“There,” Yit said to himself, “that should do it.” Two large eyes glowing like light bulbs peeked out from behind the great steel dumpster in the alley. The fumes of rotting vegetable matter and meat by-product didn’t phase the sprite, who’s wings stuck out beyond what it considered a good hiding place. It grinned, hiccupped and waved one last hand at the hidden place. “And he said I couldn’t do it.”

Come November, no one even recognized this part of the city, Yit had done such a good job. He’d mangled brick and mortar, swirled steal into a pool of unusable mass. People commented it looked like someone had put a stick in the wall and gave it a good stirring until it was so mixed up you couldn’t tell one thing from another. And the twisting had spread out, down the walls of the alley, devouring everything in its path until the three surrounding buildings were mushy lumps on warped concrete and asphalt.

TV stations had never left the site. Daily, something new was falling off the building, slopping hard against the ground, and seeming to mold into the landscape from there. What people had noticed the strange manipulation of their homes and offices had left. Others, not so alert or fortunate, died in the wreckage. Police waited around the clock for something recognizable as a body part to emerge from the whirlpool stone so they could identify a body.

No one dared get close to it, but Yit, who visited regularly. Completely invisible to the normal human, the tiny fairy would spring back and forth, collecting the odd bit of jewelry or cookware that would crop up. It amazed him what sort of coin he could fetch for real clay pots and zirconium back home. And if it hadn’t been for Leadwick, he’d never have been up to the task. He was always reminding himself to thank him, but never got around to it. Too much to do, he always justified.

It was years later, after the twisting had settled down that the Venice Beach riots stopped after a barbell golem smashed up seven unsuspecting muscle-bound protesters. And after that came the death of Ms. Hattie Shaw. Autopsy showed she’d been turned into a denim rag doll. Her family was inconsolable, and the lawsuit against the nursing home is still heavily mediated.

Yit took stock of all this, and smiled. Not often a small nether creature gets to stir up actual trouble for the humans who long stopped believing in them. He wondered if all this carnage would make them reconsider, but stopped as soon as he remembered what he’d already done to his own countrymen.