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It began, as many things do, with a death. I'm lucky I guess, that I got to watch. It would have been harder if I'd had to wonder if it had really happened. But I was there, close enough to see his eyes blink once more as his head was held up by the hair. It would take more than a changeling to live through beheading.

While I think of his execution as the beginning, I suppose it began earlier than that; when my mother died. I can't remember much about my mother, which isn't surprising given how young I was when she ran into the woods with me in her arms. If she hadn't done that, dying alone on the hill, I wouldn't have learned to talk with the fairies, and that was the only thing I really had to offer.

While most people can see fairies, few people can recognize them no matter what form they wear, and fewer still can talk to them.
I am quite blessed in that not only can I do both of those, I can even convince them to help me, for whatever reasons, they have always liked me. If they hadn't I suppose my bones would be resting on that hill with my mother's.
But they did like me and raised me as best they could, and even found a changeling to bring me back into the human world when I got to be too big. Michel even managed to find my father, and being the stalwart type he was, returned me to him.

My father... well he was surprised by me to say the least, and I was surprised by him. Growing up with the faeries, all I really remembered from being a human was my mother talking about God,and since the faeries were my mother, I figured God was my Da. Since fairies don't talk, not really, I would talk to God. He didn't talk back this isn't one of those stories, but it was comforting to have someone to talk to none the less. But back to my father.

My father was nice enough, and he taught me about the human world. He taught me about the revolution that didn't happen, and the rein of 'we could do worse' King Edward. I was born in the colonies you see, but my father went back to England to negotiate with the King and Parliament, and that was when my mother gave birth to me, and ran into the woods to the fairy hill. Wait, let me tell you about King Edward and the revolution that wasn't; it isn't the proudest point in history, and a lot of people over look it.

About oh... fifty years ago, King George realized that England was in a spot of finantal trouble. Rather than do what any good housewife knows to do; that is trim sails, cut expenses and wait it out, he turned his eyes to the colonies. At that point the colonies were just starting to get things set on their own, building up cities, and organizing communities. Loyal subjects paying normal taxes, mostly in coin, because it would be a pain to ship farm animals over the Atlantic for taxes. But King George thought to himself that since they could pay in coin, then they could pay that AND more normal taxes. The people of England wouldn't mind, it would be solving the problem in a way that wouldn't result in more taxes for them, and if the people in the colonies minded, who cared- while they were getting onto their feet, they still couldn't survive without what England sent them. So there wasn't much they could do about it.

Sadly he was right, there wasn't much they could do about it. Some people grumbled, some people groused, and some people were delinquent, but in the end, most of them paid the raised taxes. And if it had stopped when England got out of the financial trouble, it would have been fine. But King George was never one to let a good idea die. He decided to sq ease the colonies for all that they had. After all, what did it matter? The colonies were filled with thieves, and brigands, and religious nut cases. The land over there was filled with sprites, savages and land witches, so no one important would be put out.

No one 'important' was, but many many 'unimportant' people were and the longer it went on the more annoyed they got. Things heated up and protests were made. There was even a few battles. But before the disturbance got to a full fledged war, King George died. His son, Edward at the time fairly young, took over, rescinded most of the ridiculous taxation that his father had put in place and formally apologized to the colonies, offering each of them a seat in the parliament to insure that it would never happen again.

Right, so the reconciliation ended the war before it became a proper war, and each of the colonies got a seat in Parliament, so everyone lived happily ever after, right? Unfortunately, not quite. There were will malcontents in the colonies that wished the revolution had gone through,and that they could be their own country, not simply part of the English empire. One such was my grandfather. He was a great mover in the revolution that wasn't, and my father, a boy of no more than ten did his part as well. Which is probably why in what time he spent with me, my father painted the Resistance in such colorful and glowing colors, when most people regarded it as nothing but a nuisance. But I had hardly spent any time with my father at all before I was alone again. He disappeared, leaving me alone in a house that I had hardly learned my way around, in a town where I knew almost no one. I would have been in much worse shape if Michel hadn't come back to see how I was doing. His return was unexpected, to say the least, and I nearly died of shock when I saw him.

It feels useless to talk about him. Other than Da, he's the only one who ever seemed to actually care about me. I knew God loved me, like a Da should, because if he didn't I would have died. Some days, it was all I could think about. As long as he loved me, that was okay. And he always would. And he'd always be with me. Though the night that Michel was executed, I'd never felt more alone. It felt like God had abandoned me, just like my Father, my mother, the fairies, and now, Michel. I was sixteen years old. I guess I should have been used to being alone, but it still hurt. Michel had been executed for no good reason. A stupid witch hunt. They said that he'd killed someone but that's not true. Michel had never hurt anyone. The king had laws in place to protect people like Michel, but people ignored them, and they were in turn ignored by the law enforcers, who probably agreed with them anyway. There had to be something that I could do. But I didn't have any skills, the only thing I could do is talk to faries.

yes. yes he does.

Not another macro, Kittywitch...

i just realised... I have a right to show this off.

I had to screencap each frame, align them, put them in order...