Curse of the Dragon

Tamber gazed up at the azure sky somberly. The dreary afternoon bored her endlessly. Especially when she had no one to play with. Her only friend, Mota, had been playing with her for awhile until his father had called him to come and help his mother in the garden. Tamber never saw the point in having Mota help considering he had three sisters that could be of much more help and also wouldn’t complain the entire time.
Suddenly, she was distracted from her musing when she heard a strange rustling behind her in the woods. She hastily twisted her body around and surveyed the little she could see into the forest. Her eyes met only the half-light green of undisturbed foliage. Not even a tiny butterfly perched on a nearby flower dared to move on this dull summer day.
‘I wonder what could have made that sound then.’ She thought curiously.
Shrugging, she passed it off as her imagination playing tricks on her, and glanced to the sky once again. She then realized with a start that it was much later than she had originally thought. As she watched the sky seemed to be bleeding from a small would as the red of sunset began to stain the horizon. After a moment of marveling at the beauty of it, she sighed and pushed herself from the ground.
‘I’d better be getting home,’ she thought to herself. ‘Not like anyone will be expecting me though…’
Little five-year-old Tamber had been an orphan her entire life. She couldn’t remember ever having parents, and had never had any real guardians to watch over and care for her. She lived alone in a small hut at the edge of the village, and was given bread and other necessities by the kind elderly folk that lived close by. They claimed that they had always thought of her as their own grandchild, and so they took to taking care of her meals. Everything else she had either learned to do herself or lived without.
Her long, satiny black hair which flowed down her back didn’t need much care. All she really did with it was to wash it in the stream whenever she took her bath. The rick black hair complimented her coal black eyes that lit up as if with a true flame whenever she smiled. On this day she was wearing a simple green sleeveless shirt for summer and plain brown pants that went just past her knees.
Upon reaching her hut, Tamber immediately noticed the sweet aroma of food sitting on the stand by her bed. She smiled to herself and dug right in. Halfway through the loaf of bread, Tamber heard a small tinkling near the window. Glancing up, she saw a small wood fairy standing shyly on the window sill. Smiling encouragingly, she crossed the space between them and handed the sprite a small piece of the bread.
“Thank you very much!” the fairy exclaimed in a high-pitched, almost shrill, voice with a wider grin on her fragile looking face. Tamber smiled widely in reply and took the rare chance to study the fairy up close.
She wasn’t very big. She looked as if she was only about the length of an adult man’s hand. Her body had the look of being extremely frail, as if , if Tamber happened to breathe a little too hard, she would blow away in the resulting wind. The fairy’s skin was many different shades of brown just as it would have looked on a true tree. This was complimented by thin green wings that looked for all the world as if someone had plucked leaves from a bush and stuck them to the tiny creature’s back.
When the little visitor finished her meal, she thanked Tamber once again and flew off to be with her colony for the night.
‘With her colony. Yeah, no one wants to be all alone on a night like this,’ Tamber thought as she watched the fairy fly off into the night.
With her company gone, Tamber finished her dinner content, but very much alone. She changed silently into her bed cloths and, with the full moon shining on her face through the gaping window, fell into a peaceful slumber.