It was summer when the children began disappearing.

When it began, it began with the forgotten. The homeless children of the world. Then it took the children as they played on the streets, as they learned in their schools. Eventually children began being taken from the same room as their parents.

Weeks passed, scientists studied the disappearances. They learned three facts about the disappearances.

1. Only children younger than eighteen were taken.
2. The kidnappers where not human.
3. There was nothing you could do to prevent your children from being taken.

So people trained their children. Gave them knives of iron and silver. Flasks of salt and of holy water.  Those unable to defend themselves found themselves with necklaces and bracelets of iron and silver. But even that could not save them.

Three years after the disappearances began, they stopped. There was no warning, no sign. Every child younger than eighteen was gone, taken.

People mourned, and began to rebuild their lives. Memorials were built. People moved on.

It was ten years after the last abduction when the children began to return. Their eyes glinted with magiks unknown to us for centuries. They spoke with a quiet elegance, and wore their words like armour. But only the eldest returned to us. Those who remembered this world. Those who remembered a time when their eyes did not glint with magiks unknown and did not speak with a quiet elegance and wore their words like armour. They knew who took them.

And it became clear who took the children.

It was not aliens. Nor was it anything from this dimension.

No, it was something older than the universe itself. So powerful they wear the fabric of galaxies upon their skin.

The children where taken by the fey.

The children where taken by faeries.