“Well, that’s another improvement on last time,” the dimply-cheeked chap announced.
“Yes, it took her a few hours to remember until you raided the cookies and jogged her memory,” laughed a lithe and dashing wood nymph dressed in bottle green.
“Zephyr. Oh, Zeph, how are you?”
“Same as when you saw me yesterday,” he teased, kissing her on the cheek as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.
Soon the group had swelled to the size of a small, colourful cloud of cheeky chums who emerged from various impossibly cute dwellings to exchange glad greetings and tall tales of events in the glade since Alice’s last visit.
You see, in spritish time, a human day is a very long time, very many days in fact, and although Alice had only been back in her human form for what seemed like a few hours, she had been missing quite some time from her rainbow house with the daisy yellow door and the rose and daffodil furniture. In fact, this time she had been away for such a long time that the Willowand had started to wonder whether she was ever coming back.
The woodland nymphs of Ashridge Forest were so caught up in their chitter and chatter that no-one bothered to notice the animated collection of magical sticks and branches, rumoured to have a unicorn hair heart, that sulked by the door.
So the wand did what any self-respecting ancient artefact would do, were it capable of moving on its own. It morphed itself into a miniature green dragon and flew up to the seat of Zephyr’s trousers while he was in mid-tale and, with one carefully directed steam breath, singed his buttocks at the point where they parted, until he started hopping on the spot.
“Aaahhhhhhh,” he screamed, frantically patting his trouser area in an effort to end the hot stinging.
“Oh, Helygenn, I’m so sorry to have ignored you,” said Alice, reaching across and tickling the tiny dragon under its chin until it settled on her arm, made its way to her tunic pocket and then returned to its original shape.
If it’s possible for a bundle of sticks to smile smugly, that’s what the wand was doing as it poked out, proudly.
“The wand seems to have missed you as much as we have,” laughed Nimbus. “And as jealous as ever, I see”.
But he quickly choked back the end of that laugh as Alice’s pocket stirred and three or four purple stars bubbled out in more of a growl than a chuckle.
The Wood Nymph Council met that night in the quartz circle.
Firefly lamps lit the friendly throng, feasting on bowls of berry broth to keep their beacons blazing while the elders debated the important business of the day.
A particularly respected sprite, Helice as he was known, held everyone’s attention as he described some especially troubling events on the fringes of the Ashridge Forest kingdom.
“Four fawns were taken in the last two moon cycles and it would appear that something has now started attacking the adults.
“Even a juvenile group of horned monarchs struggled to repel a small pack of berewolfs down near the Glahglade only two sundowns past.”
“They seem to be growing bolder and more frantic,” replied Zephyr.
“There were sometimes raids this far south, but on nothing like this scale. Could it be sign of the return to the solstice eruptions? There have been warnings on the winds for some time now, as we all know,” asked an aged nymph in bottle-blue tunic. “Our winged friends have been bringing news of fresh fire from the hills, we all know that.
“We’re most likely safe under the ring shield. Yet many of our friends will be exposed.”
“But surely evil power could not have returned to the Firehills? Not after all this time?” Sylvane asked their leader.
Clad in silver, Helice seemed to shimmer when he spoke. His was always a reassuring voice of measured calm.
Alice could sense the unease pass across the gathered band of mystical folk, however, and she could detect the strain behind the eyes of the elders. She may have had a particular talent for sensing the feelings of others, but she was pretty sure everyone else could feel the tension in the discussion too.
As several senior nymphs started to voice their concerns all at once, the chatter and rippling hubbub was rudely interrupted.
The sudden, unexpected arrival of one of the most respected of their kind, Dianah, the warrior who oversaw everything to do with safety and security, came as a shock.
She flew wildly into their midst, clearly out of control, and crashed into the crystal flames.
Alice had never seen their hero like this before. Her blessing bow was broken and limp, she gripped her spear tight, her face was soiled and her eyes were frozen with a wild fear.
“We must reinforce the shielding spell now.
“They’re upon us.
“We’ve been betrayed.
“Move…!”
Before the panicking sprites could organise their scattering, the smell of the threat was upon them even before the monsters arrived. It was like the worst fox spray upon a festering carcass and it warned of much worse to come.
In the blink of an eye, huge snarling shapes crashed through the lower boughs of the trees, crushing the bluebell beds and bracken.
One of the visiting rainbow sprites had flown directly into the path of one of the sets of slavering jaws, terrified by the fiery orange eyes and rumbling growl. The beast opened its dribbling mouth mid-stride and snapped at the delicate ball of light. But it tasted nothing as the target disappeared in a precious puff of multicoloured stars.
Then Dianah deliberately flew in front of it to distract it from a group of infants huddled under a large leaf, and stabbed it in the muzzle; it chased her, howling, back into the dark wood.
At the edge of the glade, a row of pretty houses were destroyed in seconds as two of the creatures fought over what was, at first a family of emerald wood nymphs or silkies that somehow transformed into a pile of twigs. They tore and ripped at the wood in frustration.
Alice had flown up a hazel tree, pursued by one of the beasts, howling its intent. But she was shocked to see it use its front limbs and claws to climb almost as quickly as she could fly.
“These are no ordinary werebeasts,” she thought to herself, thinking of the dog-like creatures of legend. She was deliberately inching out to the very tip of a long branch near the very top. When she got there, she turned to face her pursuer, smiling.
“Now who’s a not very pretty boy, eh? Come on, there’s a good, very bad puppy,” she teased, holding her hand out as if to pat it.
Unable to resist, the monster gave a loud howl, snarled and began to nudge along the bough until, when within a foot or two of his tasty prey, the inevitable happened.
Alice smiled as she heard the branch first crack and then, as if the tree had done it deliberately, which, of course, it probably had, the branch gave way under the creature’s weight. The monster fell as though shot and plummeted like a stone, leaving Alice hovering on her lace wings.
“Bye, bye, beastie,” she waved, sarcastically, as it fell then crashed onto the forest floor a long way down.
A quick glance around the glade revealed that, while her friends were clearly frustrating their attackers, their home had been overrun by foulness.
Sylvane and Nimbus were cunningly teasing and leading a pack of the creatures on a one way trip in the direction of the sinking swamp, where she imagined they would meet an unpleasant end.
Helice and Zephyr had formed a protective diamond with several of the other senior sprites and they had conjured a phantom whirlwind that mesmerised the monsters, giving the rest of the clan time to disappear or hide.
Yet there seemed to be an endless filthy stream of the foul creatures, who clearly followed one another’s scent trail to their glade, a path laid down by those who had gone before.
“We are going to tire and our powers will start to weaken,” Alice thought to hersel
f.
But, just as hope gave a hint of fading, something nudged her fingers apart and into her hand.
She then found herself compelled towards the centre of the crystal circle by a force she couldn’t actually see.
What happened next would be sung around campfires and remembered in tall stories for generations to come.
Onlookers remember it in different ways.
Some recall Alice, Willowand in hand, eyes burning, verdant green, chanting and morphing until she was the size and shape of a tree.
Others don’t remember anything but the pulsing flash of light stemming from Alice herself. It was unlike any light they had ever seen before.
But what they all agree on was feeling the warming glow of good energy flowing into their bodies, a sensation some describe as the sense of love you associate with your closest and dearest when you are reunited after time apart.
This goodly glow rapidly rippled outwards until it filled the glade and then the meadow and then what must have been the entire forest.
It spread and pulsed with a steady rhythm, like a heartbeat, and then, when fully charged, suddenly erupted into a million lightning flashes of sharp emerald.
Each shard seemed to search out every dark and gloomy place and space, transforming any fear into overwhelming positive energy, a sort of nourishing hope against ill thoughts.
Then they were all gone. None of the violent, malignant beasts could survive, it seems; they simply melted into the soothing light.
Yet, where Alice had stood, the epicentre where the crystal forces met, there remained nothing but a beam of light reflecting an image, like a flickering cinema screen.
When the returning nymphs looked closer they could make out, in the beam, the projected image of the most azure-coloured, weeping willow tree, a face seemingly delicately etched into its mid-bark.
Then Zephyr looked down, searching for something with panicked eyes, and his heart sank as he saw the unmistakable shape of their very brave friend, slumped horribly like a damp pile of leaves on the mossy forest floor.
Back at the cabin on the other side of Ashridge Forest, Henry had woken with a start when he heard the howling.
He had tried to warn his mother of the black beasts before in his pictures. But all she did was warn him that he would have to go to see the pokey strangers in the town who used to talk about him using words like “special” and “different”, but in a way that he knew didn’t mean good. He didn’t like those type of people. In fact, it seems, there were very few people he liked or trusted at all.
There it was again, he thought, his excellent hearing detecting another of the spine-tingling whines on the wind.
“Sounds like they are huntin for somethin’,” he muttered under his breath, his voice trembling a little with excitement as he peeped through the gap in the window shutters, the catch having broken long before he could recall.
Unable to see anything stirring in the dark, other than leaves rustling in the wind, Henry dropped his legs to the floor and tried not to tread on the creakiest of the floorboards as he made his way across their small hall to his mother’s room.
Poking his head inside, he could see that she was in a deep sleep. She was also muttering something to herself, as she often did.
Confident that she wouldn’t wake, he reached up and pulled his brown coat on, stepped into his smelly sandals and made his way onto their porch. He then sprang over the small flight of steps that would surely betray him.
Neither Alice nor Mum knew of his private trips across the meadow to his special teepee of bracken, bark and branches.
Nobody knew that Henry had a private place where he would go. Here he could be free from prying eyes and questioning tongues.
Nobody knew, that was, but the night-time friends who sometimes paid him a visit, if he was lucky and the air was still enough not to carry his scent on the breeze.
Tonight, Henry felt drawn to his secret place. His den of mysteries.
Something about tonight was very different. It was like waiting for a very special dinner cooking for too long in the oven while the aroma of the roasting drives you hungry mad.
The delicious night sounds were teasing, calling, drawing him outside.
So he hurried his step.
Despite the late hour and dark night, Henry seemed to have a sixth sense about his surroundings.
He could hear the littlest rustle.
He could see the vaguest outline of a shape.
He could feel their hearts beating.
So he never bumped into anything as he wound his way along the dark path to the deeper parts of the forest.
As the urgency gripped him in a tighter and tighter hold, he started to walk even faster.
Soon he realised that he had broken into a slight jog, which became a run and then a sort of lolloping gambol until he felt himself tingling all over and his forearms forced their way down and, yes, he was sprinting, free.
Yet he wasn’t running like a boy any more. He was now galloping on all four limbs and eating up the fast rushing ground before him.
As his silhouette merged with the horizon he could see the midnight route ahead as clearly as if it was the middle of the day.
Then he threw back his head and howled out his exhilaration to the blushing moon and watching stars.
When Alice came round for the second time on that long day, she was greeted by Nimbus’s round face, beaming as ever.
Many of her other friends were packed into the cottage drinking hot cups of sweet nectar tea and tending to their very many cuts and bruises. The werebeast attack had clearly taken its toll.
Outside, the fey villagers were working hard to restore the damage caused. The air was electric with friendly magic as wands were waved, houses rebuilt, shelters restored and delicate bodies healed.
Helice and Dianah were leading a security party, first sending out winged scouts to watch the outlying areas and forewarn them of any more evil activity.
Hummingbirds, moths, fruit bats and large black beetles flew off to do their duty at the leader’s request. While at the edge of the glade, more magical folk were at work setting flare light traps and creating plunge pits and other devices to ensure that they weren’t caught cold twice.
Helice and the elders had clearly combined their powers as the whole glade rippled with a purple haze of magical light. Alice knew this was the crystal shield spell, something the Nymph Council only used in times of grave danger.
There was a price to pay for the shield and she could see that crystals in the circle were fractionally darker than they had been the day before.
Eventually, if not replenished, they would lose all of their protective power.
“We can’t live under the shield forever,” announced Helice. “We are going to have to find a way to contact our strongest friends in the forest and to find out the extent of the troubles.
“It has been a long time since creatures like this have been brave enough to venture this far and we can be sure that, while they have had a shock, braver of their kind will eventually be back. They will not be able to resist the temptations here.”
“Temptations?” asked Dianah.
“Yes. Us,” he replied, with a grimace.
Alice had heard and seen enough and rose from the pretty pastel-coloured couch where she had been recovering. She felt sort of drained and bruised from the inside out, but other than that was relieved to see everything back in apparent working order.
Even Helygenn had returned to wand form and was lying still, for a change, in his nesting box on the rosewood table, never really far from her side.
At this point Helice and Zephyr appeared at the door.
“Well, how’s our Willowand warrior feeling?” their leader asked, a proud smile on his face. “I don’t know how you did it and am, if truth be told, a
little reluctant to enquire. But you certainly saved our skins there. We were about to be overrun as there were so many of them.”
“It wasn’t me… it…” she started to reply, but stopped half way, realising that she had no explanation either other than it had something to do with the situation, her and, of course, her mysterious wand-creature.
“Always knew you were special,” said Zephyr, with a twinkle in his pale blue eyes. “Now perhaps you can help us think of a way to make sense of what’s happening, as it is very clear that a disturbing shift has taken place in the crystal power plane. Unless we can get to the root of it, what happened here is most likely only the start of troubling times to come.”
That evening, after the hard work was done and the nymph village returned to its former modest glory, the elders met again in an emergency council.
Their debate ranged long past twilight and when it concluded it was obvious from the body language that whatever conclusion had been reached had difficult consequences.
So it was with mixed feelings that Alice and her closest friends responded to their leader’s summons.
Unusually, Nimbus had the task of relaying the news, presumably because his bubbly manner would soften the blow of the decision.
“We have debated long and hard and, no matter how we look at the challenge, it seems that we are going to have to look beyond the glade for the help of a higher power.
“The shield will only last so long, so we need help with the problem at its source, the Fireills.”
As he spoke he was clearly troubled by the prospect and what he had to say next.
“We may be a resourceful folk, but we need help. Your Willowand created a vision of the help we need to source now. We need to reach out to the Prince of the Forest. We need the help and counsel of Hernunnos, the Greene Man.”
Even the wisest and most experienced of nymph elders gave a sharp intake of breath at the mention of his name.
“As Nimbus has stated,” said Dianah. “We need to break cover from here in order to have any hope of contacting him.
Legend of the Lost Page 5