At the Desk

Long ago, in a soft green land, before stories were set to parchment, there dwelled a fair and ancient people. Beautiful and terrible, they sang beneath the stars among the standing stones and walked as kin beside the elder races of the world.

Then iron came to their shores. They were hunted from the forests and driven beneath the hills. Their numbers dwindled, and in time they revealed themselves only to kings, heroes, and those marked by fate. Mortal folk came to fear them, and the old people could no longer walk openly beneath the moon and stars.

Yet blood must endure, and so, on certain thin and moonless nights, when the veil between worlds wears nearly through, a child of iron may vanish from its cradle. In its place lies one of theirs, a changeling, sent into the mortal world so that some faint wisp of what they once were might yet remain.

My wife suggested I swap some things around. She was right. She usually is. But that meant this had to go. I liked it, so it’s here.

Intro

Daniel and Claire were perfect. Not the cloying, look-at-us kind of perfect you see at the end of a story. Not the kind that photographs well or fits neatly into a frame. Rather, they were the other kind: the kind that holds.

The kind that makes two people more together than they could ever be apart. The kind that could stand at the gates of hell and laugh, not because anything was funny, but because they were there together, side by side.

It didn’t start that way and it wouldn’t end that way. But for a time, brief, impossible, and complete, it was as good as anything ever gets.