Tinder’s side was sore from the impact of being hurled by the alchemist as she followed the flow of fresh air all the way up to the surface.

  The fairy had no way of knowing how long she had been entombed in the elves’ cold, dark facility.

  She had spent the last couple millennia second-guessing her memories of the world above, doubting if the world in her memories could truly be as lush and vibrant as she recalled.

  As she finished the painful climb up the ancient stairs, she found herself in the middle of a craterous dig site.

  Her eyes burned.

  She couldn’t let herself savour the clean air or the blue sky, instead she immediately bolted, scrambling up the steep walls of the crater, up to the lush field above.

  When the fairy looked back down at the ruin, seeing no sign of the two humans who would no doubt try to catch her, she allowed herself a moments rest.

  Feeling all sorts of overwhelmed, Tinder scanned her surroundings from the hill being excavated.

  To the north lay a town on the edge of an emerald-green lake stained by natural minerals.

  To the east, a forest sprawled all the way into the horizon, blanketing the undulating hills with a diverse patchwork of canopies.

  Without further thought, the fairy set off for the forest, her trail betrayed only by the wandering disturbance in the grass.

  At Tinder’s scale, the lush fields were a verdant forest crawling with still-familiar beasts.

  “I hope I lost them…” Tinder thought breathlessly as she moved against the shadows cast by the eastward sun.

  “I’ll hide in the forest…” She repeated to herself nervously.

  “I-I have to find where the others are… I hope somebody still lives in this forest…”

  Tinder was forced to stop when she came across a flowing stream.

  She gave her tattered wings a miserable glance before cautiously approaching the silty shore of the cool tributary.

  When the fairy peered into the water, her reflection made her gasp in despair.

  She tried to run her fingers through her tangled locks only to get her fingers momentarily snatched by the web of matted hair.

  The fairy’s hair was a dull gradient, starting bronze at the roots and going white as it knotted into felt.

  Peeking over her shoulder anxiously to make sure she wasn’t being followed, Tinder took this rare opportunity to rinse millennia of filth off her skin.

  When Tinder spotted the small, brown rock peeking up from the grey silt, she immediately recognized it as a piece of flint.

  Using a different rock, Tinder knapped the flint into a spear with just a couple precise strikes.

  The fairy used the blade to pierce the bark of a tree.

  She used the sap that spilled from the wound to glue the spearhead to an appropriately sized twig.

  She cut, then twined a blade of grass into a length of green thread which she used to sling the spear over her shoulder.

  More confident, now that she was armed once again, the fairy travelled upstream, until she found a safe crossing point.

  That point came in the form of a cobbled patch of smoothened stone protruding from the water’s surface.

  As a fairy, Tinder’s experience with water was either as a projectile periodically pelting her tribe from the sky, or as something you flew over as high as you could manage.

  Between fish, crashing waves, and the nightmare that was water tension at fairy-scale, most fairies – Tinder included - never learned to swim.

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  However, as the threat of being tracked down and put back inside her prison loomed over her, the fairy made her treacherous leap of faith from the bank of the stream to the first slippery stone.

  The sound of rushing water drowned out the rest of the world.

  Looking up, the fairy saw the distant woods dither out and diffuse into increasingly open fields.

  Looking down, the fairy saw a refracted garden of weeds and algae being dragged by the rushing current.

  Trembling like a leaf, Tinder reached the opposite side of the stream with a giant gasp of relief.

  She collapsed onto the dry land, trying to hug the stationary ground beneath her.

  Her brief moment of peace was snatched away by the low rumbling of a feathered predator looking down at the fairy from beneath a nearby shrub.

  Tinder froze; her eyes locked with the beast nearly thrice her size.

  Its long neck ended in the head of an owl, springing from the bipedal body of a terror bird.

  Its characteristic red, wrinkled talons crunched on the twigs below in a threatening display of strength.

  Slowly, without making a sound, Tinder readied her spear and assessed her surroundings out of the corners of her eyes.

  By the time the sun began to set on the fairy, she had already fashioned the bird’s feathers into a comfortable dress.

  She hung its sinew from the ceiling of her tree hollow, hanging the bones from more improvised grass-rope.

  Meanwhile, a portion of its meat roasted over a pile of glowing embers outside.

  Tinder knapped away at a shard of bone until it had the grimace of a simple comb.

  The knots she couldn’t work out, she cut off.

  Ordinarily, fairies settled high up in the trees or even on the sides of cliffs.

  But without a working pair of wings, Tinder was lucky to find a natural cavity at ground level.

  “There, that’s… a little better…” she said, glimpsing her reflection in the waxy cuticle of a pilfered leaf.

  “These woods are so bountiful, surely I’ll find my people here…”

  As she went to lay down on a freshly cut mattress of moss, the fairy saw a flash of unnatural red light followed by a deafening bang.

  She squeezed herself against the corner of her den, not daring to make a sound as she awaited some magician’s gloved hand reaching in to drag her away.

  As the seconds turned to minutes, no hand descended on the fairy, instead, the explosion continued in various different colours.

  When she mustered the courage to poke her head out of her shelter, she saw colours bloom in the sky over the distant town.

  Each dazzling discharge was followed by a loud boom that never failed to make Tinder jump.

  “What kind of magic is that…?” Tinder wondered in a mix of fear and awe.

  “Are they shooting something in the sky… or are they just making pretty lights?”

  Already chastising herself for her recklessness in her head, Tinder cautiously crept away from the forest and through the fields leading to the town.

  The colourful explosion continued periodically.

  Every time it started up, she hid in the grass and waited for it to pass.

  “Those were humans down in the ruin…” Tinder recalled nervously.

  “Humans can’t see very well in the dark… everything will be fine as long as I stay out of sight…” she repeated to herself like a mantra.

  Rather than entering via a main road, Tinder quietly slipped beneath a gate and into somebody’s backyard.

  From there she snuck into a maze of alleys and backroads.

  With every step the cumulative hum of bustling festivities grew louder but no more distinct.

  Outside what the fairy had no way to knowing was a bakery, Tinder found a perfectly climbable gutter.

  The fairy – fuelled by a cocktail that was equal-parts adrenaline and curiosity - climbed the rusty gutter all the way up to the red rooftop.

  Once she made it to the top, she took a moment to catch her breath before carefully peering down over the edge at the rowdy celebrations happening below.

  Her blood ran cold as she took in the horrific scene before her.

  Bodies hung from the rooves.

  Heads on pikes lined the streets.

  The people present ranged in debauchery, from feasting on skewered organs and body parts, to those playing games ranging from gruesome to bizarre.

  One dwarf unleashed a volley of rubber balls upon a stack of carefully arranged skulls.

  Elsewhere, a frogman competed against an elf in a game where you tried to lasso little bobbing dolls floating in a big tub into your bucket.

  It was all fake, of course.

  Dolls commissioned by the artists’ guild.

  Old, problematic games that only a fraction of the elves lives long enough to understand why they were problematic.

  The food was a show of culinary camouflage that transformed a tin of cake and a bucket of fondant into everything from anatomically correct eyeballs to whole, realistic limbs.

  To Tinder however, the scene wasn’t far from how the world was in her time.

  The mix of colourful lights, music, and jubilant laughter juxtaposed by the visceral imagery was enough to make her feel sick in the pit of her stomach.

  Without a second thought, Tinder fled the town and rushed back in the direction of her secluded little nook in the woods.