A powerful witch runs away after the villagers try to execute her, couple years later children randomly start disappearing. She’s taking abused children away from their parents and raising them in the woods. But once they grow up and leave, they forget how to get to the witch’s house and their memories of her become blurry.
The town was evil. But the children? They were still pure, there was still good in their hearts, trickling out of their mouth and ears and gentle hands.
She stayed there for years, trying to protect them as much as she can. Even after the villagers had enough of a witch living amongst them, she still took in the lost children.
Every parent’s worst nightmare is their children growing up. The witch was no different.
Her kids, they called her mama once. And now when they passed her as adults, they didn’t even give her a second glance. As far as she figured, they didn’t remember her at all.
(She’d tried talking to Benjamin once, one of her favourites, because he had been a clingy child who couldn’t bear to leave her side. He was thirty when she tried visiting him. When she approached him, he treated her kindly, but the kind of pleasantness you show to strangers and not someone you call your mother.)
The witch was sad, of course. But there was nothing she could do; they had to go, sooner or later.
One of her boys entered her room. “Mama?”
It was Peter, her oldest. He was turning eighteen in a couple of days, and soon it would be his turn to leave.
It hurt her to see him already.
“Yes, love?”
“I am leaving soon,” Peter said. A statement, not a question. “But I don’t want to.”
“You have to, love. None of your siblings wanted to leave,” she answered, simply. “But the hour you turn eighteen, you’ll forget. And you’ll wander off, and then you’ll never find your way back.”
Peter looked sulky. “Isn’t there some way to make me not forget? I don’t want to forget you, ever.”
She almost laughed because of how close she was to crying. Her boy. Her sweet, sweet boy.
“I’m sorry, love.”
He slammed the door behind her when he left. Peter had always been a fiery one.
When she opened the door on the day of Peter’s eighteenth birthday, she expected him to be gone by then.
Instead, her boy was sitting on the bed cross-legged, holding an empty bottle.
He had drunk a potion. An anti-aging potion.
“I found a way, mama,” he said, his eighteen-year-old hands clasping here, firmly. “I don’t want to forget you.”
He left, too, when he got bored of being cooped up in the house with no company. But he visited her every few years, bringing her stories of how he visited children, following in her footsteps.
They called him Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up.
“I remember the turning point moment. I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my roommates, and it went into a backstory flashback set in high medieval Germany. ”Why are you sighing?” one asked, noticing that I’d laid back and deflated rather gloomily. I answered: ”She’s not of sufficiently high social status to have domesticated rabbits in Northern Europe in that century. But I guess it’s not fair to press a point since the research on that hasn’t been published yet.” It made me laugh, also made me think about how much I don’t know, since I hadn’t known that a week before. For all the visible mistakes in these shows, there are even more invisible mistakes that I make myself because of infinite details historians haven’t figured out yet, and possibly never will. There are thousands of artifacts in museums whose purposes we don’t know. There are bits of period clothing whose functions are utter mysteries. There are entire professions that used to exist that we now barely understand. No history is accurate, not even the very best we have.”
PSA to all you fantasy writers because I have just had a truly frustrating twenty minutes talking to someone about this: it’s okay to put mobility aids in your novel and have them just be ordinary.
Like. Super okay.
I don’t give a shit if it’s high fantasy, low fantasy or somewhere between the lovechild of Tolkein meets My Immortal. It’s okay to use mobility devices in your narrative. It’s okay to use the word “wheelchair”. You don’t have to remake the fucking wheel. It’s already been done for you.
And no, it doesn’t detract from the “realism” of your fictional universe in which you get to set the standard for realism. Please don’t try to use that as a reason for not using these things.
There is no reason to lock the disabled people in your narrative into towers because “that’s the way it was”, least of all in your novel about dragons and mermaids and other made up creatures. There is no historical realism here. You are in charge. You get to decide what that means.
Also:
“Depiction of Chinese philosopher Confucius in a wheelchair, dating to ca. 1680. The artist may have been thinking of methods of transport common in his own day.”
“The earliest records of wheeled furniture are an inscription found on a stone slate in China and a child’s bed depicted in a frieze on a Greek vase, both dating between the 6th and 5th century BCE.[2][3][4][5]The first records of wheeled seats being used for transporting disabled people date to three centuries later in China; the Chinese used early wheelbarrows to move people as well as heavy objects. A distinction between the two functions was not made for another several hundred years, around 525 CE, when images of wheeled chairs made specifically to carry people begin to occur in Chinese art.[5]”
“In 1655,Stephan Farffler, a 22 year old paraplegic watchmaker, built the world’s first self-propelling chair on a three-wheel chassis using a system of cranks and cogwheels.[6][3] However, the device had an appearance of a hand bike more than a wheelchair since the design included hand cranks mounted at the front wheel.[2]
The invalid carriage or Bath chair brought the technology into more common use from around 1760.[7]
In 1887, wheelchairs (“rolling chairs”) were introduced to Atlantic City so invalid tourists could rent them to enjoy the Boardwalk. Soon, many healthy tourists also rented the decorated “rolling chairs” and servants to push them as a show of decadence and treatment they could never experience at home.[8]
In 1933 Harry C. Jennings, Sr. and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, folding, portable wheelchair.[9] Everest had previously broken his back in a mining accident. Everest and Jennings saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-market manufacturers of wheelchairs. Their “X-brace” design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements. The X-brace idea came to Harry from the men’s folding “camp chairs / stools”, rotated 90 degrees, that Harry and Herbert used in the outdoors and at the mines.[citation needed]
“But Joy, how do I describe this contraption in a fantasy setting that wont make it seem out of place?”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince FancyPants McElferson propelled forwards using his arms to direct the motion of the chair.”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince EvenFancierPants McElferson used to get about, pushed along by one of his companions or one of his many attending servants.”
“But it’s a high realm magical fantas—”
“It was a floating chair, the hum of magical energy keeping it off the ground casting a faint glow against the cobblestones as {CHARACTER} guided it round with expert ease, gliding back and forth.”
“But it’s a stempunk nov—”
“Unlike other wheelchairs he’d seen before, this one appeared to be self propelling, powered by the gasket of steam at the back, and directed by the use of a rudder like toggle in the front.”
Give. Disabled. Characters. In. Fantasy. Novels. Mobility. Aids.
If you can spend 60 pages telling me the history of your world in innate detail down to the formation of how magical rocks were formed, you can god damn write three lines in passing about a wheelchair.
Signed, your editor who doesn’t have time for this ableist fantasy realm shit.
knitting in the dark 