birds and other small tree-dwellers, for his meat and his furs. He built racks to dry his food, so it would survive the winter.
One twilight, he saw a circle of mushrooms, though he did not know if they were safe to eat. He stepped inside, planning to walk past it, when the world changed around him. It looked like the same forest, but now he could see houses in the trees, and fairies his size fluttering about between them.
He ran to the place he put his drying rack and his shelter, but neither of those were where he remembered! So he realized, this was not the exact same forest. He had been transported into another forest, where these strange, winged people lived. He ran back to the fairy town, and he asked someone dressed up in leather armor, standing guard outside a massive tree house decorated in preserved butterfly wings, “What is this village?”
The guard said, “Village? This is our capitol city.”
The lonely halfling was shocked. He had only heard of cities in passing before, and only knew that they were big. This fairy city must have been huge! So he explored around, and asked many questions to the people of this city. To his surprise, he got just as many answers and even questions back! This was strange. Nobody had ever talked to him before.
He spent so long in the fairy city, his stomach started to rumble. He trotted over to the butcher’s shop, and walked in the door... but then, he looked in his pockets. No matter where he went, he still would have no money to spend.
But the butcher asked, “What are you looking in your pockets for?”
“I’m sorry,” said the lonely halfling, “I came in without any money to pay you.”
The butcher laughed. “You’re silly,” she said. “We don’t pay in gold here! We pay in favors. That way, everyone helps each other get what they want.”
“Favors?” asked the halfling. “But I don’t have a lot of skills or talents. What could I possibly do?”
“You could help me deliver some packages,” said the butcher. “I have deals set up with all the other food vendors, that I get some of their food for some of mine... so you can send my deliveries, and you’ll get some things to eat for your trouble.”
This was something the halfling could do, so he agreed to the terms. If he chose not to make the deliveries, the butcher wouldn’t give him any stock. It seemed fair enough to him. But he realized, he couldn’t live on meat alone. So he make the same deal with the fruit, vegetable and bread vendors. He would make their deliveries in exchange for their products, too.
The halfling would go back to his forest, every now and then, to use the things he had made to age his meat or preserve his vegetables. But when he went back to his solitary shelter, he still felt very lonely. The fairy city was nice and he got along with the food vendors, but he didn’t live there and he didn’t have a place to belong here.
But one day, a curious pixie followed the halfling into the halfling’s forest. “What’s this place?” he asked, marveling at how all the trees were in the same place-- but still different.
“This is the forest outside the village I was born in,” answered the lonely halfling. Then, he showed the pixie the shelter he’d made, his drying rack and his tools. The pixie was intrigued! He asked the halfling to show him how to use these tools and to show him what his favorite spots in the forest were.
Then, finally, the pixie asked the halfling to show him his village. “I can’t do that,” the halfling said. “They banished me from the village, because there was nothing I could do for them.” Certain that the pixie would understand, because of his favor-based economy, he thought it would be left at that.
But the pixie stood on the ground just to stomp his feet angrily. “But you can hunt things in the trees without even flying! You can build a house and tools! You know how to dry meat! You can fish! You’re even really good at making fast deliveries. How can they say you can’t do anything!?” Then, the pixie seemed to have a revelation. “They must be liars.”
The halfling knew that fairies had a special contempt for liars and people who skipped out on their end of a bargain. Worried that the pixie would take matters into his own hands he said, “Wait, they weren’t lying! I couldn’t do any of those things when they banished me.”
The pixie huffed, but he let it go and he started to fly toward the fairy ring.
But he came across a hunter, whose arrows were tipped in cold iron. The hunter shot the pixie, and the pixie made a terrible scream that could be heard throughout the forest. The halfling ran toward it as fast as he could, and he stabbed the hunter to death with one of his fishing spears; he couldn’t let someone with cold iron tools find the fairy ring, under any circumstance. But the pixie was still injured. He knew the halfling village would never help a pixie, but the doctors in the fairy city would never be able to extract a piece of cold iron. So he patched up the pixie himself, having learned how after a few scrapes with some wild animals.
“You saved my life,” said the pixie, when he came to. “What do you need? How can I repay you?”
The halfling tried to say he didn’t need anything, but the pixie just wasn’t having it. So, he gave in and he said he wanted a friend. The pixie tried to convince some other fairies to be the halfling’s friend, but they were content being good acquaintances.
The pixie tried to enchant some animals to be the halfling’s friends, but the halfling told him that a friend needed to be able to talk back, and he wasn’t a druid.
Frustrated, and certain he would fail the deal, the pixie enchanted the halfling village to love and accept him... but the halfling knew it wasn’t real.
“I don’t get it,” said the pixie, “I’ve failed every time I tried to make you a friend. I don’t want you to be all alone anymore-- what’s going to happen to me if I can’t finish this deal?”
“You didn’t fail,” said the halfling, “You made me your friend.”
And the two of them were friends for as long as the halfling lived.
