gods of Never Land. How do we go about finding them?”
Their place of being is never constant for very long. We will need to ask where they were seen last.
“Oh, dangerous whimsical gods—on something like the Flying Dutchman. This gets better and better. So how do we find out where they are?”
I have been asking the Small Friends, the many-legged companions of the woods. But I think we shall need to seek fairy help.
The OOOOOOH! that Wendy couldn’t quite suppress in her throat had to be caught and killed physically with her hands: she clapped them over her mouth and held tight while the sound tried to come out.
Tinker Bell did something that was a like an eye roll stopped midway, with a tiny smile thrown in for good measure.
Unfortunately, this is not the best place to do it. We’re at the edge of the Qqrimal Range in the Pernicious Forest, and things live here that feast upon fairy kind. We tend to avoid this area. And we certainly don’t draw attention to ourselves while here by gathering in groups. But hopefully there will be one or two of my kind about, traveling through.
Besides predators, my brethren avoid human contact. Hide somewhere and peep out.
“Absolutely!” Wendy breathed, only a little disappointed not to be involved in actually meeting them. Watching fairies up close was still more fairy contact than she’d ever had before…even if it didn’t seem fair somehow, now that she could understand what they said.
She found a clump of shiny, large-leafed plants and arranged their long canes until her body was hidden from view. There was a nice hole in one of the leaves through which she could spy. The hole was still being worked on by a “Small Friend,” a caterpillar with purple scales instead of fur. It looked at Wendy in dubious surprise. Or so Wendy assumed. It was hard to tell with its faceted but depthless golden eyes.
“Excuse me,” she whispered. “I’ll just be here for a moment.”
She was unsure if the fairy dust gave her the ability to communicate with otherwise unspeaking Never Land creatures, but the thing did give her a long, hard look before going back to the business of chewing and ignoring.
Tinker Bell, meanwhile, was drifting with purpose up to the highest leafy branches of the jungle. Her light glowed warmly off the leaves below, the droplets seeping off their thick veins, the sweet sap running down the trunks of the trees. It made the whole clearing look…
Well, like it was touched by fairies, Wendy thought with a smile.
All her life she had looked for fairies in more mundane places, experiencing a rush of hope and warmth whenever a scene even palely imitated the one before her now. Candles at Christmas, fireflies in the park, flickering lamps in teahouses. The sparkling leaded glass windows of a sweets shop on winter afternoons when dusk came at four. A febrile, glowing crisscross of threads on a rotten log her cousin had once shown her out in the country: fox fire, magical mushrooms.
And here it was, for real! Tinker Bell was performing what appeared be a slow and majestic dance. First, she moved to specific points in the air around her, perhaps north, south, east, and west, twirling a little at each stop. Then she flew back to the center and made a strange bowing motion, keeping her tiny feet daintily together and putting her arms out gracefully like a swan. As she completed each movement, fairy dust fell from her wings in glittering, languorous trails, hanging in the air just long enough to form shapes. She started the dance over again, faster this time.
And again even faster. Her trail of sparkles almost resolved into a picture, crisscrossed lines constantly flowing slowly down like drips of luminous paint.
Wendy felt a bit like John, overwhelmed with a desire to try to reduce and explain and thereby translate the magic. But she also felt a lot like Michael, with an almost overwhelming urge to break free from her hiding place and see it up close, to feel the sparkles on her nose, to run a hand through the sigils not for the purpose of destruction but from a hapless, joyful desire to be part of it all.
Tinker Bell finally stopped, breathing heavily.
Wendy held her own breath.
And then…
Out of the darkness…
An answering glow.
Like a firefly in the mists or fish from the darkest deep, the light came bobbling through the jungle gloom. This one was tinged orange