Disclaimer: Ownership turned into an owl and flew away, alas.
Author's Note: Muse notes that some of you seem to think this is going to be a longer and more involved story than I have any intention of writing. I have pointed out that the course of this little work has already been set and it is to resist the temptation to pander to the reviewers at the risk of the story. Brain-brain would like to second that opinion and further add that if muse wants to write an epic, it will have to do so with another idea. I apparently need to slap brain-brain. Now I am going to sit back, keep a wary eye on the nebulous thoughts floating about my cranium, and hope you enjoy my current offering. Sigh.
...
She's read all the stories. Before she'd read them for painted dreams and wondrous spun lullabies, magic imagery whispered to the mind of a girl longing for adventure. After, in a world where truth wove through the words, giving them power, giving them life, she hears the warnings howling down through forgotten years and scorned belief. They'd known once, in the present of another time, what danger lurked here…
"Stay."
It is not a command, nor yet is it a request; the voice is uninflected, as if it was a word, nothing more, but there is meaning within its echo.
Her hand hesitates a moment on its path to the phone, for there is meaning to her actions as well. She glances to where the wounded Goblin King lay, apparently unable to move, vulnerable for only her to see. And yet strong enough to be able to shift form at will, so that she lives in constant dread of her father walking in to find a strange man draped across his daughter's bed. But there is nowhere else to put him, even when he is an owl, and there is ever the still healing wound on his chest...
She wonders what he thinks of that; she's read all the stories, they are always perfect in them, perfectly beautiful or perfectly ugly, but perfect all the same. What happens when that perfection is marred? He gives no indication of anything, merely watches and waits, smirking on cue, and silently does not ask…
If you change your mind, give us a call…
At the other end of line are imperfectly normal friends, waiting for her to join them, wanting to take her out for an average night of dancing and boys, human boys. A night of fun and laughter, and the hopes that maybe, just maybe, someone in the crowd waits for them. The familiar, never ending dance, the steps of which lead on to a life where goblins don't whisk children away on power of an angry wish, where a crystal really is just a crystal, where there is nothing more than reality. The life every human was meant to have.
The stories tried to warn her, she just didn't understand. For in the end it is not the enchantments, it is not the pomegranate or the apple or the peach; it is not a matter of the tricks or the snares, an unwary promise or a foolish wish. The danger is the glimpse, the knowledge of what else. There is nothing stopping her from picking up the phone, no compulsion or geas, he has no power over her after all. He cannot make her obey his not command, his not request, his wish…
…except that she chooses to do so.