The glade stood quiet, the clean sky overhead as rays of light shone through the rounded leaves of the trees. The ground was littered in flowers of all shapes and hues, butterflies and bees flitting around between them to carry out their business.

An ethereal blue hand ran over one, a dainty, pink petalled wildflower, fingers phasing through it as if they were but a transient breeze. Sandals pushed through the patches, intruding into the foliage without so much as a single disturbance.

The woman tensed as a leaf flew from a tree, passing through her short, turned up nose before continuing on it's way. Her gaze followed it for a moment, before she turned her attention back to the plants. The fluttering of wings demanded her focus, gaze shifting down to a butterfly that landed before her.

She reached out to it, brushing her fingers through it's form as she studied it. It was a Monarch, at least that was her best guess. Unperturbed by her presence, it drank deeply from the flower, before continuing on it's way.

She liked spending each and every day here, it was peaceful, it was beautiful, it was bliss. Quiet eons ticked by, just her and the forest together in blissful harmony.

Then the machines came.

One day, she sat by a rabbit, brushing her fingers through it's fluffy ears, recalling how it felt from the hazy recesses of her ghostly mind. She was driven from her reverie by a noise, a strange noise, a foreign noise, one she didn't know or understand.

Standing to investigate, she hovered along, drifting through ancient trees and drooping vines, towards the disturbance. Her expression became one of horror as she laid eyes upon them, a fear she hadn't known since the night of the dogs dawning over the spectral fae.

Great beasts of yellow steel loomed beyond the treeline, spurting sickly fumes up into the pleasant sky. They had massive jaws and trampling treads, and rumbled with such an aggressive cacophony that it almost sent her skittering off like that day uncountable years ago.

They started their advance, crumpling and crushing life beneath their infernal heel. She watched in silent terror as metal jaws clamped through bark, ripping and tearing life away without a second's hesitation. She spotted figures, sat within the rough skulls of the beasts, tapping away at controls and buttons, were they demons, possessing husks of metal and bending them to a dark will? Were they soulless mortals, bound by pact and contract to exert the will of death?

Whatever they were, they had to leave, they couldn't stay, she didn't want them here. Rushing forwards. But as she tried to push against the machines, what was surely a suicide charge, they just passed through her, her resistance as futile as that of the grass beneath their treads.

She could do nothing, do nothing but watch as the glade was torn down, and hot, stick tar was lathered over the ground, hardening and rendering it dead. She could do nothing but watch as rectangular towers were erected over the dead ground, as the beasts moved in, living in the decaying corpse of the land. They passed through her, as her attempts at resistance passed through them.

She saw nary a speck of green that wasn't boxed, tamed, leashed to the will of the unholy beasts. As night fell upon the world, a mournful wail escaped her lips. It cascaded across the concrete forest, echoing through the corpse of the land she called home.By midnight the spectral fairy maiden was no more, and howling banshee's cries were all that remained.

((I wrote a thing, dunno whether it's angst or just depressing, but here it is!))