Briar Rose 18
Her dreamtime moral lessons: out one ear and out the other, as the saying goes. In spite of all the fairy's promises and reprimands, when the little ninny's not bewailing her fate, she's doubting it, or if not doubting, dreading it, afraid of what she longs for. It's frustrating, she simply cannot, will not learn, and it sometimes makes the fairy, haunting too long this empty head, lose her temper, even though she knows that could she, would she, her own magical ends would surely be thwarted. That the child sometimes fears what she most desires, the fairy can appreciate, princely heroes being the generally unreliable and often beastly lot that they are, but that she doubts that her prince will ever come suggests she underestimates her own legendary beauty and its power to provoke desire in men. That such desire is a kind of bewitching (no wonder they blame it on the fairies!), the fairy knows and uses to her frequent advantage, though just how it actually works is something of a mystery to her, one of the main differences between humankind and fairies being that, for fairies, to desire something is to possess it. The nearest she can come to it is desiring desire itself so as to know the seeming pleasure got from its withheld satisfaction. She is not all-powerful, of course, and so sometimes suffers as well a certain ephemeral longing for the more absolute powers denied her, but, as a caster of spells and a manipulator of plots, the fairy understands that her talents by their very nature assume other powers and prior plots which provide the necessary arena for her transactions; it might even be said that she is empowered by the very powers she lacks, so she cannot really desire them. If, for example, in order to experience desire and its gratification firsthand, she were to try to take Rose's place in the bed and receive her prince (unlike Rose, she can learn, would), she knows she might lose power over her spell and either reveal herself prematurely or get trapped in her new role with no way to escape it. In a sense, omnipotence is a form of impotence. No, a stool in the servants' quarters of this mooncalf's head where she can sit quietly, filing her teeth, is the closest the fairy can come to witnessing desire's strange mechanisms, or, passing fancies apart, would wish to.
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