Three Short Fairytales

by G. Wulfing

thornbushes. “I am not beautiful. I am ugly.”

  The silence from the Wyvern was almost as long.

  “It makes me sad to hear you say that,” he said at length.

  “Why?” asked the Chlyh tightly.

  “Because it’s not true,” said the Wyvern. Then he added, “You have beautiful milky-white skin. You have gorgeous green eyes. You have a silky, graceful tail. Your hair is like sunlight fallen from the sky.”

  The Chlyh could not believe her ears.

  “Your body is a lovely shape, full of graceful curves. You are all grace and lightness.”

  “Why are you lying to me?” asked the Chlyh brokenly.

  The Wyvern sighed. “I’m not lying,” he said simply.

  The Chlyh slumped down in the thorns, not caring how deeply they cut her.

  “I cannot believe you,” she mumbled.

  “Why not?” asked the Wyvern.

  “Because no one else says it.”

  “Maybe they don’t know it,” suggested the Wyvern. “You hide yourself so well in that bark garment.”

  “That’s because they all stared at me when I first came here,” said the Chlyh. That she did remember, though she could not remember how long ago it had been.

  “Maybe they were staring because they think you are beautiful,” suggested the Wyvern gently.

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  There was a long pause, while the Chlyh remembered something that hurt.

  “The looks on their faces.”

  The Wyvern considered this.

  “Maybe you should try again …? What does it matter what they think, anyway? You are what you are. If they don’t like it, they needn’t be friends with you. … Not many of them are friends with you, are they,” he guessed gently.

  The Chlyh was silent in shame. No, she thought; none of them are friends with me.

  She wanted to cry, but she had no more tears.

  The Wyvern waited until sunset for the Chlyh to come out of the bushes.

  “It’s almost sunset,” he said. “Won’t you come out?”

  Slowly, after a long moment, the Chlyh struggled out of the thornbushes. As she emerged, her damaged covering was torn away. The Wyvern stared at her again.

  “You are covered in cuts. Don’t you hurt?”

  The Chlyh shook her head. The cuts were nothing compared to the hurt inside.

  “Come, this way is water. You can wash your wounds.”

  The Wyvern led the way to a stream that the Chlyh knew well. Too miserable even to want to hide from the Wyvern, the Chlyh sat down in the stream and slowly, half-heartedly, began to wash the cuts. The Wyvern plucked a large, soft leaf from the bushes on the bank, waded in behind the Chlyh and began to gently wipe away the blood and dirt from the Chlyh’s back. The Chlyh was so astonished that she froze, too exhausted and bewildered even to try to escape. It was the first time she could remember that another creature had touched her in kindness.

  When the Chlyh’s back was clean, the Wyvern began to comb her hair with his wing claws. Carefully he removed the twigs and thorns and tangles from it, until it was lying softly on the Chlyh’s shoulders once more. “Your hair looks like gold in the sunset,” he murmured. “I told you it was like fallen sunlight.”

  Slow tears began to trickle once more down the Chlyh’s face, and plopped into the flowing stream and were swept away.

  “What’s wrong, Huldre?” asked the Wyvern, wading around to stand downstream of the Chlyh, so that her tears flowed past his two legs and his long tail, and so that the sunset was behind him. His wings were half-opened, showing that the membranes of them were crimson.

  And the Chlyh could not answer.

  After a few moments of standing there, watching her, the Wyvern said, “Come on. You should go home and rest.”

  The Chlyh’s heart felt as heavy as a boulder inside her, but somehow she got up and walked slowly home, clutching the remains of her garment about her. The bark chafed against the cuts on her shoulders, but she scarcely noticed. The Wyvern walked beside her, not speaking but looking at her every now and then. Silently, the Chlyh entered her cave, without looking at the Wyvern. The Wyvern found a boulder nearby, on the left side of the clearing, and curled up on top of it to sleep, with his head turned toward the cave. There was no sound from the cave all night.

  In the morning, the Wyvern waited on his boulder for the Chlyh to come out. But she did not come.

  In the afternoon, the Chlyh stepped out of her cave, holding the tatters of her covering about her, and looked around the clearing, wondering if the Wyvern was still nearby. She saw him on the boulder. The Wyvern raised his head, smiling, and hopped down from the boulder. “How are you?” he asked.

  The Chlyh did not know what to say, and stared down at the grass.

  “Thank you …?” she ventured at last.

  “For what?” asked the Wyvern, still smiling.

  “I don’t know,” stammered the Chlyh.

  “You are welcome,” said the Wyvern graciously. “Are any of your wounds still bleeding?”

  The Chlyh shook her head. Why was he interested in her, she wondered.

  “What will you do today?” asked the Wyvern next. “I think that you should be careful in case you make the cuts bleed again.”

  The Chlyh nodded dumbly. Still she did not know what to say.

  The Wyvern hesitated. “Will you be all right?” he asked at last.

  Finally the Chlyh raised her eyes from the ground and looked into the Wyvern’s brown ones. She still did not know what to say, but the Wyvern did not seem to need her to say anything.

  For the rest of the afternoon, the Chlyh sat on the grass outside her cave and mended her bark garment. The Wyvern sat opposite her and told her stories from his travels. The Chlyh listened and sat, looking up at him occasionally, and once she even smiled. When she did, the Wyvern paused in his telling and watched her, and, glancing up, the Chlyh saw an expression in his eyes that she had never seen directed at her before. Hastily she looked down again at her bark weaving, wondering what that expression meant.

  When evening came, the Chlyh asked if the Wyvern would share some of her food. The Wyvern accepted. The Chlyh lit a lantern, and the two of them sat on the grass with the lantern and the food between them. The Chlyh’s garment was not yet finished, but she sat in it anyway.

  The Wyvern said, “You don’t have to wear that, you know.” The Chlyh was silent.

  “Does it keep you warm in Winter?” asked the Wyvern. The Chlyh shook her head.

  “Does it keep you dry in the rain?’ asked the Wyvern. The Chlyh shook her head.

  “Does it protect your skin from anything?” asked the Wyvern. The Chlyh shook her head. The bark did nothing that her own skin could not do.

  “Then why do you wear it?” asked the Wyvern. There was a pause.

  “Because I am ugly,” murmured the Chlyh, hanging her head.

  “You are not ugly. You are beautiful. You do not have to wear that covering.”

  The Chlyh looked at the Wyvern from underneath her brows. “Then why did they all stare at me when I arrived here? Why do they not want to be friends with me? Why do they dislike me?”

  “Maybe they stared because they had never seen anyone so beautiful as you are. Maybe because they had never seen a Huldre before. Maybe they think that you do not want to be friends with them. Maybe they think that you dislike them and want to be left alone. Maybe they don’t really know you.”

  The Chlyh stared into the flame of the lamp.

  “Try it,” whispered the Wyvern. “You might discover something good.”

  The next morning, while the Wyvern went to find some berries which he knew were ripening nearby, the Chlyh slowly continued to mend her covering. She left it lying on the grass while she strayed to the other end of the clearing to pick some long stems to weave into it. She returned to it with her heart thumping. It had worked! She had gone without it for a few moments, outside the
cave, and nothing terrible had happened. No one had seen her and called out that she was ugly. No one had seen her at all. She wove the stems into the garment, thinking. Maybe the Wyvern was right. Maybe it would be all right to go without the covering. But creatures still might laugh at her, or ignore her and push her out of the way. But how would she ever know unless she tried? These thoughts went around and around in her head, until finally, before the Wyvern came back, she decided to try it.

  Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she got up and walked away from the clearing, looking for some creatures to meet.

  It worked. The Chlyh went up to a rabbit and said, “Hello.” The rabbit seemed very surprised to be greeted by her, but it answered her politely, and before she knew it, she was having a conversation with it. The rabbit introduced her to his family, who were all grazing nearby. The Chlyh tried to copy the way she had heard other creatures having conversations. After she had talked to the rabbits for a little while, she took her leave of them, and, heart thumping, sought out others. Throughout the afternoon, she went up to several different creatures and talked to them, and they answered her. Some of them stared, and the Chlyh wanted to run away, but she forced herself to walk toward them, and they greeted her politely. None of them ran away or mocked her or spurned her advances. The Chlyh felt as though her brain had turned upside down with delight.

  When the Chlyh returned to her cave, at sunset, she found the Wyvern anxiously waiting for her. “I tried it! They talked to me! I went up to them and talked with them! I wasn’t even wearing my covering!”

  The Wyvern gave a huge smile, his brown eyes melting. “I