by Ren Curylo
“Do you want to enter? We can meet the Elves if you’d like. They have a King as well as an Elder who, I think, tends to visitors and the like.”
“Who is their King?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know. I don’t spend much time with the creatures of Lerien. They all have their desires, I can usually hear their yearnings all at once, and it does tend to drive me crazy. I can shut them out for short periods of time, which is what I’m doing now.”
“Oh, Rizvan,” Anoba said sympathetically. “I’m so sorry. I had forgotten what a hardship it is for you.”
“I manage,” he said. “Shall we?”
Anoba shook her head, feeling suddenly but emphatically reluctant to reveal herself or her cousin. “Let’s don’t,” she said.
“Why? I thought you wanted to come here. Isn’t this place significant?”
“Can you help me cloak it?”
“Cloak it?” he asked, puzzled.
Anoba nodded. “Yes, can we make it so it’s not noticed or thought about by most folks?”
“Anyone in particular?” Rizvan asked.
She shrugged. “Mostly others in our Envoy and it may be a good idea to keep the humans out of the area as well.”
Rizvan narrowed his eyes and looked at his cousin. “Us? Which of us?”
“Ársa,” she whispered. “I’d like to block it from Ársa, so he doesn’t come here.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible since Ársa is our commander, Anoba.”
“I don’t mean to block him,” she said. “Just kind of hide this place from him. You know, like out of sight, out of mind.”
“Why?”
Anoba shook her head and said sadly, “Mo dhia, Rizvan, I wish I knew. I have these dreams and they made me feel so strongly. They lead me in surprising directions. I can’t explain it. I know this is something that must be.”
“I don’t think we can block him from this forever. He will eventually be able to overcome it and when he does we can’t stop him from coming here.”
“That’s true,” Anoba said. “But we can perhaps delay the inevitable.”
Rizvan nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll help you. The best we can do is keep Ársa from thinking about the Elves. Maybe add a little flourish in there that makes him forget quickly enough when they do pass through his thoughts. It may last three or four hundred, but I wouldn’t expect must more than that. Will that help your venture?”
Anoba sighed in relief. “That will help, I’m sure. Thank you so much, Rizvan. I appreciate your help.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “That’s what families are for, isn’t it?”
Anoba smiled. “What do we do first?”
“Take my hand and we’ll work on this together. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to complete the cloaking.”
She took his hand and followed his lead as they set to work hiding Lasahala Run from Ársa.
66 years later Imber 18, 383
The Piney Woods Til’gaviel
Moriko & Adamen Adamen’s gait matched Moriko’s quite well since they were nearly the same height. Moriko was more muscular and used to traversing various terrains on foot. Adamen had a frail Fae appearance that was more deceiving than accurate. While Moriko had more stamina for walking, Adamen could fly effortlessly, which went a long way toward keeping up during their long trek.
“Tell me again why we can’t just Travel here?” Adamen asked, “Since I know you can do it in a matter of seconds.”
“Because walking gives me the opportunity to observe the forests and their inhabitants and listen for any signs of distress.”
“Nothing here needs attention, I can assure you. This place is infested with more different kinds of Fae than you can shake a stick at. Believe me, Moriko, if something was wrong here, someone would know it.”
“Point taken, Adamen, but since there aren’t many humans in this place, word will travel slower than you might think. Besides, half the fun of an adventure is getting there. Tell me about these Fae creatures you want to show me. What are they called again?”
“Tigmuc,” Adamen said.
“I’ve never heard of them. I wonder who gathered those from the old world.”
“I wouldn’t venture a guess,” Adamen said. “Apparently someone did. I can’t imagine where else they would have come from.”
“Nor can I, but I’m going to look into it and see if I can find who recruited them for the trip,” Moriko agreed. “What do you know about them?”
“Nothing. I’ve never seen one either. I had a conversation with a Pixie I knew back in the old world last week. I go out adventuring with a troop of Pixies now and again,” Adamen said. “She told me about these guys. I wanted to see for myself, but I didn’t want to go alone.”
“I’m always up for an adventure, especially when I get to see new things. How much farther is it?”
“I think it’s just up a little ways. They might be hard to find, though. I’m not expecting them to have any kind of village or anything.”
“Well, we have plenty of time to look around for them.”
They walked along together for another ten minutes. “Look, there’s a clearing up ahead, I think. It looks like the path widens anyway,” Moriko said.
“How far into The Piney Woods are we?”
Moriko pulled her gan-sreang from her pocket and activated it. “Here’s a map,” she said, showing it to Adamen. “That blue pointer is where we are.”
“And we came in from Isil’gania Province, and now we’re just over the provincial line in Larandir, is that right?”
“That’s right. We’re still heading west, so if this clearing up ahead is where they live, we can place them just over the provincial line. Let’s go see, shall we?”
“I’m all in,” Adamen said.
They went forward quietly, scarcely daring to breathe for fear of scaring their quarry away before they got a chance to see them. Moriko walked carefully, trying not to crunch the sand in the path beneath her feet. She kept her gan-sreang out in hopes of photographing these new creatures they sought to see. Adamen flew beside her, inches above the ground, determined to make no noise at all.
The two women glanced at one another as they stepped into an area that was more a wide spot in the path than an actual clearing, but it was the most amazing thing either of them could remember seeing for quite some time.
“What in Ifreann is that?”
Moriko stared for a moment with her mouth open trying to understand what she viewed. “It can’t be,” she said in awe and amazement. She stepped forward, curiosity overtaking her sense of caution. Adamen followed closely behind her, walking now.
“Where have I seen this before?” Adamen asked looking perplexed at the large table sitting in the middle of the wider pathway.
Moriko nodded. “It is a model train. There used to be big ones in the old world that carried freight and passengers across the land.”
“Oh,” Adamen said, snapping her fingers. “I remember seeing something similar, all rusted out and lying on the ground.”
“Yes, all of the trains in the old world were reduced to rubble centuries before we left there. This one appears to be solar powered.”
Adamen looked up through the towering trees. “Is that a Fae? I have never heard of Solar Fae.”
“No, solar is from the sun,” Moriko said, trying to reason what she was seeing as the small model train chugged past them on the track. “There’s not enough wind here and something is powering it.”
“It must be Fae powered, Fae magic,” Adamen said.
“It’s not like any train I’ve ever seen, and there is certainly nothing like it on Lerien. The humans haven’t developed enough here to have trains.”
“Maybe these Fae carried on something from the old world.”
“Trains were long extinct in the old world, too,” Moriko said. “But look at it; it’s so bright and colorful.”
“What are those things rid
ing on it?”
“They appear to be small figures of some kind,” Moriko said. She moved closer to study it better, falling silent as she did.
The train had an engine and a caboose with at least a dozen small flat cars in between. It was painted in bright, glossy primary colors. The flat cars each had one small figure standing in the center. The little passengers, no more four inches tall, were all nearly identical in height, though an occasional one was slightly shorter than the others. Most of them had pudgy potbellies. They were furry with vertical stripes, some pale grey with darker grey stripes, some pale and darker brown; others were similar shades of blue. They all stood at attention, each wearing a small metal bucket for a hat. They had round teddy bear ears jutting out angularly from beneath their buckets.
“Are they real?” Adamen asked in a whisper.
Moriko leaned forward to look at them more closely. “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “They sure look real, but I can’t even see them breathe and they aren’t moving at all.”
“They’re riding the train around in circles,” Adamen said, barely suppressing a giggle. “They’re so cute.”
“They are certainly quite cute,” Moriko agreed. “They have a tunnel to ride through and everything,” she noted as they watched the tiny train engine disappear into a perfectly sized tunnel.
“Look at this pond here, Moriko,” Adamen said pointing to an area at the opposite end of the table from where the miniature train chugged through the tunnel.
“That pond looks like the one north of here,” she said. “I camp there sometimes.”
“They have a campfire there near the pond.” She moved her hand over the tiny pile of sticks and firewood placed at the edge of the pond. It burst into flames and burned as if it were a full sized, real campfire, the likes of which Moriko built nearly every night in her roams through Lerien’s forests.
“This is amazing and weird,” Moriko said. “Look, here’s a chair at the front of the table. I wonder who built this train.” Moriko, drawn to the chair, sat in it, with her back to the table. “Why did I feel I needed to sit here?” she muttered.
Adamen either didn’t hear her or ignored her. She was riveted on the train, watching it intently as it continued to make its way out of the tunnel and down the slope toward the pond. “It’s a slow train,” she noted.
Moriko looked over her shoulder at the train. “Yes, it is, but the fact that it works at all, out here in the woods, is pretty amazing.”
“I think I should take this little guy’s bucket off his head,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Adamen,” Moriko said. “We don’t know anything about these creatu…” She stopped speaking as she watched Adamen pluck a bucket from the head of the fellow standing on a car toward the middle of the train.
“Look, he’s got a little mushroom on his head, balanced between his ears,” Adamen said. A scream tore from her lips as the creatures behind that fellow flew from their perches and swarmed in her face. The one missing his bucket stood as still as the ones in front of him, but the train had stopped. She tried to swat them off as they swarmed all around her face and neck, slapping, biting, pinching, and shrieking in shrill operatic tones.
Moriko looked from Adamen, who was valiantly swatting at her assailants and shrieking as loudly as they were, to the halted train. She reached out, snatched the tiny bucket from her friend’s hand, and replaced it on the bareheaded creature, knocking its mushroom off in the process. She braced herself for a similar assault but found instead, that all the creatures stopped attacking Adamen, and one by one, returned to their place in line on the train cars. As soon as the last little fellow settled back where he started, the train began moving again as if nothing had interrupted it.
“Well, shit,” Adamen said, sitting down in the sand with a firm flop. “That was frightening.
Moriko returned to her seat on the chair and vehemently agreed. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking at Adamen, assessing the multitude of scratches and bite marks on her face, neck, and hands.
“I think so,” Adamen said, looking at the backs of her hands. “Is my face worse?”
Moriko nodded. “Come here and I’ll heal it up for you a bit.”
“You can heal?”
“I can heal you and other wild animals,” she said with a grin. “I’m not so good at healing myself.”
Adamen moved beside the chair and sat on the ground close enough that Moriko could reach her. Moriko took Adamen’s hands in hers and healed them first before moving upward to cup her face. As she was finishing up, a movement on the opposite side the chair caught her eye. “What the Ifreann?” she said, turning toward the movement.
A long, furry, blunt-ended tail hung down from the seat of the chair, draping over the side and dangling nearly to the ground. Alternating rings of deep sable and pale creamy brown adorned the lush, soft tail. Moriko picked it up gently in her hand. The fur was as soft as moonlight.
“Oh, mo dhia,” Adamen exclaimed. “It’s so cute. Look at its little face.”
Something wiggled behind Moriko in the chair and she looked down at it. The animal attached to the long tail had a body of nearly equal length. It was chubby and soft. It had a deep sable colored stripe running the length of its body, from neck to tail, right down its spine. There were large sable spots on either side. Its legs were relatively short with soft sable striping close to its feet. The feet were catlike, Moriko noted as it crawled around from behind her to move into her lap. It looked up at her with dark brown eyes that sparkled. Moriko was almost taken aback to discover that it had a wet, brown pig-like snout.
“Is this a Tigmuc?” Adamen asked as she patted the creature on the head. “Look, its little face is stripey too, and it has a raccoon’s mask.”
“I see that,” Moriko said, stroking the animal the length of its body as it sat in her lap.
The creature licked Adamen’s hand enthusiastically.
“Be careful it doesn’t bite you, Adamen,” Moriko warned. “We aren’t familiar with this creature.”
“Do you think it’s really Fae?” she asked.
The train running on the table behind Moriko sounded a loud, shrill horn. Adamen stopped petting the animal and stood to look at it. She moved a step or two away, watching the train roll past on the small tracks. “This whole place is strange,” she muttered. She spotted the mushroom lying beside a tiny boulder near the tracks and moved forward to pick it up. “Look at this,” she said, bringing it over to where Moriko sat.
“It came off the guy’s head when you snatched is bucket off earlier,” Moriko said.
“What is it?”
“It looks like a mushroom.”
“Hmm,” Adamen said.
Moriko saw the expression on Adamen’s face change. She said, “Don’t eat that,” just as Adamen popped the small fungus into her mouth.
“It tastes like…” Adamen stopped talking and her eyes grew wide and slightly bulging. “Uh-oh,” she said before the air made a sharp popping sound and she transformed into a creature identical to the one who sat in Moriko’s lap.
“Adamen,” Moriko said with a slightly panicked tone.
The creature in Moriko’s lap laughed softly. “She be a’right,” it whispered.
“You can talk?”
“You hear I can.”
“How do I get Adamen back to herself?”
Adamen twisted around, looking at her new body shape. With her cat-like paws, she felt herself as best she could. She turned and took the long, blunt tail in her sharp teeth. She giggled.
“Th’shimmer, it won’t last long. It never do on humans.”
“She isn’t a human,” Moriko said.
“Uh-oh,” the creature said. “She not Fae, is she?”
“Yes,” Moriko said. “She’s a Lilitu.”
“Oh, well, then,” the creature said, “it’a be a while. Maybe a hundred years, maybe a thousand.”
“What?” Adamen shrie
ked.
“What can we do to return her to normal?”
“Just be calm,” the creature said with a reasonable tone. “Be patient.”
“What are you?” Adamen asked crawling up into Moriko’s lap to join the creature she now looked exactly like.
“I a Tigmuc,” the creature said. “I name is Izett. Me am the leader of our drift.”
“Your troop name is a drift?” Moriko asked.
“Yes,” Izett said. “This carnival we do once a year. You happen along at the right time.”
“Carnival? You mean this train?”
“Yes,” Izett said. The animal sniffed the air and leaned toward the bag Moriko wore at her waist. “You has candy in that bag, miss,” it said.
“Maybe,” Moriko said.
“He wants candy, Moriko,” Adamen said.
“She,” Izett said.
“She?” Adamen repeated.
“She,” Izett said. “I is a she.”
“Oh, sorry,” Adamen said. “She wants candy,” she corrected.
“We can has candy?”
“I’ll see what I’ve got.” Moriko shifted carefully so she could reach inside her bag without knocking Adamen and Izett off her lap. “I have some chocolate covered mints,” she said, pulling a bag of candy from her pouch. “I bought them last week at a confectioner’s shop in Wexford.”
“I may has one?” Izett asked.
“Of course,” Moriko said. She pulled a small ball of candy from the bag and held it out to Izett.
The creature shifted from her spotted pig form into one of the creatures who were riding on the train behind her. She took a bite of the candy and rolled her eyes in pleasure. “We loves mint,” it said. “We loves chocolate.” Izett jumped up and leaped over Moriko’s shoulder to land on the table beside the pond. When the train neared her, the creature stepped up to the track and stood on a switch hidden beneath a large-leafed plant. The train stopped short, knocking each of the creatures from their cars. They tumbled off and over the ground.
They jumped up, clearly unhurt, buckets still soundly on their heads, and turned questioningly to Izett. “Why you stops the ride?” they asked in unison.
