1914 was the death-knell of the large scale fae operations. Faeries cannot cross a threshold unless invited in. That is why you never let them in. However, a house is a bunker, the nation state is a fortress. In a country, those thousands of miles away are your brothers and sisters. In a nation, your threshold can be anywhere.
The fae are disgusted by the modern nation state. Under monarchs and emperors, you could sneak your way in, despite the threat of iron, but with the modern nation state? Threshold is everywhere. Satellites, national borders, enormous political alliances compromised everything. You could spot a crossing with ease. In 1914, the war began with threshold violations. Mobilization.
Magic cares about the spirit of the law, not the word of the law. A homeless person is de facto being prevented from voting, they are not *de jure* being prevented. They cannot vote because they don't have a permanent address, but they are not legally prohibited from voting. The theoretical capability to vote means that everyone elligible to vote in a democracy can declare a threshold. A homeless person and a president have equal power to declare a threshold anywhere in the country. A vacant lot can be their home.
Iron and steel remained the words of the day, and they themselves retained the magic of threshold. NATO and the Warsaw Pact built weapons with interchangeable parts from a dozen nations, and vehicles capable of reaching across huge distances. Machines that would fly faster than sound, or orbit above with a tiny enclosure for the homo sapiens. Embassies, official vehicles, property in one's lands that belonged to another's. The wires and cables across the world, the hot lines to fight wars and communicate disasters. They were all thresholds.
The only way to avoid the modern threshold is unstable realms, lands no one wants, lands of transition, or those set aside for nature. We have pushed them into the fringes, into the hedges and roads. The natural parks and preserves, where wildlife grows. Or they must take advantage of their mistakes. Iron was their greatest foe from its stability. But as industry turned to the atomic age, and the information age, exotic materials entered a whole new field. Instability spread. The humans could not be infiltrated in the old way, but there were new ways to observe them. The connection to the other world never faded.
Radioactive hot spots, coal seam fires, and other disasters compromise threshold declarations. The nation state's psychic presence is diluted in these places. They are considered lost, even by workers in protective suits. Lost, but never abandoned.
The fae who lived in Chernobyl were satisfied. A single explosion had ended a mighty empire, so claimed its leader. The humans fled their fires, abandoning their possessions. Books and toys, bicycles and cars, reminders of the past. Not abandoned, they were lost. When you abandon something, you take yourself out of it. But when you lose something, you still have your love for it.
The buses took with them all who once owned and loved the city, scattering them to the wind, the whims of the failing empire. Laundry remained on racks, but paperwork neatly put away. The fertile land, once a boast of the nation, a beautiful place without coal smoke or toxins, was lost forever. The engineers were gone with those who had supported them, a magical arrangement in of itself, for they only existed to support each other.
The promise of return to the land that would not come back was a boon of magic. The land was taunting and pleading in alternation, calling out for those who once lived there. Their cold rooms and beds, their shoes and clothes clashed with men and women's uniforms and armor piled in the hospital, ripped away to save their lives. The things that made life worthwhile rendered as poisonous and untouchable as those to make life survivable. A land given to the fae in all but agreement, but relinquished all the same. The zone was bizarre, insane, with sanity serving only to mutilate insanity.
Men and women in mottled camouflage helicopters flew over the undamaged and pristine settlement, looking at the wild weathered city. They did not speak of the figures waving back at them.
The liquidators saw them but never spoke. They dismissed their presence and never stayed long. They marched in grids, removing trees, machinery, equipment that made their low-background steel rattle. A faerie never stood in front of a liquidator. Their rubber suits, lead, and low-background steel could dissuade a faerie at ten paces. They never looked up, and kept their eyes on their background steel, the dosimeters and counters.
The liquidators were rationalists, sons of peasants, or men and women of science. They were good soviets. They believed in science, or they believed in their cause. If not the Soviet Union, then they believed in their duty. They believed in their armor, in their machines. They all believed in cleaning up their mess. And both knew not to be tempted.
The fae couldn’t even tempt the ones in trouble, the ‘inauthentic’ ones. Half belief was dangerous; you didn’t believe but you didn’t doubt. Enough to take you off the highway. But the liquidators were one unit. They pulled one another back from the radiation. ‘Step out of line and you’ll never see your family again,’ the commissar would say with a look, ‘Stay in line and there will be vodka’. And they never traveled alone.
Did you hear someone calling you from those distant woods? ‘No, it was pareidolia,’ the rationalists would say, ‘the dead trees make you hear words where there are none.’ ‘You didn’t, say the peasants, ‘we will bulldoze those trees tomorrow.’
The regional coating of radiation delighted the fae. It painted their former threat, iron and steel, with a poison that compromised its power. The trees were dead, the color of iron even from space, timeless and unending.
And still the land became wild. The pets who survived the liquidators joined the packs of the wild. The greenery grew in spite of the oxidized trees. Though rusted from space, they grew from the soil.
The love of the land never went away. It was lost, but not forgotten. The nightmare of one dark April night had become a world of contradictions, a land of insanity and sanity impossible to differentiate, grasping at those who visit to tempt them into the shops, cinemas, and offices, the bus stations and restaurants, knowing it meant death.
For years the faeries were content. The humans crewing the plant were enough for their purposes, grimly going about their work. The tourists never stayed long.
But then the war began. The borders fluctuated. The men and women emitted a power that had vanished one April day from this place. Others came. They entered the forbidden forest, digging trenches in the soil, hunting the forbidden animals, and kicking up clouds of radioactive dust.
“No one goes there, for god’s sake, there is no one there!” said those once lived there, those who remembered, and those who served it.
Now the faeries dart amongst the radioactive trees, living manifestations of the fae world; timeless and unaging. They cling to the buried trucks and machinery, in the hopes the humans will leave. The iron that once stopped them has now become their lifeline, so hot the humans won't touch it.