The Old Fairy
antagonist · fairy · the forgotten one
The fairy nobody invited, because nobody remembered she was alive.
How we meet them
Arriving halfway through a dinner she was not asked to, at a table with no place set for her.
Personality
Proud, precise, and entirely unwilling to pretend she has not noticed.
What they want
To be counted. She does not want the gold case; she wants to have been remembered enough for one to exist.
How they change
From fifty years alone in a tower, to an entrance nobody planned for, to a sentence that outlives her and that she never comes back to see carried out.
How they speak
Very little. Her most devastating moment is looking at a plate and saying nothing at all.
How the story treats them
Nobody at court had decided anything about her. They had simply stopped thinking about her and settled privately on her being dead, which is the injury the story is actually about.
One surprising thing
Her curse was originally death. The hundred-year sleep everybody remembers is not her spell at all; it is the seventh fairy's amendment to it.
If they were real today
She would be the relative who finds out about the wedding from somebody else's photographs.
Key moments
The ordinary plate
There is no eighth case of gold. The king has a place laid and gives her the plain cutlery, and she looks at it for a long moment and says nothing, which is worse than if she had.
She will die of it
She stands up when her turn comes and gives the gift she has been holding since the doorway, and the room goes as quiet as a room can go.
Who they know
The Seventh Fairyrival
The two of them never argue, and the entire plot is the argument between them.
The Kingneighbour
He did not snub her. He simply did not think of her, which turns out to be worse.
Characters like The Old Fairy
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