In Chicago, I summoned Deacon Dan.

Deacon Dan appeared and crouched down in front of me. “Please don’t tell me you are going to skip church.”

I nodded. “I need to fake my death, that or really die. I’m beginning to think that may be the best fake. In any case, I won’t be able to come for a while.”

Deacon Dan gave me a blank but creepy expression and then looked up at the sign in front of the cafe. “Why did you chose this place?”

I gestured to the sign. “I want to talk to a couple of Deaths before I fake my death and make sure they won’t have issues when I come back.”

Deacon Dan said, “I can spare you that conversation. The Deaths are too busy to worry about fake reports. As long as you don’t go over the Persephone Limit, or start to expose the wrong thing to the wrong people, they won’t bother with you.”

I smiled. “Thanks, you just saved me some time.”

#

In Oslo, I placed a few more Stingrays and waited.

Caerwyn summoned me, “The Efrit Cuyan took the bait. I’m tracking his movement by phone. He has left his yacht and is heading into town.”

With Caerwyn connected and able to see from where I was, I took off as a rook and sailed high over the water. Near the yacht, I saw the Efrit get into a car and leave. I circled a few more times, landed on the yacht, and turned into an owl. No Efrit was near.

“Caerwyn, I’m disconnecting and going to explore. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

Caerwyn disconnected so I turned back into myself and slid into shadow. Finding the master bedroom was easy, but the next task was unpleasant and distasteful. I started licking the bottoms of the shoes in the Efrit’s closet.

I connected with a Fairyland after sampling the third set of shoes. I continued checking. The Efrit had a pair of shoes on him that I couldn’t check, but all the rest of the shoes came up with nothing.

I went to the Fairyland and found the gateway the Efrit used to get to it. I had an odd thought, so I licked the ground below the gateway. I connected to two more worlds.

I turned as a large blue mass of smoke coalesced into a large blue man with tusks.

He shouted, “What have you taken?”

I shrugged. “Some dust off the ground. But I’m planning on claiming this world and doing a makeover on it.”

The Djinn made a gesture and sent a magical attack my way. I returned it to him and he fell asleep, keeled over with a huge thud, and woke back up.

I walked over to him. “You okay?”

He glared at me. “You will rue the day you attacked me.”

I started taking off my belt. He noticed the buckle was iron and started to try to get up.

I took off my belt and swung it experimentally with the buckle on the free end.

The Djinn said, “That’s not fair.”

I saw an ornamental bottle in a display and started walking toward it.

The Djinn whined, “You’re going to get me in trouble.”

I didn’t see anything in the bottle or feel any presence in it, so I opened it and held it up. “Bet you can’t fit inside this little bottle.”

The Djinn turned into smoke, and the smoke went into the bottle. I capped the bottle and put it back in the display. The blue smoke swirled. Probably angrily, but who can tell the emotion a Djinn is trying convey when he is just blue smoke?

I tried to connect and overlay worlds but it didn’t work. The Djinn world had a lot of mass on it, but not enough for me to compete the project I wanted to complete.

I was experimenting with gateways when I felt the gateway to this world open.

Cuyan the Efrit asked, “How did a son of Adam find his way here?”

I asked, “Do you share this world? Maybe someone let me in.”

The Efrit bared his teeth for a moment. “I share my treasures with no one. How dare you sully my place. On top of that, this body will not survive in this universe when I leave it, so you will be causing me quite a bit of inconvenience. I will make you suffer infinite pain for this. Again, foolish mortal, how did you find this world?”

I sped up time since he was here and no one else was going to be alerted by my speeding things up. “That’s for me to know and for you to never, ever find out.”

He left his body. I bound him to the Fairyland of Death, took him to the Fairyland of Death, turned him into a Fairy, and returned to the Efrit’s Fairyland. Tired from transformation and world transit, I sat down with a snack and decided to get some rest before continuing my experiments so I could maybe manage to get enough mass here in this world to complete my plans.

#

I woke up in a bed under a covered balcony high over a rain forest covered swamp.

There was a crystal ball as one of the knobs on the bed frame. I peered into it.

The image of a Fairy with bronze feathered wings spoke to me. “So, Phil, you were thinking about suicide to protect me from the Fate you think might be worse than death. Here is the thing: unless we know more about the danger, we can’t protect Caerwyn. Don’t worry, even if you are damaged beyond recognition, you’ll have to sleep sometime so I’ll be able to get free.

“I manged to get mass to set up this world and a few others, but I’m not sharing any secrets with you since you may turn traitor against me after Roc transforms your brain. I also took care of the rest of the Efrits, but I’m not giving you any details other than letting you know I have Caerwyn safe in a world I took from a dead Efrit’s shoe. He will stay there until we know it is safe for him to come out.”

I got out of bed and went to the railing to look out over the swamp. I walked down the stairs and found a chamber where the Efrit’s treasures were stored. The bottle still had blue smoke swirling around in it. I sorted through my gateways and went to one I’d set up near the recycling yard in Arizona.

#

In Arizona, I turned into a rook and sailed high over the recycling yard. Nothing had happened so I figured Archer hadn’t gotten here yet. I summoned Maud.

“Maud, I realize I owe you an attempt on Archer’s life, but can I put it off?”

Maud said, “Let me know where he is and you stay away. If you are feeling merciful like this, he will kill you for sure.”

I flew down to the yard. “No, I’m not feeling like being merciful. Right now I want to end this, but I have two reliable prognosticators who have told me not to kill him. I plan to fake my death and make him think he killed me instead.”

Maud asked, “Can you bring me through?”

I sighed and brought her to the yard in Arizona.

She looked around at the huge blocks of stone that delineated where glass, plastic or aluminum and other types of refuse were kept. She looked at the collection of old household fittings and air conditioners. “This is just the place for a final battle.” She pointed to a truck in the distance. “That may be him.”

I said, “Let’s hide.”

She took off and hid behind some of the large stone blocks near the far wall of the chain link fence. I turned into a rook and took off. I wanted to be out of the range of human or Daemon sight so Archer wouldn’t decide to take a pot shot at me.

From a distance, I saw Archer step out of his truck and aim a weapon at the transformer near the recycling yard. The transformer made a loud popping sound, and the indicator lights on the security cameras all went out. The power was out. He got back into the cab but didn’t start driving. After a few minutes, he drove up, got out, and cut the lock on the gate. He pushed the gate open and turned to go back to the truck.

Maud stood. I was too far away to do anything. Her arm was a blur as she hurtled something at Archer. Archer went down. The projectile deflected off him and went through the windshield of the truck.

Maud started running towards Archer. I went to Fairy. I found the gateway and returned to the recycling yard. Before I could reach them, Maud was kneeling beside Archer’s body. I ran up beside her and the truck blew up. In a move too fast to see, Maud was now holding me cradled in her arms with her back to the explosion that was blowing past us.

She set me down and smiled. “It’s over. It’s finally over.”

She collapsed. I took her to my hospital Fairyland.

#

The little girl doctor asked, “Doest thou knowest her blood type?”

I said, “She’s an Ogress.”

The girl shook her head. “We don’t stock her blood. Thou art a Fairy king and capable, duplicate her blood. We are going to need a lot.”

I closed my eyes and focused on seeing Maud’s blood. After capturing the information I needed, I made a gateway and opened it so I was in the hospital Fairyland but also partially in Snipsnort.

The nurse who was about my age me handed me a package with an empty bag for holding blood. I filled it.

She started hooking it up to give Maud blood. “I intended for thee to duplicate the bag, but I guess this is better. Cloris, order more blood bags.”

A woman that I hadn’t seen before came in and looked at me. “Thou hast a wound that needs taking care of.”

I looked at my arm, but the place I’d been injured was on the back of my arm and I couldn’t angle it to see it. It had stopped bleeding so I wasn’t worried about it. I closed my eyes and spent a moment fixing it. As I did, I remembered needing to place a corpse of myself back by the explosion.

I asked, “Canst thou spare me? I need to make a corpse and place it.”

Cloris said, “Let’s go to my office. I’ll help thee.”

After entering Cloris’ office, she closed the door behind us. “Now strip.”

I stared back at her.

She gave me a stern look. “I’m a Crossroads certified Fairy nurse. Thou dust need thy old clothing for the body if thou dust want it to convince.”

I thought a moment before stripping and changing into me in my everyday work clothing.

She turned her monitor around and showed images of Maud’s back where she had been lacerated by shrapnel from the exploding truck. “Study this so that thou hast an idea of the wounds. I’ll get the bits they pulled out of the back of the Ogress. Ogresses are tough, so thou must make thy wounds even worse.”

#

The explosion had blown gravel back and the front bumper from the truck had broken the corner off one of the large stone blocks at the back of the yard. Maud and I had been lucky. I used a gateway to place my body so I didn’t add any footprints to the area. I dragged the body back a little to try and simulate its movement, but the effect, I suspected, was more artistic than physically accurate. The corpse I placed was damaged to mostly obscure my features. I wanted to be able to deny my death later, but I still wanted the assumption to be that it was me.

With the corpse placed I returned to the Hospital Fairyland.

#

I was assured Maud would recover, and she wouldn’t have any scars. That left me with one last duty before I went back and found out what else my prognosticating friends had planned for me.

#

Roc, the mind robber, would probably hunt me down and find me unless I hid in the Fairyland that my Fairy self had put together from Cuyan the Efrit’s treasure world. Not knowing any better way to meet up with Roc and wanting to at least see what was in all the time lockers, I returned to the world they were in. I was expecting to be in a tomato garden, but instead I was in a chamber without any exits apart from a pair of vents. Signs covering the walls.

The first sign was “Carts, Party Food.” The next said “Carts, Party Refreshments.”

There were no gateways and no doorways, buttons, or any magical anything, but the top of the signs had a sort of annoying shadow issue like a camera or fiber optic cable. I figured it out. They had fiber optic cables to get to places by shadow stepping. Of course the Queen of Shadows would know to use fiber optics. I looked further up and saw another sign “Carts, Alcohol, German Beer.” Scanning over signs, I wondered if they thought I was an alcoholic or was going to be one when I grew up. There was a lot of beer and that was just one of the alcohols listed.

I shook my head, stepped to the center of the room, and closed my eyes. I spun around and pointed. I walked until my finger touched a sign.

The sign I touched was “Seeds, Pasture, Alpine.”

This wasn’t food. I examined the end of the fiber optic cable and then slipped into shadow.

#

I’d been walking past containers reading signs without opening any of them. Stairs and catwalks were attached to the stacked containers to reach the various levels, but I was staying on the ground walking on the large white granite blocks they were using for pavement.

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I felt Roc start to invade my mind. I couldn’t see him. Guessing he was on the other side of the containers I was surrounded by, I turned into a raven and flew up.

I located him by circling above and feeling the edge of his trying to read me.

He shouted, “Come on!”

I made a raven cry and circled to where I could stand on a container on the edge of his range.

I landed.

He shouted at me. “Gyaa!” It wasn’t really intelligible. Just a sound of frustration.

I turned into me and shouted back, “You get me, my weaknesses, desires, plans, follies, and fears. What do I get?”

He shouted back, “Smarter.”

I backed up as I felt his mental touch.

He shouted, “You’re thinking, ‘Great, maybe I’ll end up with a third-grade education.’”

I shouted, “Reading my mind doesn’t make me trust you more.”

He shouted, “What do you want?”

I shouted, “For my friend to be safe. For my friend to have options.”

He shouted back, “I’ll be honest with you. I can’t do that. No, really, I don’t have that option. It’s basic to how I was made.”

I considered my nature as a Goblin, and my thoughts about my possible weapon capability that the Elves might have built into Goblins so they could protect the Elves’ horrid children. I stepped into range so he could read my thought and then stepped back.

He shouted, “Well, you guessed right. I have within me the fellow who designed that concept. I don’t know that it changes anything, but you have a large section of ancient minds cheering for you. The machine that stored them still wants you, but you guessed right. It wants to preserve what it has more than it wants you or your friend.

“Here is the hard thing. My mind is fuzzy logic based on solid priorities and filled in with logic and desires from a multitude of minds. Their thoughts are weighted by past reliability, and the communities choices, along with a lot of other things, but it averages down to that. I’m messed up. Just like a people. Maybe more. A lot of these minds are ancient and barely relate in the modern world. A lot of these minds would have never willingly entered a Fairyland while they still lived.

“They may be rooting for you. And they are since I am rooting for you in a conflicted way. But my instincts want you. I can assure you, apart from malignant beings, as evaluated by the mass of my minds, any being within me has privacy. Any being in me with current existence outside of me, has it even more so apart from one condition.

“I am driven by core protocols to try to help you become as brilliant a genius as possible. That might cause me to arrange things that you might not desire.”

I shouted to him, “You manipulate destiny and that’s the best sales pitch you can come up with?”

He screamed, “Everyone just shut up!” Then he shouted. “Sorry, I’m conflicted here. Instinct versus argument. You have my instincts conflicted in a way that I’ve not been conflicted since before Ben freed me from the Great Enslavement.”

I shouted, “What’s the Great Enslavement?”

He shouted, “You are a Goblin. Your family knows a lot of the legends. The disease your people escaped so they would not be mind slaves to the Elves.”

I shouted back, “Yet my instincts still make me try to take care of children.”

He shouted, “Look, this body has wicked advantages, but it has never been good at shouting for long. There has to be a better way. I should be the one to come up with it, but I can’t hear myself over my own mob screaming at me.”

I slid a gateway down and across until I found where the young man was sitting on a metal catwalk with his feet on the stairway down. He was cradling his head and rocking it.

I slid the gateway close. It let me see through it, and it passed sound both ways.

“We can talk now. What is the worst thing you ever did to someone you read the mind of?”

He took his hair in his hands and pulled on it. “Okay, confession time. When I was not tuned to function in this universe, my scanning killed people.

“Even if you use yourself to destroy me, your friend won’t be able to avoid being read, unless he stays entirely out of all known places. There are more of my kind out there, and you won’t be around to destroy them.”

I said, “That’s where you are wrong. One reason I don’t fear death, apart from the flash of pain and panic, is that I have died before and made a new body. Why did you start chasing me?”

Roc looked right at the gateway. He had mismatched eyes. “We heard that you had spoken with an Angel. We are prognosticators, we have been called the Fates, but we are fakes. We are not in that sense psychic. In empty cells, we improvise minds and lay weak recordings of folk unworthy of making a permanent record. Using that, in many ways, we beat the psychics. We can figure out the minutiae of how people will respond and knowing physics we can guess at the rest.”

I said, “But you have messed up and nearly killed me more than once.”

His voice had an edge to it. “Imagine someone whose mind is based on constant interruption from a mass of minds. Imagine how much that being hates being interrupted, especially by someone outside. Let me finish.

“Apart from probability and the inevitable greed of man, our predictions cannot tell us what we do not have clues for. You have two of the best psychics. They read waves. Waves result from people, and events and waves can show pictures and detail.

“We end up with more detail, but we can’t read coming events. We can confuse things by playing with the influential and flighty, but other prognosticators can muddy our waters in ways we, of course, cannot predict.

“Angels, prophets, and psychics are different. When we can hear their prophecies, we can find outcomes that beat all the rest. But first we need those words or we have only the clues that nature gives us.

“You met an Angel. That made you important. Angels read it all and like the true prophets, they have access to what has been ordained.

“To show you our flaws, we had reading after reading that indicated your importance. So important that my brothers and I gave you Phil Thibodeaux's fortune. A fortune we had built. But we never guessed that a Southern-born, country Goblin child from the sixties with a second-grade education and a career of delivering fish could be a genius.

“That environment was nearly a perfect description of how to limit the development of a mind. We just put together other prognosticators’ visions and knew we needed to support you while not having you associate directly or strongly with the Dread Lord.”

I asked, “Why?”

Roc said, “You slay Efrits. If you were identified as a partner with the Dread Lord, the Efrits would go nuclear. Things might end and things might get really rough for a while. Either way, innocents would suffer and recipes would get lost. Genius that might have been would never get born. I have a lot to make up for. My helping you do the job that you alone do best is one of the few ways I can make up for the disasters my existence has caused.”

I stepped into range and felt him riffling through my thoughts, memories, and mind. He and I stayed quiet.

It didn’t take long and there were still tendrils of contact.

He said, “Still, you frustrate me. Good for you. Phil, you’re the tip of the iceberg. Still brilliant. Still an important mind for me. Yet the greater part of your genius I will never have. Your Fairy will forever elude me.”

I turned into an owl and flew to the catwalk he was sitting on. I turned into me with a backpack and took out some sausage.

He said, “Don’t worry, I don’t want a share. You won’t either after you taste some of my favorite sausages. You’re hungry, lets go eat.”

He opened a gateway and stepped through it.

I slid the gateway we’d used for talking back to my shoe and followed him.

#

A waitress turned and said, “Hi Roc, I’ll be right with you.” She turned back to the other waitress who was crying, but smiling while doing it.

“Yeah, wings just get in the way if you want to cuddle. The diaphanous ones crinkle and the butterfly wing dust gets to be messy. Bat wings are okay, but the guys with them are odd. Angel wings might be nice, but their sort isn’t really interested, or they are too self-interested.”

The crying waitress said, “You have customers, I think I’m mostly over it. I just got upset again thinking about it.”

Our waitress turned and walked over. “Sorry, my friend just had a break up. Kind of rough after three hundred years, but romance doesn’t always translate to happily ever after. What can I serve you?”

Roc said, “Oyster poor boys. Root beer. Let the King know that Phil here isn’t going to try and take over the Fairyland.”

She went over to a window and shouted, “Destiny calls! Two Oyster poor boys, and the Fate says the new guy isn’t going to try and steal your Fairyland.”

The other waitress turned and smiled at me. “Are you a Fairy king?”

Roc said, “He’s taken and by all indications, his girl manipulates destiny. Probably best looking elsewhere for romance.”

The waitress sighed. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

Roc made a go away gesture, waving the back of his hand towards her. “His girlfriend might.”

I looked around at the restaurant. It looked like the sort of dive I always wanted to sell fish to but it was too big and popular. I always tried to avoid the sort of restaurant where people might take their families.

Roc said, “After you’ve eaten, you’ll be able to come here, speed time, and get a meal. They run a bit faster than Real normally so they won’t mind. Don’t worry about pay. I helped arrange for them to have an ocean, and this just one of the perks you get for cooperating.”

I asked, “This seems like a pretty good payoff, but I might just be okay with it since my mind has been altered.”

Roc laughed. “If you were altered horribly, you’d never know. Yes, I realize that when you sleep you’ll be evaluated, but then, you’d die in your sleep if it was a horrible alteration, so you’d never know would you?”

I narrowed my eyes. “You have a horrible sense of humor.”

Roc agreed. “I really do. Not my worst trait. Not even close, but I definitely laugh at some of the worst things. I even laugh at myself as I do horrid things.”

I thought to myself, “So I made friends with a monster.”

Roc said, “Maybe less of a monster. You’re part of my collective mind now, and there are some shifts in my internal politics. The you in my mind seems to be quite popular with the internal masses. Who knows how I might end up?”

#

I woke up and checked my crystal ball.

The image in the crystal ball showed the Fairy with bronze feathered wings sitting on his glass throne holding a mug in the air. He quickly downed it and wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his free hand.

“Phil, my treasure, it is worth losing sleep to wake, but I will need to rest as well soon enough. I can’t keep staying up like this, so relax. Just as Roc managed to get read your mind and incorporate who you were, he put a copy of us inside him, and I can read him like a book.

“But he is a library and the volumes go on and on, so I have a lot to read. But rest assured that when you rest I will rest and read when I can, so sleep long hours if you can and stay well rested. For me, dear Phil, the you, you barely know.

“There is a gateway on this crystal ball to the world I hid Caerwyn in. Be sure to invite him to dine in the restaurant Roc took you to. It will be fun having the team of Phil and Caerwyn active inside of Roc. Hackers both inside a thinking machine made well before the history of man. Who knows what could happen?”

#

I sat in the throne room of the Fairyland my Fairy had put together in the Efrit’s treasure world. I didn’t sit in his glass throne. For one thing, it was cold and unpadded. For another, even in my ten-year-old Goblin body, I was a bit large for it. I wasn’t really into the whole king on a throne thing either.

The reason I was in the throne room was for the acoustics. My cajon sounded great there. Odd thing. My udu drum was a bit more convenient, and I didn’t have to bend over it so much to play it. A double bass does almost as well as a drum and for some things better, and it can be played with a bow and the string can be thumped, plucked, slapped, and more. The double bass was way less portable but has more range. My percussion trees gave me effects that I loved, but when I just want to reflect on things and clear my mind, nothing beats having a well-made crate to sit on and slap. So I sat in front of the throne and imagined I was playing daft music for the daft Fairy king I owed my existence to. I recorded it to the crystal ball in any case so he could have some background music the next time he was awake and went to work on things.

As I wove beats into patterns as strange as any I had woven before, I contemplated my next move. Having someone know me and know my mind was bothersome. I felt like I had to sit up straight inside my own head. I slouched as I beat rhythms just to ignore it, but it still bothered me. I was taking medicine so I would age normally and have an adult body in years instead of centuries. I was just beginning to sort of notice girls. That was scaring me. I was going to have a witness to my fumbling stupidity, so I felt like skipping my meds.

I kept deciding I’d ignore it and let it all hang out internally, but then I would try and think brave and noble thoughts so I didn’t seem like the selfish schmuck I was.

I just beat rhythms and relaxed my mind. I needed to release Caerwyn from whatever crystal palace my Fairy self had imprisoned him in. I needed to check on the installation art aluminum forest. My plans for fabricating and building the percussive woods as an installation project had already been reviewed by the machinists who were making it. I didn’t need to appear alive for it to continue, and as far as I could tell, the purchaser was likely enough to be disappointed when I turned up alive.

One small group of Efrit’s had been disposed of. From the conversations we had recorded of Efrits talking internal politics, there were quite a few more. I probably needed to hit them hard before they identified that they were being hunted and started being more careful.

Depending on what Hubert and Swampy had in the way of plans for me, I intended to stay dead for a while, expand my network, and track down all the Efrits I could before I started to strike again and clean them out. Apparently some didn’t trust having cell phones. The Efrits that did use phones thought the technology-resisting Efrits were old-fashioned. I thought they were the smart ones and would soon enough be the only Efrits left.

I continued playing rhythms until I found a groove and forgot everything for an extended moment in time. I hadn’t really had this sort of moment of peace since we left Hubert’s mansion in Real. Beating on the sink while washing dishes may not be a lot of people’s idea of relaxation, but washing dishes was a moment of peace for me since even before I was a Goblin.

I thought about the wooden stool I stood on as a child and wondered where it was. It was long gone and the wooden sides probably wouldn’t be all that great a drum. I dimly remembered a worn carousel image and maybe a pig and a clown on it. Someone had spilled paint on it.

It was an odd memory of childhood, but it was the only thing I could remember from back then that was mine. At least I remember my mother shouting for me to get my stool.

I got back into the drum beat. Goblins don’t usually have a lot of fond childhood memories. An unwanted and inconvenient child had to make joy where he found it. The Goblins who snatched me did me and my family a favor. I played a rhythm and let the past slide away.

#

The world where my Fairy self hid Caerwyn wasn’t frozen in time. The gateway took me to a large balcony like no other. Imagine that the world was small, and it had twelve castles evenly spaced about it and each castle had a crazy tall tower. Now turn it all inside out where the towers are touching each other in the center. I was on the top of a tower and all the other towers touched and had railings where you could see down to the castles and the woods and fields in the far distance below. You could look up to see the woods and fields in the far distance below. There were fountains but only one of them was releasing water. Water was running in the thin channels between the stones in the floor and running off the edge of the castle. I walked around in a circle where I was directly under places I had been standing on moments before. I didn’t know where Caerwyn was so I summoned him.

Caerwyn answered, “Are you awake or do you have shiny wings?”

I said, “Awake. So you met me?”

“I’m in a grape orchard. I took the water slide down. Your Fairy you is crazy. I say we keep this place as an emergency backup headquarters.”

“Caerwyn, seriously, I was worried you were trapped here.”

“No, your daft other gave me a crystal ball that lets me alter the time rate here just in case I got tired of waiting for you. I was thinking we should make this our headquarters, but I’m worried about how structural the crazy tall towers are. If they fall, the stones could land anywhere.”

I concentrated and felt a sort of shake to the structure I stood on. I wanted to get down from the towers, but then I didn’t want down where the towers would be over me.

I said, “Come to me and let’s leave. This place doesn’t seem safe.”

Caerwyn appeared beside me. “You don’t think it’s safe either?”

I said, “I shadow stepped to a tall building once that felt like this. Probably thirty years ago, and it is still standing. Despite that, I’d rather not stay here long. I don’t think it’ll fail soon, but I think my Fairy self likes ruins.”

Caerwyn held out the bunch of tiny green grapes he was holding. “You could always speed time and test.”

I tasted a grape. It was sweet. I wanted to collect more of them, but I didn’t want to risk anyone's life doing it.

#

I was wearing my Daemon form. Anyone who knew Soslani might think I was him at a distance. I was as handsome as him in this form, I didn’t have the Daemon’s charisma, and up close, my appearance was not quite the same.

I was in a spider excavator with the shovel arm extended. I was using a gateway to dig and letting the auto-level system keep the arm adjusted so the wide ditch would be level. At the top of the hill, I made a gossamer boulder to roll down the hill and compress the soil in the ditch before I filled it in and made a proper road. At the bottom of the road, Hey Guy was waiting to dispel the gossamer boulders I was making when they reached him. He kept letting the boulders get closer and closer before he dispelled the gossamer. Duchess Byebye, Lady Hippydippy, and Lady Anteater were circling overhead in raven form.

After deciding the ground was compressed enough, I flew to the bottom of the hill as a rook and turned back into my Daemon form. I made a gossamer image of the road, cables, drainage pipes, and stones I was going to build. I made the cables and drainage first before gesturing to the group gathered.

I summoned Lord Loadstone. “The usual culprits are here and ready to eat.”

Lord Loadstone answered, “Give me a moment. Alright, my liege, bring me through.”

#

We sat in the tower I had made at the top of the hill and ate parsnip, pea, and fish stew.

Lord Loadstone gestured with the heel end of the bread loaf he held. “Thou dust know that it would be hard to make thyself any more popular with the masses than thou art. I was so delighted to hear about thy plan to improve all the roads and make structures like this for travelers to weather storms in, that I never brought myself to ask, ‘Why art thou doing this?’”

I finished chewing and swallowed. “My prognosticators have put me to the task. Their visions have given warning that I need to avoid turning into myself or an owl until six months pass in Real. They also warn me that I need to secure the paths and make these towers. Since it pleases the inhabitants of this Fairyland—”

Loadstone interrupted me, “Thy kingdom, sire.”

“My kingdom. Since it pleases the inhabitants of my kingdom, it behooves me to do a good job.”

Lady Anteater said, “Make the next statues of us dancing upside down attached to the ceiling of the next tower.”

I winced closing my eyes.

Lady Hippydippy said, “It’ll fall eventually. Probably sooner than later.”

I said, “Bas-relief will hold up well enough.”

Dutchess Byebye said, “Make hers upside down. Make the rest of us normal and have me holding a cat.”

Hippydippy said, “Let’s go try to catch a cat.”

All but Lord Loadstone and I got up and flew off as ravens. Lord Loadstone and I gathered up the bowls so he could take them back.