Excerpt: Fledgling

Consider this: Every elf ever to live on Earth came from the body of a human mother, yet never once has this been discovered by a single scientist. Elves start as single-celled parasites, floating through the air in search of a human host. Once they implant themselves in an appropriate womb, they reproduce asexually, mimicking the fetal development of a typical human in all ways but one. Every elf gestates for exactly six-and-three-quarter months before expelling itself in a very quick, nearly-painless delivery.
In simpler times, these seemingly too-premature babies would be abandoned by their grief-stricken hosts, often thrown in a river or left in the forest to die. The elves, like newborn deer, were well-equipped to fend for themselves soon after "birth", and they would walk away from their intended graves within minutes of their abandonment to begin their long journeys toward the North Pole, center of the Earth's magic.
Unfortunately for elves, human medical advances and human medical arrogance in the last century have greatly complicated matters. More often than not, new elves now find themselves being whisked away from their human hosts and then hooked up to machines and IVs and catheters before they could escape. Many have found themselves trapped for weeks or months in sterile incubators surrounded by cooing nurses and strange beeping noises. These unfortunates quickly go insane, forgetting their elvishness and regressing into human-like infantilism that can last for years.
This is how Tilde "Tinky" Twindles began her life some twenty-seven years ago. Her parents were none other than the famous Norwegian sex therapists, Odd-Sven and Kjaere Twindles. When their tiny daughter pushed her way out of Kjaere two-and-a-quarter months ahead of schedule, they surrounded her with love and the best prenatal services money could buy. One week after her emergence, the little elf' lost her little mind, drooling stupidly in her incubator while white-clad humans sucked away all remnants of her intelligence and independence.
She lived for almost seventeen years as a human before her elfin magic fully emerged from its dormancy ...