Opal

A sprite that doesn't quite conform to the image you might imagine.

A still little body lay on a rock just under the surface of a murky green river, encased in a slimy bubble. This body was feminine in features, but not in the way you might expect. Not in the way that suggested frailty, but one that suggested womanhood, commanding power with its volume and demeanor. This fairy bore minimal likeness to the stories told to you as a young child, with no gentle flits and floats around flowers–this fairy would use her power to kill that gentle flower you're imagining. She was small in height; only as tall as a stumpy, lumpy carrot just half grown in the garden.

Her body was heavily decorated with curves, each one like a cloud to lay a head on, soft and fleshy. Wavy rings of hair swirled around each of those curves in black spirals, sneaking over pale skin like tar dripping over snow. Hiding beneath all that hair, on her neck, were gills that were rimmed with green, which pulsed in and out with each light pump of breath. They struggled more than they might have in Wisteria Farm’s prime days, their green less like springy fresh moss, and more like crispy dying ferns. 

Feathery wings sprouted from her back, with the fuzzy brown and gray spots and smudges one might find on a common moth. This body, these wings, this magic, belonged to Opal, a she-fairy whose name gave a softer impression than she ever could. She had no more family, no more friends, and spent her days laying alone in her gelatinous bubble of half-sleep in the lifeless Pearl River.

She opened her eyes. Beyond large freckled lids and jet-black eyelashes were eyes the color of dying lilacs; eyes that had no capability of seeing the world in bright colors, only in dark, drab ones to mirror dark emotions simmering lightly beneath a carefully placed lid of secrecy. She had become a master in the art of trading anger and sorrow for indifference and detached disdain.

A passing fish, swimming scared from an unknown something across the pond, kicked up a small cloud of silt that drifted past the walls of Opal’s bubble and flowed into her left gills. The gills shuddered and expelled the silt, like a cough, and the sprite rose out of the gooey encasement she rested in. She kicked off the river’s bottom, bursting smoothly out of the river to rest on a different rock–one with a good view of Mother Wist. She did this every day, sometime between her poor quality of rest and her small efforts to find food. And while she sat, she thought of what once was; the leaves of Mother that used to hold vibrancy and absorb warmth. The river that used to vibrate through and through with life of its own, not just reflect the death around it. The family that used to love and surround her from all sides, now hostages of the cruel and secretive winds of change.