Julien Aklei

I decided I should give a little background about the Pine Fairy, so you won’t think he is just a whimsical concept I made up!  For starters, he is a fairy, of course, but that is a broad term describing all humanoids on different frequencies from our own. Some fairies, such as the Pine Fairy, are very similar to us, with emotions we could relate to, while other fairies are more inhuman, with emotional responses we might find bizarre. As a rule, the more fairies resemble us in shape and size, the more their thought processes mirror our own. And the more likely we are to see them.

Pine Fairies are symbiotic with Pine Trees and share many of their gifts. A Pine Fairy gains in magical power primarily through the experience of sorrow. Over time, grief hollows these fairies out, and colors like silver and gold pour into them to fill up the hollow places. These colors connect the fairy to heaven and the angels and he becomes a conduit for bringing this pure, uplifted energy into our reality.

Pine Fairies are linked to the evening of the day and the season of Autumn. For many fairies, it is forever the same time of year and the same time of day. This is not true for Pine Fairies, although time in their world is skewed to stretch out the hours of dusk and nightfall and condense the hours of morning and day. Likewise, the seasons of autumn and winter are stretched, while the seasons of spring and summer are compacted.

Pine Fairies become loners in their old age and spread out far and wide across the globe, rarely encountering one another. This isolation drives sadness even deeper into their bones. They do interact with other species though, and tend to be friends with many ‘inanimate objects’ such as canes, jars, and grandfather clocks.

They like to walk, especially at night, accompanied by a cane or walking stick. Pine Fairies are delicate beings and it is comforting to have a burly piece of wood with them, much as a woman might like a man to lean upon. They gain knowledge from the silver beams of moon and stars. They will walk by a river if one is near, for they can glean still other forms of knowledge from the moonbeams that float in the water.

All Pine Fairies are male. They do not use sexual reproduction. They are born inside pine cones, nestled beside the seeds. As youngsters, the Pine Trees feed them, shelter them, and teach them some of life’s basics, but eventually the fairies grow independent. And while they frequently choose to live among Pine Trees as adults, it is not a necessity, just as a man need not live in the same town as his mother.

Pine fairies enjoy many of the same foods we do, such as peas, cornbread, and cake. As young men (when they are the most red and human-like), they may even eat meat. In this most burly and masculine time of their life, they have even been known to brawl with one another and possibly kill. But as they grow older, grief eats away their bone marrow and withers their muscles. One by one their red blood cells die and they become empty shells of the men they were before. This is the time when their life is really beginning.