The archers stationed at the front of the group turned on small lights and silently slipped into the darkness. He finally saw how the lights worked when MarJoReAn picked a plant growing from the tunnel wall and it immediately started glowing.
Cheela, becoming increasingly nervous, sniffed the air and wildly paced back and forth across SeeLee’s shoulders, softly gurgling, “Rin.”
SeeLee suddenly jumped in front, blocking the travelers’ path. She had warned that they must be absolutely quiet while walking through the darkest part of the tunnel, and must carry glimmer fronds to shower the ebony tunnel with whispers of light.
The frond SeeLee pointed to was as long as her arm. It resembled a dandelion after the golden flower was replaced by the fluffy seed ball. SeeLee picked the frond at its base, and a glow of white suddenly radiated from the fluffy ball on its end. The frond’s light reached three feet in all directions as SeeLee held the stem tightly, putting the glowing ball at arm’s length in front and slightly above her head.
She told her followers to pick a glimmer frond, explaining that their bodies’ electromagnetic field would make them glow. Upon release from the wall, the fronds glowed with a brilliant radiance, with golden rays filtering through the light. SeeLee warned that the glimmer frond would go out if it left the warmth of their hands. It had but one chance to shine.
As she started walking, SeeLee reminded her friends to stay close, as they would be tiptoeing past the den of Rinyon and Thewlian, who were fast asleep. She cautioned that the two would be very angry if awakened and would surely eat whoever disturbed their slumber.
Onward the staggered line marched, more worried about glimmer fronds extinguishing than disturbing sleeping creatures. When the tunnel slowly became fungus-lit again, SeeLee paused to make sure everyone made it through. As they all passed, they were rejoined by SanDroMonEnLor. At the back of the line, only Clayton heard the old fairy, in a low voice, ask SeeLee if the smell of humans had awakened the dragons from their thousand-year nap.
Dragons! He didn’t dare tell the others, fearing they would stop going to the fairy tree. Why did there have to be dragons, and what would happen when they started flying around? Clayton thought back to the movies he had watched with dragons cast as villains, and none of them boded well for keeping the fairies’ world a secret. The dragons would certainly be seen by the outside world once they started flying, and the attention they would bring would surely flood the fields with news crews and curiosity seekers from around the world.
And what of the dragons themselves? Were they just dumb beasts, or were they highly intelligent and evolved creatures? Sleeping for a thousand years and then waking up to a nightmare of noise and confusion would surely be upsetting. When the dragons first settled down for their centuries-long nap, humans were living in huts, and weapons were swords and spears. The world the dragons would discover upon waking would be horrifically different and hardly one they would fit into.
When the dragons last flew, they were masters of the skies. How would they react to planes and helicopters? What would they think of the cars and trucks speeding along old, weaving roads that once knit tiny villages? How would they function in the towns changed into giant cities? And the numbers of people! Dragons on the loose would not be a good thing.
Rinyon and Thewlian—the names conjured visions of noble beasts, though much literature portrayed dragons as monsters. Clayton recalled Cheela’s agitation and distress in the tunnel before passing the den. Did the little churla have an inbred fear of such beasts? He wondered if the dragons should be hunted down and killed.
With today’s technology, would there even be a place on earth where they could hide? The hammering questions pounding his head made him uneasy. Fear brought by the dragons’ awakening caused him to shudder. He feared the fairies would leave after the dragons awoke.
He desperately wished he could talk to SanDroMonEnLor now. Why would the fairies harbor something that could cause so much harm to their peaceful, safe, and beautiful world? Clayton figured the old dragons must have great worth if the fairies risked being eaten by them every time they passed their den. The fairies probably had some way to control the dragons, he decided. Maybe they even thought of them as pets!
Just what kind of powers and abilities did the fairies possess? He wondered this question for probably the millionth time. The extraordinary things the fairies did on a daily basis seemed completely natural to them. He was surprised the fairies hinted that even humans might develop these abilities if they put their minds to it.
Rumors were always swirling about people who could levitate or use telepathy, but making things shrink was something he had never heard of. He was certain the further they explored the fairy tree with SeeLee, the smaller they became. Penny must have been smaller than a grain of sand when she was standing on the shore of the lake! Whether or not atoms really cared about all this shifting and shaking around, he had no idea, but thinking about it always made him uneasy. Something about the carved panels also made him uneasy. The creatures shown on it would certainly be candidates for fulfilling the Native American’s prophecy of creatures that would someday roam the land. And SeeLee almost talked as if they were still around to be a bother to the fairies. Lately, most of his thinking about the fairies world made him uneasy, and he searched for something to ease his troubled mind.
Suddenly, a particular churla incident snapped into his mind. When he and his friends had been exploring fairy furniture on the raised platform, he occasionally looked across the room for Penny. On one eye-search, he saw a churla perched on the nearest table having a tug-of-war with its tail for a piece of wood. The churla and his tail each gained and lost ground in this escalating contest of wills.
Then the angry churla gave an extra strong tug, and the tail, as if purposefully, abruptly let go. The surprised churla somersaulted backward along the table, bouncing off everything in its path. The equally surprised tail quickly followed. The circular motion of the somersaulting churla turned the tail into a spirally whip, the end of which smacked into everything that hadn’t been pummeled by the churla’s body. As it rolled along the table, the churla managed to bounce into six other churlas before it came to a rolling stop.
The battered churlas were playing with wood pieces, trying to build something, as were their tails. The churlas shrieked and jumped, throwing wood high into the air. The tails also shot sky-high and pitched the wood they held. Some wood pieces landed on the next table, startling the churlas, who also shrieked and jumped and threw wildly.
Like a stone thrown into a pond, this activity rippled like a wave. The noise grew louder until the commotion spread halfway across the room. Soon, maybe thinking the ruckus was a signal of imminent danger, the remaining shrieking churlas and their tails began launching their wood pieces. The churlas quickly scattered for cover as the echo of their screams were drowned by the din of the landing, bouncing wood.
Everything fell quiet just as suddenly as it had started. There wasn’t a churla in sight, just fairies seemingly frozen in fear of being pelted. Whether sitting, standing, or ducking, the fairies held motionless in strange contrast to the upheaval seconds before. The eerie silence, boding equally strange, was finally broken by the fairies’ laughter.
As things returned to normal, the churlas peeked out from their hiding places, and after a quick look around, they returned to their previous woodworking as if nothing had happened.
For one churla, however, the incident wasn’t over. That churla, whose tail had started the commotion, walked to its tail’s tip, kicked it a couple times, then jumped up and down on it as if to make a point. After that, the churla turned and headed to a pile of wood pieces. Slowly, the tail tip rose like a cobra, and after a few tremors, it shoved the churla from behind into the woodpile. The tip of the tail quickly dove off the table to hide. The churla picked itself out of the woodpile and rose to answer this new challenge, but the offender was not in sight. Trying to pretend nothing had happened, the
little churla quickly joined the others.
Of everyone crowding the room, only Clayton had seen what had caused the churla-inspired pandemonium. The others couldn’t stop laughing when he explained the domino-like fiasco.
Although at first the fairies distracted the kids from schoolwork, all their grades began to improve after they started to understand the fairies’ world. Clayton singled out particular conversations with SanDroMonEnLor and SeeLee as the reason.
The old fairy had spoken of it while walking along the branch. SeeLee mentioned it again as they climbed the circular stairway. As they passed a wooden panel showing a peaceful period, she explained every fairy’s obligations to others and life in general.
Challenged by the fairies’ view of things, the kids now thought about their own schooling as an adventure in learning instead of only a requirement. It seemed the more attention they paid to a school subject, the easier it was to be good at it. In each class, they demanded a detailed explanation of any new word, idea, or concept their teachers introduced before going on to the next one. A side effect of their new fairy attitude was definitely showing in their grades.
Their diets were also slowly changing. Learning some foods did more harm than good to their bodies, they avoided eating junk. SeeLee had explained how a body’s own energy-producing system would shut down whenever the body had sugar to burn for energy. The more the energy factory was shut down, the less able it was to produce energy on its own when needed.
Clayton, his sister, and his friends started eating what their bodies needed instead of what their tastebuds wanted. Their parents were certainly amazed when they asked for more vegetables and fruits at the dinner table. They were even more amazed when desserts were refused. At first, the kids didn’t feel a big difference in their bodies. But after a while, they noticed they had more energy when they awoke in the morning, and it seemed to last longer into the day.
Clayton frequently marveled at the things SeeLee knew, until he remembered she was almost twelve hundred years old. The bits and pieces of knowledge shared by the fairies seemed like common-sense lessons humans should know, but did not. Maybe, if humans weren’t so busy, they could come to realize these things themselves.
He thought about his friends’ older brothers and sisters becoming grown-ups. As they became adults, it seemed they started complicating their lives. Jobs were needed to pay for these complications and took up most of their time and energy. All the adults he knew were busy keeping up with the complications created in their own lives. For generations, the fairies were too busy running from danger to develop complicated lives. Now they seemed entirely happy with the simple way they lived.
He started to dread that he too would get older and have his own set of complications filling his life. Then a thought struck him—what if he ran away and lived in the fairy tree? Would he stay young forever? It had worked for Peter Pan. Maybe it wasn’t just a story. Maybe there were fairy colonies scattered all over the map, as SanDroMonEnLor had hinted, and he hoped there were a few somewhere.
His mind blanked out, and he just sat very still, soothed by the rain’s patter. With a start, he remembered something SeeLee let slip. It happened in the hall of the peeper fairies, and from what she hinted, older peepers could get out of their bodies. They would drop their bodies in the hall, and their minds were free to float to sites they found familiar.
He daydreamed about the places he would go if he could leave his body, then quickly blushed with embarrassment when he realized what he was thinking. He gave the others a quick look, hoping they didn’t have a clue where his mind was wandering. But his friends were still busy talking, so he started listening to keep from thinking.
“…so we already knew. Right, Clayton?” Penny asked for confirmation.
“What?” he questioned, now certain he was turning red with embarrassment.
“Weren’t you listening again?”
“No, I was thinking instead.”
“I was telling them we knew about growing even smaller when we went into the peepers’ hall with SeeLee,” Penny explained, bringing him up-to-date. She was growing tired of his spaciness.
“Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “The branch wasn’t that big, but the rooms inside were really huge. We must have gotten smaller just going through the door, but we couldn’t feel the change happening. The rooms further up the branch looked as big as the one we were on, but I knew that if I climbed, I’d get even smaller. I wasn’t comfortable with that idea.”
“It didn’t bother me until we were looking for Penny,” Karl admitted. “Then I started losing track of how small I thought I was compared to my original size. When I realized I would soon be the size of something easily squashed like a bug, by a bug, I almost turned around and went back. Then we ran into Kast and Penny, so I didn’t have to find out how much stranger I would have felt.”
“You baby!” Penny taunted. “I was a hundred times smaller than that when I was at the lake, and I didn’t think anything of it,” she bragged.
“That’s because you didn’t think about it. You’re lucky. If the concept had crossed your mind, you probably would have fallen into the lake. You must have been much smaller than a grain of sand,” Karl trailed off. “And anyway, you’re small to begin with, so it’s a lot easier for you. You understand small,” he debated, gearing up for a heated rebuttal from Penny.
“No matter how small we get, the fairies are a constant reassurance that we’re safe,” Phil said.
“Unless you consider being eaten by a monster when it wakes up,” Paul argued back.
“Or being pooped on by a bird when you’re standing on a branch,” Brian added.
“I saw some really big dried poop blobs on those branches,” Ron joined in. “And you really don’t want to get hit on the head by bird poop that’s bigger than your head.”
For several minutes they all laughed uncontrollably as they pictured anyone but themselves being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting plopped on.
“Well, okay,” Phil admitted. “Safe, except for stuff like that.”
Their voices quieted, the sound of rain assaulting the roof taking over. It offered a background to whatever fairy memories whirled during a long silence.
He wondered what Wendy was doing right now. Two days before their dinner, she had been chosen to replace a student in the foreign exchange program who had fallen ill. He was horribly heartbroken as she suddenly disappeared from his life with a brief goodbye in school. It had seemed too good to be true when she’d wanted to hang out with him. He was going to get to know her. He was going to take her to the fairy tree. And that kiss! She had kissed him on the lips, and it made him melt. And now she was gone.
Glancing at the dismal scene out the window, he suppressed a shiver brought by the chill in the air. He was tired of seeing five colors of gray blanketing the sky. He wished the sun had peeked out today. Feeling tired and lazy, he started to sit back down.
“Put another log in the wood burner while you’re up,” Penny said. “It’s getting cold,” she added, gathering her jacket around her.
“Don’t put too many in there. It gets to ninety degrees in here too quick, and we’ll have to open the windows again,” Paul warned.
Clayton gave the woodpile a lazy look and slowly picked up a couple logs. As he approached the old wood burner, he thought about the two days it took them to install the fiery beast. They had decided to cut a hole in the floor of the room, and hoist the wood burner straight up with pulleys hanging from the ceiling. Both floor and ceiling had to be strengthened to support the one-hundred-fifty pound ancient fireplace.
Using a diagram he drew, Karl showed how the heavy iron wood burner would seem to weigh only fifty pounds when lifted with a pulley. It still took all of them to hoist the heavy load. Karl forgot to add a mechanism to tie and hold the rope so the wood burner could stay suspended above the floor. To make up for the oversight, everyone had to take turns holding the rope while a thick piece of
plywood was moved to cover the hole in the floor. They put a layer of scrap brick on top of the plywood, then finally lowered the wood burner to its new resting place. They were exhausted after the effort and didn’t finish the stovepipe work until the next day.
The twins’ father insisted he come and inspect their work after hearing the boys planned to start fires in their tree house to keep warm. He helped cut the correct length of stovepipe and found the safest place to locate it. When he saw that the wood burner was positioned in a corner of the room, he went home and returned with thin metal plates to put between the stove and walls as a heat barrier.
Clayton opened the door of the firebox and stirred the coals before throwing new logs into the blaze. He looked out the window once more and said, “It’s been raining for so long, I think half the snow’s already melted. I don’t think it’s even a foot thick anymore. I hope we get an early spring.”
“It’s just the middle of March. You can hope all you want, but it could still snow two months from now.”
“Thanks, Karl. I didn’t need the reminder.”
“How come there can’t be snow fairies?” Penny complained.
“Their wings are so thin they would quickly freeze. Then they would break like glass if the fairy moved,” Karl explained.
“Well, maybe they could just stay on the branches and wear little mouse-fur coats.”
“I bet they never thought of that,” Brian retorted with a grin. “You should tell them next time that you see them, Oh Penny, most wonderful Queen of the Universe.”
“Oh, shut up!”
They all wanted an early spring and an early summer, leading to an early firefly sighting and a trip back to visit the fairies. They still lamented not being able to see them once more before winter set in. After their last trip to the fairy tree, they had no doubts that they would be seeing them a few more times. But an early harvest kept them busy with farm chores for almost two weeks. After that, it rained every day for ten days straight. Snow fell on the last two of those days, and everyone feared they wouldn’t see the fairies again.
Beyond the Firefly Field Page 23