1st January 2006
Welcome to ‘Ask Esra’, the new home for all your questions about the fae. Our journey to Earth was a necessity, changing your home in a way you could never have been ready for, along with turning some of your lives completely upside down. We’re doing what we can to help, but it truly feels as though we can never do enough. Especially when there are those within our people who are against the very idea of accepting the damage we’ve caused. I’m not one of them.
Alongside Willow I’ll be working to help in any way I can. Between the two of us we made the decision an online reference would be helpful, and alongside this somewhere I can give guidance to those who might need it.
The first question you may be asking is how. How will I be able to do this, when it’s known magic and electricity don’t mix? Fortunately we aren’t on our own, so your questions will be passed on to me by Conor, the son of your current Prime Minister, who very kindly agreed to help me set up both the online reference and the ‘Ask Esra’ site. I appreciate the fact he was willing to work with us to make this a viable possibility, because we know there are those out there who may be something more than human, without any understanding of what this might mean for them. I also won’t be the only one answering your questions, if you’re something other than fae, because I’ll be getting some help from the shifters and the mer.
If your plan is to use this to send vitriol and hatred in my direction then feel free. Let it all out at someone who’s able to deal with it, rather than those who are struggling. Finding out they’re something other than human isn’t easy. They never made the choice. I’m certain, if they were asked, it wouldn’t be a fate they’d say they want, but there’s no undoing what is. Unfortunately we’ve long made selfish choices, and in that I include both the mer and the shifters, because the fae weren’t the only ones to misuse Earth in the past. We can’t undo those choices, or the decision we made to journey here. There is no way back to the world so many of my people still call home.
Choices not made by us affected us all. Many argued we had to leave Kalinia, but they were too young to be heard, and that number included both my brother and our current Queen, who became the heir to the throne too late for there to be any truly easy option to take. There were others who needed her help, unable to create doors the way she could, with the rest of them being lost as magic slowly faded. We were lucky to be able to create a door between Kalinia and Earth, with the main reason being the fact Alder managed to find a place of magic. Had it not existed we never would have made it. Maybe it would have been better for you if we hadn’t. I understand if you feel that way. Our decision was entirely selfish in a way, because if we hadn’t made the journey we wouldn’t have survived, but there were many who were innocent in this whole mess.
Had those voices been listened to sooner we’d have had a chance to look more deeply into the options we could have chosen from, but, in the end, we needed an inhabited world, with some magic. Why is this the case? There are those who’d say I should keep this to myself, it’s best for those who aren’t fae not to know, and they’re the reason we didn’t know the truth to begin with. I don’t want for us to fall into the same bad patterns as before, where knowledge of who we truly were was destroyed by those who didn’t want to admit the truth. For a currently unknown reason the magic we use is lost. It’s something Willow plans on looking into, in order to understand better how this happens, which may have been done before. We have no way of knowing, unfortunately, due to the aforementioned issue of the fae who didn’t want to accept this is part of who we are, and the reason we’ve travelled from one world to the next. Earth, we believe, is safe, thanks to your existence, which we have no reason to believe will come to an end any time soon.
Without you it’s entirely possible we’d have ended up killing another world, although not by choice. Had it not been for a journal found during the time spent packing up it’s likely we would never have known the whole truth, our theory unproven, because there were those of us who believed that was the case, including Alder. Hence the decision he made Earth was the safest choice for us. What we couldn’t have known, until it happened, was exactly how we’d change your lives. The places of magic started to grow with our arrival, slowly spreading into parts of your world, transforming all those who have any magic within their soul, and it was never something we anticipated was a possibility until we saw it happening.
Our decision was made in the mistaken belief we’d be unlikely to affect your lives the way we did, and that belief was due to our lack of knowledge on the magic of your world. We thought we’d simply take over a park. An apology doesn’t undo anything, and yet I am still sorry we made the choice that led to this happening to all of you. Had we had the time we’d have looked more deeply into this too, to be able to make an informed choice, rather than simply jumping from one world to the other, because time was running out for us. If you want to know anything more about this I’m as willing to talk about it as I am anything else linked to the fae. No questions are off limits, but I reserve the right not to answer all the questions I receive. Especially if they happen to be rude in any way.
Leave your questions here for Esra.