Prologue

Some unsteady fairies had to climb over him... Any of the other boys obstructing the fairy path at night they would have mischiefed, but they just tweaked Peter's nose and passed on.

The baby was crying. His exhausted mother slept peacefully in her rocking chair by the window, oblivious to her child's wails. It was a peaceful night and the air was still; so had she been awake, she would have been most startled when a powerful gust of wind blew the nursery's window open.

This was no natural occurrence, as was soon evident by the tiny, glowing creatures that zipped into the room through the open window. There were three of them, and they flew with purpose to where the baby lay on a soft cot in his wooden crib with a blanket tucked around him. He was but a week old. Alighting on the boy's chest, they began to talk to him soothingly in their tinkling, bell-like voices. As a baby, he had no trouble at all understanding what they were saying. His sobs stopped abruptly, replaced by the loveliest of gurgles: a baby's first laugh.

"Do it now!" tinkled the mauve fairy.

The two other ones, which were grey, hurriedly reached into a bucket-like object they were carrying between them and grabbed sparkling dust from it which they sprinkled over the infant just as another fairy, emerged from the baby's first laugh.

The baby sneezed.

"Quick! Quick!" the mauve fairy cried. "Inject it into his brain!"

"What's going on?" the new arrival asked. His azure light pulsed around him in slight unease as the two grey fairies flew forward and pressed the metallic object they carried against the boy's forehead.

There was a sound like metal scraping on metal as tiny needles shot out from the item held fast to the baby's head and injected a large amount of something into his system.

The baby began to glow, then rose suddenly from his crib, laughing again. His laugh was peculiar now. It sounded looped; almost unnatural.

"What've you done to him?" the blue fairy asked in alarm.

"We've blessed him," the pink fairy replied. "We've granted him eternal youth."

"But why?" the new fairy was too new to understand.

"His eternal youth means eternal life for you," the mauve fairy replied. "You should be grateful.

"Now come; the Fairy Council will want to see you now. You have become the most precious fairy in all the lands. You must be protected, as must this child."

The azure fairy looked back uneasily at his creator, the young, glowing boy. "What is it?" he asked.

"We are calling it Perpetuated Avoidance of Necrosis," one of the grey ones answered. "Or for short, PAN."

Author's Note

I need a better acronym for PAN, haha...