On Fairy Stories

No, I’m not really following in the footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien. For one thing, he was a fair bit wiser and more knowledgeable than me, and for another, his works would be somewhat oversized for a blog. But I do love tales as much as he did, and enjoy reading them to this very day.

Tales are usually about trials the hero (or, less frequently, the heroine) has to pass to come into his powers and/or be whole (again). He usually also wins a kingdom and a lady as well because he proved himself worthy of these things. There seems to be a rather limited set of trials, and no matter where you go, you see very similar stories (which only shows that human beings are really not that different at all) (yes I know it has a million complex reasons but let's not go into them just right now).

This story is set in a world where a certain order of fairies (the tengeri) are charged with maintaining a dynamic balance, and that includes testing future kings and queens to see if they’re worthy of the throne. The tengeri are powerful creatures, beautiful monsters, magicians and shape-shifters who come up with cruel trials, but only to make sure that the kingdoms of the World Tree don’t fall into the wrong hands. The people in their tales often have a hard time and sometimes fail, but at least they don’t take entire kingdoms down with them (most of the time, that is).

The tengeri themselves don’t have it that much better. They have to do really horrible things to those on trial, and they’re not cruel by nature. That's important: they’re supposed to test the mortals, not maim them, and they can’t do that if they find too much pleasure in their suffering (of course, some tengeri do go rogue, but after a while they end up as monsters and are hunted down... usually by mortals: defeating a wayward tengeri is the greatest trial of all). Also, though the tengeri are powerful creatures, they’re not infallible: they make mistakes, have quirks, and are continuously tested by their own trials.

The story is about one of them, a tengeri who has to find a suitable husband for a young princess, and also see if the princess herself is fit to become a queen. He did the same for the princess’s parents, and while he almost became friends with her father, King Grim, Queen Blossom was one of his worst charges, and he needed to be really harsh with her to tame her arrogance.

The best practice in such cases is to abduct the princess and weave a thread of tales that can draw in heroes to save her. But what seems to be a routine task becomes tangled already at the very beginning, when the girl’s father, instead of trying to stop the tengeri, greets him as a friend.