A Thing Forgotten — Allen L. Wold

Amanda's world, despite certain similarities, is not ours. They have steam power (not punk), limited electricity and gas, teletype instead of telephones, and a semi-agrarian civilization which feels familiar. There are other peoples in the world, related to us but who are not the same, and some of their technology seems like magic to us. Some of it might as well be.The language of this world is nothing like the English in which this story is told. Their measures of time, date, distance, weight, and currency are very different from ours, so I have used familiar terms for their units, which are approximately similar to ours. Their nobility titles have different meanings from the British which I have used as a model. I have used American names for the regular people, Amanda's people. The names of people of other races and species have been given approximate spellings. I have used the names of our plants, animals, fabrics, and foods, for those things in Amanda's world which they most closely resemble. I have given names to their countries which are intended to suggest the countries in our world which they are most like, as their own names would be meaningless to us.If you read something and think, That's not the way it really is, just remember: Nothing in the story is the way it really is in our world.So, what if the Faerie-folk were real? They are not Tolkien's Elves, nor the little people at the bottom of the garden. They are the old people, the other people, the Good People, the bright people. They call themselves Dalra. What if we had learned how to coexist with the bright people, and with the secretive shadow people, instead of driving them away into the forgotten corners of the world, where they still live. It is so easy to do. But once the bright people have gone, their rich and almost magical land returns to nature, which will never be as good as when they left it.What if, ages before we discovered them - for they were here before we were - they had been on a long, slow, downward slide, losing the technology we now think of as magic. What if, long ago, they had lost something else, which they had hoped would help them retain that technology. What if someone found a hint, a clue as to what it might have been, and that it was still out there, somewhere, in a forgotten place. What then?Amanda Valentine, on her first hunting trip with her father, discovers a shadow-gate....