Your first question, I assume, is what is a Swatter Knight? The question is a fair one from a position of reasonable ignorance. After all, a secret order should sustain itself as precisely that: secret.
What are we, then?
We are the wall between worlds. We are the berm that restrains the flood.
Swatter Knights protect the world from the invasive legions of the fairies. Most people think that fairies are imaginary—much to the delight of the fairies. This is for the best, truly, because unless a person knows where to find them and holds the power to fight them, a fairy stronghold is best left undisturbed. As magical creatures, fairies are fought with magical weapons. Perhaps surprisingly, the necessary weapon lives in many homes, but rarely is it recognized for its true importance. Where you see a fly swatter—a tool of convenience for eliminating pests—I see a weapon. I see a shield. I see a banner of victory over an encroaching enemy that will not yield and will not relent.
My swatter is bright green, composed of thin strips of flexible wood within a hickory frame upon a polished oak handle. My sister’s swatter is pink, diligently stained by the stroke of her hand and the blood of our enemies. Both are far sturdier than any modern composition of a plastic flap on a flexible wire. I hang mine from my belt on a bundle of old shoelaces. Another simple thing to the average person, but to me these laces have carried me safely across countless battlefields.
What the fairies lack in size they make up for in conviction and numbers. They carry spears the size of needles, tipped in venom. Although it hurts like mad, a single stab is unlikely to kill you. A swarm, however, could fell even an adult. Even worse, some people are especially vulnerable to their poisons. A single prick could prove lethal.
In that way, the laces protect us. I wear thick clothes that cover my skin, with gloves, boots, and a veil. The laces bind the openings closed, preventing the fairies from sneaking inside. Simple clothes to you. Impenetrable armor to me.
The trouble with fairies is that they are crafty. They seem innocent enough, and easily convince people that they are friendly and mean you no harm, but then you let your guard down. Then they get you alone, and outnumbered, and are quick to turn against you.
The reason above all reasons to fear the fairy-kind is their magic. It is subtle and difficult to see in action, but the worst of all their power is their ability to steal your imagination. To a child, whose imagination is nearly limitless, this is hardly a threat, but as you grow old and your imagination fades, their power grows strong. In very short time, I will lose the ability to see them, and their entire world will disappear.
That is why my sister and I, young as we are, are Swatter Knights. Because we can see them, and because my people need us. We harvest from the Old Forest, the home of the fairies. Long ago, before my grandfather was born, my people were at peace with the fairies, but not anymore. The time for words has passed.
To protect our people, we enter the Old Forest to uproot the fairy strongholds and destroy them.
Today is our first mission of the year, and the fourth year that I have gone into the forest with my sister. Before we go, we tuck our hooded shirts into our belt and tie them tight. The hem hangs low, nearly to my knees, eliminating the risk of an untimely untuck. Then we bind the wrists of our shirts around our gloves and the ankles of our pants around the tops of our boots with the laces that our mother handed down to us from the boots that she wore when she was a knight. We shroud our faces and necks with enchanted scarves that leave only our eyes uncovered behind the veil.
As we don our vestments, our mother anoints us with the prayers that will keep the fairy magic at bay, at least for a little while.
My sister seems impatient as we dress. I wonder if she is eager to depart or eager to return home victorious. There is always a celebration waiting for us when we return.
I am nervous. I am always nervous when we go out. Knowing that my sister is with me quells that feeling, but I know that one day I will need to go alone, and I question who will take my place when I grow too old to see the fairies in their natural form.
I once felt sorry for the fairies, but this manner of work makes a person hard in the heart. Killing another thing, no matter much it hates you, matures you fast to the harshness of the world.
A dreary day, overcast, windy and cold, greets us as we exit the safety of our home.
That makes it a good day for us. It is difficult for them to fly in the wind and the cold weather makes them sluggish.
We pass over the Spellbound Creek by way of the Stonewrought Bridge. This is the border between our lands. From here to the depths of the Old Forest is the territory of the fairy nation.
I bring my swatter to my face and whisper the invocation that will awaken its spirit. It quivers in my hand, ready for battle.
“Let’s go this way,” my sister says, pointing into the underbrush.
I trust my sister’s experience and follow her off the road. We slip down a steep embankment into dry creek bed, deep beneath the dark, twisted branches of the Old Forest. We inspect the seals on our armor to ensure nothing knocked loose during our descent. The sky is even darker down here, and the shelter of the shores deflects the wind. A good place to find fairies. We walk softly towards the Green Pond. If not for the fairies, it would be a nice place to visit for a swim. Centuries of fallen leaves crunch beneath our feet, revealing our position to a keen listener.
The air grows warm unexpectedly.
“Fairy magic,” my sister whispers, squinting at me. “There must be a camp nearby.”
I tense up, holding my breath, waiting for the sound of fairy flight. Fearful and yet craving the telltale buzz that follows them everywhere.
We steel ourselves, rigid as the stones, and listen. Fairies see movement better and color, naturally drawn towards the wavering of a flower in a field. They sense the heat of your breath and the sound of you shifting in your clothes, but color and shape are far harder for them to detect.
My legs ache as I struggle to restrain my instinct to twitch and fidget, as all people do.
A rapid buzzing snaps our heads to a sound behind us.
A fairy approaches from the direction of the pond. Its classic black and yellow uniform reveals its station as a soldier.
It flies solo. A messenger or a scout.
Never kill the loners. That is the rule. If they do not spot you, they will lead your directly to their stronghold.
It lands on a branch within my reach and stretches its legs. It turns to face me and stifles its body.
I often wonder if they think like us. If they talk to themselves in their head at all times, as I do. I wonder if they have families, as I do. I wonder if they wonder what I am, about how I think, and if I am the same as it.
Then I remember that it would drive its poisoned spear straight into my eye, if given the chance.
I fight the urge to crush it where it sits.
A moment later, it moves on, and my sister follows first. I step where she steps. When she steps. We find the scout exactly where we wanted, right outside a small outpost.
“Ready?”
No, I want to say. I am never ready for what comes next.
I nod anyway.
My sister leans in slowly and cocks her arm back only a tiny amount.
Swing from the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, all at once. You must swing faster than their eyes, and anything less is far too slow.
The fairy splatters triumphantly as its brightly colored armor shatters into pieces and its innards smear across the branch beneath it.
You must think I am a monster when I say such things so gleefully, but you would feel the same if you were me. If your life depended on the death of something else.
The hive responds swiftly. Maybe the sound of one dying draws them out, or maybe there is a smell it releases, or some other kind of magic that allows them to communicate, but a fairy hive reacts as a single mind faster than a group of humans ever could.
Hundreds of fairies burst from the outpost, clouding our vision and fogging our minds with their magic. The buzzing of their wings feels like the thunder of a storm, and it becomes difficult to focus our eyes on a single target.
In these moments in the storm, a normal person devolves into madness, but we have trained for exactly this purpose. We have perfected our technique as a team. Unlike those that came before us, we do not fight the fairies that fight us directly. Instead, we attack the fairies that attack the other person.
We stand half-crouched, barely an arm’s length apart, screaming in panic on the inside but still as statues on the outside.
To track a fairy in flight is extremely difficult, so we affix our gaze upon the clean white cloth of the other knight, allowing the black and yellow heraldry of our foes work against them. Only our wrists twitch as we position our swatters and thrash the fairies that dare to land upon our sacred attire. We must strike hard enough to kill, but not so hard that the other person feels the sting through the cloth. Our trust in each other becomes invincible in these moments.
The swarm is small at several hundred. With every flick and smash, we reduce their numbers rapidly, and we suffer no injuries. As the haze of the assault begins to lift, we hear the buzzing of the wings, but none of them land.
I glance nervously behind me as my sister breaks her stance.
“They’re leaving.”
Fairies fight to the death. This is strange.
“There must be another hive nearby! We have to follow them before they hide it with a spell!”
My sister suddenly sprints away towards the pond. I run along behind her as fast as I can, but I am not as quick as she is. In only a few strides, she is out of sight around the bends in the creek.
“Hurry up! They’re going this way,” she shouts from beyond my vision, and her voice pulls me forward like a lure.
The erratic crashing of brittle leaves and twigs beneath my feet replaces the sound of thrumming wings. In my struggle to keep pace, I fail to notice the gnarled root waiting to catch my foot, hidden beneath those same crunching leaves. It is a common fairy trap. The eye is naturally lazy and ignores such hazards unless directed, and it requires very little magic to compel you to ignore it entirely in a moment of haste.
My foot slides perfectly into the grip of the root, and my forward movement sends me sprawling into the dirt at tremendous speed. White-hot pain shoots up my leg from my twisted ankle. I wrench my foot out from under the root, and try to stand, but it hurts so bad that I tumble over again.
Fairy magic is subtle, above all things. That is why, even though I want nothing more than to sit down and cry, I bite back tears and inspect the bindings on my armor. Two laces are loose and one is off. I take the time to fix it, because I must. I can hear my sister calling me, but I must fix the bindings to protect myself. Without them, I am exposed and vulnerable.
The cries of my sister become frantic as I complete the knots and move forward. I might be slow, but I am not out of the battle, so I push on. It feels like years before I finally find her, alone, at the edge of the Green Pond.
At its most vile, fairy magic weakens the mind the way that a river erodes a shore, and emotions like panic easily gain strength. This time, though, they do not need their magic. I have never seen a true fairy legion before. Thousands, or maybe millions, of tiny buzzing bodies streaming through the air in a horrific cloud of poison. I can barely see my sister in the haze of black and yellow bodies that swarm all over her. Inside the cloud, I see her swinging frantically, striving to kill them all. Her bright pink swatter flashes in and out of sight. At every pass, I hear what sounds like pebbles falling on a wooden plank as countless fairies break across its wide edge.
“Where are you?”
I hobble forward, trying not to fall or cry. We always fight as a team, but she is alone. That is how I keep the panic away. I think about my sister, alone, inside that cloud of death. I tell her I am coming. I tell her that I fell and twisted my ankle, but she cannot hear me over the chaos around her. I cover my eyes and push into the cloud, and the buzzing drowns my thoughts. I follow the pink swatter as it flies through the air, and even though I am only a few steps away, I still cannot see her. All I see is a giant blob of fairies covering the entirety of her shining white armor, as they claw and stab with their spears, seeking to pierce the tightly woven fibers. Her free arm is up across her eyes, leaving her weapon arm swatting about blindly in the air.
I feel the weight of my clothes drag down as the fairies latch onto me, as well, forcing me to swat them away. I want to get into formation, but we are in disarray. There are too many and she cannot see me.
My sister suddenly screams and her weapon hand shoots to her face. Her swatter flies free, falling slowly to the dirt, and then she bolts from the clearing without even seeing me.
I feel the swarm turn its attention to me. I cannot win this fight alone, but I cannot abandon the front, and I must never allow them to steal my sister’s weapon. I crouch down to grab it, engulfed by dread as I do. As I curl my fingers around the fallen swatter, I feel the fairies crawl into my shirt from the back, through the fissure that opens between my shirt and my pants. My extended pose has ruptured my seals.
I feel their blades dig into my back and my spine burns as their venom induces twitching convulsions in my legs.
Now this is bad. With no armor and an injured leg, there is no way for me to safely retreat. I am not enough. That leaves one option: the pond.
Blind and aching, twitching and overburdened, I stumble my way over to the water. Total relief washes over me as I fall headlong into the depths of the Green Pond, directly within the courtyard of the fairy stronghold.
Fairies cannot swim, though, a fact that perhaps saves my life, regardless of whatever else might be living in the pond. Thankfully, the answer is nothing as bad as what is up in the air around me.
I linger in the frigid liquid until my limbs seize and I cannot tolerate it any longer. Fairies have long memories but a weak conviction to keep fighting. They burn their energy fast and must rest. I take advantage of their lapse to exit the pond and hobble away. The sun has nearly set when I finally crawl my way out of the creek bed and back onto the road. Leaves and dirt cake my uniform and I am drenched through to the skin.
I find my sister sitting on the Stonewrought Bridge, waiting for me.
“I’m sorry I ran off,” she says. “I thought you were right behind me, but I couldn’t come back to find you. I’ve been worried sick.”
When she turns towards me, her face is badly misshapen around the brow, to the point that both of her eyes have swollen closed from the venom. She can barely see me. That is why she could not return to rescue me.
I smile and accept her apology. Then I hold out her swatter, retrieved from the battle, but she refuses to take it from me.
“You can have it. I’m never going back there.”
When faced with a dire certainty, nothing prepares us for the inevitable. Her departure from the order was going to happen one day, no matter what. I merely did not expect it to happen so suddenly. I implore her to reconsider. The fairy fortress still stands, and I cannot conquer it alone.
“Oh grow up. They’re not fairies, you idiot.”
Hardened or not, I am still a child, and castigation from a loved one immediately brings tears to my eyes. My sister is never like this. Then, in defiance of my trust in her perseverance, she shatters all that remains of my hope.
“They’re just wasps,” she snaps.
Just like that, with only three words, she ended her knighthood. One dose of venom directly applied to the eye cost her the power to see their true form. A single tiny spear laced with a poison for the mind reduced the order of the Swatter Knights to one.
I learned how to fight them on my own after that. With her absence, I lost more than an ally, but it taught me a different kind of resourcefulness that served me well in the rest of my life. There never was another Swatter Knight after me, and I served my people for years beyond the tenure of any other knight. When I grew too old, I broke with family tradition and entered the world of business. I carry a briefcase to work, and sometimes I feel like I live in a suit.
However, I still see the fairies. Sometimes, anyway, but it gets harder every year.
Since the day my sister retired, I keep two swatters with me. Hers, a pink one hangs above the mantle in my home. Mine, the green one, remains with me in my briefcase. I stow the old laces around my ankle, beneath my socks, where no one can see. My sleeves are always long and my legs are always covered. Even in the blistering heat of summer, I sling a glimmering white scarf around my neck, just in case I need it. As the last of the Swatter Knights, I must prepare myself to act at any moment.
The fairies may have successfully hidden themselves from me, but they have not won. One day, I will pass these relics on. I have a child of my own, now, and another on the way. The eldest is nearly old enough to begin her training. To be taught the spells and bestowed the weapons and blessings.
The last of the Swatter Knights is nearly too old to fight, but one day soon, a new knight will carry the title of my order. She will be strong and wise in the ways of the knights, and she will make the fairy world tremble.
Every day, while my child I sleeps, I conjure the prayer of the knighthood, preparing her for what is to come. I hold her gently, caress her cheeks, and whisper the invocation that has carried me through nearly three decades of war.
“The world can be whatever you imagine it to be. Imagine something wonderful.”
