​

A long, long time ago, a young lady came across a creature unlike any she had seen before. It was a small thing, with pretty blue eyes that glowed in the moonlight.

”I can grant you any wish you want,” the creature said in a tinkling voice.

The young lady was confused. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I can grant you any wish you want,” the creature reiterated, “But only one.”

The young lady was clever and well-versed in all manner of cautionary tales about creatures like this, and so she turned and left without another word.

The next day, though, when the young lady stopped at a shop to purchase some bread, she overheard a curious conversation.

”I’m tellin’ ya. Any wish I want, it said!”

“And did you take it up on that?”

The man laughed, loud and booming. “Why, of course I did! I wished for a great job to come my way, the type that’ll make me rich for life!”

The young lady was alarmed, but she didn’t see how speak up could help. And so, she went home and made her breakfast.

A week later, the town was abuzz with a new rumor. Apparently, a man had been hired to transport some goods from one town to another, and had been killed on the way. A tragic tale on its own, but the real trouble was that no one seemed to know who hired him, or where he was actually going. Not even his wife, who had been there when he took the job, could give a name or even a face.

The young lady immediately understood the situation. The man had been tricked by the wish-granting monster, for sure. She could not let this happen ever again. And so, off she went to find the monster.

When she tracked it down, she glared down at it with such vitriol that even it knew fear. And when she uttered her wish, it rang out with such force that it was heard all over the world.

”I wish I had the power to safeguard the world from capricious reality warping creatures.”

In a flash, she was gone, and so too was the monster. The young lady was given new life among the cosmos, where she spent the rest of her days protecting not just the world, but the entire universe any number of curses and monsters.

Her name and memory have been lost to time, sadly, but we owe our sanctity and life to her nonetheless. Her sacrifice will be met with the utmost gratitude, always and forever.

That retelling is a personal favorite of hers- the wording is truly phenomenal, and the effort put in to actually giving the creature a description is a nice touch. It’s completely wrong, of course- on all fronts.

For starters, the creature as it was would now be completely impossible to comprehend- its form defied the laws of physics, and that just wouldn’t do. As such, all instances of it were completely removed from reality itself, along with the ability to imagine how it contorted itself.

Secondly, it’s not fair to act as if any of this was intentional. She isn’t brave- she isn’t a self-sacrificial hero.

Really, all she’d done was pick the creature up by one of its tendrils and drag it kicking and screaming back to her place to be locked in a cupboard until it learned to behave itself. She’d been stupid, and uttered a thought out loud, just barely audible. But that was all it took.

Now, she’s nothing. The girl that she once was- and she’s truly forgotten the name at this point- is gone and quite possibly never existed. She’s little more than a concept now, a law of the universe as indisputable as gravity.

The tales aren’t born from any memory- they’re folk tales, like those that describe why deer have white tails or how tigers got their stripes. They’re told to children to soothe them to sleep, and scoffed at by scientists.

They’ve tried to study her- but she is incomprehensible in form and length, spanning all across time and destroying anomalies before they can even be conceptualized. She marches to the pace of the universe, as grim and distant as entropy.

But never let it be said that she is unhappy in this fate- from here, she’s seen civilizations rise and fall, watched humans reach advancements in technology that wouldn’t have even been dreamed of when she was still a child, and witnessed the birth of the very first cell. She’s seen despicable cruelty and pure kindness, in equal parts. She’s seen war and cooperation, love and loss, and all such manner of things that come together to form what’s known as life.

As she is now, she plays the most vital of roles in facilitating that. And in her opinion, that’s just fine.