You know the guy you see in the occasional band that is way too into the music? The over-enthusiastic fellow with the tambourine or at least shaking something, beating a rhythm on something, and dancing or moving without even thinking how he looks to the audience? That was me at the Goblin Music Festival. Who am I kidding? That’s still me when I get lost in the music.
In a huge abandoned factory now alive with Goblins, I was sitting on and beating a crate with a band way out of my league. I don’t read music. I never had a lesson. I never got past second grade. So all the Goblins in the audience were staring at the nine-year-old that everyone was calling a hero while he made a fool of himself playing music well above his pay scale. I’ll confess that I’m not all that terrible, but only because I have been slapping rhythms on every board I come across for the last fifty years. Yep, I’m that kid who won’t stop drumming on the table. The Goblin they are calling a hero.
If I confessed it all to someone, they might think I had moments of bravery and moments of good intent, but hero is not a word I’d use to describe myself.
Back out in the audience, another Goblin nudged me. “Seriously, wow. Every band that gets up on stage is inviting you to play with them.”
It all dropped into place. The hero thing. The bands gesturing for me to join them. My not having done anything heroic. I shadow stepped back to the area my family was in and handed Jordan a backpack. Back here, it was louder so I couldn’t be heard. I waved bye to him, and he took my arm and dragged me into shadow. In a chamber below the stages, he left shadow and we sat on large pipes with valves and dials with the music still throbbing above us.
I said, “The backpack has money, spread it around, hide it, don’t get in trouble over it. It’s all clean. I didn’t work hard for it, but I didn’t steal it. I’m gonna see a few people and head out.”
Jordan said, “See you ‘round. Thanks for bringing us to this. Phil, it was amazing seeing you play with all those groups. You worn out?”
I said, “Something like that. Take good care, Jordan. Seriously, if someone tries to rob you, just let it go. Don’t get hurt. I’ll check on you, and I can give you more money. It ain't a problem.”
I slid into shadow. With all the Goblins in and moving in shadow here, there was no way anyone was going to be able to trail me. In the office, I was taken by the arms by two pretty Goblin girls. Both appeared to be at least sixteen. Since I looked to be about nine, and it had taken me around fifty years to get that last year of age, I couldn’t guess how old these girls really were.
Sitting in the highest chair at the table, I looked down at the tall, bare-wood stool they had me sitting on. Probably to make sure I didn’t feel bad about being the youngest looking person in the room but it seemed a bit like a booster chair.
A girl said, “Phil, we have been debating things, and we think you should stop taking the pills that let you age naturally. At least for a while.”
I glanced around the room, and Nia, the girl wearing the purse I had returned to her, nodded to me. “Sorry, but it is possible that your aging might change things, and right now Roland Hubert needs you unchanged.”
I polymorphed into the form of me carrying the backpack with the pills in it and started taking out the three bottles of pills they had given me.
A girl who I wasn’t sure if she was human or Goblin said, “Keep them. Someone else you know might want to age up a bit.”
I thought about Monroe, Jordan, and the rest of the family and wondered if I could get more of the pills for them. I thought about the ancient toddler I had just adopted and wondered if she might want to grow up a bit. I looked at them and realized that if these folk knew as much as they knew about me and what was going on, then, like me, they probably didn’t need money.
They wanted my friends alive so that meant they wanted me well.
I asked, “How do we turn them back from stone?”
The girl I was thinking might be human said, “Keep them moist or wet and in a dark, cool place. They are or were or sort of are among the last remains of the giants. Roland and Anthony, as long as they don’t stay in sunlight for too many days, will still be living crystals in a matrix that can grow. Eventually, they will start transforming to take advantage of biological distribution of chemicals and the process should speed up. As long as they are not shattered, heated up, or exposed to too much ultraviolet radiation, they should be fine. Roland will need you around to restore his full cognitive ability, but we have a plan to wean him off of that necessity.”
Another girl slid a briefcase towards me. “Here are some identification papers for you and some detail and maps to a few junkyards you inherited. Sadly, Mr. Phil Thibodeaux, the same horrible genetic condition that makes you look so young ended up killing your mother and father. You should be able to get away with being Phil Thibodeaux for at least ten years. If you don’t stay in one place long, you might get away with it for twenty. The management agency that oversees these junkyards will keep bringing things in and then recycling them, so you should take Roland to visit these junkyards regularly. This way he has the best chance of finding the sort of resonant stuff he needs to thrive.”
An athletic looking girl stood up and gestured for me to stand. She smiled and said, “I need to gift you with operating heavy equipment, and then you need to go practice.”
I was confused and looked up at her as she kissed my forehead several times. I looked back and the stool I’d been sitting on was gone. Still confused, I didn’t react when she took my arm and took me into shadow. We ended up in a field a distance from the factory. Around us were cranes with magnets, large machines with scoops and grabber claws, bulldozers, trucks and tractors.
She let go of my arm and said, “The keys are all in them. You are certified as a heavy equipment operator. Now you need to practice.”
This was a gifting I had never dreamed of, desired, or needed in any way. Oddly though, it was also crazy fun getting up in huge monstrosities and picking up wrecked cars and smashing them around or moving them with the gentlest touches. I worked through the night, taking a pile of rusting metal and arranging it into small neat collections of similar items. I loaded trucks and drove stuff around.
In the cab of one of the trucks was the briefcase I had forgotten and two boxes of bandages with a note stuck to one of them. I took off the note.
“Put these bandages on Anthony and Roland where they will contact skin, or stone in any case. When you question your own heroism, remember, heros are the ones who keep going and keep trying. Swords, guns, and armor are not the true tools of a hero. An open hand and an open mind are all the tools that a hero needs. Bravery is not the hallmark of a hero. A hero is the one that remains guided by his compassion despite his fears and tears.”
My eyes welled up with tears as I read. I put the bandages in my backpack and took the briefcase to Fairy.
#
Standing on a platform in the middle of a stone structure with a roundabout intersection and seven roads leading off into the distance, a pair of men sitting at a stone bench build around a column stood up and bowed.
“Long live King Snipsnort!”
I bowed back. “Please rise.”
The shorter one stepped forward. “My lord, we are wondering if you couldst be persuaded to build the bridge to Nowhere. There are many other projects and having the major crew keep building a bridge to Nowhere for the next hundred or so years will mean, no new castles, no new aqueducts, and no new amphitheaters.”
I asked, “How should I build it?”
The taller of the two said, “You are king of Snipsnort. You have control of vast energies stored for eons that you can change to stone and be built with.”
I stepped down from the ledge after looking around for the traffic that was probably going to be a plodding mule with a cart a few times a day and approached them so we wouldn’t be yelling across the road. “You’re aware that fine things like jewels and gold could be made with it instead of stone.”
The shorter one sighed. “Fine, you can make piles of trinkets that some women would delight in, yet the practical ones will ask why uou didn’t bring a pale of water from the well when you came in?
“Jewelry gets stolen and buried, but a bridge or a lighthouse becomes a treasure that unites and guides people for ages to come, builds pride and aids exchanges. A well made aqueduct is a treasure that make a town clean and prosperous. Gold in a vault is only useful to pay off ransoms and wage wars with.
“Better not to fight or get kidnapped in my opinion.”
I asked, “We have lighthouses?”
The tall man said, “Not nearly enough. When the great seas rage, and fishermen look to the shores for refuge or debate riding it out on an endless and angry sea, a lighthouse can be the only guide to one that works so hard for so little and provides the fish that greedy fishmongers charge so much for.”
The short man whispered out of the side of his mouth. “Shhhh. He is one of those greedy fishmongers.”
They both stared at me blinking for a moment before they kneeled and bowed to me. “Long live King Snipsnort.”
I said, “Please rise.”
They stood up. “Sorry, Great King.”
I asked, “Do we have great seas?”
They nodded and the short man said, “We are bounded by the seas of Fairy. Most of the really great and ancient Fairylands are.”
I asked, “There’s one big Fairyland, and we’re an island?”
The tall man shook his head. “While you are the kingdom, great lord, no man is an island. You might as well ask, ‘How large is this realm?”
I asked, “How large is this realm?”
He shook his head from side to side and his tone changed to that of someone lecturing a child. “In Fairy, we have a term for the size of such things, yet we do not measure them. Measuring is a way of limiting and preparing to market things. It’s all fine for an accountant, but if one values something with their heart, one does not weigh it to find out how much one should value it. When we have something huge that requires appropriate vagueness, we say it is rather huge. How many can say what a hectare really is or comprehend it? When you say a hundred thousand hectares did you truly make it any more clear?”
I asked, “So we keep it all irrational?”
The short man says, “Kind of, but irrational is an entirely different thing. You see man tries to separate things into two piles before weighing them. Good and evil, chaos and order, but the truth is simpler. Within your yard and neighborhood, there may be good and bad dogs and the smith’s yard may be full of old junk and chaotic, while the old lady’s garden is clipped neatly in fine order, the neighborhood is much bigger than either yard and what is outside of that is even larger.”
The tall man said, “And beyond that outside are things unimagined, yet to deny these unimagined things their place would be unreasonable. So, when do you plan to start building the bridge?”
I asked, “I am not sure, but what does that have to do with the irrational?”
The short man asked, “What is larger, the set of irrational numbers or the set of rational numbers?”
I winced. “Sorry, I only made it through second grade, and that was long ago.”
The tall man asked, “If you have three apples and call that three, which is larger, the number of neat slices of apple that you could make or the number three?”
I said, “Three, wait, no the number of slices.”
The short man looked around like someone might have shown up. The tall man continued. “That is to say that the real fractions of an apple is larger than the number of apples. But let’s say you took a sledgehammer to the apples and splattered them everywhere. You have far more bits just stuck on the hammer and your apron than you ever had neat slices. Those bits are the irrational numbers. You can’t even try to count them so why do it?”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
I said, “Aren’t there Fairytales where the good folk count things that no one else can count?”
The short one asked, “Are we really going back to square one?”
The taller one shook his head. “Look, I take an orange and eat it. Now we can’t compare the orange to the apples. But how many bits of orange are there inside me?”
I shook my head. “That isn’t even a rational question.”
He nodded to the short one. “There, I love it when a student catches on. So, you see that it isn’t a question of good or evil, though that matters, but we are stuck in the worlds between heaven and hell, so, really, we can ignore those questions and as long as we treat each other well, who cares? And it isn’t an argument of entropy because that never ends well. It isn’t even order versus chaos. The real question is: can you explain it or is it just plain daft?
The shorter one looked around again and said, “Since we agree that everything is possible and the reasonable things are smaller than the possible daft things, that makes the universe a tiny insecure puddle of reason in the middle of a huge expanse where insane children are running around trying to make splashes, and that is why we need you to finish that bridge as quickly as you can.”
I asked, “How did this relate back to bridge building?”
The shorter one threw his hands in the air while the taller one stared at me and shook his head.
The shorter one waved with the back of his hand as he started walking away. “You’re having better luck explaining this than me. Wow, how does a being explain the obvious to someone who couldn’t handle a third grade curriculum. Oh, well. Long live Snipsnort.”
The taller man crouched down beside me and then looked at the man who was leaving. “Long live Snipsnort.”
He looked at me and asked, “Do you like puppies?”
I nodded. He said, “None of the puppies will be let into the house if they get all muddy. We don’t want that do we now, do we?”
I shook my head.
He nodded at me and smiled. “But if there were a nice long bridge over all that mud, the puppies could all come in and play. We all like playing with nice clean puppies don’t we?”
I asked, “What if they grow up to be bad dogs? What if they get out of their yard, eat all the apple bits and then go make a mess of the old lady’s yard? If there is a bridge, those dogs will be loose and able to go anywhere. They could end up chasing all those children trying to make splashes and then drink from the puddle. What happens then?”
He started backing up slowly, quietly muttering under his breath, “When faced with a Daft Fairy, don’t draw any attention. Keep a mild and uninteresting smile as you slowly back away. Do not run until you are well out of sight and the Daft Fairy is distracted. Do not, whatever you do, use glitter. That was poor advice to begin with.”
He bowed while still slowly backing up, keeping his eyes on me and smiling in a reassuring but patronizing way. “Long live Snipsnort.”
I took to the shadows along, but not in, the shadows I had taken this way before. Expanding my feel for the paths of shade. As I approached my manor house, I saw the gate was open and men were working in the yard.
I slid out of shadow back by a tree and walked up.
A man greeted me at the gateway. “Good morning lad. What crew art thou with?”
I tried to think how to put this. As a new king, few would recognize me and it seemed bad to not tell them, but telling them I was king also seemed a bit odd. I thought, “I am thy humble servant, King Snipsnort,” but that didn’t feel right either. My image of a king would say boldly, “I am the lord of these realms, the king of Snipsnort.” That sounded conceited but I really didn’t know what else to say.
The man said, “Lad, are you slow or do you not have any good reason for being at the residence of the great king of Snipsnort.”
I said, “Sorry, I was just trying to figure out the best way to introduce myself without seeming too self important. My name is Phil, and I am the king of Snipsnort.”
He shouted, “Krul, the Kings here.”
A man came over and looked at me and then back the man who greeted me. “Are you through taking a break or are you ready to help get those statues out of the basement?”
I said, “Please be careful and they stay in the basement.”
They both looked at me. I started walking in and they blocked my way.
I backed up, and gave them a hard stare. “Don’t push it. Those statues are friends of mine.”
They both crossed their arms. More men and a woman came out and looked at me. I didn’t have a choice. I turned into a giant rooster.
Everyone dropped to the ground. “Long live King Snipsnort.”
I passed through shadow and down to the basement. There were two crates that had been partially built around the statues. A pair of men were sitting and talking.
The one wearing an apron said, “Fairywings! It would be sweet to live in a place like this. I mean the pools down here are cold, but imagine getting in them after a hard day of work in the sun.”
The one in the vest said, “Fairywings, indeed. But you wouldn’t want to stay long. Imagine though that after a long day in the sun, you had wine and a melon cooled in these pools. Now that would be sweet.”
I went up stairs, slid out of shadow and started to step down when I realized I was still a seven foot giant rooster.
Vest guy shouted, “Fade me, it’s the king and he looks pissed. I knew we shouldn’t have taken the break.”
They both kneeled and bowed, touching their heads to the ground. I turned back into myself and went to examine my friends as they said, “Long live King Snipsnort.”
The statues looked intact, and the crates they were building were really nice. I sat on the corner of one of the frames and thumped on a panel attached to it. It had a good enough sound, but I needed to get my friends in water and out of the crates. I was about to ask the men to guard the statues for a moment while I found blankets to pad them, but I had a better solution.
I said, “Please rise.” I made gossamer sand to put in the bottom of one of the pools. I stepped in and the sand was too solid. I had forgotten that wet sand on a beach could be solid while dry sand was soft. Sort of the opposite of mud. I started playing around with gossamer fluff and came up with a sort of soggy horsehair sort of mess that stayed flexible when wet and would still pad the impact of stone on stone. Then I made gossamer ramps.
I got rid of them and kept trying. Finally a teeter-totter sort of thing let me lift one end of a crate. I tried to put a gossamer ice block under the end but that wasn’t going to be stable when I lifted the other end. I kept trying things until I got the first statue lifted. I made supports and levered the crate over a pool. Dispelling thin layers one after another, I finally got the statue, still held by the crate, into the pool. The second statue was easier since I had already done one and knew what I was doing.
I used gossamer cloths to dry the exposed parts of the statues and then put the bandages from the box marked for Mr. Hubert on him and the other set of bandages on Uncle Anthony. Mr. Hubert’s face was under water, so I had to do some more leverage work and then make a stone block to hold the crate in place at an angle.
By this time, I had an audience and displaced water had flooded the area. There were channels for the water to flow through, but I was wet and the floor was wet. I looked up at all the workers watching me and smiled. “These are good friends of mine. They got turned to stone but they need to stay right here and safe until they get better.”
I thought about it and sped up time in the Fairyland. I was hungry but with all the people here, I didn’t want to leave my friends alone. I didn’t want to take out candy bars because I could go through them quickly if I shared them. I sat on the lowest step and looked back at the crew that was still watching me.
I continued looking up at them until one of them got the idea. “We should get back to work.”
All but a couple of men left.
A man holding a hat said, “Long live King Snipsnort.”
Another man joined in part way through and then said it again. “-ive King Snipsnort, long live King Snipsnort. Great and powerful king, I have a bit of a request. Somehow several huge steel structures got in your courtyard. Do you think you could lever them out like you did the statues? We have no idea what the caretaker was doing or how he got these here.”
The man with the hat said, “Won’t work. Gossamer levers will dissipate the moment they touch steel. Great King, be careful though. All that steel may be a trap. There are a pair of scorch marks in a spot in the corner. I fear that some of your subjects may have died the second death.”
I stood. “Gentlemen, I thank thee for thy concern. I will, I think, keep all that steel to remind me to always be careful. When I look at it, I will keep mindful of the dangers that can face one if one is not prepared.”
They nodded and bowed. “Long live King Snipsnort.”
I was hungry or I might have started laughing from hearing “Snipsnort” one time too many. I asked, “Do you ever start to laugh when you hear the name Snipsnort?”
The man with the hat wobbled a hand. “At first yes, but after”— He turned to the other man— “What do you think, was it about six hundred years ago when we got the name?”
The man said, “Probably in our time, but I suspect it was not more than eighty years in Real. They shift time so oft and do it strangely so there is no way to keep track.”
He turned and shouted, “Henny, you were there when Snipsnort was named. How long ago was it?”
A woman came into view at the top of the stairway. “No telling for sure. It is hard to keep track of, but the closest I can come is eight-hundred and twenty-three years, sixty-four days and seven hours. I am sorry that I can’t be more useful what with me memory and all.”
She sat down, looked at me. “Long live King Snipsnort. So at the time Lady Sneezewort was alone at the throne room guarding the gateway. When the representative for the Registry came in on a survey of greater Fairylands, he assumed we had a Fairy King. He asked what name our Fairy king went by, Lady Sneezewort laughed since we hadn’t had one in ages. She said, ‘Snipsnort.’ Not sure what she meant by it, but the man took it as the name of our King and Fairyland. He bowed and said, ‘Well, then I will be thanking you and on my way, Lady—‘
“Well, Lady Sneezewort didn’t love her name and was laughing at the thought of having a King named Snipsnort. So she blurted out, ‘Anteater, Lady Anteater.’
“It was not until later that we found out that our Fairyland was named Snipsnort, and once it was entered it would take a Fairy king of this realm to change it. It was also found that Lady Sneezewort was officially titled as Lady Anteater and well stuck with it since she had given it to them herself and the Registry does not look kindly on jokes.”
I asked, “So you are used to the name, “Snipsnort?”
The man with the hat said, “Not merely used to it. We are quite proud of it.”
The other man said, “Proud enough to punch any Fairy foolish enough to call it, ‘Snipsnot.’”
I asked, “Does that happen a lot?”
He nodded. “Not terribly often, but if you visit another Fairyland and Dutchess Byebye isn’t around to beat the snipsnot out of anyone who says it, it’s almost the first thing other Fairies think to say.”
The woman nodded. “Apart from the beating. Our Dutchess Byebye doesn’t usually beat people. She prefers to reach down their throat and pull things out. She’s quite the terror, our Duchess Byebye.”
I stayed sitting by the statues until the last worker told me they would be shutting the gates and leaving. Then I took out the food Monroe had packed up for me and started eating. After eating, I made stainless steel fittings and doors in the basement to protect my friends. Then I made a bed so I could comfortably sleep next to them.
Waking up, I found I needed to shadow step out to the woods to take care of business. A couple of men armed with bows and swords were sitting concealed in the bushes. I hid in shadows to find out what they were up to.
One whispered. “Still, you have to admit, this is pretty sweet.”
The other nodded. “No question about it. I doubt anything is going to happen though.”
“Do you think we will get to meet him?”
“Probably, we are royal guards after all.”
“So cool. You have to admit it is pretty sweet having an actual king to guard.”
“Don’t get carried away, we don’t just get to kill anyone who approaches the manor.”
“I don’t know about that. I mean, we shout, Halt,’ or, ‘Who goes there,’ and they had better stop dead in their tracks and not even think about reaching for a weapon. Do you think we can put an enemy’s head on a spike if we have to kill them?”
“I don’t know about that. Byebye doesn’t keep heads anymore so that day may be gone.”
I decided not to step out of shadow and greet my loyal subjects. Instead I went back to the manor house and realized I had to get past wards to get in. As I used the key and opened the door, I felt something slide through shadow into the manor. I left the key in the door and chased it. I beat it to where the statues were and came out ready to fight.
One of the kittens that had come with me into Fairy stepped out of shadow and perched on top of the stairway.
The kitten narrowed its eyes at me. “Can you fix him?”
I asked, “You talk?”
The other kitten appeared near my feet. “I’m hungry.”
I said, “I need to go shut the door and get the key, but we can feed you and talk after that.”
#
I woke from a dream where I was in the hallway of a high school about to take a science test but I was still in a nine-year-old body and I still just had a second grade education. I was holding a large clock, like you might see on a wall, in both arms because a girl was following me and trying to snatch it. It was a disturbing dream and in parts, it felt real.
I got up from bed hungry.
#
Through the cracks where my stainless steel wall didn’t join perfectly to the tiled ceiling, I shadow stepped out to the woods. There were people outside the gate to the manor. From the woods I could smell food cooking down in the town below. I reconsidered my decision to stay here. At least at Bogview Castle they fed me.
Lady Anteater was trying to slow time. I didn’t let her. I wanted Uncle Anthony and Mr. Hubert back to normal and no longer helpless stone before I sped time back up. No one told me how long it was going to take, and as far as I could tell, I only had one way to find out and that involved waiting.
I had food in several backpacks, but I was having to use it to feed two kittens, and I had intended to use it when I was starving after transformation. I shadow stepped up to where the people were waiting to see if any of them had brought gifts of food. There were a pair of them arguing over who owned a parcel of land. I got the impression that it was big, and they were both doing well. Neither of them had brought any food to bribe me with so I wasn’t in the mood to settle their argument. That was that, hungry I wasn’t going to be fair to anyone.
When I slowed time, it was still early in the morning on Saturday. It was too early to summon most Goblins. Since Vic worked at a music store, and unless he was at the music festival, he was probably going to be up and at the store by ten. Maybe nine and he probably had to get up at least thirty minutes earlier, but I didn’t want to bother him.
I sat in the basement with the kittens eating sausage, cheese, and bread.
Fuzzy said, “We couldn’t find our yard. The house is gone.”
I said, “We are in a Fairyland. I need to figure out how I am going to feed you.”
White Gloves stopped licking the cheese she had between her paws. “We can feed ourselves, but the only thing with the smell of home is now a statue in a pool. I miss Mr. Hubert.”
I said, “Hopefully he will be back to normal soon.”
The cats both nodded to me like it was perfectly normal for a person to turn to stone and then turn back.
Fuzzy got up. “We want to sleep down here but there is no padding, and we can’t get back into the place easily. We have to leave to find food.”
I nodded. “I ‘ll have to work on that. Keep checking back here and I’ll try to take care of that soon.”
I thought about Dutchess Byebye and wondered if she had eaten yet. She wouldn’t have any trouble with getting food. She would probably just walk up, point, and tell them to give it to her.
I considered going to the caretaker’s house and seeing if there was any money there. He and his wife died while they were trying to kill me. Unless they had a will or something, I probably had as much right to the money as anyone. I was kind of disgusted with myself for even thinking it. I needed money but I didn’t want any taint so I started shadow stepping to the giant throne. I was nearly there when Lady Anteater tried to slow time down to match with Real. Since I was about to go to Real, I let her.