Winged creatures are ephemeral. The Elfins, not immeasurably long-lived, are spooked and fascinated by these shadow-selves, their analogs, which Warner studies with the silver-eyed dispassion of a Leeuwenhoek. ‘No one fancies the thought of being cut in two like a wasp in the marmalade’ (242). Moths, bats, dragonflies are portents; five black swans will come for Tiphaine, who will be the sixth. Gulls are nemesis itself: ‘Blood ran through their breast feathers, their beaks were red with blood ... The ship moved silent as a ghost under her crown of beating wings and incessant furious voices’ (159).

Unspoken, save in one prophetic vision, and most dreadful, is their fear that mortals — butcher’s meat — will triumph over old creation. Transient, uncouth, our human kind will conquer by outbreeding, by infernal engines. One such terrible device — a bicycle — comes crashing into Castle Ash Grove with its riding harbinger: a drunken midwife who uncorks apocalypse, a disinfectant with a fearful smell. But let Dame Bronwen speak:

‘When I fainted it was because of what was shown me. I saw trees blighted and grass burned brown and birds falling out of the sky. I saw the end of our world, Morgan — the end of Elfin. I saw the last fairy dying like a scorched insect.’ She was mad. But she spoke with such intensity it was impossible not to believe her. (119)

Take heart. It is not yet; it is not fate. Futurity means nothing to the Elfins. No clock will strike for them; the horses of their endless dusk run free. Those mortal lovers who can meet them in their endless now here nowhere are fortunate: they know a brief but absolute felicity. Here is Thomas of Ercildoune at play with Tiphaine:

Love was in the present: in the sharp taste of the rowanberries he plucked for her, in the winter night when a gale got up and whipped them to the shelter of a farm where he kindled a fire and roasted turnips on a stick, in their midnight mushroomings, in the long summer evenings when they lay on their backs too happy to move or speak, in their March-hare curvettings and cuffings. For love-gifts, he gave her acorns, birds’ eggs, a rosegall because it is called the fairies’ pincushion, a yellow snail shell. (23)

The mortal of the pair is wiser than the Queen of Elfhame; he refuses ‘to make trial of the elixir of longevity’, to stall and harness time, and put it, jaded, to the plough:

He flung away from her, saying she must love him now, instantly, before the lightning broke cover. A time would come when he would grow old and she would abhor him: he could tell her that without any exercise of prophecy. The storm broke and pinned them in the present. When it moved away they built a cairn of hailstones and watched it melt in the sunshine. (24)