Olivia doesn’t know exactly how they get out of the Narwitches’ world. One minute, the three of them are gliding up, up, to what she assumes is the surface of the water, inside the squishy, smelly belly of the anglerfish. The very next minute, she and Oliver are standing on a patch of dirt in blinding sunlight — and Vellie is nowhere to be seen. Panicking, Olivia looks down at her left hand. She is relieved to see the little gray passport is still there. It’s hot to the touch, like when your fingers graze the cookie pan before you’re allowed to steal one fresh from the oven. The palm holding the rabbit passport has the faint imprint of the rabbit insignia, a still-tender burn mark but it’s rapidly fading. She is equally relieved to see her fingers are back to the way she’s used to: no more webbing between them. No more scales either, she notes with satisfaction as she checks her arms and legs. She’s back to being a regular human girl. She’s wearing the same clothes she was wearing when she descended that mysterious staircase from Paul’s bedroom. She shoves the still-warm passport deep inside the front pocket of her dark jeans, smiling as she does so. It feels good to be back inside her favourite jeans. Her fingers collide with the packet of long, pink sticks of bubble gum, apparently unscathed during the journey to the bottom of the sea. She pulls out a stick and savours the familiar sweet flavour and chewy mouthfeel, blowing a couple of joyful bubbles. She looks over to see Oliver has already extracted the Switch from the pocket of his hoodie. He looks like he’s about to turn it on and start playing his game when Olivia hears the most horrible commotion on the horizon. She grabs Oliver’s hand and marches them both closer to see what’s going on.

Olivia drags Oliver, Nintendo Switch in tow, over the crest of a a slight hill, which gives them a vantage point to see what’s happening in the valley below. Opposite their hill is a grove of what look like towering oak trees, their top branches growing as tall as the hill where Oliver and Olivia stand overlooking the valley.

“Oak trees can live for a thousand years,” says Olivia to Oliver. “And they can make approximately 10 million acorns over the span of their lives.”

“It looks like there are 10 million acorns down there now,” says Oliver. He’s right. Acorns are everywhere in the bottom of the valley. They run around in acute distress on little legs no fatter than a stray hair. A palpable, collective stress fills the air. (Acorns are notoriously unstable runners, which exacerbates their anxiety considerably.) The little round nut bodies are crashing into each other left, right and centre. They tumble in disarray. Tiny hatched hats fall off round heads. Tiny spindly arms reach frantically to reinstate them. They kick and scream and fight as hard as they can with their little hair-legs. The screaming is the worst part. Very high-pitched, a wailing of distress so acute and tormenting Olivia’s eyes stream with tears from the first instant the sound meets her ears. Oliver is bent into a little ball, hands covering his ears, rocking back and forth, unable to deal with it. Olivia would ordinarily have a fact to share about acorns, but she can’t think of anything. She is sure they are not supposed to be running around, though.

A ring of creatures have arranged themselves in a sort of wall to prevent the acorns’ escaping, and they seem completely unconcerned with the noise. Olivia assumes their senses have become dulled from over-exposure. Gradually, Oliver and Olivia hear a faint chant rising up to meet their ears. It almost drowns out the yelling acorns. The chant is very beautiful. Like an old hymn sung in unison into the lofty heights of a nearly-forgotten church, the chanting ascends the valley walls and seems to reverberate around in the air. Oliver slowly uncurls himself and they both strain to decipher the words. Olivia wonders if the air in this place is made of something different, something that echoes. Her fingers turn the bubble gum package over and over in her pocket as she contemplates what she’s seeing.

“They die so they might LIVE. They break to become beautiful. They die so they might LIVE. They suffer to sustain us.” Chant he little creatures all around, closing in on the distressed acorns. As they chant, the creatures step in time to a dance as if in collective trance. They loop and dip and slide to create interlacing, concentric circles around the panicked acorns. Their steps are so tight and coordinated there is no hope of a single acorn escaping through their ranks. It is like siege warfare. It is death by dance.

The chant breaks into a call-and-response:

“They die so we might LIVE.”

“Yes, they break to become our sustenance.”

“They die so we might LIVE,” (this from the first group of creatures again)

“They suffer to sustain us…” the others respond.

Olivia looks around for a leader, someone who appears to be in charge. If there is one she definitely can’t tell who it is. The little creatures appeare to be all the same. They look like tiny soldiers, each one in a small metal helmet worn between long ears. Olivia blinks a few times until she is sure of what she sees — yes, it appears that each of these tiny people has four arms. Down each of their backs hang what appear to be veined, translucent capes. Oliver and Olivia are both pondering their strange little outfits when all of a sudden a very aggressive whirring noise fills the air, as if a huge swarm of insects had suddenly arrived on the scene. In a perfectly ordered, almost military, fashion, the children see each small cape unfold one by one, and lift its bearer’s feet off the ground below.

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“They’re wings!” Olivia gasps. “Look, Oliver! They are tiny flying people.”

“They are fairies,” a reprimanding voice intones right behind them. The kids jump a little and then turn to see it’s just Vellie, back again in that same midnight blue robe, still twirling and twisting and spinning the marble-like orb in his lower two arms. “These are dragon fairies, not people,” Vellie sounds annoyed that they don’t know this already.

Olivia is trying to decide whether to defend her lack of knowledge with the explanation that none of these demographics are in her Grade Five textbook when it becomes suddenly apparent why Vellie called them dragon fairies. A great cloud of smoke rises up from the hovering droves of fairies, which the children see a split-second before the flames.

“They’re breathing FIRE!” Oliver exclaims.

“Yes. They are Dragon Faires,” Vellie all but rolls his eyes at the children again, but now Olivia can tell something is making him emotional. His eyes are all wet and he reaches into his robe to withdraw a handkerchief woven from delicate dandelion fluff to wipe the tears running down his face.

“Vellie! You’re crying.” Oliver goes over to take one of his long-fingered pale hands. To Olivia’s great surprise, Vellie allows this.

“The Acorn Sacrifice. It always gets me, even after all these moons,” Vellie mumbles.

The Dragon Fairies are now hovering almost at eye-level, far above the valley below. They have started to match their melodic chanting with a sort of airborne dance, the flames from their mouths interjecting to punctuate crescendos at the end of each repetition. They dart around, through each other, missing each other’s madly whirring wings by under a millimetre. It looks impossible, the distances they kept between one another — the kids can’t believe they aren’t crashing.

The acorns stop running around in distress. Most of them lie, exhausted, on one side, tiny spindly hair-legs and arms collapsed across their little round bodies, hats askance. Some of their hatched hats have fallen off completely, their owners too spent even to roll a few centimetres in order to put them back on. At least half the acorns are bald now, sitting, laying, faces bearing hunted looks. There is a skeleton crew of Dragon Fairies still on the ground, maintaining a perfect formation around the perimeter to make sure none of them escape.

On and on goes the sky-dance. The spectacle is completely mesmerizing. Olivia blinks and realizes she, too, has a watery trail running down her cheek, just like Vellie. Oliver still holds onto the end of Vellie’s long fingers as the three of them stare into the sky together. Time seems to fade away. The kids have no idea how long they stand there, staring at the repetitive dance.

Suddenly, the dancing stops. Dragon Fairies are hovering, mid-twirl, mid-swoop. It’s like when kids at Oliver and Olivia’s school play freeze-tag, but in the air. A fresh-looking acorn is walking resolutely toward the bedraggled group on the ground. It cuts through the wall of Fairies standing guard and lift a megaphone, made of a curled leaf, to its tiny mouth.

“I will be sacrificed!” Thunders the acorn’s voice from the leaf-megaphone. Olivia wonders how the voice can possibly be amplified so much through a small dead leaf, but it continues to thunder through the valley. “The rules demand more of us sacrifice ourselves, my dear community. I will tell you why I am doing this. Some of you will want to join me.” It takes a deep breath and goes on: “Look around us. This is the Oak Grove, the source of life which all of us call home, as do the Dragon Fairies. As you are well aware, both our societies depend on the health of this very grove. My dear community, if we run from the sacrifice, if we resist, we remain as we are: small and defenceless, only to cower in fear at this same ceremony during the next moon cycle. Our arms are weak. Our legs are weak. Look at you: half of you can’t even keep your caps! You’re exhausted and pathetic.” The acorns collapsed in exhausted heaps before it blush a little and slide their eyes from left to right, observing the sorry state of their fellows, which only mirrors their own. “BUT,” Says the acorn speaking into the leaf-megaphone. “If we give up, if we sacrifice ourselves, we have the chance to become great. We have the chance to become those oak trees themselves. For in our death, we can achieve far more than by staying alive in our current form.”

It pauses for a long time, as if it practiced it that way. A couple of the bedraggled acorns stand wearily to their feet. One or two lean on larger acorns for support. The speech seems to have inspired these few sad souls. The vast majority of the acorns remain as they are, a stray cough or grunt the only signs of life. Some seem genuinely unable to move, lying on their sides with their hair-limbs in floppy disarray.

“Who is WITH ME?” Roars the lead acorn into the leaf. “Every moon cycle, the dragon fairies take by force what all of us need for sustenance. They force us to do what’s required to sustain our home. Come with me and be joyful. For we can do this by choice!”

The handful of acorns who stood to their feet wobble forward. “We will die so they might live!” One of them shouts with tired enthusiasm. The others gradually chime in until there is a chant in unison. The dragon fairies strike up their own dance and chant until two groups are joined in the melodic chanting.

“Wow,” says Olivia out loud. “That one acorn really changed everything by sacrificing itself and getting the other ones to do it too.”

Vellie’s eyes are dry again.

“Silly little spindly-legged wretches,” says Vellie in response. “Every moon cycle one of them is convinced by the Dragon Fairy Guard to give almost that same speech so they will be convinced to go by choice. Acorns have such short memories.” He says this with disdain, like he is proud of the dragon fairies for taking advantage of a lesser species. “Ah well I suppose it offers those nutty little beings some belief in the nobility of their species. Clever fairies…”

Olivia regards Vellie’s four arms with new interest. The lower ten fingers are still spinning furiously around the orb. She can’t help but think that Vellie’s shape, especially the four arms, suspiciously resembles that of the dragon fairies.’ Almost like he is a giant replica of one of them. She is thinking about how to ask Vellie if he has wings under that robe when the air is filled with an overwhelming rushing sound and the passport burns against her thigh through her jeans pocket as they are ported away from the dragon fairies’ world.