October Prompted Fiction: Fae School Collection: Alder - Finding a Door: 543 words

[k_a_webb]

Written for rhodielady_47's prompt on doorways to faerieland.

Alder spent most of his free time looking for places that the fae could move to, if the council ever made the right decision. They wouldn't listen to him because he was young and, as far as they were concerned, was not a proper council member. None of them seemed to realise why someone so young was on the council. It seemed utterly illogical to Alder. A teenager would only ever become the head of a family if something serious had gone wrong with that family. Sighing, he tried not to think of what had happened and just focus on finding somewhere.
 

One of the guards had suggested Earth. Earth was a world that the fae had visited often, until most of the doorways were closed off for one reason or another. Some had closed by themselves because the fae's magic was failing; others had been closed by the King because they had become dangerous for the fae who used them; and some had been closed from the other side, because a house had been built in front of them or a place of magic was destroyed. A few of the doorways only opened on specific days, so Alder was looking back in time for possibilities.

There was a door in a place of magic that only opened on Samhain, but it had long been blocked by a tree and he hadn't yet found a year when the door was free of that tree. Every year he went back he knew it was more likely that their arrival would change the Earth more than anyone in the council would approve of. Finally Alder made the decision to look forward a few years. He checked the year it was on Earth, which was 2005, and chose the year 2008 to check on the tree.

When he saw that it was gone he was happy. Then he realised why the tree was gone. One of those signs he had seen too often was up. The beautiful place of magic he had seen through hundreds of years was going to be turned into a housing estate, because the humans couldn't stop reproducing. Shaking his head at their stupidity he checked back one year. In 2007 the tree was also gone, so Alder made his decision, and then realised that he was a hypocrite.

He was looking for a new home for the fae because they had destroyed the world they were living on. They had used its magic without thinking and that was causing the world to fall apart. Both the fae and the humans of Earth were selfish creatures who needed to learn lessons from the mistakes they'd made. Moving to another world that was already inhabited might help the fae to learn their lessons, because it wasn't only them that they had to care about, and hopefully they could help the humans.

Even though Alder was happy he had found somewhere for the fae to go he knew that there was a huge problem. He had to get the council to agree to the move and they didn't want to believe that something was seriously wrong. It didn't matter what he said to them, how eloquently he explained the problem, because they just didn't want to know.

© K A Jones 2011

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

This is disturbingly similar to global warming.

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