tuesday afternoon

[deepest_magic]

Elizabeth's house is within walking distance. Bella goes over to it the following day, after lunch, carrying two extra clumsily-frosted but perfectly baked cupcakes in her hands and notebooks in her backpack.

Comments

[neverbeatme]

"I don't know, I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head except Hansel and Gretel and there weren't actually any fairies in that one, just lots of cannibalism."

[deepest_magic]

"There's still that in the kids' versions I've seen," muses Bella. "Or at least threats of cannibalism."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. But I mean... 'fairy' used to mean 'terrifying otherworldly creature who will steal your baby and replace it with an enchanted log'."

[deepest_magic]

"What is the log enchanted to do?"

[neverbeatme]

"Act like a baby for a week until the magic wears off."

[deepest_magic]

"Why bother?"

[neverbeatme]

"To throw off suspicion? I don't know. Fairies also don't traditionally make a lot of sense."

[deepest_magic]

"Huh. I wonder if that's just lazy writing or if there's a way to interpret them that does make sense."

[neverbeatme]

"Want to look up some fairy tales and sensify them?"

[deepest_magic]

"Do you have a good collection of the kind of fairy tales with actual fairies in them?"

[neverbeatme]

"We can check!"

[deepest_magic]

Bella hops up and starts hunting for books.

[neverbeatme]

There are some books of fairy tales available, although it is not always easy to tell which ones contain fairies.

[deepest_magic]

Bella divides up the books and starts hunting.

"Fairy tales," she pronounces after a while, "are really, really weird. I wonder if stories that get written now will seem weird in three hundred years."

[neverbeatme]

"Not all old stories are this weird. Like, the Iliad is comprehensible and that's thousands of years old. And contains absolutely no log babies or people giving birth to goats, as far as I remember."

[deepest_magic]

"I haven't read the Illiad. Is it fun or just comprehensible?"

[neverbeatme]

"I'm not sure I'd say it's fun. But I liked it okay."

[deepest_magic]

"It's about a war, right? Troy?" says Bella vaguely.

[neverbeatme]

"Yep. Rivers running red with blood, Achilles dragging Hector's corpse around the city walls."

[deepest_magic]

"Why did he do that? Corpses are heavy."

[neverbeatme]

"He had a chariot. I think Hector killed somebody he liked and that was the only way he could think of to express how mad he was about it."

[deepest_magic]

"I'd figure killing him would do it. Or did he not kill him personally?"

[neverbeatme]

"Nope, killed him and then dragged him around afterward. I think there was a thing where how you treat dead bodies is really important, because of afterlife stuff or something, but the copy I read didn't actually explain."

[deepest_magic]

"I'm pretty sure there isn't an afterlife," says Bella, "but if I ran one it wouldn't make a difference what happened to the bodies."

[neverbeatme]

"Well, in ancient Greece they thought it did, I guess."