The Death of the lucky rich

At the end of the rainbow, there's a place where the Leprechauns meet to discuss the future of wealth and luck. We've all heard of the pot o' gold and the luck of the Irish but those are both metaphors for the wealth that this council of little green men control. It's from this table at the end of the rainbow that they decide who gets the wealth and the luck and who does not. Recently, I feel that the council has lost sight of the good they used to do. Something had to change.

Leprechaun’s are fae (fairies) and fae are gods: creatures in charge of something just as Hestia was in charge of the hearth and Thor was in charge of thunder. They guide such things and control them through means beyond that which any human can understand. God? One thing that created the universe? It's mythology for the gullible. What people don't understand is that many things made the universe and many things control it. It's not as simple as an umbrella figure but fuck's sake if it were only that easy.

Most of us know about the others or are at least aware that something else could exist, but we differ in our responsibilities and reasons. Some might view me as a god of dogs because I am immortal and all dogs directly descend from the canis lupus or the wolf, but I am not as lucky as all that. God or no God, I have never been as lucky as the movies portray my kind.

The vampires, descended from aristocracy and humpers of their own family, were cursed by the gods for their wretched concentration of power and wealth (not to mention greed beyond comprehension to the point that their blood thinned and it was a fitting and almost biological punishment that they should have to drink to keep their blood strong. However, do to the royal money and greed, they do not suffer the common man's eyes over the centuries like I do. A Were in a movie seems to never worry about money. Somehow they all have it and they're all educated and the immortals have amassed enough wealth that they never speak of working at a corner store for minimum wage. HA! It's right where the Leprechaun’s would want me. It’s bad enough that they can barely control the vampires over the centuries by toppling the monarchical system.

I drone on about my pathetic little world, so I suppose I'll get to the night it happened. The gatherings are always after a full hearted rain when the air is crisp with moisture and a cool breeze blows to clear the clouds. At the end of the broken sunlight trail, in a clearing in the same place as always, there's the rainbow's end and a pot of gold that never runs dry. Within this pot is all the wealth in the world that ever was or ever will be. Each coin represents pieces of a fortune monetary or otherwise that the council will bestow on certain people. They are outside of time and space and therefore they could review everyone in the world at the same time and nobody would be able to tell that meetings take place at lengths of days or weeks or sometimes years. Wolves can't enter their realm unless one of them has been caught and we have the key.

One of them was caught alright; one of them was torn to pieces as I had intended to do with the rest. Mankind had become so formulaic that bestowing wealth was far too easy and the council had to be stopped. I remember running in wolf form, with the key draped from my jaw, towards the edge of a cliff at the edge of the world in the grassy plains of Ireland. The conditions were perfect and the rainbow ran right off the edge. As the dew and mist stung my face like thousands of tiny pine needles, I ran with the speed of the Windigo and leapt from the cliff towards the rocks below.

The next I noticed, I was in the forest next to the pot of gold and I was naked and back to human form. Ahead of me were shrubs that grew as tall as redwoods and made two almost covered paths to the table of gifts. The meeting had already begun and they had gathered the water vapors to the center of the table to peer in on the world of the humans. The Leprechaun’s liked to pretend like life was "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" and thus they designed this dungeon of real power to resemble the idea that what they did was only following the natural course of human free will. The wrong path would take you in circles, while the right one took you to the table of gifts. Ironic that the right path turned out to be literally the right path. It was designed that way to show you that there is definitely a wrong path; self-righteous, arrogant, pricks.

I walked into the meeting with stealth so that I made no sound and announced absolutely no presence but they knew I was there and what I was the moment I entered. This was their realm and they showed no fear. Why would they fear? They weren't warriors; their weapon was fortune. Lucky me that fortune favors the bold. As if to prove my wretched boldness, I moved with speed the human eye could not perceive but with speed that they could almost match. Almost but not quite. As I said, they're business men, not war lords and wolves are hunters, not business savvy purveyors of wealth. The advantage to assassination was on my side.

As I finish wounding them to incapacitate movement, I began my address.

"Thousands of years I've watched you shape the fortune of this world into its oblivion. I have never had your luck on my side and never cared to as I carry my own like all preternatural creatures. However, I have seen the greed of the wealthy grow, in some cases, beyond even your control and as you are no longer needed and your 'balance' is proven to be broken, it has come time that you all be retired."

"Ya dannae what ya do, boy," said a Leprechaun. "We be the last line of defense against the most corrupt of your world."

"I know that's what you say and we both know immortality. Beyond that, I'd say the playground has us both as children grasping at straws. There was a point that they were not but mortals who depended on us but you lost control as did many of the higher realms."

"There's a way for everything to..."

Their cries barely echoed for an instant and in that moment, incapacitated and unable to use the powers they had, even the basic ones like accelerated movement, I feel like they knew what it meant to be powerless to your fate, just as I had seen in the humans of the day. Those who they had doomed because they had given gifts to a CEO who had the course of his life mapped out till he took control from them and began wrecking all those in his way. I had watched it and now they could feel it: helpless and now headless.

There is only one way to kill an immortal. That way is to decapitate him. Anything less is only going to make him mad. There are some out there that even decapitation doesn't work on but everything is cleansed with fire at the end. It's difficult to set a fire with dew all around you but I came prepared and along with burning their table, I burned all of them in the center of it.

It's a beautiful thing, Justice. That's what happened that day and it felt wonderful. It felt vindicating: holding the leprechaun heart in my hands. The bloody limp organ like a diminished ego dripping with gold flakes. Ha! How pathetic and cliché that in our world, a stupid saying like "Riches are in our blood" would be literal. The last sigh of a dying creature comes so much quicker when its gargling its own blood. I'd so hoped it would be more dramatic: this death scene but it was quick and brutal and over in the blink of an eye.

It was fitting. The end of money married to luck was over in an instant but outside, the walls began to fall. countries fought wars and within the states, anarchy ran rampant. The wealth staggered and everyone became nervous. That nervousness lead to civil war and the war led to the end of capitalism as we know it but that's a story for another day.