The moss maidens wove all night, making a shaggy shelter for the lost and orphaned children at the foot of the forest’s loneliest tree. In the morning soft sunlight flickered on the dewy moss when they awoke, amazed to have found themselves a home at last.
He looked down, pretending their words hadn’t hurt him. The moss growing upon him for the past century or so knew better. It couldn’t think of anything to say, so it hugged him a little tighter and let him know he wasn’t all alone.
It wasn’t as fancy as a castle made of stone, carefully cut and lain just so. Still, after years of studying architecture in London and Barcelona, the mouse was proud of the make-shift castle he’d made for himself. So he moved himself in, ordered a dragon or two from a mail-order catalog, and waited for his next adventure to begin.
The forest was filled with scrolls of age-old magic, but no one remembered how to read them. They languished in their secrecy, decaying unread into the soil. There the rootlets ate their forgotten words and grew great trees filled with ancient magic they fed us in the air.
The dragon withdrew and hid behind her tangled white hair. Her hair turned that colour after she went racing through a storm cloud and collided with a stray bolt of lightning last autumn. It makes her feel self-conscious but she’ll tell you the story if you ask her.
They scrambled up the fungus stairway, the cyclops shrieking with frustration because he couldn’t follow. They crawled inside the cave and caught their breath.
“We can’t stay up here forever,” he said, peering down at the waiting beast.
“All we need is a friendly salamander,” she told him. “They love damp, rotting wood like this. They might know another way out.”
The knight, lost out of time and space, wandered the forest without reprieve, leaving a trail of folklore in his wake. When his armour grew rusty, he covered himself in the bark of a birch and it preserved him, forever lost and looking, though for what I cannot say.
“A bed of moss, a gentle breeze, and the certainty of a few fairies hidden away has taught her more than I could ever hope to,” said the old woman with a cackle that echoed off the leafless branches.
The spring bulbs peeped up from the leaf litter, worried they might be a little early or worse – too late! Cold winds swirled around, carrying the sounds of hungry robins and the smell of damp soil. They waited a few more days, working up their courage, before bursting above the old leaves and claiming their place in the sun.
Jennifer Shelby 