[The Hedge]

Poisoned.

He's been here maybe an hour and he's been poisoned.

By a tiny dragon.

That was apparently also a hornet.

His vision is starting to blur as a vaguely pink hue begins to saturate his view. He coughs into his hands, his body shaking with the effort, only to find his palms spattered with glowing magenta when he holds them at arms length. It feels like he's getting pulled apart from the inside out... Guh... what an awful way to die. Death by tiny stinging faerie. The nauseating feeling continues to build like steam in a pressure cooker, causing him to keel over sideways and curl into the fetal position to try to stave off the gut-wrenching sensation. Thankfully he really doesn't have the presence of mind to notice skin sloughing away and flesh fusing into plates of black chitin. The whole process takes little more than five minutes before the poor guy is gone and there's an iridescent black chrysalis pulsing with neon magenta glued to the base of a tree.

Weird.

Well.

Not super weird.

Weirder things happen all the time in the Hedge.

This probably isn't any worse than some of the other things people get turned into.

For the next hour or so the chrysalis will sit there, humming away as it saps dreams and gossamer from its surroundings, steadily growing until it's roughly three times its original size. Then comes the wet, sticky sound of rending chitin as the back of the thing splits open, spilling neon goop onto the forest floor as a veritable swarm of dragonflies come crawling out their armored womb. They all have a few things in common. All winged, yes. But their wings range in appearance from damselfly to wasp to butterfly to the armored carapace of beetles. Some are all black chitin with fearsome looking orange stripes and stingers. Others are covered with iridescent, brightly colored fuzz. Some are smooth and aerodynamic. Others sport horns and spikes. They swarm of dragonflies seems to represent all corners of the insect kingdom. Quite frankly, their diversity is stunning.

...though they all share roughly the same size and an equally bewildered expression on their tiny faces.

"What just happened?" several thousand tiny voices ask in perfect harmony.