A hop, skip and an eternity away, Foxglove (resplendent now in head-to-toe emerald) was leading Emlie through a breezy country of widely spaced perfect half-domes. The grassy mounds rose to either side of their route, many of them capped by strange standing stones. Far behind them, the gargantuan rock wall out of which the two had emerged into Feyside towered out of the atmospheric haze. Foxglove gamboled along, tireless, regaling the girl with tales of this hill-troll, that Sidhe chieftain, and how their whims and misadventures had shaped the lands through which they traveled.

Emlie stumbled along in his wake, burgeoning bone-deep tiredness abetting the dazed elation that had unsteadied every step since her arrival. She couldn’t stop craning her neck every which way, futilely attempting to drink it all in. Sweet Forgers – had she really, on a whim, followed a supernatural being straight out of her world and into another? A strange and wild world… and a stranger, wilder guide… a capering, capricious scarecrow figure, equally enigmatic for all of his… loquaciousness:

“…and so Idlewylde prevailed in her dream-struggle against Cankersport (whose shattered body was cast into the Grimswallow Sinkpit, accounting for its foul disposition to this very day) and proceeded to reimagine this cantref’s landscape in accordance with her whim!” Foxglove surveyed the windswept hills; his smile slipped the tiniest notch. “…would only that her whim had been a little less boring, eh?” Shrugging, he strode on.

Another fewscore yards brought the faery to a bend in the road that thrust it between the bases of two particularly steep hills. Striding around it, he was briefly lost to Emlie’s sight. Upon rounding the turn herself she found him leaning against a rectangular stone pillar on the near side of the road. A second upright rose from the opposing hill-base, and a rough-hewn third canted between them. The whole conglomeration formed an eerie archway that spanned the path.

Foxglove grinned insolently. “Well hello there, slowpoke. Lost admiring the scenery?”

Emlie frowned at the insult.

The faery misinterpreted: “Me neither.”

He turned and gestured at the stone archway. Was it Emlie’s imagination, or was a mist trickling down from the crosspiece? Was she seeing things, or was the light striking the path beyond the threshold of a subtly different quality? Were the shadows cast by it stretching along a different angle?

“Fey-gate. One thing that Feyside has all over Mudside, Rose: when one whim and one imagination fail us, it’s oh-so-easy to transition to another!”

With that, he bowed her through the portal…

…and into another environment altogether. Emlie frantically glanced behind her. The standing stones were still there. She dropped her eyes earthward. The path remained, constant and solid. Everything else had changed.

The windswept aridity of the hills was gone, replaced by a moist, misty funk. Rather than the undifferentiated brightness of a step ago, or even the random dapple typical of Sunside forest floors, the now red-grassed ground was awash in mesmerzing slow-shifting swirls and slashes. Galncing frantically up in search of whatever might be slicing the incident light into such bizarre patterns, Emlie discovered that the path was roofed over with the most curious cover she’d ever seen, an assemblage of thick black curlicues twisting like so many pinwheels in a lazy breeze.

The girl’s uncomprehending eyes next whipped to either side, where they encountered a brace of bright red trunks erupting upwards from the roadside, each featureless and unbending as a sculpted column. Twelve or so feet up, each trunk sprouted a thicket of thin, ramrod-straight branches, which in turn supported what appeared to be a single spiraling thigh-thick length of fleshy wet obsidian. Each sinuous strand in turn dangled numerous short black tendrils, all of which wafted in an unfelt breeze. The whole looked less like a tree than a slime-covered eel wrapping a crimson hatstand. And there before her stood a forest of the incomprehensible things.

Faced with such stark abnormality, anyone less sure in their perceptions than Emlie might have doubted the evidence of their senses. She herself was taken aback by the transition, her stomach knotting, misgivings multiplying in thes sudden face of another even farther and even foreigner locale. She took a trepidacious step back through the archway… back into blue skies and green hills. A step forward… again into surreal shadow-swirled crimson.

She was tempted to fret, to balk, even maybe, just maybe, to ask to be taken back. But to have given rein to any of that would have been shameful. And she was Emlie, and proud. So instead she simply stepped forward, found her voice, focused on Foxglove and quipped, “This is a lovely imagination, then. Was its owner deranged?”

Unaware of the transient drama unfolding behind, the capering faery (now decked out in crimson to match the trees) only smirked. “Oh, quite. I wouldn’t say that too loudly, however – she’s also quite viciously prickly. You have to admit, though, she gives great woodland.”

“Umm, yes, quite so. And all of this…” she groped for an appropriate word.

“-cantref.” supplied Foxglove.

“-this cantref, then… this is somehow a separate realm of Feyside than the one we’ve just now departed from?”

“Oh, aye. A step away, a realm apart, a wholly disjoint set of routes and rules and realities!”

“But you know our route through these places?”

“I am these places.” The faery passed a long-nailed finger through the empty space where a less vulpine figure might keep its nose. “I scent our way, girl. I feel the flow. I hear the call.”

Emlie’s prim, superior sensibilities (and, perhaps, a touch of insecurity over her disorientation and upset upon first encountering the phenomenon) prompted her to sniff, “Seems frightfully unorganized.” And to ask, “Mightn’t we get hold of a map of the place?”

The response to this was a piercing guffaw-bout that grated like the cry of a gull-flock while pulsing the faery’s raiment through an eye-burning gamut of colors.

“Ah, little one,” the faery continued between cackles, “you’ve a rare gift for comedy! Map Feyside! Why,” he chortled, “you might as soon purpose to map your own dreams!”

More gleeful grinning and hung-head-shaking followed, interspersed with chortled repeats of “…map Feyside!”

Emlie’s face fell. The faery’s ridicule was stingingly familiar.

When Foxglove (now settled on a tasteful shade of taupe) did collect himself enough to look up, it was to face so potent a mixture of ire and hurt that he was moved to do something he did exceedingly seldom: offer something approximating a non-snarky explanation: “You see, Rose, any map you could concoct would be misleadingly obsolete ere your ink could dry. The cantrefi are the externalized wills of their overlords; consequently they shift with every new notion, every fleeting whim, every usurpation. The routes between them are beyond treacherous or unnavigable... they are unimaginable! Their geometries are the stuff of Faery, their fluid natures ungraspable by unattuned minds.

“In short,” he finished with a sly sharktooth grin, “it is an exceedingly lucky thing for you that I am here!” He strode off down the path.

Emlie followed a heartbeat later, having spared a brief nervous glance for the fey-gate before it vanished around the bend behind.

The light gradually shifted as they walked on, eventually attaining a ruddy dusky quality despite the lack of a visible sunset. The spaces between the trees grew red-on-red, their shadows longer. The trees closed in around the narrowing path, their inky fronds hanging so low that Emlie increasingly had to bat them away like cobwebs. So intent was she on bulling her way through the dangling mass, so unbalanced in her forward-leaning annoyance, that when the foliage abruptly ceased she pitched forward in surprise, earning an angry hiss from her guide as she stumbled past him.

Emlie shot a questioning look back at Foxglove, still lingering behind the threshold of the trees. The oddly alert-looking faery ignored her inquiry, his attention wholly riveted on the way ahead. The confused girl could only ape him and likewise scrutinize the open space she’d inadvertently entered.

It appeared innocuous enough: overhead, an expanse of panoramic burgundy sky streaked with orange clouds. Underneath, a meadowy clearing… a dusklit expanse of knolls, rocks, and low shrubs perhaps a hundred yards across. The path meandered across it, a sinuous dirt-rut through the crimson grass in no great hurry to reach the far tree-wall marking the forest’s resumption. Flitting, flickering lights crowned the low hillocks, drifting singly and in small groups. Emlie at first took them for fireflies; she drew in a sharp breath with the realization that they glowed each a subtly different shade, like backlit stained glass, and exhaled it sharply upon noting the lingering trails of glittering motes left in their wakes.

They’d left the forest’s stuffiness behind when they’d emerged from under its overhang, as the open space let the evening breeze slip through. Emlie felt it stir her hair as she stepped out from under the shadow of the trees, and she saw the tails of Foxglove’s bow tie lift and flap as he stepped up beside her. Emlie sighed with simple delight.

The faery evidently did not share her satisfaction. Lifting his face to the darkening sky, he sniffed at the breeze. His eyes narrowed. He darted his serpentine tongue in and out, as if tasting the air. The girl made to step past him on into the clearing, but he shot an arm out to bar her passage.

“Uh-uh-uh…” he drawled distractedly.

“Why are we stopping?” Emlie demanded.

By way of reply Foxglove gestured with his head back toward the clearing’s center. Emlie resentfully glared where indicated… but then squinted thoughtfully.

Now that the faery had called her attention to it, she did sense …something.

The first actual signs were small, subtle, at first unapparent to Emlie. She’d been idly observing the “fireflies”… and had only gradually registered that their motion, previously random and leisurely, had begun to show hints of direction. Increasingly urgent direction. In fact, they were vacating the field. Abruptly they all dashed, flaring like miniature comets in their haste. Within seconds every one of them had disappeared over the treetops with only a radial spray of swift-fading contrails left behind to mark their passage.

Thusly directed, her attention rose beyond those treetops, up to the sky… and into awareness of another preternatural disturbance. A moment before, the evening clouds overhead had lazed motionlessly in serried rows… now they appeared in motion, drifting and twisting… swirling in a slow vortex centered over the clearing.

Something ruffled Emlie’s hair. It was the formerly fitful breeze collecting itself, gaining in both constancy and strength. It too was abandoning linearity, weaving a great spiral in the crimson grass as it gyred in seeming ground-level reflection of the clouds above. The trees edging the clearing all began to bend and sway in ominous counter-clockwise unison. The wind’s whisper rose, mounting first to whistle, then to a keening, then to an outright howl.

All the clearing’s detritus, all the fronds and pebbles and loose dirt, began to drift and swirl, spiraling with gathering speed in towards the epicenter. At that spot it coalesced into a thin, dark column of whirling debris that erupted skyward. Overhead, a matching column twisted down out of the converging clouds. The questing cloud-tendrils sought, touched, fused… upon which the conjoined whole swelled massively out from its narrow earthen terminus.

Emlie reeled back, agape and pointing at the sinister funnel before them: “It’s… it’s a twister!” She started to back away.

Foxglove rolled his eyes at her. He grasped her shoulder to halt her retreat, shaking his head “no.”

In front of them, the tapering cloud towered massively over the clearing, threatening ruin. Yet Foxglove held them firm. And indeed, despite its violent manifestation and ominous appearance, the funnel cloud wrought no immediate devastation… rather it almost seemed to be settling, slowing, its keening suction slackening. Emlie was relieved by the lull… until something about it began to twinge, to thrill unpleasantly, the discomfort portending further preternatural impossibility.

For, the ultra compact storm was slowing… without dissipating. It sat sharply defined, solidly opaque, as its cyclonic action wound down… stopped… then resumed in the opposite direction.

The impossible reversal carried over to the vertical – the threads of cloud that had appeared to Emlie’s eyes to be spiraling upwards from the ground ceased doing so… and then, to her astonishment, began twisting ever more rapidly down into it. The storm’s air movement also reversed, the suction of a moment before giving way to outward pressure shoving her back with equivalent force. Her head was forced back, affording her a bizarre glimpse of the funnel’s top pinching inward as if straining at the connection to its parent cloud.

There was tapering, constriction, then a final lurching paroxysm that tore the cyclone-top loose from the clouds overhead. The newly decoupled cyclone-shaft teetered, steadied itself and then, before Emlie’s overwhelmed and disbelieving eyes, began a stately descent toward the ground. The girl looked down expecting a more grounded take on things, but the ground level goings-on only reaffirmed the bizarre scenario, as the funnel’s corkscrewing cloud-threads created the strong impression that the thing was screwing itself into the grass of the clearing.

By the time Emlie managed to return her attention upward, cause for further wonderment had materialized - the funnel-top had plunged low enough that something could be discerned atop it, some solid object riding the teetering cloud-column down the sky. It plunged down, down toward the clearing, growing rapidly from a speck into a sizable shape into a looming disaster. Emlie threw her hands up in anticipation of the impact. Through her wide-spread fingers she glimpsed a whipping blur of substance as whatever-it-was swept down the final few yards-

THUD

-and slammed into place, the last vestiges of the cylone vanishing beneath it. The howling wind ceased as if snuffed, yielding to a sudden quiet. Only the receding echo of the event affirmed its reality… that, and the strange structure now sitting at the clearing’s center.

Feyside had once again shattered Emlie indifference, this time via an obtrusion of the absurd. What faced her now, from literally out of the clear blue sky yet occupying the clearing as if it had always been there, was a round stone tower. A tower, moreover, of preposterously cliché design and bizarrely diminutive scale.

A six-foot-diameter drum of unmatched rough stone-and-mortar rose perhaps fifteen feet into the air, bulging, narrowing significantly then broadening again into a tiny bartizan crowned with an equally miniature battlement. Fist-sized golden citrines adorned each of the battlement’s merlons, the sole décor gracing the otherwise featureless structure. No doors or windows were in evidence.

It was, in short, less a tower than a child’s doodled shorthand for one, less a real fortification than a reified storybook depiction, a simplified icon realized on a comically unimposing scale. This, contrasted against the awesome manner of its arrival, left Emlie utterly at a loss.

“What IS it?” she gasped.

Foxglove flashed an incredulous glare. “Watchtower.”

“Why is it here?”

“Keeping watch. Don’t they have such where you come from?”

“Not that go gadding about on cyclones they don’t!”

Foxglove’s glare was withering. “You expected the great Watchtower of the Airy East to roll up in a hansom cab?”

“I didn’t expect it at all!”

“You invaded an alien realm (through the plumbing no less) and you gave no thought that your passage mightn’t go unnoticed?” He tsk-tsked. ”Why Rose, how perilously short-sighted of you! Just what kind of penny ante operation did you think we were running here?”

“Me?!? I-”

WHO TRESPASSES IN THE REALM APART OF TECH DUINN?

The startling interruption BOOMED across the clearing; Emlie, shocked, reeled back clutching at her ears.

WHO BY THEIR PRESENCE DEFILES THE MEADS OF ANNWYN?

Beside her, Foxglove appeared unaffected by the din, though the force of the sound blew his tie and tails back behind him. Concentric pressure-rings blasted outward through the grass with each deafening syllable, flattening it. Where the rings intersected the foliage edging the clearing they puffed it in and out in time to the thundered pronouncements.

WHO DARES PROFANE THE SACRED SOIL OF MAG MELL?

The increasingly strident demands stirred flickers of amber light from the mortar between the tower’s blocks, bright enough to throw a radiant grid over the clearing and its occupants as they reached their crescendo:

…STAND AND GIVE ANSWER TO ALDEBARAN, GUARDIAN OF THE EASTERN AIR!

And with that, shadowy silence fell. Emlie blanched, uncertain of whether or how to respond. She inhaled trepidaciously and was just on the verge of speaking up when the silence was sullied by what sounded for all the world like the noise of a raspberry being blown. She turned a scandalized glare on Foxglove, only to find him standing at attention with hands clasped behind his back and an angelic expression on his face. Even more flustered, she turned back to the tower.

She was about to reattempt a reply when Foxglove relieved her of the burden by stepping deftly in front of her. Swaggering forward with easy confidence, he resonantly intoned, “O Aldebaran, Great Eastern Watcher, O Quintessence of Air and Firmament; I do summon, stir and call you up, to bear witness my repatriation and to give license to the open passage of myself and my train. Sylph of sylphs, come forth and bear witness that we may be on our way!”

Then, the formalities attended to, he slouched into an infinitely more relaxed and insouciant pose and queried, “…how do, Debbie?”

There was a pause, then

…TRICKSTER?

Peeking around Foxglove’s body, Emlie saw a wooden hatch bang open atop the tower. From it rose a female faery… who was noteworthily the least ominous-looking faery Emlie had thus far encountered.

A shock of coarse and alarmingly red hair emerged first, followed by a jowly and prodigiously be-nosed face. This too featured red hair in abundance, from the unruly eyebrows that swept outwards beyond the confines of her face to meld into her mane, to the tufts poking out of the pointed and heavily-lobed ears, to the more-than-occasional whisker. The bristly brows framed heavy-lidded eyes with natural fleshly whites, but gemlike pupils akin to Foxglove’s – though in her case they shone a rich citrine yellow that matched the ornaments on her tower.

Behind the head came a squat saggy tatterdemalion-clad body barely squeezing through the trapdoor, altogether unremarkable save for a heavy golden badge of office pinned to one breast and a modest pair of gossamer wings that were all but occluded by the pudgy frame.

Judging by her visible upper half, the whole of the faery likely did not stand much over a yard in height.

She inhaled the outside air lustily, then barked out a wracking cough that set her chins, jowls, and dangly earlobes a-jittering.

“Dreich, but ye cannae imagine wha’tis like ta be cooped up in this thing fer ages on end! I’m fair puckled!” she declared to no-one in particular. She cleared her throat and spat extravagantly before leaning over her tower-top to squint at the tall male faery.

“Hey ho, imp, y’auld tattyboggle! Hou’s aw wi ye?”

Foxglove grinned ingratiatingly: “How could I be other than splendid in the presence of ‘the Great Eastern Quadrangle’?”

The faery woman produced her own broad, exceedingly homely smile: “Ye always did hae a silvery tongue when it came to the forms, ye did!”

Foxglove obligingly waggled the organ in question at her.

Chuckling, the little faery reached down into the tower and pulled forth a large gourd, from which she plucked a capping cork. She took an extended pull, consuming several glugs worth of its contents; upon setting down the gourd she belched appreciatively, sending skyward a tiny puff of green flame. “Willst come up’a cuppa, surely?” She gestured down into the tiny tower and shook the gourd suggestively, sloshing the liquid within.

Foxglove licked his lips – the offer obviously held appeal. Mastering his obvious regret, he shook his head. “Maybe some other time, Debbie. I’m bound for Court, matter of urgency and all that.”

Aldebaran helped herself to Foxglove’s share. A thin trickle of the gourd’s bright green contents ran down one of her pudgy jowls. “Come frae the mortal realm, hae ye? They finally kick yer skinny arse oot?”

Foxglove grinned. “Dying to keep me, actually. But all in vain, dear Deb - they’ve yet to craft the prison that can hold me!”

The faery woman snorted, spraying tiny green droplets from her nose. “Ah, but ye always were a braw boaster, R-”

“Uh-uh-uhhhh,” Foxglove hastily cut her off, “-here I’ll have to insist that we do stand on ceremony, Deb. My sobriquet of the moment is ‘Foxglove’, and if you must name names, then I’d feel well-gratified if you’d indulge me by employing it… exclusively.”

The Watcher expressed amused skepticism through a rumbling snort: “Aye, right, fine, an’ ye kin cry me ‘Mab, Queen ‘o’ the Toadstools’! Whit fer, ye barmy elf?”

Foxglove waved dismissively: “Oh, no important reason. ‘Tis all for the mere delight and benefit…” he reached behind him, scooping his arm around Emlie’s shoulders and drawing her forth, “…of my wee traveling companion here.”

He was caught off-guard by Aldebaran’s reaction. Her golden eyes grew big as saucers; they practically popped forth from their orbits. “A MORTAL?? Ye brought a mortal HAUR??” She dropped the gourd and flailed about behind her, questing for the rim of the tower hatch.

Foxglove draped a constraining arm over Emlie, partially hiding her from the Watcher’s apoplectic glare.

“Easy there, Deb! Easy! You’re liable to fluster up a windstorm or the like!”

The lanky faery adopted an exaggerated air of studied nonchalance: “Besides, what’s all the fuss? I seem to recall a not-long-ago time when we used to parade more mortals through this place than Sugarplum has cavities!”

“‘Twere auld enough, ‘Foxglove’…” (at which she shrugged, perhaps admitting the pseudonym’s suitability) “…an’ much has transpired since! Ye dinna ken!”

“Aye, I wouldn’t know… I’ve been away on enforced holiday, as you indelicately alluded to. Now I’m again at liberty and back to home, and with a prisoner to boot!”

Off Emlie’s astonished glance, he theatrically-yet-ineffectually cuffed her, growling, “Cease your insolence!” even as he stomped discreetly on her foot.

To Aldebaran: “As you can see, I have things firmly in hand! I fail to see why there should be any sort of problem…”

“The mortal world is shut an’ shuttered tae us now, a place o’ peril, forbidden. The Lord an’ Lady both hae bid us in their ways return the favor in full should the opportunity arise.

“The Lord would have intruders feel His slow cold constraint…” Her formerly slack mouth rose into a tight-lipped scowl, while something dire stirred within her golden eyes. “…while the Lady-” She leaned out over her tiny parapet, pinning Emlie in place with their intensity. She suddenly looked quite ominous after all. A matching amber light stirred within the lines of the tiny tower’s mortar, silhouetting the bricks. “-the Lady, she would treat them to Her dreadful quick heat.”

“Well then,” Foxglove leaning around Emlie to intercept that baleful gaze, “it’s MOST fortunate that I’m heading straight to Elfhame and the Courts. Their Highnesses will doubtless want to chide this sneaky little rapscallion in person for slinking in here after me, no? Come along, mortal scum, we wouldn’t want to keep Them waiting!”

Still holding the Watcher’s eyes, the faery seized the flabbergasted Emlie’s wrist and began to circumnavigated the tower.

“Trickster, tha’s nae whit-”

Foxglove waved a negligent hand: “Don’t trouble yourself over it, Deb! If justice must be served and royal decree fulfilled, that it is only meet that I take the full cruel burden of its prosecution upon myself!”

The prattling faery kept well away from the base of Aldebaran’s tower, dragging Emlie behind him all the while. Meanwhile the girl, aghast at what she’d heard, more than once attempted to stand fast and protest; every time she did, the faery gave her arm an extra-hard yank to silence her. Nor was Alderbaran content to stay silent:

“Trickster, mine is the warding of this quarter an’ I-”

“-should in no way feel any obligation to thank me! A giving heart is a happy heart, as old Hordefoot used to say… and he should know, he had six of them! Why, I remember when once he told me…”

The chattering faery spared a glance away from the girl he was herding along... and what he saw prompted an involuntary patois-interrupting hissing inhale. Even Emlie swallowed nervously.

The glowing watchtower was pivoting slowly, tracking them. From her perch atop it Aldebaran herself was glowering darkly at them, citrines ablaze. The plump faery no longer looked remotely silly, and her miniature tower not nearly so miniature. Foxglove continued to prattle, but in between inanities he hissed to Emlie, “You had to open your mouth…”

He dared another smile at Aldebaran – “no trouble at all! Worry not! Moseying along!” – but the Watcher was past any charming. Her glower evoked an intensification of radiance, accompanied by an ominous whistle akin to the sound of an approaching gale.

Foxglove growled out of the corner of his mouth, “It’s no good, girl, best prepare to flee futilely! The old bat is on the scent, she won’t…” He snapped his fingers. “The scent!”

“Imp, ahm warnin’ ye...” The voice rode the gale-sound, insistent as thunder. A reek of ozone filled the air.

Pulling up short, the faery seized both of Emlie’s shoulders. “Girl, do you still possess that liquid stink?”

Emlie’s indignation flared anew. “My Aromanton Sweetwater, yes. I-”

“Give it here!”

She reached into her pouch. “Oh, now you want a nosegay! I knew you’d come around-” She squawked as the faery plucked the atomizer from her hands. He stared in brief perplexity at the complex bulb and nozzle, until an ominous vibration from the watchtower hastened him. He shrugged, bent back, and simply hurled the entire contraption into the clearing.

“A gift for you, Deb!”

The glass bottle shattered against the parapet directly below Aldebaran’s perch. Fixated on the retreating duo, the glaring Watcher at first ignored the distraction. But when she raised a pointing finger and inhaled to shout… or worse… a look of surprise crossed her face.

Foxglove noted it, nodded, and shoved Emlie to a full-on run.

Peeking back over her shoulder, the girl glimpsed Aldebaran leaning far out over the rim of her suddenly quiescent tower, snuffling at the splash stain left by the lilac water… focused on it to the blessed exclusion of anything and everything else. Even after the faery had plunged her down the enclosed path on the far side of the clearing and out of view of the tower, Emlie could still hear Aldebaran’s snuffling echoing behind her.

She allowed herself to be herded on for a few moments more, and then pivoted defiantly to face the herder. "Why did you DO that?"

Foxglove flashed her the sort of look usually reserved for particularly slow children. "Why, only to save your precious little skin, if that’s all right with you. You can cover up the mortal rot-stink with something else for the time being." He grinned at her umbrage and his own cleverness, but found his good humor utterly unreciprocated.

"Oh do buck up, Deb had more use for it than you. You see, the old windbag’s nature and portfolio connect her particularly intimately to the airs and vapors. A little surprise on that front, an unprecedented novelty, and the dear sylphy thing is completely helpless to resist it! So we’ve added some otherworldly spice to her day, as well as ensured that you get to live through yours!"

If the faery expected gratitude in response, he was disappointed – the girl evinced only anger and bewilderment.

Emlie for her part shook her head, hoping it would bring some order to her thoughts. "But those things she said... and those answers you gave her.... You... you called me a sneak! And a prisoner!"

Foxglove snorted easily. “And so you are, Rose, and so you are... at least as far as nit-picking authoritarians like our dear Eastern Watcher are concerned! Whyever would you have thought otherwise?”

“You said I was welcome here!”

“That I did – by me and mine! Hardly my fault if the universality of my remit has decayed during my enforced absence! Particularly as interpreted by the rather severe lights of certain backcountry-bound tools of Seelie isolationism! Reallsy Rose, ‘tis I who should be taking offense here! Ye gods,” he muttered, “and to think that lickspittle Deb and I used to- ahem.” He caught himself with a polite cough, before settling instead for lewd pantomime.

But Emlie was unamused: “You didn’t even try to explain.”

Foxglove frowned at the wasted frivolity: “Come now girl, did you really expect me to squander our freedom on some hopeless attempt at convincing an implacable stone tower of the harmless rectitude of our, ah, unique circumstances?” He flashed his charming, mocking sharktoothed grin once more. “After all, I agreed to conduct you through my realm in trade for your role in securing my freedom... not to yield it up again (and yours into the bargain) as a result of standing foolishly on ceremony! I-”

Whatever he might have said next was interrupted by a rumble from behind them. Through a gap in the forest canopy, the Watchtower of Air rose into view, climbing sullenly skyward atop a twisting column of cloud.

“Ahh... Looks like Deb is done admiring your lovely fragrance. Moving on...!”

Foxglove bowed mockingly toward the distant departing spire, then turned and set off at a brisk pace. Emlie followed in his wake, pondering these new and not-altogether-comforting insights.

Her misgivings continued to assail her however, and some time after the last traces of the Watcher had vanished she attempted another question. “What are we doing here, Foxglove?”

The swift-striding faery positively glowed with innocence. Without breaking stride, he quipped: “Why, enjoying a leisurely stroll through a lovely weald, partaking of nature and all its glories! What else?”

Emlie halted with fists planted on hips. “Enough. You know what I mean.”

The faery winced as if pained. He shot a worried glance skyward. “Well, not that leisurely, perhaps! O Stony-face, let us not risk you gathering any moss, as I believe your people say!” He flung a long bony arm around the girl’s shoulders and attempted to hastily shepherd her down the shadowed path.

But Emlie resolutely dug her heels in and summoned her best inner Lord Mayor’s Daughter: “As it appears that I’ve become a fugitive all unawares (thanks to you), I should very much like to know how you shall go about clearing the air on my behalf; in the meanwhile, it would be lovely to know where refuge lies and how we shall go about getting there… preferably something a bit more concrete than ‘strolling through nature’s glories!’ So not a single step more, Foxglove, not until I get the straight answer you owe me! Where are you… your nose… your ‘flow’ leading us? Where are we going?”

Foxglove sighed, “You really are a nosy child, you know.” A finger curled comically against his face mimicked a beaklike protruberance. But that latest jape proved no more successful in lifting the girl’s stubborn scowl than any previous, and the faery threw the hand up in resignation. “Very well very well VERY WELL… I reported our destination truly enough to Aldebaran. We are bound for Elfhame… eventually. Once there, I assure you that I will waste NO time in securing you the fulsome Feyside welcome that a girl of your stature so richly deserves.”

The faery huffed, apparently winded by the effort of producing so much truth. He eyed the girl expectantly. She for her part maintained her narrow-eyed glare for several seconds more before nodding fractionally and prompting, “Hold on… ‘eventually’?”

“Aye, eventually. Soonishly. Well-nigh immediately, even. Preceded only by the most pragmatic of safe travel practices: there is a demi-Thinning within this domain, and as a matter of base survival we are making for it.” He tugged her into motion.

“Survival?” Now that answers were in some sense forthcoming, she unclenched a little and allowed herself to be tugged on into the wood in the hopes of prolonging the faery’s volubility. “And… a ‘demi-Thinning’?”

“Nosy and slow, let us amend. Demi-Thinning, yes; just what it sounds like, nothing subtle about it! A Veil-crossing of lesser magnitude than a full Thinning. The worlds are not quite so overlaid that we’d be able to squeeze between them (even were you not so endearingly porky, my lovely robust girl) but fear not, such is not our intent in any case!”

“Fine. What IS out intent?” asked Emlie, resolutely ignoring the rest of the faery’s blather.

“Doggedness is no fit replacement for actual wit; remember that, child.” Foxglove admonished.

He plucked a dangling ebony tendril and swung it idly as he continued. “We are simply going to make use of the thinness of the Veil here to… have a peek around with impunity.” And forestalling the girl’s next demand for clarification, “You know: rather like some vast leviathan that slips the barest fraction of itself above the waves, so as to roll an eye around the limitless horizon while keeping the bulk of its bulk safely underwater. For after all, I am known for nothing if not the vastness of my persona… and of course for the titanic scope of my, ah, pursuits…” He waggled the thick tendril for emphasis.

If the girl registered any salacious undertone she gave no sign of it. “Of course. And what pray tell will you be peeking around back in mortaldom for? It would seem that all of our peril is here, in this mad world you’ve brought me to!”

The reminder of their recent close call elicited a frustrated hiss from the faery, following which he lowered his voice as if in fear of being eavesdropped upon, while his clothes became a midnight-trimmed crimson suggestion of camouflage. He responded in tones equal parts disbelieving and pitying: “Sweet sheltered child, I fear that events transpire unbeknownst to you (for I in my kindness and desire to shield you from the harsher realities have spared you the beknowing…)” Emlie’s stance bespoke renewed hostility; Foxglove quelled it by holding up a quick conciliatory hand. “Yet I suppose you have matured under my tutelage, grown in wealth and in wisdom as it were… perhaps you are ready to face the spilt-wine-and-withered-blooms side of life, eh?”

Emlie snorted, by this point past even trying to parse the faery’s elliptical nonsense. She waited for the actual gist. He beckoned her close with the upraised hand as though he were about to share a confidence

“Rose,” the faery all wide-eyed sincerity now, “the sad truth of the matter… is that back on your Sunside, your people regard neither my kind generally nor I specifically with the universal and all-consuming love and affection that any sane being would vouchsafe us as our inarguable due. In fact, hard is it is to believe, some of you dirtlings downright dislike us.” He finger-traced a spiral against his temple, apparently underscoring the insanity of the position. Emlie, meanwhile, suppressed a snide retort and pricked up her ears – this sounded interesting.

Warming to his subject, Foxglove began to pace. Emlie stood a few paces back, following his movements intently. The dappled light falling on the faery covered him in swirling shifting patterns as he moved. His voice had grown passionate and hypnotic, warmth threaded through with sadness, hypnotically compelling:

“Imagine how this galls me… a genuine appreciator of humankind, one o’erjoyed by the long and storied history of the mutual love and respect conjoining our races… Imagine my utter bafflement at resentment towards we who witnessed your humble beginnings, we who walked beside you and before you across the breadth of your history, we who upheld you in the sorest of your trials. We who are, dare I say it, practically your wise older siblings!”

Now the faery’s garb took on the brightening hues of a sunrise, while his head canted appraisingly, appreciatively: “But then, you doubtless knew that, Rose. For you strike me as a girl who never denied my brethren a saucer of milk left out on a summer’s evening, or stinted a stand of blue bells planted for Fair Folk to bed down in… didn’t you?”

The girl shrugged, then nodded shyly, and Foxglove beamed: “Why, I’m preaching to the choir, aren’t I!”

But then his smile fell (along with his sartorial luster), leaving a mien (and a suit) grown suddenly solemn. He hunkered down next to her on the path and addressed her eye-to-ruby-eye:

“Ahhh, but Rose… such devotion is precisely why discussion of the current sorry state of affairs must grieve me beyond measure. For it falls to me to reveal to you a sorry blight upon this paradisiacal arrangement – a serpent in the grass, a worm in the apple… a foul corruption that, ashamed though I am to admit it, has lately arisen within the breasts of your fellow men!

“I speak of a Great Disavowal, girl… of a plague of ingratitude and resentment, an inducement to renunciation, to denial… even to fratricide most foul. Myself I blame the changeable nature of the human psyche (as compared to the even-tempered and deliberate character of my own sainted people, of course.) You short-lived mortals harbor a childish inconstancy (a defect whose observance, I hasten to reassure you, elicits absolutely no personal malice, only pity – for how can one begrudge the poor fruitfly the courseless pell-mell spending of its brief buzzy span?) Yet it cannot be o’erlooked that this unfortunate condition to which your oh-so-transient kind is universally susceptible has of late resulted in misguided, bitter, aye some might say high criminal, misdeeds…”

Emlie shook her head in the face of this barrage of words; but any question that might have asked was cut off when Foxglove abruptly sprang up out of his his poised solemnity, balling his fists and baring his shark’s teeth in a snarl of loathing. He continued with sudden heat: “I fear that I can neither mince words here Rose, nor pardon easily! Not in the face of such deliberate and widespread perfidy!

“For make no mistake: what ‘twas once an aberration is now a movement, Rose – a fool’s arson that has swept the blank dry tinder of your unsteadfast world! Ptew,” he spat in disgust. “Woe betide the arsonists should ever I lay hands on them!” He theatrically wrung a pair of imaginary necks.

“These latter-age mortal malcontents hate and fear magick, whimsy, joy. And they have done everything in their pathetic power to purge it from the face of Mudside. They crave a return of the Dark Times, emulating those wretched ancestors who dared raise hand to the very People of Dana themselves; and like those ancient anarchs, they would see all familial affection between our races sour and die.” The ruby eyes improbably dulled, apparently laden with barely unshed tears.

“Nor are they magnanimous in victory,” the thin lips twisting scorn into the word, “for their running dogs would hound unto extinction those brave faeries who would dare stay the course on your side of the Veil… singling out the most ardently mortal-loving of my Folk… and heaping upon the shoulders of certain heroic advocates for interracial unity a particularly hearty helping of misery and drek …”

The faery indeed appeared powerfully affected, groaning out the last from between trauma-hunched shoulders, every inch the tragic martyr pleading his case with melodramatic humility. Having done, he stood heaving silently, haunted-looking and struggling for composure.

Emlie for her part was no less moved. Chewing wide-eyed over these dramatic disclosures in the silence following, she felt a visceral pang of recognition that cut through her practiced wariness. She could not turn her nose up at what might otherwise have seemed like fishy-smelling hyperbole, for she was overcome by the whiff of something that her own sense memory insistently identified as truth. Rather than challenge the faery’s disclosures, she found herself responding by laying a tentative hand upon his shoulder: “Heroes… such as yourself, Foxglove?”

She had meant that to sound at least a little flip and scornful, but empathy stripped it of all archness.

Patting the girl’s hand, Foxglove nodded. He hung his head modestly.

“In all humility… yes, precisely like me!”

The mercurial faery sprang upright, flashing a daylight-brilliant smile and skipping several steps down the path before pivoting on his heels: “…at least, if the depth and determination of the opposition is any indicator. For you see, the base villain that I wish to scent for traces of at the demi-Thinning… the implacable antagonist who has stalked me through the long days and across the cruel Mudside miles… indeed the very creature whose cunning trap you so cleverly sprung me from this very day… it is my belief that this monster in human form stalks us still, dogging our footsteps from across the Veil.

“Black Laurn, she is called, vilest scourge of faekind.”

He emphasized the naming with a blurring swing of his vine that CRACKed it like a whip. “She is the spear’s tip in mortaldom’s quiet war upon all faeries… and upon their syphatizers.”

War… upon their sympathizers. Emlie was both rapt and rattled. She shivered, glanced around. The shadow-swirls of afternoon light on the forest floor felt suddenly oppressive. Abruptly keen to keep this too-close-to-home discussion in the realm of distant hypotheticals, she blurted a desperately skeptical “but… how could this person… how could anyone do that?”

The gemstone eyes ensnaring hers narrowed shrewdly, while the persuading voice took on a richly honeyed quality: “Oh, I think you know the answer to that, Rose… don’t you? For all that you’ve never been one to deny the Folk a dusktide tithe of meat and mead, never barred your door against us… you’ve not been lauded for your wise beliefs, have you? Rather the reception your lifelong beliefs has garnered you has been somewhat… chillier?

“You see, you struck me right from the get-go as a freethinker, as one who knows. And in consequence, as one no doubt oppressed by the closed-minded tyranny of the dirtling masses…” leaning shrewdly in on the girl, “and maybe more than just the masses. Closer to home, perhaps…”

Taken aback, Emlie took a step back. Foxglove matched her with two steps forward and a flick of his wrist that looped the free end of the tree-tendril around the back of her shoulders and into his other hand. A tug arrested her retreat. “Your nearest and dearest, no?”

Foxglove’s features sharpened into a dangerous glower. He tugged her a step closer and his voice dropped into a deep growl: “As well cease feigning innocence! For I know more than you might think of your little kingdom, girl, understand more of this lordly father you mention than you might suspect… a venue for the bloody disenfrancisement of my people, ruled over by a chief abettor! And you his daughter…”

Emlie shook her head and tried to turn away despite the snare, reflexively protesting, “It’s not my kingd-”

But Foxglove jerked the tendril sideways, spinning her back to face his suddenly burning glare.

“Are you not then a party to atrocity, bound by blood? What possible defense can you hope to muster?” The faery underscored his hissing ire by reflexively squeezing, his fingers digging so deeply into the tendril that it burst into a cloud of inky vapor around Emlie’s head. The ruby eyes tunneled through the momentary murky blackness, their angry furnace-bright flare illuminating the shark’s teeth grit beneath. “Well?”

The girl paled, looked away. “You don’t… we… we’ve… entered an Age of Industry… there’s… there’s simply no place…” she muttered to the ground in faint, rote defense of her lordly father. But her heart was clearly absent, dismay written across her shadowed face… a face that Foxglove with his now-free hand seized and tilted up towards his own.

“An Age of Imbecility, you mean! An Age of death! By rights, you should pay the price for the folly of your kin…”

And then the long fingers were tightening around Emlie’s throat, threatening her access to air. The girl’s eye’s went wide… then squeezed despairingly shut… and yet she did not struggle or pull away.

“By rights, aye. And yet…” The glaring faery gazed at the girl’s purpling face a moment more, before relenting… slightly. As she gasped down air, he reflected: “And yet, I choose to believe that your heritage does not define you, girl, any more than does the blather that you so inanely parrot. I choose to believe that you know better.”

Releasing her throat altogether, he shook her chin in benevolent admonition. Then he dropped his hand to her shoulder and squeezed it fiercely. “I believe you know the truth, in that you live it… if you can call that ‘living’.” His voice thinned to a whsiper: “For rather, I believe that you suffer under it, suffer so profoundly than any possible chastisement of mine would pale by comparison. Poor lost child…” His voice trailed off as he stepped backward.

Foxglove’s attire took on the midnight hue of a mourning suit and his eyes dimmed to dull dead stones; he resumed speaking in a gravelly cold gravesoil growl: “Your kin, and those they serve… they wish to wipe all traces of the Folk from your waking life, all memory from your histories, all hint of us from your dreams! By consigning us to the realm of foolish ‘superstition’, by forbidding you our benevolent intercession, they carve out a bloody void in the very center of your behing… a void that, mark me girl, they intend to fill with naught but grim gray plodding insipidity!” He balled his hands into fists, squeezing so hard that his nails drew bleeds of black vapor that puffed out from between the fingers and which he wafted angrily away.

“As they banish the living magick of Faerie, so do they erect in its place a dead edifice of mud and lumber, brick and iron - a false faith of coin-counting celebrants proselytizing the insipid sacraments of ‘science’ and ‘commerce’. Feh!” He spat over his shoulder, the spittle erupting into a puff of smoke as it hit the ground.

The expectoration apparently signaled another change of temperament, for when the bald head back toward the girl its eye-gems had shifted lustre again; now they twinkled with apparent kindness, scintillated with sympathy. The voice grew plaintive, sympathetic, insinuative: “Those like you, who resist… those sensitive simpatico mortals who yearn our yearnings and dream our dreams… how can you hope to survive on such thin gruel? Bereft of dream and purpose, you will before long wither to naught! And in the interim,” Foxglove edging in yet more, his looming, leering, tender face filling her field of vision, “these same diabolical strictures serve equally well as a means to deny and discredit such as you, do they not?

“At best, they merely mock, these ostensible kith and kin and lords and lovers, deriding your desires, your beliefs, your very nature. Such pain…”

How could the faery possibly know this? How dare he presume to dissect her secret pain? And, what’s more, to hitch his own plight to hers? Emlie wanted to feel irate, manipulated.

And yet she could not help but flash back a day and an eternity, hearing again her father’s heated denunciation of her ‘nonsense of magick and alchemy and faery stories and all the superstitious rest’. Close behind that came the echo of Beidon’s sneered ‘Mistress Emliana…’ followed by his mocking cackle. And behind those latest examples, a lifelong litany of similar, the goodly folk of Clear Crucible united behind her back in derisive disregard.

She winced, made to shake her head, but the relentless faery again caught her chin in his palm and returned it to the snare of his gaze.

“…pain, aye, and that is at best. Pray, child, that you never learn firsthand the worst your malcontent people will stoop to in order to silence you. Where the merely coercive fails, the unapologetically corporal can work wonders. Black Laurn is far from the only misguided mortal handy with a lash… and that just for first offenders! Pity the true recidivists, Rose,” the chimeslither voice acutally cracking in anguished empathy, “for more than one tongue sings no more praises of the Folk, for want of a mouth to call home! The hands well-accustomed to fey offering-making that have since been, ah… served their severance, to turn a phrase… are already legion. And sovereign amongst transgressors, those accommodating mortals unaverse to spending the odd starlit romantic interlude in company of a Feysider or two?” (The faery managed a bawdy wink even while slouching as if under the weight of superabundant sadness.) “Why, you could practically smell the sooty reek of their pyres from this side of the Veil.” He fanned away imaginary pyre-reek before clapping his hands together while hopping back up.

“Really, the depravity involved is startling in the depth of its enthusiasm…!”

The faery seized the girl’s shoulders, holding her fast as he summed up his argument: “These are your people, Rose… for which you have my undying pity, given that they stand as surely in opposition to the likes of you as they do to the likes of me. They… smother you, they… clip the wings of your flight, they… ground you into the mire, they piss gloating upon the fires of your imagination. They have nothing to offer you, nothing but the drear living death of endless pariahdom.”

He paused as if willing Emlie to absorb his drear declarations. Then, just as she was beginning to oblige him, with a sudden motion Foxglove spun the girl free, catching her hand as she flailed for balance and guiding her surprised stumble into an elegant dance turn. His tone was suddenly gaily bright:

“Yet, O Rose Faery Friend, you have defied them, defied them all!” The faery lifted her hand with his own (suddenly yellow-sleeved) one and twirled the girl underneath, timing the rotations to his singsong utterances:

“-defied the ignorant mortal masses,” spin. The faery’s suit was now a handsome gray.

“-defied the foolish faery lickspittles who’d bar your entry,” spin. Shining citrine.

“-above all defied the so-called loved ones who have fooled and failed you!” spinning twice around, the faery’s wardrobe shifting color each time.

He whirled her faster and faster, each rotation bringing her flashing back around past some loud new shade of morningcoat fabric. The colors whirled, mesmeric: “They would never countenance the girl who sought magick, who begged to be spirited off into Faerie, would they? And so in their cowardly censure they have forefeited you forevermore!-”

And he wound the startled girl back in, pulling her into a close embrace.

“-for never in a million years would they dare set foot where you now tread! Would they, o bravest? And yet you should spare them no lament-”

Foxglove tipped Emlie backwards into a dip.

“-for you must know that Mudside held no regard nor role, no place nor promise for you, Rose. Better far that you are rid of it forever.”

Emlie drank all of it in. The unreality of her impossible surroundings. The undeniable solidity of her captor-cum-coconspirator. And the irresistible allure of his argument, the dreadfully perfect fit of its thesis. It silenced her rebuttal, cut through her defenses, opened her eyes.

There, stolen and sundered from all that she had known, half-blinded by the swirling overhead dusklight of an alien forest, captive in the circling arms of a seducing faery, Emlie, saw. She saw the truth of it.

She let her head hang limply, lolling in his arms.

“Poppa-” she sighed aloud.

Beidon…, an anguished interior voice moaned.

“All gone…” whispered Foxglove with a shrug.

She could swear that her head hit bottom with an audible sound of breakage… a sound that carried above the breeze, echoing and continuing over the rustling of the strange abstracted trees… an anguished rolling glassine sound, brittle, brutal and enervating. The shattery sound of a world crashing down around her, or rather within her, close by her heart – of the structures and strictures of her life collapsing inside her like so many glass towers.

In their place there rose the first foundations of a stark new glassine construct: a shell. An encasement cold and hard and as resilient against love as against betrayal. Its cold bleak implications dismayed her, and she turned away from it in anguished disavowal…

With sudden violence she shoved loose from Foxglove’s grasp, stumbling several steps up the path. She caged her face in her hands… a mirroring of the nascent encasement of her heart.

It was some time before she found the strength to uncover her eyes again. When she did, it was to encounter a solemn Foxglove standing patiently before her, regarding her with ruby-glint avidity: “Poor, poor Rose. You are truly alone now, aren’t you?” His lips twisted in sorrow as his eye-gems flowed into a look of sincerest sympathy. “A creature of no world. Misunderstood… bereft… abandoned.”

And with that he turned from her and walked away, hands behind his back, shaking his head sadly. Emlie watched him depart into the forest shadows, devastated and empty and lacking any strength to follow. She slumped bonelessly, head laid upon knees in the dirt, and gave herself over to misery.

She’d gotten out no more than three or four forlorn sobs before an interruption gradually intruded upon her awareness. She would have thought herself past caring, and yet somehow the rustling sound from the forest canopy overhead made ever-increasing demand on her attention.

Sighing, she lifted her tear-streaked face. Her bleary, unfocused eyes quested a moment before spotting a moving perturbation of the trees’ draped black coils. Even while she struggled to resolve its source, she was distracted by a compact circular shadow that swept over her and drifted from view on down the path.

What choice was there but to rise and to follow? Emlie pursued.

Chuffing ‘round a corner in the path, she witnessed as the object itself finally dropped into view… Foxglove’s stovepipe hat, the one he’d lost that morning high on the cliffs!

It sailed smoothly down through the air, its gentle glide utterly at odds with its un-aerodynamic shape, passing the bottommost tree-coils even as it coasted the last few feet …to overtake the ambling faery and settle with uncanny perfection atop his bald head. As it touched down, he pivoted on his heel ‘til he stood face-to-wide-grinning-face with her.

“Of course, this ending also serves as a beginning.” He flicked his restored hat down into a rakish tilt. “The fools of your former home may belittle you for your faith in the impractical and the impossible… but here, the impossible is altogether commonplace!"

He pointed at her. “The brave girl who dared to enter Feyside, the Faerie of her hopes and fears… such a girl might well find such surroundings… suitable.” He swept the hand away from his head into an all-encompassing wave, taking in the path, the forest, and the myriad realms beyond. His gesture ended with his arm outstretched toward Emlie, fingers outstretched in entreaty. “…certainly, if nothing else, she has earned a place traveling by my side… and that is no small thing!”

Emlie glanced from the alien forest, to her own small hand, to the proffered palm. It loomed large in her vision, the focus, the safe harbor, the eye of the storm. She was walking forward before she’d even begun to consciously weigh the offer, stepping up in front of the faerie even as her rational mind wove skeins of fact and folklore arguing against acceptance, clasping his hand in blatant defiance of that outraged part of her that laid claim to wisdom. She was done with wisdom. She was done with loved ones. She was done with… with Mudside. The girl who sought magick would have it forthwith. She would never return… unless it was to bring all of this back with her, to restore unto her world that which it had lost.

But that was an awesome thought, too big to grapple with, necessarily cast aside for now.

Foxglove meanwhile had grasped her hand strongly and was pulling her towards him. As he enfolded her in his long-limbed embrace a soft sob escaped her. Her faery guide soothed her with a whisper in her ear: “You will ride with me upon the wind. You will run atop the disheveled tide, you will dance upon the mountains like a flame. You mortals do occasionally have a way with words…”

He held her thus for several seconds before pushing her gently away.

Immediately after, he was back to fussy form and brushing down his morning coat, smoothing its folds, fretting over the removal of imperceptibly tiny bits of clinging detritus. He sniffed at a lapel, grimaced, and began urgently fishing in his breast pocket. “…and ahhh, if only that were all you had.”

With a grunt of desperate satisfaction, he withdrew his handkerchief and whipped it into place under his nose.

“That’s the problem with even the best of you humans,” came his silk-muffled gripe, “you can simply never get the smell out.”

The girl and the faery trekked through the remainder of the gloaming, leaving off only when the light did.

They rested (Emlie declined to call it ‘camped’, as she’d foolishly omitted any overnight gear from the morning’s hasty packing, while Foxglove gave no indication of needing or wanting such cruft) athrough the following strange darkness (‘evening’ seemed an inaccurate term for the diurnal downside in a realm that lacked a visible sun) amidst the trunks of the faery forest. Once they’d hunkered down in the middle of a copse, Emlie assembled a bed out of fallen “leaves”, the fleshy tendrils proving surprisingly comfortable. Foxglove simply squatted atop a boulder, mantis-like, and pulled his hatbrim down over his eyes; Emlie had no idea whether he’d shut them (or, for that matter, if he was even capable of doing so.) A few sparing bites at one of the buns out of her kidney pouch made an oddly serviceable dinner, washed down by a single sip from her leather canteen.

Her overall level of satiety surprised her. After all, when it came to food Emlie was no occasional dainty nibbler. After a long ramble she typically was unabashedly both famished and parched. Today’s long exertions certainly compared impressively to her past experience… and yet she’d registered only mild hunger and thirst, and a tiny modicum of her provisions had sated and slaked her.

She considered bringing the oddity up with Foxglove, but as she studied the crouched faery the words died on her lips unvoiced. She couldn’t say why, precisely… the faery had her trust… didn’t he? He was her cohort, her companion… and, inarguably, her sole source of first-hand knowledge of this strange realm and its unique nature.

Yet Foxglove was also a faery… and no matter how companionable he might appear, he partook of that nature himself. Emlie had read too many cautionary tales (including more than one concerning the consumption of food in Faery) for her to easily consider abandoning either her wariness or her provisions. She swallowed her curiosity along with her bread, and held her peace.

Whatever oddness affected consumption in Feyside, it for better or for worse did not extend to sleep. Emlie nodded off the moment her head hit the “pillow”. And she dreamed.

Those dreams, the first she’d experienced on Feyside, unfolded as a strange witch’s brew of muddled recollection and phantasmagoric imagining. They felt haunted, pervaded through-and-through by an invisible presence that lingered just beyond the threshold of full perception. And their imagery was troubling: A sniggering Beidon, his rough smith’s hands grasping her dress at nape and rump, hurled her bodily through her bedroom window. Someone caught her. When she turned to thank her savior, she beheld Gordun, clothes ablaze and charred skin flaking gruesomely. A hideous death’s head grin split the crackling flesh of his face as swung her back, then flung her away. The disorientating arc of her flight resolved into a terrifying plunge toward the mawlike gap in the bower wall. Narrowly passing the gnashing root-teeth, she was swallowed whole, and found herself plunging down a throat of stone whose corrugations were flagstone arches.

She fell a long, long time through the cavernous darkness amidst the dreadful slow tinkling of bells.

The fall at last ended in an impossibly soft landing cushioned atop a vast cratered plain of lumpy pink. Her dream-self stooped to touch the strange flooring, horror mounting as she recognized it as flesh… the outstretched palm, in fact, of a gargantuan hand. The dream-murk parted as she looked up, and the titanic figure at the end of the connecting mountain-ridge of an arm resolved into her father, grown incomprehensibly large. His glower was like a storm cloud, and his voice when he spoke was thunder. He hurled down drenching spittle-soaked chastisement of his cringing daughter, upbraiding her for her foolish wasted life. The silence following was expectant, magisterial. The expectation was clear, but Emlie stood defiantly silent.

When she did not recant, Grywald closed a colossal fist over her, his fingers forming a claustrophobic vault. A tilt of his hand dislodged Emlie’s footing and dumped her down the chute of his cupped palm, toward the blinding orifice at the far end and the unknown gulf beyond. As she slid, she again sensed the unseen presence, and realized with the sudden illogical surety only possible in dreams that it had been there throughout, presiding over her entire horrific adventure… and that it now lurked out there past the opening, waiting for her. She strained and scrabbled at the fleshy slide, to no avail. She rocketed out through the breach into a blinding void, the unending final fall that followed granting the moment that her dazzled vision needed to resolve into-

-Foxglove’s leering face. The faery was leaning down over her from his perch, nudging her shoulder roughly with an extended toe. “Why a race as terrifically short-lived as humanity would want to spend such a large slice of that brief allotment staring at the inside of one’s eyelids while burbling insensately is quite beyond me. Enough, I say! If you MUST loaf, loaf silently!”

From her leafy bed, Emlie shrugged, then shivered. She was still drenched from Grywald’s spittle… no, she reminded herself, dream, that was a dream. Rather she (and the forest floor) appeared to have been drizzled with a generous Feyside-sized helping of morning dew.

The faery, meanwhile, had turned back to whatever it was he’d been doing prior to her awakening – a ‘whatever’, Emlie, noted with a start, marked by the sound of tearing paper. She bolted upright, shedding leaves and water droplets, to find Foxglove flipping through her beloved volume of Enno’s Magickal Ages. Each page was affored a briefest of perusals… before the faery would sneeringly excise it from the book! “…twaddle… boulderdash… pure, unadulterated crap...”

Horrified indignation returned Emlie to her feet and to her most imperious: “What in the world do you think you are doing?”

The faery didn’t bother looking up. “Redacting. This so-called History is naught but bunk and fabrication. I daresay some of it is downright defamatory!” He scoffed at another page, then tore it out. “For all my protestations, child, your people’s present practiced disavowal is in some ways scarcely more nauseating than their former pathetic credulity!”

Emlie scooped the page up from the mud-puddle it had landed in. Cradling the soiled paper, she sniffed, “But… but… these stories were articles of faith for me! Cornerstones of my-”

“Rose, Rose… you stand in fabled Feyside itself! What need have you of ‘faith’ when you have the genuine article, the firsthand evidence of your (admittedly sadly circumscribed) human senses? Faith is for the cowmaids and lovesick fools I make such brilliant sport of, not for such as you! It’s bookum for the ignorant masses, essentially remedial.”

He made a disavowing flourish with the book that ended with it offered out toward Emlie, but when she reflexively reached for it he withdrew it slightly with a small shake of his head.

“You’re a better sort now, Rose, elevated to a better place. I urge you to leave the faith nonsense to the mortal rubes.”

Emlie inhaled to throw back an angry response… and found that the exotic scents of Feyside that flavored the breath left her with none to offer. Her hand grasped the book, paused… shook imperceptibly… then the fingers relaxed, dropping Enno’s tattered History into the mud puddle at her feet.

The faery nodded proudly before turning and striding away. After scrambling to collect her scant belongings (less one book), Emlie followed after him, her thoughts and feelings an indecipherable roil.

An accord of sorts now having been reached, the trek that followed passed in companionable silence. Emlie had the impression of leagues rolling past under their feet, somehow devoid of the arduousness and fatigue that she associated with travel. At points she again felt the vaguest touch of hunger, but a few clandestine nibbles of one of her sausages dealt with that. She sensed that they were penetrating deeper into the strange forest, with the black-on-scarlet trees growing progressively taller and donning thicker, more tightly coiled “foliage”. The quality of the ambient light changed as they tramped on, indicating even in the absence of a discernable sun that morning (or whatever passed for it here) was progressing toward the midpoint of Emlie’s second Feyside day.

Next Chapter: 12. Emlie, Eenervated, Embarked