faery

The forest is full of goblins. They guard the fifty-one pathways to the docks. When people walk past, the guards turn to rocks, and sometimes, someone particularly observant will say:

“Oh, look, an old mine entrance,”

Their friends won’t listen, and soon that someone goes off on their way.

The mine entrances are surrounded by mossy banks and at the bottom, where no one looks, is a trap door, and only the goblins in guard know its key.

We found an entrance quite by mistake, my sister and I. Being only two and three, we were so short and so fat that the goblins mistook us for some ladies passing by, and ushered us through.

"Tonight's a beetle themed do!"

The trap door opened with a whisper, and down a glittering, sliding tunnel we went.

It was night on the docks, and the beetles, as large as boats, flew among the shreds of starlike sky. My sister and I fell in with the goblin ladies, who all assumed we had come from abroad. There were tall and small on the dancing squares, and after we left the bouncing castle where the faery held their annual meetings, we were led to see the sea as it spilled into clear streams to cool the inside of the mountain.

They warned us not to go too deep, where the furnaces were, and we obeyed and wandered back up to the docks. We spotted the monsters in the loch, and when they waved us in we swam to meet them. They laughed when we paddled back to shore.

It was then that the sun rose on the world beneath the forest. We embraced the ladies and so we saw the goblins nod. We ran to their helping hands and up and out through the trap doors we went.