Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: Fairytales are curiously horrible things. In this expert a mage looks at the source of many fairytales and how that source evolved over time and adapted to the modern world, and in general to humanity’s eccentricities. But does that make things better or worse for us?
In the days of old, the Fair Folk would keep their distance from us, hiding among the trees and in nearby dimensional perspectives. Safe from us, but able to cross back and forth freely due to their near instinctual ability to manipulate dimensional headings. Over time, however, things changed.
Who of you, reading this, have not yet encountered one of them walking the shadowed streets of our cities?
The human mind is not flawless; our Masks obscure the fair face of Sophia with a thick veil of axioms. We often think that only we change, that only we develop, that we are the ones observing and learning. But we rarely think of the inverse. The thought that perhaps the Other watch us and come to know us, in their way.
The further we reach back in time, the more they stand out from among us. The forms they sculpt for themselves strike us more like a mockery of human flesh than a disguise. Their words were still laden with impressions of their language, their deeds alien and bizarre. Today, they mingle among us, oft recognisable only by their opalescent eyes and the slight torsions of space that accompany them.
Why is that?
What has changed over all these years?
They have learned, they have understood and they have adapted. We are to them, just like they are to us, fascinating, different, mysterious. Our culture is laden with symbolons that defy their expectations and stoke their curiosity. The life of a simple human is the existence of an alien entity, indulgent in experiences they cannot share.
As they are to us, as the many we have studied were and continue to be. For it might be, that the very nature of a mind is to be enraptured by the existence of another mind. Two unknowables that perceive each other, both desire to know the other.
And so they eat and drink with us, even though our food does not nourish them. They lay with us, even though they find no pleasure in doing so. And finally, they kill and dissect our bodies and take our hair and bones as trinkets from which they fashion dolls.
The modern fairy tale is the tale of that which lurks out of sight, preying upon us: the story of the Fae, the story of our fate. And so, in this realisation, we relive the horror of our childhoods.
Esoteric Musings... 