I shouldn't have said it!
I seriously didn't do anything I shouldn't have! Honest! Well, actually, I probably shouldn't have said what I said where I said it and when, and in fact, you could say that what I did was exactly what I shouldn't have done. Now, even if you're only technically sane, that last sentence should have confused you. So, here is a real explanation because real explanations always make more sense.
I shouldn't have said I was bored.
I shouldn't have said it in the middle of a forest.
I shouldn't have said it half an hour before midnight, because everyone knows that stories don't start at midnight; they start shortly before it. This way, the most dramatic part of the story can take place at midnight.
So guess what happened next.
...Guess what? It wasn't a unicorn swooping out of the sky to carry me away to a beautiful land over the clouds with rainbows and lollipops growing on trees and fairies all over the place.
Normally only events can happen, but some people are the kind that can happen to other people. Some are the kind you wish would happen to someone else.
This particular person was a faery. Not a fairy, the little girls in skirts made of flowers with little sparkly butterfly wings, but a faery. The real kind.
She had long hair, a sort of peachy gold with certain places where it was pinker. It was kind of wavy, but if you looked closely you could see that it was actually just very relaxed curls. There were a few leaves caught in it. I got a very close look, because she sort of came out of nowhere and crashed into me, crushing me against a tree.
About thirty seconds later, She stumbled backwards. She blinked, clearing the hair that was obstructing her view.
“What the?”
There didn't seem to be an expletive. That was the entire question.
I didn't say anything. The only thing I was certain of was that I knew even less about what was going on than she did. In any case, at best it would be fifteen minutes or so before I could issue any sort of informative noise beyond 'ehhhhh.'
My mind was racing. Unfortunately, it was losing.
In the meantime, my eyes were three laps ahead and gaining, taking in every detail.
Her ears were long and pointed, although for some reason I had expected that. What I hadn't expected was the wings; they were only as wide as my hand and the top halves were as long as my forearm. The bottom halves were just little swirls. The wings had no thickness, they were just a two-dimensional film floating in the air an inch from her back. I expected them to billow in the slightest air current. They were translucent pink, and looked as though they had been painted in the air. There were some places where the brush hadn't quite been touching, and there the film degenerated into mist.
She was wearing a dress that would make a diamond envious; there was so much sparkle. The sparkly bits fanned out over the fabric in delicate, vein like designs. The dress itself was bright green and... Difficult to describe. It could have been any dress under all that sparkle. I just got an impression of sweeping, um, ness.
She seemed to have gotten her breath back and was preparing to embark on a tirade.
“Gods! Why don't you watch what you wish for?! Oh, that's right, just drag me out of my home and into some forest in the dead of night in this godforsaken reality, which by the way is certainly not the right word for something so unreal! And it's bloody freezing cold here. I mean, it's not as if there isn't proper sunlight around to warm it up, but oh no, everyone lets it get cold. It's not like you couldn't get it sorted out with a bit of effort! And you, you don't even look happy! I mean, most of the time I get called by little kids and, okay, they're not exactly what you want to deal with when you haven't even had breakfast yet, but at least they appreciate me!”
“ehhhhh.”
“Whatever. Come on.”
My vocal systems kicked in at this point.
“What? Where?”
“You're coming with me. To my home.”
“Why?!”
“It's my duty.”
She grabbed my arm.
“Wha-”
And then, the forest evaporated around us. It didn't disappear suddenly, or fade out slowly. My view of the forest was apparently a sort of bubble of liquid around us, and it broke up into a lot of little droplets. Then, we were apparently in space. In front of us was the world. It was, well, the world. Continents and stuff. Familiar. But then it began to change. The stars and planets around us shifted, the moon swiveled until it was in a completely different course, and the globe itself began to change. However, the time of day didn't budge by a second. Continents moved and changed shape, a burst of redness and a cloud of ashy white concealed a third of the Earth's face for almost a hundredth of a second. As I watched, Africa split up into thousands, probably millions, of small islands. Antarctica moved up until it was over the equator, and then scrunched up and split as what had been South America crashed into it. Nearly thirty seconds of glaciers and volcanoes passed, and finally the complete reconstruction of the world slowed. It looked totally different. The set of islands over the equator that had been Antarctica flushed opulent green along with a large collection of new volcanic isles in the previously Pacific, which had pushed the Once-Hawaii over towards Japan. A range of mountains where America had been was stripped of its patchy green and turned white; with snow, I assumed. Meanwhile, in the golden plains nestled between the white peaks, a single tiny speck of green flourished and grew to easily noticeable size. It was still tiny from this vantage point. I noticed the strange pattern of sunlight; although it should have been noon around where Australia was, there was still sun on the other side of the globe. The world was mainly lit with a mottled pattern of dark in certain areas.
Then it condensed. Part of me was expecting to be back in the forest, but instead we were standing about six hundred feet up in the air. To my intense surprise, we were falling.
The faery said, “Damn. I forgot.”
She reached out and grasped the neck of my T-shirt. We started falling much more slowly.
“Doesn't this hurt your wings?” I asked.
“Nope. Wings are made of Chryomastagin,” Seeing my puzzled expression, she clarified, “Chryomastagin is one of the strongest materials known to any race. Second only to Farracin. But you can't make wings out of Farracin, it's too thick. Chryomastagin is also the absolute thinnest material. It's thinner than light on a screen. It doesn't actually have to have any thickness at all. Not even the smallest fraction of an atom. It's the thinnest thinness that can ever be imagined ever. Also, if I angle them just right, it doesn't matter how much I'm carrying, I'll stop completely. No more falling. The whole immovable object thing.”
Our feet touched down in the mountain-ringed plains. I had assumed they were gold with yellow grasses, but I was apparently wrong.
“Sand?”
“Close.”
I reached down and scooped up a handful of cool, rounded granules.
“It can't all be gold,” I said, gesturing around at the massive gold desert. “There isn't this much gold in the entire world...”
She looked at me pityingly. “Of course there is. It's right here.”
“But...”
“It was all buried underground. I heard that a long time ago there was a dead volcano that all the molten metal in it was gold. Oh, there was obviously electrum and silver and platinum and the lesser metals and certainly a lot of molten rock in it, but I think it probably got churned up and pooled out here and maybe this entire desert had a foot or two of solid but impure gold from that volcano in it, and then when the White Mountains were raised it all got broken up or something. I dunno.”
“So, the people in this desert are pretty rich, then?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well... All this gold...”
She gave the shimmering basin a cursory glance, as though it was, say, a gingerbread cookie; nice, but nothing to get excited about, instead of a sight that would make El Dorado look very insignificant indeed.
"What about it? We don't use it for big money, if that's what you're thinking. It would be unfair. We only use it for our smallest coinage, 'cause there's so much of it. It's so common that it isn't valuable aymore."
“And the mountains? It's not snow, is it?”
“No, of course not! It's marble.”
This made me pause.
“It's all white marble?”
“Yes, there's a thick layer of white marble that makes up the mountains, but the sort of fluffy look is because there're drifts of marble dust hundreds of feet thick.”
I had to pause and rerail my train of thought.
“So why have you brought me here anyway? Ok, the desert is cool and everything, but--”
“Ah, yes! Follow me.”
She turned and walked away, toward the center of the plain.
I turned and followed her.