The First Chapter

Once, in the beginning of the twentieth century in a large city up North, there lived a scientist named Mikkel. In the large city, he attended university, studying to his heart's content until he could study no more and he was ready to write his own novels.

Mikkel studied natural science, his favorite subject being insects. As a child he loved insects and would beg his mother not to step on them when they wandered into their house. "Take it out, Mikkel. I do not want to find it upstairs in your bedroom!" She would yell. Mikkel was an obedient child, but he drew the line at certain insects such as caterpillars, moths, and butterflies.

Butterflies were his favorite. There was nothing more radiant in the springtime than a butterfly trying to find its favorite flower in the patch. They were innocent creatures who brought nothing but good, and from the moment he could hold one in his palm, he knew he wanted to study them for the rest of his life. And study he did. Mikkel studied until his eyes watered and his stomach churned from lack of food.

It was his goal to write the most informative novel on the butterfly than anyone had written before. To achieve this goal, he was spending his first summer out of school at his uncle's vacation home on the island of Fejø. The house was currently out of use and there was a village nearby where he could buy supplies, although he was hoping that he wouldn't have to go into the village often. This trip was purely for research, nothing more.

As he'd been fortunate, he had the money necessary to sustain himself and then some. Buying a train ticket was as simple as buying a loaf of bread. When he arrived in the small village, he was pleased to find friendly citizens and a carriage driver willing to take him to his uncle's house. In the city, they had buggies. That had become the preferred transportation. In the country, there were no automobile dealers or market for them, only stables and shops that sold buckets of ripe-smelling horse feed, bicycles, and carts.

The ride was bumpy, but not prolonged as he thought it would be. The house looked just as it did when he had visited as a child, although the siding was cracked in places and was beginning to peel. The windows were covered in a sheen of dust. The inside remained untouched. The old furniture was covered in stained white sheets that Mikkel removed immediately, folded up, and placed in an old wardrobe in the bedroom.

The house wasn't especially nice due to lack of care, but it served its purpose well. It was smaller than what Mikkel was used to. There was only a single bedroom upstairs, a large main room, a room for storage, and an indoor bathroom that his uncle had just recently put in for his trips to the summer home he took in the middle of winter. Mikkel smiled as he looked over the house, now clean and bright as he remembered it to be.

Before he began his work, which he planned on beginning immediately, he boiled a kettle of tea on the stove and unpacked the food he'd brought from the city. He hoped it would be enough. As he silently drank the tea, he roamed outside, contented with the fields of flowers. Past the flowers was a recently dug well, and beyond that was the sea.

Mikkel grabbed his notepad, one of the folding chairs he knew his uncle kept in the shed in the back, and set it up outside, sitting and watching a few of the insects that flew around. This particular day was sunny, but the wind was whipping around. A few of the creatures were having trouble with their flight. Mikkel had to smile at their misfortune, even writing a little note saying, "It must be very difficult to have wings on a windy day."

This would not be recorded into his novel, of course. The butterflies were plentiful, but they didn't come close. When Mikkel spotted one close enough to sketch its appearance, it flew away with another strong gust of wind. Damn that wind, he thought. Staying in the field was becoming useless, but he had another idea.

Mikkel, using one of his uncles rusty shovels from the shed, dug up a few flowers, roots and all, and potted them in a china bowl from the kitchen, the only thing he could find that seemed to suffice. He placed the flowers in the windowsill where he could watch the butterflies without them blowing away. He watched from the side of the window, not directly in front, and he was sneaky about it, not wanting to scare away any of the creatures.

All day he sat there, watching the few butterflies that stopped by, drawing pictures of them, making notes, catching one under a glass to examine it closer before releasing it again. If there was one thing he didn't believe in, it was keeping insects. Of course he'd collected them as a child. He kept them pinned to a piece of cardboard on his wall. But they were found dead, not killed. Usually. There were times when he'd wandered off his path and felt as though one butterfly was too beautiful to get rid of. But this one was a very simple monarch, and keeping it was useless.

Mikkel went to bed that night, but was not sleepy. He was eager for the next day. When the next day came, he did it all over again. He watched the butterflies, wrote about them, drew them, captured a deceased one he'd found on the side of the house, and examined it under a microscope. "Sorry," he said as he used a tiny pick to open the body. When he could see inside the butterfly, he scribbled out what he saw. It was difficult to see, even with the microscope, but this was a successful day.

The next day was similar. And the next. Soon, a week had passed and the weather had turned gloomy. Rain fell around noon. It fell in thick sheets, slamming into the bobbing flowers and banging loudly into the glass windows on the front of the house. The back windows in the back were facing the direction of the rain and it wasn't necessary to close them. No butterflies were out. They were safely tucked away wherever it was that butterflies went when it rained.

Mikkel started a fire in the stove and began to boil a few eggs for lunch, pouring himself a glass of wine from the cabinets. He sat down in a rocking chair next to the window again, watching the clouds grow dark as night, the only light in them being streaks of lightning that were followed by bellowing thunder that nearly shook the house. The rain was turning into a storm, and he decided that shutting the window would be best.

The man picked up the potted flowers and moved them to the table, then shut the window and closed the curtains. He lit a few lamps, grabbed a glass full of water, and poured a fair share into the bowl the flowers were in. To gain the company of the butterflies, the flowers needed to be in their prime condition. With a pocketknife, he began to cut away any dead or dying part of the plant. For this bunch of flowers, there was a dead one in the back, sick from stem to blossom. The stem was thick and to cut through it, he wrapped his fingers around the top, near the petals.

Mikkel felt something writhe in his palm and the powerful flutter of wings, and he drew his hand back. There was an insect on the flowers, although he didn't know what kind. It felt more like a bird, perhaps. It was either a bird or a very large butterfly. He almost didn't want to know, but if it was a butterfly, then he would be making one of the biggest scientific discoveries in years. With a slow and steady breath, he turned the pot around, putting his glasses back on to see if this was truly a butterfly.

When his eyes focused and he could see the creature, he drew back in such a state of surprise, shock, awe, and fear that he nearly lost his footing. This was no bug or bird. This was no creature he'd ever seen in his entire life, but he'd read about them. As a child he'd dreamed of them, hoped with all of his heart that they were real, because if they were, then magic was real, and all children wanted magic to exist.

"I've lost my mind," he said at last, the only reasonable reaction he could think of upon seeing a small fairy clutching onto a flower and watching him. "You aren't real, are you, fairy?" He said with a shaky laugh. Mikkel reached out to touch the fairy, but the creature drew back immediately and flew to the window, slamming into it like a fly, although without an exoskeleton, it hurt the creature and it fell onto the windowsill. It began to rub its shoulder, knowing now that it had been hurt.

Mikkel walked over to it, microscope shaking in his hand as he held it up to its face. It backed away, closed its eyes, and let out a noise that sounded like metal on metal, like the pendulum of a bell clinking against the shell of the instrument. The noise was high-pitched, much like a squeak. The face of the fairy looked very human, but the nose was more petite and it curved up, like a delicate figurine. The body had the proportions of a young man, but one who was slender. The form was both feminine and masculine in many ways, though if Mikkel was going to call this fairy anything, this was a male.

"If I am dreaming, and I am sure I am, then this is a very good dream," he murmured to the fairy, who only watched him blankly, his fear lessening as he stood up and tried to push away the microscope with a noise of disdain. "Oh, my apologies! Do you speak? Can you understand me?"

The fairy turned and started banging on the window, letting out a prolonged squeak that Mikkel recognized as a scream. "Oh, no! No, no, it's okay! It's okay!" He smiled reassuringly, picked up the fairy in his hand, and tried to comfort the creature. "I'm kind! I'm very kind! I'm not going to hurt you! Food… I bet you would like some food!" The creature let out another squeak, but this one was trembling and he saw small tears on his cheeks and he began to panic as he feverishly sliced a cherry into pieces. "Here we go! Here," he said, handing the creature a thin cherry slice about as big as his fingertip.

With another quiet noise, the fairy took the cherry slice, brought it to his face, then pulled it away and looked at Mikkel, who smiled wider. The creature took a bite, then sat down in his hand and continued to eat. The fairy wasn't terribly small. He must have been five inches tall. Mikkel could see that he was a very messy eater, and even more concerning, he had sharp canine teeth for biting. While he was distracted with the fruit, Mikkel used the microscope again, looking at the wings.

Despite all of the fairy tales he'd read where fairy wings were similar to the wings of butterflies, they were not similar at all. They were something completely different. They were slightly frayed on the ends and an off-white colour. They were wispy wings, almost translucent with red and blue veins pulsing through them. It reminded him of his own wrist. He reached out and softly poked a wing, which earned him a glare and a murmur.

This was an amazing discovery for Mikkel. He grinned when he realized that this was the biggest discovery in this millennium. Well, he believed it to be, at least. Without a second thought, he grabbed his notepad and his pencil, and began to scribble a sketch of the fairy. The fairy seemed to notice and climbed onto the notepad, staring at the image before trying to take the pencil. Mikkel watched with amazement. "It's too big for someone so small! Wait," he said. He cut a piece of lead off of the pencil tip and gave it to the fairy, who began to draw on the page.