A fairy tale
Nov. 19th, 2020 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariAt first, we didn't take children from their homes. We found them at the tops of hills and the bottoms of rivers, deep within the forest or abandoned at the crossroads. Sometimes we tried to give them back, for we know the pain of losing one you've cared for. But the humans said their children were tainted. Monstrous. So we took the children for our own, and raised them strong and beautiful.
The abandoned children were rare once, but then the stories started to spread. We steal children, they said. If a child vanishes, it's our doing. It wasn't their fault. They were the ones wronged. It was us, always us, who took the children away, and they'd give anything to get them back.
(Give anything? They freely gave a child to the water's depths. What could they give to trade back for it that could be worth more?)
Sometimes the children come to us now, through candlelit prayers on moonless nights, or charms left at the water's edge, or walking unafraid into the forest, certain that whatever they find won't be worse than where they came from. We don't always take them. Some return home frightened, talking of how they narrowly escaped our sinister grasp, their prior squabbles forgotten as their parents comfort them. But others come to us with scarred minds and bodies, and we don't turn those away. It is proper for a child to be raised by those who love it, and when that love is unfairly withheld, we are nothing if not Fair.
The abandoned children were rare once, but then the stories started to spread. We steal children, they said. If a child vanishes, it's our doing. It wasn't their fault. They were the ones wronged. It was us, always us, who took the children away, and they'd give anything to get them back.
(Give anything? They freely gave a child to the water's depths. What could they give to trade back for it that could be worth more?)
Sometimes the children come to us now, through candlelit prayers on moonless nights, or charms left at the water's edge, or walking unafraid into the forest, certain that whatever they find won't be worse than where they came from. We don't always take them. Some return home frightened, talking of how they narrowly escaped our sinister grasp, their prior squabbles forgotten as their parents comfort them. But others come to us with scarred minds and bodies, and we don't turn those away. It is proper for a child to be raised by those who love it, and when that love is unfairly withheld, we are nothing if not Fair.
