The Faerie Promise

Welcome to Faerie Vale

Aurora Mae Anderson grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere.    Well, not technically the middle of nowhere.  It was technically in the middle of Idaho.  But, if you asked Aurora, that didn't sound very romantic, to be in the middle of Idaho.  The town was called Faerie Vale.  It was not known for much to the outside world, other than having a few kids disappear over the years.  Kids that later, sometimes many months later, turned up safe and sound in their beds. 

It was these disappearances that put the town on the map and made a name for it for a while.  There were a few national news stories done on the disappearances when they first started happening.  But, the world soon became bored with it when the kids kept turning up safe and sound.  Eventually, the story surfaced that the struggling town had made it up in order to garner their five minutes of fame.  That was all it took to take the town right back off the map.

Oh, the stories those missing kids could tell, though!  Of course, the adults never believed the stories; but, if pressed on it, they would all admit to feeling a faint tingle of deja vu in the back of their mind when they heard them.  A feeling which they promptly dismissed, but also quickly motivated them to hush their little ones before people thought them odd.  Little people?  Nonsense!  Creatures with twigs for hair?  Balderdash!  Red eyeballs in the bushes?  Hogwash!

Over the years the residents of Faerie Vale knew better than to share those stories, or talk about the disappearances for that matter, with the outside world.  Sometimes, though one could never be sure, some parents kind of liked the quiet when the kids were gone for a while.  Oddly enough, whenever they did try to report a child missing, some couldn't seem to get their fingers to work the buttons on the phone.  Others couldn't get their tongues to come unstuck from the roof of their mouth, as if they had just eaten a spoonful of peanut butter.  After a while, they just stopped trying.  The kids always came back, so there was no point in telling anyway.

Well, that was until the year Aurora turned sixteen years old.  The year that the boy with the pointed ears and cheekbones that were just a little too sharp to be normal showed up.  A dangerous boy who made a dangerous promise to her, and waited to gain one in return.

Oh my, how I do get ahead of myself though!  First, I must give some background to the heroine of our story or you will be utterly confused.  What kind of a storyteller would I be if I let you fall victim to confusion?

Aurora grew up in a loving home.  Her parents loved each other and they loved her.  They didn't quite always understand her, though.  You see, like most of the small population of Faerie Vale, they lacked what one might call imagination.  In other words, they were entirely ordinary.   And our dear Aurora was anything but that.  She was a smart, sensitive, empathetic child.  She was advanced for her age and had a voracious appetite for all things literature.  Her favorite place was the library and it was there that the seed of her imagination was cultivated.

Aurora was left home alone a lot from a young age as both parents had to work to support the family.  This was a time and a town where doing so wouldn't bring Child Protective Services down on you, and she never minded being home alone.  She lived down the street from the library and walked there daily.  She spent all day there in the summers, and all afternoon there during the school year.  This brick-and-mortar container brimming with fantasy and reality became her second home of a sort.  The librarian like a second mother to her.  This was where her first introduction to the fae occurred.