The Changeling

Once upon a time there was a girl named Tiny. When Tiny was born she was perfect and good just like all babies are. Unfortunately, Tiny's family had been carrying demons for many generations. Tiny tried to be a good girl and do everything right, but no matter what she did, she couldn't please her family and the demons hurt her a lot and many were able to move in. There was still a good part of Tiny left, but it was hard to find with all the demons in the way. Her family had many expectations for how she should act or how she should be, but they didn't expect her to do or be anything special. She was just the invisible child in the middle of a family with lots of children. Tiny was not allowed or encouraged to grow, so instead of being a human, as she was meant to be, she only grew as tall as a dwarf. She was Tiny on the outside, just as she was on the inside.

When Tiny was older, she married a human man named Denial. She wanted a baby so she had one - even though her husband wasn't happy about the idea. Tiny had her baby boy and she thought that she was happy. Tiny named her son Normal. Tiny had great expectations for Normal and he lived up to almost every one. Normal was very smart - he was so good at school he was advanced a year ahead of the other children his age. He was also very good at sports and nearly everything else.

Three years later, Tiny had another baby: a perfect baby girl. Tiny was pleased, as was her husband. Tiny had always wanted a girl to be all the things that Tiny hadn't been allowed to be. She wanted her baby to grow up to be a strong woman who could do whatever she wanted in life. However, Tiny was confused about the difference between what she wanted for her baby and what her daughter wanted for herself. Tiny was going to be very sure that her daughter grew up to be big and tall like the humans and not a dwarf like her mother. In fact, Tiny wanted her daughter to be even bigger than humans - she really wanted a giant.

One night, some goblins came and stole Tiny's baby and took her away to their land. Luckily, the fairies were watching and they replaced her with one of their babies. Fairies did this occasionally, but not often. Such children were called "changelings." The fairy baby's real name was Different, but Tiny never found out that there had been a switch, so Different grew up with the name Tiny had given her, and all the human expectations Tiny had for her, even though that wasn't her at all.

Because Different was a fairy child, she wasn't well adapted to living with the human family. Fairies are not like humans because they walk on tiptoes, play with fairy dust, are very good at things like music, and, of course, fairies can fly. Fairies are also very sensitive to untruth and because her new family denied that they had any demons the falsity made her very sick. Tiny took Different to a healer who gave her some medicine and made her mostly better. But Different was still not like the family she had been given to.

Although she was sickly to start with, Different soon started to grow and seemed to be doing just fine. When Different started to make words out of the sticks on the forest floor and play songs on the lyre and flute before she was even three, Tiny was sure this baby was even more than she could have wished for. This baby was obviously meant to be a giant or a wizard. Her expectations for her baby grew. Tiny was so caught up in the amazing things her baby (who she still thought was her own) could do that she didn't even notice that Different was different for a very long time.

Different was a happy child, but she was very unlike human children. She played with the fairy dust in the air and listened to the fairies' songs. Different didn't know that she couldn't fly any more so she walked on her tiptoes and flapped her hands a lot. Different paid so much attention to fairy dust and fairy songs that she didn't pay any attention to her parents or anyone else at all. She pretended so hard that she was with the fairies again, that she didn't notice that she was living in a human world. Different got great pleasure from little things like the light filtered through the trees or shining on something. She heard music in everything and constantly danced to it. She could become totally absorbed in a simple block of wood, or spin herself around very fast so she could see everything at once (and because she liked to feel dizzy).

Different was happy with her fairy games and Tiny was happy with her perfect baby, even though she was unusual. Because of all the special things the baby could do, Tiny was excited and had great expectations that her baby would grow to be very big and not anything close to the stunted dwarf that she was. The demons in Tiny were not so pleased. They didn't like this strange baby. They knew she was different and they were scared that she would one day be able to defeat them. The demons hurt Different a lot. One night they took the baby into the woods and left her there. The next morning, Tiny discovered that her baby was missing. Everyone in the village helped to look and they found Different in the woods exactly where she had been left. Tiny took Different to the healer to see if she had been harmed. Different was no longer happy and she no longer did her special things. Different did nothing at all for 3 days.

Many healers were called in. They gathered around Different and everyone tried different magic to make her better and make her normal. All the magic flying around scared Different and she cried and screamed and flapped her hands; she wanted very badly to fly away. When people talked to her, Different didn't talk back. She didn't know how to talk. She didn't even know that she was supposed to know how. Until that time, Different had been happy in her own world and didn't feel any need to talk to the humans.

Different had to stay with the healers for a long time. They watched her constantly and discussed everything she did. They talked a lot about the fact that Different didn't talk at all even though all human babies talked long before they were her age. They talked about her flapping and tiptoeing and how she never looked at humans. They tried to do some tests on Different, but she didn't understand the words or ways of humans, so she didn't do what they asked. The healers decided that Different must be exceptionally slow because human babies much younger than she was could at least do something on the test. They were a bit confused because Different could do some very smart things, but they told tiny that the special things Different did were meaningless.

They didn't know what to do with her, so they gave her labels. There were so many labels that Different got all tangled up in them and could barely move. One of the healers thought she was a fairy and a few of the others agreed, but all they did was stick the label "Fairy Changeling" on Different and it got lost among the others. The labels didn't make things any easier for Different because no one understood what the labels meant. They told Tiny she was silly to have any expectations at all for her daughter because she was obviously very slow and there was nothing at all good about being a changeling. They said if she truly was a fairy changeling there was nothing they could do to make her more like humans. They could not see anything good in being a fairy because they lived in a human world full of humans and fairies were not very well adapted to living in that world. They said changelings were incurable; she would always be strange, would never learn to talk, would always act in strange ways, and could never ever love anyone. After all, how could a child who didn't even know what world she lived in possibly love someone in it?

Different continued to play with the fairies and she still tried to fly sometimes. But she was starting to learn that she didn't live with the fairies and that there was no way she could get back. She still didn't know how to communicate with her family because fairies don't talk - they just know things. Different loved sounds, though, and she copied lots of sounds with her musical fairy voice. Luckily, some of the sounds that Different copied were actually the language of her adoptive family. She very slowly learned what sounds to make in order to get what she needed. In the end, all the labels were ignored, but Different was still restricted by the ones that were left and from the stickiness from them having been pasted all over her. This made some of her favourite things like tiptoe walking, spinning, and trying to fly, much more difficult.

Eventually Different learned to speak the language of her adoptive family and village. Different continued to do some very special and amazing things and some very unusual things as well, but as she left her fairy world, Different couldn't quite remember how to do some of the special things she could when she was a baby. Things like playing the lyre without being taught or disappearing so she couldn't hear. Different was getting drawn into the human world; she didn't know that she was forgetting how to be her true fairy self.

The demon parts of Tiny continued to hurt Different and her brother, Normal. Tiny's husband, Denial, was also hurt by Tiny's demons; he didn't even know he had demons of his own. Denial left Tiny because he didn't know that her demons also hurt the children. He convinced himself the demons only hated him. Soon after Denial left, Tiny had another baby. This baby was human but not like other humans. She called him Special.

Tiny was very happy to have a special baby because she got lots of extra attention. When Tiny was a little girl, no one gave her enough attention so she needed more than other people now that she was a grown up. Tiny started to pay a lot of attention to Special and less to Different and Normal (who hadn't had much attention to start with). Different didn't really care that her adoptive mother paid her less attention because she could still play with the fairies sometimes, but she was finding it harder to see the fairy dust and hear the fairy music. She couldn't get to her own fairy world much at all any more, so she learned different ways to get away from the human world which was still very frightening to her. Different was becoming better at talking and acting like humans, but she was still different, and she still had lots of trouble understanding the human world and its inhabitants.

Different still did her special things. She knew how to decode the runes used in spells since before the time she was taken to the many healers. Now that Different could speak the language of her village, others noticed that she could do special things. Tiny took Different to a wizard; she wanted to know if Different was called to do magic. In their world, those who dealt with magic were both revered and feared. Only people with very special skills could do magic and Tiny thought that Different might be one. The wizard did many of the same tests that the healers did - the ones that had said she was exceptionally slow. This time, the tests said that Different was exceptionally good at everything.

After her time with the wizard, Tiny's expectations for Different grew and grew. She gave all her expectations to Different until they were so heavy that she could barely walk. Different no longer walked on her toes because the expectations were too heavy. Different became so used to Tiny's expectations for her that she started to think they were really hers.
Different went to school with the other children because there were no places for children who were called to be wizards in her small village. Different still played with fairy dust and when she was very happy or very scared she still flapped her hands and tried to fly away to be with the fairies again. But Different also knew that being different from other people was bad. Since no one knew that she was really a fairy, they didn't treat her as a very normal fairy, instead she was seen as a very strange human. The teachers didn't understand Different and she didn't understand them. Different would get scared about being in class because her fairy senses were extra sensitive, so she spent almost all of her time in the library reading and memorizing spell books instead of being in the classroom with the other children.

The demons in Tiny still hurt Different every night.

Different grew up with the humans and learned to pretend to be like them as much as she could. People still noticed that she was different from them, but they thought that it was because she was magic and destined to be a wizard. No one suspected that she was really a fairy. As different became more aware of the humans she lived with, she also noticed that she was not like them. She got depressed because no one understood her. Different wanted to die because she was so miserable. When she was a teenager people were worried about her differentness and depression and stuck some more labels on her, but offered no help.

Different caught some demons because she was wounded a lot and they had many opportunities to get in. However, because she was a fairy, the demons had a different affect on her than they usually did on humans. When Different was finishing school she started to act very strangely. Her family no longer wanted to deal with their different child and abandoned her. She was taken to healers again. Different stayed at the healers' place for many weeks while they tried to figure out why she was acting so strangely. They saw that she had demons, but they didn't see the wounds that let them in nor that Different was really a fairy.

They gave Different healing potions which made her forget that she had demons. Different also forgot that she was a fairy and that she was magic. The potions allowed her to ignore the demons, but they also made her forget that she was a fairy (which she had almost totally forgotten already) and that she could do special things. Different forgot who she was altogether.

The healers eventually let Different leave and sent her to a home for humans who act strangely. They also gave her a special kind of healer who knew about strangeness and about demons. For many years, Different and the healer worked at removing her demons. It was difficult and painful work, but in the end all the demons were gone. The expectations that it was only the demons causing Different's strangeness turned out not to be true. When the demons were gone, Different became more like she had been as a happy young child. She looked more different from the humans; without the demons to disguise her true self, her fairy traits showed up better. Different didn't leave the human world as she had when she was young, but she wasn't as good at pretending to be someone and something she wasn't. However, she still didn't know that there was a name for her difference; she thought, as did everyone else, that she was a defective human rather than a normal fairy.

Different was hurt again and this time she got pregnant with a human baby. This gave her the motivation to get rid of any demon remains and heal the wounds that had let them in. Different had learned lots about having to carry around too many expectations that didn't belong to her so she was determined to allow her daughter to grow up to be exactly who she was meant to be, unburdened by others' expectations for her. Different loved her baby very deeply even though the healers had thought that she could never love anyone. Different was a very good mother, but because of her differentness and her sometimes strangeness, the human protectors didn't understand that she could be a good mother. They took away Different's baby and gave her to someone else.

After the baby was taken, Different was very sad. She was all alone again and she noticed her differentness more. Because she no longer had to hide it and because the demons and the wounds were not distracting her any more, Different became more fairy-like. Different knew for sure that she was different and she looked hard to find the right label because she knew that the ones she had been carrying around all this time were not quite right. Different looked in books and everywhere else she could. Eventually she found out about fairy changelings being raised by humans and she knew that was what she was.

It was hard for Different to find out that she wasn't really a human at all. Some of the difficult things about her life that she had expected to disappear when her wounds were healed were actually natural parts of being a fairy. As with everything else, being a changeling rather than a human had advantages and disadvantages. Different had always had problems with some things that were easy for humans and she had been very hard on herself because she could not live up to the standards. It would always be difficult for Different to feel connected to humans because she came from a different place. It would always be hard for her to understand their untruthful ways and how their feelings worked. Different also had trouble with many other aspects of being stuck in the human world where she didn't truly belong. She often wished that the fairies had never switched her because she knew that she could never get back to them and that it was going to be difficult for her to try to live in the human world.

A good thing about finding out that she was a fairy was that Different was able to drop some of the expectations that had been weighing her down for so long. She was still very good at some things, but she knew that there was a reason she was very bad at some other things. When she first let go of the expectations she was so light that it was hard to walk and she fell down a lot, but Different eventually learned to walk lightly without all the extra burden of expectations she couldn't carry. She gave herself some new expectations to keep her on the ground. It was hard to learn which and how many of the expectations were good and to get the balance right, but Different learned.

She became accepting of being a fairy most of the time even though it was hard. She found that telling others she was a fairy was sometimes good and sometimes bad. Some humans couldn't understand that there were some people who were really different because they started out that way, not because they were made that way from being hurt. Humans often tried to convince Different that she wasn't really different at all. They thought that Different said she was unlike them because she felt bad about being wounded when in fact she really and truly was different. They thought that being different was bad, but Different knew that it was okay to be a changeling and it was nothing to be embarrassed about. Sometimes she tried to act like the humans and she was usually pretty good at it, but she was still unlike them in some important ways. She knew that she was not a human and even when they tried to tell her that she wasn't really a fairy, Different knew that she was and eventually gave up trying to convince them.

Different still had times when she was very angry about being switched, but most of the time she was okay with it. Because she knew who she really was, she could learn to live in the world as a changeling even better than pretending to be a human. Different even found some humans who knew all about fairies and changelings. Some were adoptive parents of other changelings, others were special helpers and healers. Many were able to help her to live with the humans as well as possible. She met some other fairy changelings and was relieved to find she wasn't the only one and that there were others who could really understand.

Different actually ended up not acting as much like a human as she had before she found out, but since she knew that she was different she accepted it. Different was much happier being a fairy in a human world than pretending to be something she wasn't.