Dust (Of Dust and Darkness) - By Devon Ashley Page 0,24

hides it well. She keeps her head down and her hands sorting, as if her appearance wasn’t unusual at all. The spriggan’s lantern jerks back and he slowly returns from where he came. A collective sigh releases at our table.

“Sorry,” I say as soon as possible. Willow is T-I-C-K-E-D. She glares at me and chews on her lower lip, and I’m wondering how long I have left to live. The spare pixie doesn’t care either way and goes back to sleep. Willow drops her head back and sighs really loudly. Pleading my case, I add, “I was out of time and it was all I could do to wake you.”

“Next time,” she says in a calm but firm voice, lowering her eyes to glare at mine, “just bring the light to my face and I’ll wake up.”

“Okay,” I whisper, a slight tremble of fear coursing through my veins.

Willow rolls her eyes but returns to the floor, slicking her hair back out of her face. Is that it? She’s not going to kill me, or she’s not going to kill me right now? I turn to Holly for confirmation but all I get is a smile she’s trying hard to fight. I can’t help but release a small one myself before we return to our pointless task.

I manage to finish the day without Willow using me as her personal punching bag, and by the looks of her glares, it’s exactly what she’d like to do. I leave Holly alone, deciding any questions I think of aren’t worth ticking her off any further. Juniper comes to visit with me before bedtime again and lifts my mood from bleak to moderate. I like Juniper. She’s what I imagine this motherly figure I’ve just learned about should be. Loving, caring, giving, protective. All these motherly traits I wish were offered to me growing up. Sure, the village took care of me and protected me, but I always felt like something was missing. And now I know what that thing was. A real mother. And perhaps this father Holly spoke of. One or two individuals that really step up and have an interest in your well-being. Someone who makes me feel safer, makes sure I eat and bathe, tucks me in at night and tells me everything will be alright. Someone like Juniper.

Four days of slave labor have passed and the lack of food is really starting to get to me. Every morning and every night I’m given some sort of mash that contains one type of fruit and one type of nut or seed. I used to love these foods. Now they’re beginning to make me want to hurl. I’m fed just enough to keep my stomach mad at me all the time, like it thinks I’m teasing it on purpose and I deserve to be yelled at all day. Maybe it’s the consistency that does it to me. Normally I eat my seeds individually, not all mashed up with fruit. But I understand why they grind it all together. It’s so much easier than trying to divide the individual pieces evenly between the pixies.

But hunger is just one issue I’m facing. My muscles are really straining. I’m not used to this kind of labor; and even though we clearly don’t care about the purity of the mushroom powder, it’s hard being on your feet all day, every day, bending over a table. My back hurts, my feet hurt. My calves refuse to stretch and loosen.

Holly has explained the stations to me at this point, even though we haven’t gone that far in the line. At the front of the cave are the fires. There are three chiseled out rectangles with heavy iron doors to keep the heat in. At the top of each fire are holes that allow the heat to flow upward into another rectangle above it. That’s where the mushrooms are placed for half an hour to dry them out. Every day a couple of pixies go into the forest (with an unwanted guard) and collects the hallucinogenic mushrooms from random patches growing around the area. Once collected, they’re washed and tossed above the fires until they’re dehydrated. The next table will chop them into fine pieces and pass them off to the next table, where they’ll be ground into a powder using a mortar and pestle. That’s where Holly and I are today. I’m actually impressed by how much powder the pixies are capable of making in a single day.