The Misty World of Arial Hollyberry

The other day I walked into my magic room to find a couple of rather nasty goblins under my desk. They were hunched over and chewing on my computer cables. After chasing them around the room for a few minutes I called Arial to help get rid of the nefarious creatures. “Arial! come quick! There are sneaky goblins reeking havoc on my computer!” Arial shot into the room followed by two glowing fire fairies. They formed a triangle around the two little slimy green beasts, pointed their wands at at the center and chanted:

“Goblins green in face and arm

Here to do the Kind One harm

Be ye gone by count of three

Lest we fairies clobber thee”

Streaks of bright green light flashed from the fairie wands and surrounded the offending pair of goblins in a glowing bubble, then vanished in a burst of sparkles leaving only a  faint trace of footprints. Arial checked around the room to make sure that there were no more intruders. “That should do it. I think that it will be a long while before those two decide to come over again”

I turned on the computer and tried to get on the internet. “Shoot! They have fried the modem cable.” I checked to see if the lights on the router were flashing, nope, all dark. “Oh no, they wrecked the router too.” I looked over at Arial and the other fairies. “It’s going to take at least a week before I have this all replaced, what are people going to think if I don’t keep them up to date on the fairie happenings?”

Arial landed on my shoulder, her usual place, and whispered in my ear. “If you write it, they will come.” Yeah, yeah, I know, ever since Arial discovered videos she spends entirely to much time watching TV. She is a HUGE fan of Kevin Costner. I had to think for a minute. “I guess I could try to tweet on my cell phone until my network is up and running again, it won’t be the same, but I guess it will have to do. I wonder how they came through the portal, isn’t it invisible anymore?”

The three fairies put their heads together in a huddle then Arial floated back to my shoulder and stood with her hands behind her back. “It is the opinion of my colleagues that they came through the night you came back from the Midsummer celebration. Honeyed mead can make fairies a little, oh, how shall I say it, light headed.” I frowned at her. “So what you’re saying is that no one noticed that we had two to  many people in our group?” She giggled.”We do love our celebrations.” She stood a little taller and flipped her wings. “But we are now focused on the task at hand once more, never fear.” The two fire faeries slid up beside her, nodding agreement.

“Well, the damage is done, there is nothing else to do but go forward from here. Just make sure that the emerald guard is watching the portal.” I thought back to the day the trolls hairy arm came through the ivy. “It could have been a much scarier creature.” The three of them spun around my head, smiling and whispering words of consolation, then they winked out of sight. I have noticed something about the fire faeries, the air shimmers around them. The more determined they get, the more defined the shimmer becomes. When Arial and the two fire faeries winked out, the fire faeries had a very heavy shimmer around them.

I looked out the window to see Lilly heading down the street toward her little white house, it looked like she was talking to someone, but there was no one with her that I could see. I squinted my eyes and looked harder, nope, there wasn’t anyone else with her, not that I could see anyway. There is something more to her than she is letting on. I made a mental note to visit her again, maybe I can figure out what it is.

© Tami Ruesch, The Misty World of Arial Hollyberry, 2009.

Arial has been after me for days to write down my impressions of the celebration of Midsummer in the faerie realm. It isn’t that I have forgotten dancing with the faeries in wild abandon, after all, I have faeries coming and going through the ivy hedge all the time. No, it isn’t that I have forgotten, I just don’t know where to begin.

Arial poked me again. “Begin at the beginning.” She spiraled around my head, tracing intricate patterns in the air with the tips of her fingers. How frustrating it is to try and write with faerie wings buzzing in my ears! “Arial, you sound like something out of Alice in Wonderland, begin at the beginning. You know very well that it’s the “beginning” that I am having a problem with.” She did a mid-air cartwheel, as she passed in front of my nose, I blew on her wings making her bobble.

I want to stop here to tell you that, yes, I did find Arial (she was waiting for me  on the grassy slope leading up to the  firefly meadow, silhouetted against the sun as it hung on the horizon), and yes, Odette came with me to the celebration. She rode with a fire faerie on a particularly stout dragonfly. When the entire court landed at the bottom of the path, the plump dragonfly that had been transporting Odette wobbled off into the tall grass where it proceeded to flop down and stretch out  its tired wings. I could swear I heard a loud, heavy sigh of relief coming from its general direction.

Arial giggled at my teasing. “You know, I met Alice’s white rabbit once, very congenial little fellow. The flower beds are nice enough, but I didn’t really care for the caterpillar.” I gave her a a skeptical glance. “You really want me to believe that Alice was a real girl, and that Wonderland exists?” As I think about it now, that was a dumb question. Arial twirled around, making her skirts flare out. She raised one eyebrow and gave me one of her famous quirky smiles. “Do you really want people to believe there are faeries in your backyard?” Like I said, dumb question.

“Point well taken, but I do think that we are way off the point now. The question on the table is, what was the beginning. And something else… should I tell everyone what happened when Orlaith found out that you had a hand in sending me off into the faerie nevernever?” With all due respect Jim Butcher, but that is a wonderful word! Arial frowned and kicked her toe against the side of my keyboard then paced back and forth in front of the monitor, thinking hard.

“No, I don’t think we have to include that.” She scratched her head. “I think you should start when you arrived at the meadow, you know, when the sun was going down. Oh! and you can put something in about how wonderful it was to see me again!” I hunched over and looked at her sternly (I went cross eyed, but it made my position very clear). “I’ll just bet you’d like that.” She nodded vigorously. I pinched my lower lip. “No, I think I’ll start with waking up on the chase lounge in the backyard. After all, it did seem like a dream.”

“When I think about the times I’ve been to the palace, the troll, the time when I changed into a cat, and getting mail delivered via sail cloth, and everything else that has happened since seeing my little faeries.” Arial feigned surprise, I ignored her and went on. “Midsummer was definitely something dreams are made of, not that that is a bad thing mind you, but something that will take a little explaining.”

I looked at the clock that hangs on the wall to the side of my computer. “It’s almost five o’clock and I have to give the dogs their dinner.” Arial looked at me suspiciously. “Oh, I promise that I will let everyone know the details tomorrow, hey, you can stay and share the dogs dinner!”

Arial jumped up from where she had been sitting on my camera and shot out of the room. The last thing I heard as she headed for the ivy hedge was…”eeeeuww!” I do love it when I get the last word with a faerie.

© Tami Ruesch, The Misty World of Arial Hollyberry, 2009.

Odette and I followed Elendain up the rope bridge to a large platform high in the tops of the gigantic evergreen forest. We burst out of the branches into bright morning sunlight that spread as far as we could see. I stopped at the end of the bridge, holding tight to the rough rope. “Is it safe up here? I mean, won’t we fall off if the wind starts to blow?” Elendain turned back to me, smiling. “My dear, we have been here since the dawn of time, no one has ever “fallen off”. Come, walk with me and I’ll show you.” She held out her hand to me. “I promise, you won’t feel even a whisper of movement.”

I took her hand and carefully stepped out onto the large, round platform. Elendain continued. “We live in harmony with nature, we respect Gaia and she respects us, the wind never blows strong in these woods. Walk to the edge and put out your hand.” I moved gingerly toward the edge, a tingling sensation of dread crawling up my spine. Stopping about five feet back, I held out my hand toward empty space.

Elendain glided up behind me. “That’s right, keep going. Hold your hand out in front of you, yes, that’s right.” I nervously inched my way closer to the edge of the platform. Two feet to go and my hand hit something. My eyes told me that there was nothing there, but my touch said there was a wall in front of me. With my eyes wide and my mouth hanging open, I took a few more steps closer and put both hands out, palms forward, and mimed  my way around the entire platform. “It’s an invisible wall!”

Elendain motioned for me to return to her side. “There are charms all through the elvenwood. This great hall is where we hold all of our celebrations and we prefer to be as close as we can to the heavens. That is why we charmed the ceiling and walls to be invisible. Odette was giggling under her breath, with a mischievous look on her face she darted toward the edge. At the last moment, before she could leap out into the blue sky, she turned her body and smashed, shoulder first into the invisible wall.

“Oh, Odette don’t…”. She rolled on the floor at my feet laughing hysterically. “Ah missus, these inviseeble walls mess with yer brain they do. Lettin ya think yer gona fall.”  Elendain was laughing too. I turned toward her with a mock look of exasperation. “Don’t encourage her.” I tried to keep my voice stern but it’s hard not to laugh when everybody around you is laughing.

Somewhere below a flute played. Elendain turned toward the east. “Your escort is arriving.” In the distance I could see bright flashes of red, orange and yellow all through the dark green of the trees, it looked like tiny  fireworks moving toward us.

As we made our way down, dropping once more into the  shelter of the evergreen boughs, I had a thought. “Elendain? If there are charms all through these woods, how did a troll find you? When Arial and the emerald guard helped me get home through the woods by the faerie palace, they kept throwing little silver orbs into the bushes at the side of the road. They said that it made the path invisible to the trolls and since they couldn’t see the road, they would wander off in another direction.”

A shadow of doubt played across Elendain’s face. Her eyes darkened the way Lilly’s did the day Lucy and I walked down the street in front of the little white house. Elendain’s voice pulled me back from my musings. “Yes, that is a good question, and one I will be looking into, but for now…” She stopped at the bottom of the tree and stepped to one side to let me pass in front of her. “Your escort is here.”

I looked up, flying toward us through the lingering mist on the forest floor, came hundreds of  faeries riding on fireflies.

© Tami Ruesch, The Misty World of Arial Hollyberry, 2009.