By Scot Noel

Illustration by
Raphael Gonzalez 

Even for a sheriff among the fairies, there are situations beyond imagining. For Victoria, that circumstance came in the form of a woman with a reptilian hand, a woman holding Vic firmly in a pair of finely crafted forceps and lowering her toward the flame of a candle more than two times her size.

Vic could smell her wings burning.  Her feet were sorely singed before she caught at the one thread of possibility that might save her.

“Echela comde muha!” she shouted; the pain along her back and legs adding an unbidden emphasis to the words.  It was neither threat nor plea, for up to now no attempt at communication with her captor had yielded the slightest result.  “Kim bara to… bara to-a!”

In chant, cadence, and tone, Vic was mimicking the spell being intoned by the lizard woman.  The only thing that might save her now was that she knew the words and her captor did not.  She could read them from the spell book behind and to the right of the candle in whose flame she was being immolated.

The sorceress had the spell, the cadence, and the wording wrong, and Vic knew it.  The only question was: how many fairies would die before the sorceress gave up or could be stopped?

At first there was no change, except a vast increase in pain.  Vic writhed against the imminent coming of her death and pointed with a flailing hand toward the book.  “Asa cho mendre… not ‘mendaray!’  Can’t you… see?”

After that she remembered only screaming, uncertain if the sound of her own voice had ever been so desperate. 

Vic awoke in a miniature cage fastened all around with poultry netting.  The floor was covered in wheat husks and filth.  A fairy body lay with its back curled against one corner of the cage, a slim, bare-chested male covered in burns, the remnants of his wings reduced to charred stumps.  The sight startled Vic, causing her to reach up and back, running her hands across the outer pinions of her gossamer wings.  Though the pain of doing so made her cry out, she could still flex her appendages of flight.  If she lived, her wings might yet have a chance to heal.

“No one will hear you,” said a slithery voice. The sorceress loomed above her.  Long, brown hair cascaded down across her breasts, partially hiding an amulet fashioned in the shape of a pentagram.  “And should others come, they will join you in this cage.  Do you understand?”

Considering the possibility that she might be in shock, Vic took a moment to focus on the face.  This human was young, possibly beautiful by the standards of her kind.  But something was “off.”  The face above Vic was too taut.  The expression empty.  The eyes pitiless.

Vic looked to the body of the male fairy, then up sharply, accusingly at her captor.

“Not the first of you I’ve welcomed,” said the sorceress, “and perhaps not the last.  Think now.  Speak carefully.  It seemed for a moment you could do more than scream.”

Though she had endured her share of desperate situations, Vic fought to keep her legs from shaking.  Threats and pronouncements of legal force seemed hopelessly out of place. 

“I can read it,” Vic said.  “Some of the words are old Sprite spellings.  You have things wrong!”

The woman’s right hand came within view.  The fingers were green, scaled, and ending in dagger-sharp nails.  With one of those nails, the sorceress snapped at the cage meanly.

“There is nothing wrong.  The spell is the spell!”

“Then why did you spare me?” Vic asked.  The wording of the spell was her only advantage, but it was a double-edge blade.  For some reason, she knew more than the sorceress, but would it be enough?

With a grim sigh, her captor turned and left the room without saying a word.

The sorceress had taken no more than a few steps when Vic’s police training kicked in and she started to take precise stock of her situation.  They were in a thatched roof dwelling, though not a poor one.  The rooms were spacious, the walls full of varied niches, busy tables taking up more room than chairs, couches, or chests.  The glint of gold was pronounced, with coin and cup, necklace and figurine strewn everywhere, even fallen into corners where only random licks of a candle flame revealed its presence. Vic saw a pile of gold as large as the carcass of a forest deer.

Whatever the sorceress was about, it was not treasure!

When the woman returned it was to place on the work table a bird cage, a glided metal-work piece once meant to hold song birds, and within which now huddled a young fairy mother and her child.

“Time to try again,” said the woman whose right arm below the elbow was masked by a leather sleeve, the exposed hand a menacing green.  “I’ve kept these as chips to bargain with your kind. As the hour grows late, let us see what use they might serve.”

Procuring her forceps from a set of nearby tools, she opened the bird cage and deftly secured one of the fairies in the metal pincers.  It was the mother, torn away from a green-haired daughter of only a few summers.  The lizard woman took her roughly and her first scream turned to a bloody cough.  Vic heard the breaking of ribs.

The child wailed at the separation, her terror electrifying the air; her arms flailed beyond the cage in a futile effort to reach for her mother.

Instinctively, Vic reached for the scabbard at her thigh, but her short-sword was gone, as was the spider silk bow usually nestled between her wings.  Both had been missing after her capture and were nowhere in sight.

There was nothing she could do but watch, though her eyes turned to the terrified child the gilded cage, rather than follow the agonies of the mother she could not save.

“Tell me the words!” commanded the woman whose face was an emotionless mask.  The candle had already been lit; the spell book open and close enough for Vic to see.  “Tell me the words and this one is the last to die.”

“Echela comde muha,” the woman began.  “Kim bara to-a. Asa cho mender.”  As the mother fairy writhed near the flame, unable even to scream, the woman turned her eyes to Vic.  “You know the words, finish the words!”

“No!” Vic screamed.  “It’s wrong, all wrong!”

“Finish or the young one is next.”

Tears streamed along Vic’s cheeks.  Her voice shaking, the fairy sheriff picked up the spell where their captor had left off.  “Gos terra, figurante sep re-theragor.”  And so it went, but by the end there was no magic evident in the room, no change in the smell of fear or burning flesh.  The mother was gone now.

The green armed woman released the body and it spiraled to the floor like a falling leaf.

“I tried to tell you,” Vic sobbed but then stiffened, “you’re reading the spell wrong.  It’s not just the words; it’s what they mean!” 

Long green fingers shook the bird cage, tumbling the child hard against the cold metal. 

“It’s what the words mean,” Vic continued. “You read ‘asa cho mender’ as ‘fairy wings,’ yes?  You think it means fairy wings?”

“Yesss,” the woman hissed in agreement.

“But by that spelling it is not.  Listen, do you know the short, twisted tree?  The one the humans name Ceraco?”

“Yesss…”

“Do you know, they call stands of these trees the Fairy Citadel?” Vic paused to catch her panicked breath. “Falsely thinking we live within the protection of their heavy, twisting branches.” 

“Go on…”  

The seeds of the Ceraco are small, feathery things they call fairy wings.  In the old tongue, ‘asa cho mender.’”

“If you lie…”

 “I do not lie!  Those are the seeds you must burn to work the spell.  And there are other words you’ve no feel for.  Say them with a fat tongue and you will have nothing for your efforts.  I will teach you, but no more killing!”

“There is no time!” the woman shouted, bending so close that Vic caught a whiff of fetid breath.

“There must be time!” the fairy sheriff challenged in return. 

Lips pursed, her bosom heaving to agitated breaths, the green-armed terrorist paused for a moment before speaking words filled with frustration.  “There is only this night.  Only till dawn!”  She grabbed the cage that Vic still shared with the body of a slain fairy male and headed for the door.

“We shall find these fairy wing seeds tonight, or I shall bury you beneath those twisted trees of yours.”

Unexpectedly, Vic found herself laughing, her wings spreading with each amused convulsion until the pain of her burns brought tears to her eyes.  The green-scaled hand grasping the cage brought Vic up to eye level with her captor.  Holding a faint sneer, the woman’s lips made their silent threat.

“Oh, I know” Vic assured her torturer, “whatever happens tonight, I doubt you’ll bother with a burial.”

As they walked, Vic could see the cottage behind them was part of a well-kept property, an all but hidden place on the edge of a glade.  A small stream cut cross a third of the land and the rest lay covered in grasses and wildflowers, kept in check only by an aging goat whose very form was now disappearing into the twilight.  They journeyed into the trees, making good time, but the light faded quickly.  Night was coming on.  With few stars and no moon yet, it was soon very dark.

“Tell me the way,” said the woman.  There had been a rough moment while Vic’s cage was shifted to the other side and the green hand became a powerful ward, pushing aside undergrowth and feeling its way from tree to tree.

“Can’t you make a spell?” Vic asked.  “A light spell?  Or at least a torch spell for one of these branches?”

“Tell me the way!” The woman shook the cage, causing Vic to cut her head against one of the wooden bars.  Blood flowed freely down her cheek. 

Forcing herself to remain calm, Vic continued the conversation.  “You seem to know we fairies have good night vision.  Or do you see through darkness too?”  No answer was forth coming, but a tremor from the hand holding the cage made its intentions clear.

“Alright.  Turn left here and go up that rise a dozen paces away. We’ll find the trees we need a little higher than the others.”

It was the work of an hour or more to find the prize: the seedlings Vic knew would be present and budding from the tips of the Ceraco branches.  She pointed them out and her captor gathered them, placing a great number of seedlings in the leather pouch at her waist.

“We’re lucky it’s the season,” Vic said, talking nervously, hoping to hide both her fear and her thoughts of revenge.  “A week past and these trees were barren.  All the fairies are in migration now that it’s spring.  Families coming back from the winter isles.  Hundreds of clans on the move.”

“Think you can threaten me with your clans?” her captor asked meanly. 

“No, I only meant—”

“I could take a thousand of you as easily as one.  A sprinkle and you are mine.”

“You mean that trap of yours?” Vic asked.  “The fairy dust?”

“Fools follow glitter, big or small.  Now we hurry back.”  The cage was jarred roughly about her.

Why the sense of urgency? Vic thought to herself.  Spring is just beginning; there will be many more fairies for her experiments.  Why does she act like she has but a few hours to complete her plan?

They were on their way back to the cottage, when the light of a rising moon spread the shadows of the trees into the glade ahead.  The path of their approach brought them around to the rear of the dwelling, and it was there, beneath a flowering shrub - that Vic caught sight of an eye in the lunar light.

It was dead and staring, the face the eye belonged to hidden in shadow.  Turning in the cage as they passed, Vic thought she could see a body tucked beneath the blooms.

The chill of the night had Vic shaking by the time they made it inside the cottage, and the dying embers of the hearth did little to remedy her discomfort. 

She was taken directly to the conjuring table, the cage placed next to the spell book while the lizard woman took a low burning candle from a nearby sconce and lit several other lanterns and candles around the room.  In the dark, the piles of gold Vic had seen earlier made the light dance across the ceiling.

The woman put a handful of the fairy wing blooms on the table.

“Turn the pages,” Vic said as she moved into the corner of her cage closest to the book.  “I have to read the spell from beginning to end, before we start.”

“I’ve read it many times.”

“Then you know it’s a riddle of sorts?”

Silence was Vic’s only answer while the woman stood still as a tree.  Eventually her lizard hand, the scaled and sharp nailed one, came forward to caress the cage lightly. Vic decided to go on.

“You’ve been having trouble with the old Sprite words, I know.  They have double meanings or play with opposites.  It’s almost like a game.  And it makes this a dangerous spell to play with.”

“No one is playing.”  Her captor turned the page sharply, angrily. She waited but a moment and turned it again.  “Do you have it now?”

“I think so,” Vic said.  “Now, show me each of the components.  We need to have them ready.  I believe they are applied in rhythm with the words.”

“How is it you know anything of a sorceress’s trade?” 

“Would I be alive if I didn’t?” 

With a scowl breaking across her otherwise emotionless face, her captor shook the cage, causing Vic to tumble across the fairy body with which she still shared her imprisonment. Teeth clenched, Vic pulled herself back to her feet.  The clues were starting to add up now, and knowledge, any knowledge, always gave an edge.

“I’ll be honest,” Vic said a little more loudly than she intended.  “It’s not spells I know.  It’s dance steps.”

Silence followed and Vic tried to gauge her captor’s response.  Something in the woman’s eyes made her smile.  Desperation?

“A cousin with a touch of Sprite in her family line.  It’s why I know the words.  And I know that the words have a rhythm; where the moves come on the beat.  I’m think this is similar.”

“A dance?” the woman asked, incredulously.

“No, not a dance,” Vic corrected. “A spell written by a Sprite, or a witch who knew the way of them.  All I know is… the words don’t say what you think they mean.  They have the shapes of ones you know, but used to misdirect, I think.”

“These ‘fairy wings,’ you mean?”

“More…” Vic worked hurriedly to unravel the game on the pages before her.  “Enkathelon.  That word there,” she pointed, “you must know it means-”

“Are you testing me?” Her captor interrupted. A fingernail sharp as a blade and green as the scaled hand that bore it came through the cage bars to rest upon Vic’s shoulder.

“Dragon dung,” Vic said, carefully releasing the translation into the space between them.  “But said with the cadence my Sprite cousin might apply, it would serve for the wages to be earned by greed, and yet again for the physical element known as gold.”

“Gold?”

“Yes, isn’t it obvious.  In fact, I thought…”  Vic moved to the side of the cage from which she could see the mounds of the glittering yellow metal piled high near the wall opposite.  “I thought that was why you amassed all this treasure?”

The green armed woman’s eyes narrowed.

“And the phrase ‘frey-galloweth.’” Vic returned to the opposite side and shot a hand outside the cage, gesturing at the yellowed leaves of the book.  “Meaning a trivial or insignificant thing.  Sprite’s turn it, you know, to mean the most difficult moves of the dance, or in life ‘to give everything you have.’”

For the first time that Vic had noticed, her captor’s attention turned to the gold that must be weighing heavily on the floors and corners of the old cottage.

“How much of it is needed for the spell?”

“All of it,” Vic answered, then weighed the slump in the woman’s shoulders, the drop of her chin. 

“You are lying!”

“No,” Vic answered, trying not to tremble.

“She sssaid as much,” the woman hissed, almost to herself.  Her eyes seemed locked on the gold, her gaze held longingly.

The clues were building up.  If she timed it right, Vic considered, she might yet escape with her life.  Perhaps even rescue the child.  “We’ll get back to that.  For now, let me see all of the ingredients… I mean the components you’ve collected.  We’ll match them against the words and make sure they are correct.”

Something like anger seemed to heat the atmosphere between them, even though the woman remained silent and still, staring at the gold.  After a few minutes, she began to arrange small jars and stained glass boxes on the countertop, next to candle, book, and cage.

One by one, Vic verified or recommended a substitute.  As it turned out, the fairy wing blossoms were the only ingredient not available on the well-stocked shelves.  As to what her captor had been ready to employ for the ‘Enkathelon’ called for in the fifth stanza of the spell, Vic had a disturbing guess.

As they reviewed the spell, separating out the proper quantities of the components and reviewing their use, Vic became more certain of her captor’s identity.  She knew she would have to keep the creature off-balance and that timing would be everything.  The fairy sheriff would have to bring things together at the last possible moment, when there was no choice but for her captor to “fly” from the scene.  It would be tricky.

When they arrived at the last lines of the spell, Vic broke with the appearance of free-flowing cooperation.  She stopped reading and smiled.

“You’re no sorceress.  This isn’t your cottage or your spell book, but all around us – I believe this is your gold!”

The green hand with claw-like nails stopped in mid swipe.  The fingers turned in on themselves and became a fist.

“The sorceress who claimed this as home,” Vic said quickly, “I saw her body outside in the dark.  Another of your victims.  You know nothing of spells, but you do have a temper!”

“I have no time for these games.”

“No time for what?” Vic asked.  “What happens if you cannot fly before the sun touches the valley?  Why did you bring this gold here, if not for the spell?”

The woman shifted the cage holding the distraught child next to Vic’s.  Though the wailing had ceased, the young fairy’s sobs could still be heard.  The child held herself in a ball, her wings curled against her back in a way that signaled shock or terror.

“I will bleed and burn that morsel before you, then your turn will come!”

“Go ahead,” Vic said as confidently as she could.  “You never planned on letting us live anyway.  You might as well pay my toll.  If my life is forfeit, so be it.  Answer the questions.  Quickly now… then the spell.”

“Questions… questions.”  Her captor fumed.  “What is it you must know, you impudent midge?”

“Why a dragon paid a sorceress to be dressed down to the body of a human female?”

“None of your concern, midge!”

So, her guess was true!  Vic pressed the point.  “Doing penance for some serpent’s transgression?”

“Penance?  No.  You can’t know!  What would a spec know of such things?”

“Love then,” Vic ventured.  “Something embarrassing to disclose!  A great beast of the shining troves brought down by love.  Love of a mortal?”

“Enough!”

“And what happens to mortals at dawn?” Vic asked.  “They rise from sleep, leave on journeys.  Or the other thing… for some might face the gallows when the sky grows bright.”

Barely perceptible amid the flickering light from lamp and candle, a tear coursed down her captor’s cheek.  A quick, indrawn breath held tight in her captor’s throat.  As a law enforcement officer, one thing Vic knew well was when to push and when to pull.  Were a dragon’s emotions so different?

“Let’s begin,” Vic said, putting what confidence she could into the command. “Turn the page back so I can see the first stanza again.  There.  Good.  Now, I need you to make sure all the gold in the cottage is touching, each piece connected.”

After a pause, the green-handed woman went to work.

“Fairy dust too,” Vic added, “as much as you have.”

“The spell said nothing—”

“You’re wrong,” Vic interrupted.  “It’s crafty, I told you.  The last stanza calls back to the first.  I only hope you have enough, that you haven’t used it all to trap these few of us.”

Leaving Vic’s sight for only a moment, the woman returned with a leather pouch cinched tight.  Its sides bulged in the shape of an apple, though it appeared to have little weight.  When the woman worked at the ties with her blade-sharp nails, a translucent vapor touched with golden light escaped the neck.

It was more fairy dust than Vic had ever seen in one place and time, or even knew was possible to accumulate.

“The sorceress transmuted this for you before her death,” Vic theorized. “She set the fairy traps for you too.”

Once more, the woman shook Vic’s cage.  Violently.

“It’s… it’s more than enough,” Vic allowed.

“Scheming midge.  This won’t be yours!”  The woman grasped the pouch tightly, squeezing a small cloud of fairy dust into the air between them.

Vic felt the pull, the forward attraction that welled up from deep inside her gut.  She couldn’t help but look enthralled.  Even at the moment of her capture, the call had not been as strong as this.

Vic had first seen the shimmer of fairy dust as she made her way through a copse of trees, staying beneath the canopy to avoid a mob of corvids circling above, birds who were not averse to tasting fairy flesh.  There had been reports of fairy stragglers along the migration route, and the Nettoya clan had lost contact with one young family.

Just in case, Vic had her stinger in hand, a small, light sword forged by imps and made of the most ancient of metals.  If there had been foul play, her suspicions lay with the raucous, winged omnivores riding cover above the trees, but soon Vic came to the edge of a clearing and beheld an unusual sight below.

There was a fairy ring, a naturally occurring arc of puffballs growing close to the copse in a little clearing.  The glittering dust had been spread across the caps of the quickly growing fungi in a manner that Vic had neither seen before nor heard tale of.  

It was common knowledge that humans and other creatures mistakenly associated these rings of mushroom growth with fairy activity, and so even as Vic descended toward the base of the tree nearest the white circle, her thoughts turned toward the possibility of a trap. 

The continual cries of the crows sent a chill down Vic’s spine, yet though their kind was known to plan and work together, this particular machination seemed a step beyond their ken and capabilities. 

Settling in the shade of some exposed roots, the fairy sheriff watched and waited, observing the scene long enough for the shadows of the trees to grow longer into the clearing, and for calls of the circling corvids to move off a bit.  Only then did Vic venture forth. 

The call of the dust was strong; like the wailing of a hungry babe, it got into your chest and tugged until you wanted to hurry.  Yet Vic moved even more slowly for that, working her way toward the center of the fairy ring, all the time alert for any clues the grasses of the glade or the mushrooms themselves might hold.

It was there, at the center of the ring, that she found a torn piece of fairy lace and a spatter of fairy blood.  Without thinking, she pulled the lace up into the light for closer inspection.  It was then she felt the tear, the little separation that might have been a trip wire laid by the circle of fungi or a spell connecting the lace to the puffballs now surrounding her.  The bulbous mushrooms exploded as one, sending their spores above her like a dome of brown mist, mixed here and here with the glitter of fairy dust.

Holding her breath, Vic lifted up at once, her wings fluttering with panic.  She identified the least dense area of the descending cloud and headed toward it, but it was too late.  As the spores reached her, they lit up her skin like hornet stings.  She convulsed, cried out, and fell unconscious into the glade.

It was not long after that the green armed woman held her close to the candle flame and watched as her wings caught fire.

“The fairy dust, it’s not what you think it is,” Vic couldn’t help saying, though she turned away from the woman to say her words over the corpse sharing her small prison. 

“Drug, currency, ambrosia,” the woman said the words like a taunt.  “What does it matter?  Everyone has their treasure.  Something to lie, steal, or kill for…”

“Well, don’t worry, there won’t be any left after this,” Vic said, unable to keep the disgust out of her voice.  “You need to spread it all around the cottage, in a circle.  And on the roof, on the slope of the roof to the east, use the dust to make a pentacle – as big as you can.”

“What is a pentacle?”

“The same,” Vic shouted in irritation, “as the shape of the pendant you wear.  The one you no doubt took from the body lying outside!”

“The spell says nothing of pentacles.”

“‘When gold meets gold, love for love succeeds.’  It’s one of the double meanings you can’t see because you don’t know Sprite.  It refers to a dance where a pentacle of fairy dust is drawn on the grassy down above the hall in which the dancers come together.  The gold of the dust meets the gold of the sun, bringing luck to all below.”

The woman stood still, silently considering the logic of Vic’s translation.

“The thatched roof facing the east will have to do!” Vic insisted.  “Now, get going.  There’s not much time.”

Vic’s abrupt changes from stall tactics to urgent requests were calculated.  It was the only tool she had to keep the woman off guard.  Unsure of the situation and running out of time, the woman nodded uncertainly and, fairy dust in hand, exited the cottage.

With her captor outside for a moment, Vic looked across the work table to the cage where the fairy child huddled silently, holding her fear and loss close to her breast.

“We have a chance!” Vic assured her.  “Don’t give up.”

The fairy child barely stirred at the words. 

“Can you see, it’s nearly dawn.  If I draw this out long enough, she won’t have time to care about us.  Can you hear me?”  The child looked up, just barely.  Her wings had lost all their color.

“She’s not the sorceress.  She killed the woman who wove the spells in this cottage.  I don’t know why.  Maybe she wasn’t happy about still having that green arm.  Maybe it was anger over paying so much gold, or having to lose it to regain her love who now waits for the gallows.  I don’t know.  But we have to be brave and keep her off balance.  You’ll see.”

As she spoke, Vic heard her captor moving across the thatched roof, her weight shifting the layered straw. 

Vic stilled her tongue.  She was horribly thirsty, and if she thought about it for even a moment, the pain in her wings could make her cry.  As it turned out, she didn’t have time to dwell long on her situation. Their torturer was back, holding an empty pouch, the sides of which glowed with the remnants of the glittering dust it once contained.

The eyes of the green handed woman were different now, and it took Vic a few seconds to recognize the difference.  Behind the calm of the mask-like face, the eyes glowed with desperation.  As the woman stood framed in the doorway, Vic thought she understood why.  The sky outside the cottage had taken on the deep blue hue that banishes stars and heralds the rising of the sun.

“How fast?” her captor asked.

“Light the candle, Vic answered, “then I’ll begin.  A few minutes is all and you can fly from here!”

Hurriedly, the woman seized the conjuring candle, taking it near one of the wall sconces, where she leaned close and pursed her lips, blowing the flame until it leaned over to meet the candle wick and set it alight.

“No, not how fast the spell.  How fast will I fly?”

“How fast could you ever?” Vic asked.  “Could you make it from here, now?”

The woman glanced outside, as if considering the distance to some unseen point.

Hoping to maintain the momentum of what opportunity she had, Vic began reading the spell.  As she did so, the woman placed the candle on the counter next to Vic’s cage.  Word by word, Vic worked to capture the rhythm of the language, pointing to the components needed as she moved down the page. 

Only a third of the ingredients were meant to feel the heat of the flame. 

The words themselves, uttered in the careful cadence of the Sprite tongue, proved a conjuring, focusing energy into a space no more than an arm’s length from the spell book and hand’s breadth above the candle.  There, a translucent, silver globe manifested, becoming fully visible within three stanzas.

Some things, like shavings of mandrake root and a sliver of newt’s tongue were to be set above the flame in a metal spoon.  Their smoky essence traveled up to circle the globe.  Others were to be gentled within the glistening membrane of the conjured sphere, disappearing without a sound.

In went elemental stones, sacred oils, and the newly picked fairy wings from the ceraco tree.

When it came to the last, to the gold which must be sacrificed, Vic had the woman commit a single golden coin to the candle flame.  There it glittered and smudged and blackened, and as it did so the entire cottage began to shake. 

Vic intoned the final words.  “En-talakath supramente nathrakto!”

Each ring, cup, necklace, and coin began to jostle against its neighbor, throwing a deafening rattle into the air.  The noise transformed to a roar.  It grew hot within the small rooms of the cottage. 

At first it was as though the rays of a summer sun had penetrated the cottage to set the gold ablaze with reflections.  Then it became apparent that the glittering metal was itself taking on a new radiance.  Each bit of gold grew hot and then hotter, filling the small structure with a suffocating shimmer.  The room became a furnace.  The walls began to smoke.  The ceiling caught fire.

“What have you done?!” screamed the woman.

“It’s working!” Vic assured her captor, though in truth the fairy sheriff was more terrified than ever before.  Before billows of smoke could obscure the sight, the precious metal piled everywhere about them softened. The gold began to melt.

A desperate scowl crossed their captor’s face, and Vic saw menace coming.  There was nothing to do but throw all her confidence into the game.

“Don’t move!” Vic commanded.

Though fire was breaking out everywhere, Vic knew the spell must be protecting them from the full power of the blast-furnace energies needed to turn such piles of metal molten.

A stream of liquid gold, forming above the biggest pile, began to dance toward the sphere above the candle.  It came on like a snake, coiling smoothly, hotly seeking its goal.  Once it ventured to within an arm’s length of the conjured sphere, the glittering serpent struck, driving its head into the shimmering globe.  Behind it came the rest.  Faster and faster, the coiled liquid metal disappeared into the sphere.  Should the woman have moved one pace to the left or right, the searing whip of coiled gold would have cut her apart.

With the woman’s attention locked on the forfeiture of so much glittering treasure, Vic glanced over to the cage that held the child.  At first it was difficult to see through the thickening smoke, but by ducking down, Vic convinced herself that the young fairy was gone.  The bars had been bent or broken, Vic could not tell which.  There was just enough of an opening to extricate the innocent.

Vic could feel the weight of the smoke on her shoulders and it was almost impossible to breathe, but still she returned her attention to the woman, the candle, and the sphere.

With a crack like thunder, the whip of molten gold disappeared into the conjured sphere.  The walls were fully ablaze now, providing a hellish backdrop for the transformation of the green-handed woman.  Her spine split into a fan of bloodied ridges; her lower jaw broke forward, canines rising up through a well of blood.

“The spell is complete,” Vic said.  “You’ll have your wings!”

A roar escaped the mouth of the woman whose agonies were framed by fire.  The smoke prevented Vic from seeing the rest, until the writhing form grew, enlarging as swift as a shadow.  Its bulk met a wall of flame and it cried out. 

The beastly form that had grown up where the woman once stood crashed forward, away from the flames.  It exited the cottage, breaking through the place where the door had been.  Embers followed like swarms of fireflies.

Hands cupped across mouth and nose, Vic tried to take a breath without choking or scalding her lungs. Her injured wings could ill endure the rising heat, and tears flowed down her cheeks.  It was as if Vic were once again being immolated in the flame of the candle.  She cried out, not knowing if they would return in time, but still she allowed herself to hope.

It was then a great, horned head tore away a section of the roof above the spell book.  Yellow eyes cut by black, vertical pupils looked down. A forked tongue flicked between teeth big as river stones.

Malevolence radiated from the dragon, competing with the embers and the smoke to ignite fear deep into Vic’s fairy heart.

“Help me!” Vic screamed, thinking quickly.  She locked eyes with the creature looming above her.  There was no need to feign terror.   “Don’t let me burn.  Help me!  I gave you wings!”

Even through the black smoke of the burning cottage, Vic could tell the sun was cresting the horizon.

If it were possible for a dragon to evince a mocking, contemptuous, smile, this one did.  Behind the head, massive, clawed wings gleamed green in the morning light.  They unfolded and beat the flames like a bellows as the now outsized beast propelled itself skyward.

Vic felt the flames at her feet.  Her vision darkened.  Somewhere unseen, a pit of infinite tortures opened and swallowed her into darkness and agony.

When Vic awoke, she was surrounded by a squad of fairy constabulary.  More than a few sported faces covered in soot.  Streaks of red and blistering burns graced their limbs and torsos.  

A Deputy Chief by the name of Warren Kheelan stood over Vic.  Though not her direct superior, he was of a clan she knew well.  Big-winged fairies with bows over their shoulders and swords at their belts were giving her sips of water from the folded leaves of seedlings.

The sun seemed to be approaching the noon hour before a word was said.  

During the silence of their ministrations, Vic saw more than one corpse gentled from the scene in the fronds of forest ferns.  As the fairy child from the bird cage was being cared for close by, she had to assume a few of the constabulary lost their lives in the rescue attempt.  

“You saw the sign on the roof?” Vic asked.

The Deputy Chief nodded.  “More dust than I’ve ever seen.  Pulled us in from miles away.”

“She figured it was our treasure,” Vic explained.  “Thought the fairies she captured were following their greed.”

DC Kheelan laughed.  “How did you get that beast to display it on the roof?”

“I made the dust part of a spell she forced me to conjure.  Had her so confused about the wording, she would have believed anything.  Except maybe that fairy dust is a beacon to draw help, not a currency to hoard.”

“This spell you worked, is it that set the cottage aflame?”

“Yes, but not something I expected.  It was a spell of flight.  Apparently, it took away that dragon’s human disguise and gave her back her natural wings, and everything else that went with them.”

“And that was her wish?  Why capture our kind?  This cottage was known to belong to Bethany of the Voles, a sorceress of some standing?”

Vic paused for a moment, draining another seedling leaf of its water.  She coughed after and it took some time for her to regain composure.

“You’ll find the body of the sorceress behind the ruins of the cottage, under a bush.  I could not get the dragon to tell me the story.  If I were to guess…”

“Go on,” encouraged the DC.

“The beast fell in love with a human, a thief perhaps.  Someone whose greed fired the ardor within her.  She parted with a fortune in treasure to be made human, or to be given the guise of a human.  But that green arm!  Perhaps the spell did not work properly, or began to fade over time.  She came back to deal with the witch, or perhaps just to reclaim her gold.  But then… tonight’s tortures, they were about something else.  Something else happened.”

“How do you and that poor family figure in it?”

“Well, she was attempting to conjure the magic on her own, and getting it badly wrong.  It was Sprite magic and she mistook the word for seedling to mean-“

“Fairy wings!” The DC cringed as the realization hit him. “The burns… your burns and what we saw on the bodies.  Blessed ancestors!”

“There was something about the sunrise,” Vic went on.  “She didn’t say, but you could tell.  In her eyes.  It was life or death.”

“That thief who stole her heart?” The DC asked.

“Perhaps,” Vic answered.  “I imagine he faced the gallows at first light.  She needed her wings again, to reach her paramour in time.  Ahh, let her save him if she can. There’ll be no comfort in it.  With the witch dead and the book in ashes, what can she do?  There’s nothing here for her now.”

Still…”  The DC looked slowly and carefully around.  “Best not to make camp here.”  With a deep breath, he raised his voice and spread his wings.  “Everyone!  Let’s fly!”