Interesting twabble... Oh, the "thankless child". Billy Shakespeare meets Castle Heterodyne.
I liked the beginning and middle of the story, both written and narrated. The "Bad Fairy's" voice was just the right amount of obnoxious.
The ending was disappointing as the protagonist didn't manage to break the cycle, he just
Not really an ending at all.
I suppose it could have worked as a cautionary tale, like a ghost story where the victims/monsters are still out there. But it wasn't sold that way.
I guess the moral of the story is: if someone surprises you at the edge of a precipice and offers you a strange deal, throw that #$%&*! over!
I'm disappointed in the character. He could have realized his true situation and done better.
We all die, and some very short time after we do, our existence ceases to have ever mattered. It could be hours after death, or
maybe in the case of say an Einstein, up to a few thousand years. The point is that no matter what we do (and for the foreseeable future what our
species does), ultimately we will have no impact on the universe at large.
The difference between us and the character is that he knows when he will die and he has a
guaranteed afterlife of sorts. If he was able to make peace with his insignificance, he could have millions of groundhog lives, honing his happiness, maximizing (and/or evolving) whatever gave him purpose while exploring infinite possibilities.
If he did it right, there might be tens of thousands of subjective years before it became tedious.
Yes, it would suck that social connections would not persevere, but this is again, analogous to both what happens in death (assuming that Heaven and Hell do not exist), and to owning a puppy. You love it dearly for as long as you can and, all too soon, it's gone. After a while you get a new one and repeat the process.
Except, in this case, the protog can use his looping knowledge to accelerate relationships and perhaps he could pretend that he left the old one behind in an alternate universe that was slightly better (in insignificant human terms) for his having spent a year in it.
Eventually, it would have to end, and here I was hoping Tim would pull out something neat or clever (a year as an adult trapped in an infant's body ain't it). I doubt even a bad fairy could or would devote massive resources for one measly human and half his lifespan. Unless... he was The Chosen One®?
(Okay, bad example in hindsight, since that's mostly fiction.)