by E. Archer
“What about the fairies?”
“They’ll have served their purpose.”
“Oh. Okay.” Ralph looked at all the fairies jubilantly marching before him, all ready to serve their purpose. “You know, Cecil,” he said, “we could take this army of fairies to the other farms instead. With a force this large, we could easily liberate them all.”
“Then the Duchess would be forewarned. No way.”
“You wouldn’t have to attack Chessie. The fairies could all go live in that Chumpy Forest.”
“And what then?” Cecil scoffed. “We wait until the day that those with all the power decide to come track us down? We live lives half-lived, hoping for the miracle of acceptance and liberation to wander upon us? That’s no way to carry on, Ralph. I’m not going to work within the system.”
“I get it,” Ralph said. “This is your chance to right some wrongs. And you’re certainly doing it in the most dramatic way possible. But you’re taking all these fairies down with you. The most powerful among them makes sparkles, Cecil. If Chessie has more than two guards, we don’t have a chance —”
“Now, I think we can both agree that’s an overstatement —”
“What I’m saying is, if those unicorns survived, if Chessie is present and alive and ready to oppose us, then we’re already at even odds. And if we’re heading to the capital, she’s probably got hundreds of guards. All sorts of other monsters, too. Dragons and stuff.”
Cecil spat. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no such thing as dragons.”
Ralph looked at the pixie train before them. They were singing songs to the birds, passing notes when they thought their captains weren’t looking, struggling to take wing under the weight of pencil swords.
“This seems to be a lot more about your own stardom than their welfare.”
Cecil growled and cuffed Ralph on the shoulder. “Take that back! They want to save their kind. I’m giving them hope.”
“You’re ridiculous.” Ralph said. “Turn them around right now.”
“This is my wish,” Cecil sniffed. “And if you can’t take that, we don’t want you with us. No one invited you along, big boy. Go home and work through math problems all night, or whatever you do for fun.”
A number of fairies had surreptitiously worked themselves toward Ralph and Cecil, to eavesdrop better. Cecil maneuvered to block Ralph from their view. “Look,” Cecil said, dropping his hand to his sword hilt. “I don’t want to do this, but I can’t have a dream-killer on my march. Their spirits are already so low. They don’t need you making them feel hopeless.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll be quiet.”
Sneaking a look around to confirm he was being watched, Cecil reared back and punched Ralph hard on the chin.
“What was that for?” Ralph yelled, suddenly on the ground and clutching his jaw.
“I will not tolerate anything but total success,” Cecil called loudly. As he and Ralph had been marching at the end of the column, when Cecil quickened his pace to join his fairy underlings, Ralph found he was fully alone.
CHAPTER XXIV
Alone, of course, but for the basket of fire-burping bunnies. They cooed and nattered from beneath their gingham blanket, their sweet gibbering only making Ralph feel all the more lame. He sat beneath a tree and spent half an hour feeling very sorry for himself.
His thoughts swirled in a depressed spiral, descending from his rejection by Cecil to the plight of the fairies, to his own death by Shambling Mound Distemper, to his inability to get out of this wish even if he wanted to, to his parents and his cats and his old friends, to the fact that he didn’t get a MonoMyth job, to his getting teased way back for creating Sir Laurelbow, which was the same time his parents informed him about their now-very-sensible wish prohibition, which was what made him curious enough to get into all of this in the first place. He wondered, as he pondered the list of failures: Was he an eternal loser?
Ralph got himself sulky indeed. Even the bunnies’ loving nibbles on the fringes of the jeans beneath his doublet did little to pluck his spirits. I wish I could tell you that he eventually came to some revelation that gave him the courage to go chase after the fairy army.
But he didn’t. He just got tired of being gloomy.
Ralph gathered the bunnies (they had wandered from the basket to feast on the sweet grasses nearby), placed them in the basket, and bounded down the road toward the capital. Realizing that he looked silly skipping along with a basket of bunnies, he switched to a cooler gait, a sort of fist-clenched jog.
The castle was as castles are envisioned on film: turrets made more for moony princesses than for siege defense, a moat filled with alligators whose sole job seemed to be to open and close their jaws, grass-lined streets that might well have been cobbled with sugar cubes. In the center of it all rose a multicolored keep, with a neatly tiled rainbow roof.
Lacking the requisite army for forcible entry, Ralph joined the line of peasants filing across the lowered drawbridge. “Hello!” he called to the scrutinizing guards, and pointed obscurely at the basket of bunnies. They let him pass; apparently the combination of jeans and bunnies was too odd for a troublemaker.
Some of the homes were of older construction, Tudor buildings of wood and white plaster, but the remainder were made of fairies. Those constructed of dead fairies were bad enough — sprite legs and arms roped together to make beams, wings knitted to make roofs if they were opaque, windows if they were clear. Some of the buildings showed a perverse sense of humor — welcome mats composed of fairy feet, knockers fashioned from molded fairy fingernails. Others were of a simpler style, thousands of corpses roped together in clean lines.
But the buildings made of live fairies were worse. Since fairies take their nourishment from the ether in dew, a builder is saved the trouble of poisoning or beheading the lot if he works with them live. Roped or cemented in place, they stand still and stare out at the world, doing their best to keep their feet and wings out of one another’s eyes.
Ralph kept to the shadows as he followed the crowds streaming toward the keep. Minarets rose from its confectionary walls like baubles of multi-hued glass. Ralph arrived at the central square just as the duchess had begun demonstrating, of all things, how to use an exercise ball.
She was wearing an oversized tiara and a long-trained lavender gown, which she had hitched up to mid-thigh in order to straddle a fairy-size sphere. In fact, Ralph craned to see, the ball was one obscenely fattened and de-winged fairy.
“As you can observe,” Chessie said, her words echoed and amplified by a fairy microphone, “the exercise is easy to accomplish. Simply squeeze your legs” — the fairy turned purple as she demonstrated — “and as you feel more comfortable, intensify your pace. The sensation will spread all the way up your legs. Oneandtwoandthreeandfour” — the fairy turned deeper shades, culminating in indigo — “and then release.” The fairy’s color returned to normal as he deflated, pitching Chessie forward. She kicked him, and he took in his breath again and held it.
The crowd — a few hundred strong, many of them armored — cheered. Ralph scanned about for Cecil and the fairies, and was dismayed to find they were nowhere to be seen.
Have you ever lain upon the grass and thought yourself very much alone, staring at the shoots and blades for an age before seeing the many small creatures who have made a home there? A similar feeling came over Ralph as he stood in the courtyard. Gray fairies were camouflaged against the stone of the walls; red fairies had spread their wings along the fabric of the royal canopy. A popsicle vendor, Ralph noted, had a supply of wares that twitched and giggled. And that cloaked vendor, he was delighted to discover, was Cecil. He caught Ralph’s eye, paused for a tense moment, and then winked.
Ralph made his way toward him, careful to avoid Chessie’s line of sight, leaping from the shade of one large man to another, crossing them like so many stepping stones.
“Cecil,” Ralph said as he discreetly sidled next to the vendor. “I’m so gl
ad I’ve found you. Look, I’m sorry for what I said. This is your quest, go for it.”
Cecil wavered a moment and then nodded. “Welcome back, man. Now, back into the shadows. You’re drawing attention.”
Ralph secreted himself in the chilly confines of Cecil’s fairy-lined popsicle cart.
“We’re set to begin,” Cecil said, his lips just visible within his cowl.
“Excellent. Still the same plan?”
“Yep.”
And then, though they were about to commence an intricate assault, Ralph and Cecil found themselves with surprisingly little to say to each other. Ralph still felt deeply ambivalent about Cecil’s motivations, but his loneliness left him no choice but to join with him. Together they mutely followed Chessie’s weight-loss propaganda, Cecil gripping the hilt of his concealed sword, Ralph gripping the wicker handle of his bunny basket.
“Where did you find those bunnies, by the way?” Cecil asked.
“Along the road.”
“Just sitting there?”
“Yes.”
“And the basket?”
“They were already in the basket.”
“So these bunnies were sitting in a basket on the side of the road, waiting for you to pick them up?”
Ralph nodded.
Both leaned in to inspect the bunnies. They were snoozing in concentric circles, each bunny’s snores only slightly ruffling the cottontail of the bunny before him. Then a bunny startled from her sleep and chittered at the sky, before quickly resuming her bunny slumber. Upon seeing her eyes, Cecil gasped and Ralph dropped the basket entirely. The rabbit’s expression had been pure malevolence. And pure malevolence is a depth of evil rarely encountered; merely glimpsing it scars the cornea.
She was a perceptive bunny and, soon realizing the ruse was up, took action. First standing up on her hind legs, she scanned about, spat in Ralph’s face, leaped up to eye level, and then dive-bombed Cecil’s mock-fairy-popsicle cart.
“Fire-burping bunny” is perhaps a misnomer. Compared to their more noteworthy feats, the burps are but a charming idiosyncrasy.
The exploding rabbit flung dead and dying fairies into the air in a large-scale version of that snakes-in-a-can trick. The crowd became a jumble of flailing limbs covered with peasant blood and fairy-wing confetti. The remaining fairies camouflaged about the courtyard took to the air in a chorus of terrified squeaks.
Cecil found himself beyond the radius of the bunny’s initial blast, and was only knocked off his feet. Ralph, however, was flung a hundred feet into the air, and survived the fall back to earth only by crushing a dozen fairies similarly launched. The basket of bunnies came skidding to rest on its side near him. Ralph staggered toward it through the slurry of wings and tiny limbs. The bunnies had emerged crawling with mechanical determination. At the exposed bottom of the basket was a note:
XOXO,
Evil Duchess Chessie
Another rabbit sprang into the air, this time exploding in a nova over the crowd’s heads. Peasants and bits of peasants — a mixture of fairy and human varieties — went flying. A third bunny prepared to leap as Ralph held his ground against the stampeding mob. He grabbed the rabbit, shoved it back in the basket, and wrapped the gingham blanket snugly around the mass of them, their eyes glowing through the fabric.
The haze of vaporized fairy juice had thinned enough in the air that Ralph was able to locate Chessie. She had retreated to her mansion door, against which she had barricaded herself with a phalanx of armed guards. The orders she barked at the soldiers were lost under the tumult of the crowd.
Ralph dipped his hand into the basket, pulled out the first bunny he reached, cocked his arm, and launched it. It soared into the air, little rabbit limbs splayed, all four lucky feet pointing to the corners of the courtyard, and disappeared from view in the cluster of guards.
Nothing happened.
You see, bunnies will not tolerate being treated as hand grenades. They are creatures of free will — and no creature likes to blow itself up unless it has come to that conclusion on its own.
Ralph, unaware of the intricacies of bunny psychology, launched rabbit after rabbit.
Chessie realized Ralph’s plotting and, screeching all the while, frantically fitted keys into the mansion door as the bunnies continued to rain. They impacted the walls, bounced off the steel helmets of the guards, came to rest in roof gutters. But still no explosions. Ralph was down to his last bunny when he saw Chessie finally wrestle the door open. Her escape route secured, she paused long enough to shoot a victory bolt of energy from her palm, aiming straight at the center of Ralph’s chest.
But while her magical bolt was sizzling into existence, Ralph launched his final projectile. He lifted the last bunny by its struggling hind legs, swung it once around his head, and let go. It screeched as it flew on its collision course, for its rabbity intelligence afforded it all too much knowledge of its destiny. When it struck the bolt of energy, a fireball erupted that seared the nearby guards to the ground as easily as ladlefuls of pancake batter.
If the explosion of one fire-burping bunny was calamitous, a bunny chain reaction was Armageddon. The courtyard became so instantly hot that the heat turned into sound instead. By the time the mass of explosions was over, every living creature in the courtyard had been hurled to the ground and deafened. The armored guards were unable even to stand, the plates of their armor were quaking so intensely.
Ralph quickly shook off his daze, as only heroes are capable of doing. The front hall of the royal mansion had blown off, revealing singed parlor furniture and a checkered hallway leading into a labyrinthine interior, all of it burned to sepia tones.
Ralph dashed toward the smoldering entrance as a cloaked figure stole across the courtyard to intercept him.
CHAPTER XXV
The figure stood in front of Ralph and pulled back his hood. It was Cecil.
The spectacular demise of the bunnies left the capital in silence, except for the buzzing of sound-flattened corpses. The surviving citizenry were passed out on the ground, dreaming of heavy metal concerts. Their livestock were licking their wounds and gazing nervously at their own bellies. The fairy militia had been all but obliterated. Ralph and Cecil stood before the smoking husk of the mansion entrance, steeling their courage.
They nodded at each other and started into the mansion, scrambling single file. Shortly after they disappeared down the long hallway, a third figure picked her way over the rubble and followed them, unnoticed.
In Cecil’s loudly voiced opinion, the mansion contained far too many rooms. He went to great lengths to liberate the fairies in each chamber they came to, but he could only suffer through so much untying of fairy knots and ripping of wings free from varnish before he grew bored. After rescuing a set of personable fairy twins from a life of bookendry, Ralph suggested that Cecil consider delegating to them the more mundane chores of sprite liberation.
“I suppose so,” Cecil conceded, then gave the twins a rundown of what the task involved.
As they proceeded through the palace, Ralph and Cecil were compelled to ignore the pleading cries of the fairies and weakly inform them that help was on the way; but, as Cecil pompously reminded Ralph, thus was war.
When choosing to decorate her home in resentful fairies, a drawback Chessie ought to have considered was the abundant information they would eventually provide about her whereabouts. Cecil learned from the exhortations of a duster that Chessie had ascended to the second floor. Once there, a polished-fairy mirror informed them that Chessie had the moment before fled yet higher.
As they proceeded through the palace, the supply of fairy informants began to dwindle, until they reached the seventh-floor ballroom, where they were shocked to find no fairies at all.
The entire level was a broad dance floor, lit on one side by a bay of windows. It was empty, and there were no stairs to a higher floor.
“Do you think she’s here somewhere?” Ralph asked.
“I’d be su
rprised if she could climb this far up. She’s a lazy aristocrat, after all,” Cecil panted.
Ralph was sure he had something pertinent to say in return, but his words vanished entirely when the floor was suddenly illuminated in radiant colors.
A cloud had moved above, allowing sunlight to pass through a skylight and fill the ceiling with blues, yellows, and luminescent blacks. Ralph stared upward and saw they were standing beneath what seemed a giant stained-glass ceiling. But it was unlike any glass Ralph had ever known — the ceiling was a patchwork of colored gases, hovering at a uniform height and overlapping one another to create ever-shifting shades at their borders.
From the center of the multicolored cloud hung a wavering teal ladder of gas.
“Shall we?” Ralph asked.
“Not sure we have much other option,” Cecil muttered.
It may be difficult to imagine how one climbs a gas ladder. But one must remember that a gas is just a solid whose atoms are spaced farther apart. Even as your narrator, I can’t speak with total surety, but my theory is this: If you try really hard, you can be sure your atoms are in the right position to rest on the gas’s atoms, and you can climb a gas ladder as you would a ladder of the more conventional variety. You just have to concentrate. Birds and moths know how to do it every time they fly. Trees know how, when they use the sky to pull themselves toward the sun. You were able to do it back when you were a baby growing into the air. You could do it still, if only the gas ladders around you were as obvious as this one.
And so Ralph and Cecil climbed into the floating colors.
When they broke through the gas layer, a film of color cascaded around them (crimson in Ralph’s case, yellow and green in Cecil’s).
Stepping directly onto gases requires an even higher level of concentration than does mounting a gas ladder, but when Ralph channeled his energies and tried a foot on the floor, the molecules held him. After Cecil stepped off next to him, they held each other’s arms and experimented with how best to keep steady. As they hobbled toward the edges of the gas dome, every step was as if on a balloon. The effect of the light show was so stunning as to be deeply unpleasant. Ralph kneeled, put his head between his knees, and felt he might be sick.
