Niall had no idea how he was going to rebuild this house, especially if he was going to be stuck at this size. It also struck him that he seemed to be accepting of the magical things that were happening to him now. This had all stopped seeming like a bad dream and felt very real now. He thought that he may have started suspending his disbelief, that might make things easier, he thought. But it had to be a dream, even if Brigid said it wasn’t. This kind of stuff wasn’t real, gods and goddesses, enchanted forests, magical horses, it was stuff that was written thousands of years ago to explain things that science couldn’t yet. Niall was even doubting his own eyes by this point.
“What are you?”, Niall asked the man. “You look like a Leprechaun.”
“Ugh”, the man sighed, “no, I’m not a Leprechaun. Leprechauns wish they were me. I’m a faerie, Leprechauns are a kind of faerie, not the other way around”, he passionately explained.
“I thought fairies were little women with wings and fairy dust that followed Peter Pan around?”, Niall asked sarcastically, while holding back a cough caused by whatever was in this fairy’s smoking pipe. He started to feel light-headed too. Was it from the insanity of the situation, or was he getting second hand high from the smoke?
The man glared back at him. “I’m a faerie spelled with 2 e’s, not like yer silly little girls in leaf dresses with wings. Disney-looking Tinkerbells ruining the images of faeries everywhere. That’s a fairy with a ‘y’; you amadán They’re German or English or somethin’ and they can’t do half the stuff I can”, he preached, his fury clearly rising.
“It’s not a very manly name for what you are though, is it? ‘Faerie’, it sounds more like the girls in leaf dresses, doesn’t it?” Niall retorted condescendingly.
The faerie’s Cork accent had been getting stronger the angrier he got. “Men are allowed to be faeries, ya young pup ya, and I’ll have you know that I was part of the Tuatha Dé Danann before ye men came and ruined everything in the world for us. And the cheek doesn’t suit ya. Now get out and build my house before I go through ya”, he shouted, waving his hand in the air with a flurry of sparks around it that threw Niall out of the house and back to full size. It felt good to be out of that house and back to his normal height, however, the house and the faerie seemed to have disappeared.
The entire interaction had thrown Niall for a loop. Yes, everything up to now had been the strangest thing that Niall had ever seen and was straight out of a fantasy video game or movie. But, being shrunk down to the size of the undergrowth by a tiny man that looked like a leprechaun, who smoked what must be the closest thing to pipe-weed from Lord of the Rings that Niall could think of, had to be the most jarring experience he’d had so far. He stood in the enchanted forest for a minute to try and settle himself. The pile of sticks he had gathered were still on the ground where he had dropped them. The breeze rustled the heads of the lavender plants all around him and whistled through the branches of the trees above him. He reached his hand out and grabbed a petal of lavender between his fingers and thumb. He crumpled it, feeling its every bend and turn on his skin. It felt real, very real. He picked up the bundle of sticks and headed back to the camp. While walking back, he started to wonder what the faerie was expecting him to do. The house and the faerie were clearly magic, which Niall didn’t have, Niall had no construction experience, and the whole thing had disappeared once Niall had returned to full size. What was he supposed to do if he didn’t know how to do anything? And this ‘faerie law’ that he mentioned, what was that about? Niall had never heard of or read about ‘faerie law’ anywhere before, not even from Lugh or Brigid. Maybe the world was messing with him too. Like a mirage or hallucination of some form. There was this thick mist throughout the forest that could’ve consisted of anything, even some funky substances. They do exist in the wild.
He got back to the camp with the sticks and dropped the bundle on the ground next to the fire. Lugh had placed two huge, thick logs tightly around the fire and was now feeding his horse some apples. Brigid was cooking in a large black cast iron pot that was hanging over the fire. There was some kind of muffled sound coming from somewhere that he decided not to focus on too much. It seemed like not thinking about anything too hard was going to be the best way to get through this whole experience. He looked up and saw Brigid in all her splendour looking at him from over the cooking pot. She smiled and started mouthing some words at him. He chuckled, even though he had no idea what she was mouthing at him. The muffled sound happened again; it was a voice that sounded like someone was shouting through a pillow. He turned his head to the side to try and place it. When he turned back Brigid’s face had turned. Distressed, she rushed over to Niall and signalled to Lugh to come over to them. Her mouth was moving the entire time; but Niall noticed that he couldn’t hear a word she said. It dawned on him now that something was very wrong with him. Lugh rushed over and knelt down in front of Niall next to Brigid. As the two of them were examining him Niall noticed the muffled voices again, they were Brigid and Lugh’s. He knew from how worried the two of them looked that something was very, very wrong with him.
By Owen Coyne
Taken to the Corner 