http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/apr/04/family-holidays-britain-fantasy-attractions **************************************
“Well, George, what do you think?”
“It’s hard to say, Frank… that hill over there’ll be in the way – that ground needs to be flattened for these units to go in on time.”
leadis tensed her fingers as the men’s intent turned crystalline in her mind. The rough-hewn strangers leaned on their lone gate and discussed her timeless bit of hill and dale as if it was but a bit of dead fish still flopping on the earth. Like nothing at all.
Two turns of the sun behind, this happened: she’d returned from the edge of her lands farthest from her hill. She found an iron gate along the bit of path the deer trod by.
Flying over to see – she alighted, but the iron bit into her, burning her flesh, and she moved off to a lilac tree close in to the conversation.
“Dan gets his backhoe in here, shouldn’t take more than a full day’s work,” Frank considered. “Do you remember when his schedule frees up again?”
“I’m thinking it’s near to 4 July, he prattled off.
‘Do these men never experience joy?’ leadis wondered.
It was up to her whether she might show herself to these humans or not. She was not bonded to them, so they couldn’t detect her. She decided to take matters firmly in hand; clearing her mind she directed her will to make a sharp voice resound, like hundreds of tiny ancient bells that rung… when she was small.
“Kind sirs, will you be telling me what you’re about as I’m true enough the caretaker of this hill and the lands about?”
Confusion unfocused their eyes. It transformed into a growing fear. They glanced around in staccato for what might make that sort of sound straight from earth below. Their feet told them nothing.
“You’ll have to be casting eyes upward to see me!” leadis teased. “I’m over here, on your side of the lilac tree. You DO know what such a thing might be?” She saw what little wit they had about them.
Still casting about vaguely, first one, then the other fixed in on her song… a pixie once taught the tune. “Over here. Focus. My voice.”
The men seemed hesitant to come to any decision until they’d sized her up… and what she might do. Then they burst into great gulping roils of laughter simultaneously. “Who are you supposed to be then: Tinkerbell?” They laughed until they were wiping the tears from their eyes and leaning on their upper legs for support, relief in evidence.
“I am no ‘Tinkerbell.’” leadis froze their laughter in their mouths. “I am mistress and guardian of all you see, and you’ll not be on these lands without my leave.” “Now go. I am done with speech,” and she wiped her hands, one against the other, having said enough.
Or so she thought.
True, they had driven away that day, quietly and without words to explain. They may have been cowed by her true voice, which came from far-off and near. They slouched past their pitiful gate, which connected nothing, and departed in a cloud of dry spring’s dust, stirred against its sleepy will by wheels and engine.
Leadis watched the path until the last mote of dust settled back to bed. Her heart shifted. “Mark this: it’s not the feel of other human meetings.”
“They look at life and see dust.” Before realizing it, night shone winking on water while the swinging crescent mother watched and listened.
Sure enough, one day past the full, leadis returned to her hill with the bass thrumming ground a ways below, where went her shadow ahead. ‘Was the earth in pain? Why did it groan so?’
With far seeing eyes, she watched them come. Her ears skipped ahead, and heard devastating laughter in the vanguard. “This will be the end of me as I am now,” she whispered to the lake-bound lilies. ”I will perish like those before me or I will come anew.”
www.paranormaldatabase.com/gallery/scot6.htm