Lyra and I returned to the site yesterday in the cool of the evening.

The last of the vagabond vendors had packed up and taken to the highway. The field where we had danced and drank and sweated was cleared of trash and mostly free of any evidence that we had been there.

Up in the camps it was even stranger... with all our tarps and tents packed away, our caution tape and trash bins and bits and bites and blessings all gone... except for the occasional bright feather.

Lyra and I walked through the grove of quiet camp feeling like we had walked out of a storyteller's fantasy, in which our hero cavorts with the fae on a magical night only to wake the next morning alone and empty on some grassy hillside. Together, we strolled hand in hand through the trees, kissed beneath a fiery crown of sunset, and walked back just in time to see the moon ascend over the Eastern hills.

Then we closed the gates on the realm of faerie for another year, and came home.