Mayor Rolls

“If Sunny brings the pirate back, we have a problem.”

“Yes.”

“The bald creep could pop back up in another fae ring somewhere.”

“Could.”

“And there could be more of them.”

“Also maybeh.” Shady’s jaw worked. “S’what I’ve been tryin’ not to think ‘bout. How in the Abyss did Baldie get here, Ashy? Shadashia is, like, mega far from the other big islands. Too far to fly with pinches of magic dust. Too far to jump.” She bit her lip. “He wasn’t wearin’ wings and didn’t have very much on him except for a sword and pouch. Either there’s a secret gate somewhere or… something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’m hekkin’ drained. M’ gonna climb down now.” Shady blessed me with a weary look and spidered back down the tree.

I descended, landing beside her.

“Shady, he said… that an Ascendant opened a gate for you. A human with a key of the gods?”

Stars on her cheeks flickered. “Yeah.”

“Any idea what that was about?”

“No clue. We made the gate here ourselves. Me and you. No Ascendantses or keys.” She yawned like a cat, displaying rows of sharp teeth. “Stats.”

I looked at her as she stared at something I couldn’t see above her black-braceler wrapped wrist with a deepening frown.

“What?”

“Mana: zero,” she read aloud. “Soul integrity: compromised. Hrm.”

“Huh?”

“Neat. I… have two souls now. I think that dying split me in half or something.”

“WHAT?!”

“Yea. According to the bracelet stats, my soul’s in two pieces now.”

“Is that… bad?”

“S’ prolly fine.”

“Shady.”

“Whaaat? I feel fine. Empty on mana, like skipping breakfast and lunch. But I can walk and talk and boss my kobold cutie. All princess core functions operational!”

“Empty,” I repeated. “You’re… never empty.”

“Them’s the beans. Dying drained me, I suppose.”

“Wait… Can you even open the gate back home?”

“Nuh-uh. Gate needs me to feed it magic juice and I’m all out of juice. We gotta wait for the engine to reboot. Could be an hour. Could be a week.”

“A WEEK?!”

“Time works weird here anyway. Back home your grandpa’s probably still drinking the same cup of tea from when we left this morning.” She waved a hand, dismissively. “It’s fine.”

She walked right up to me, and stuck her nose against my shirt. Then under my armpit. Then my hair. Sniffing loud and deliberate, the way a hound works over a scent trail.

“What are you doing?”

“Sniffing you.”

“Why.”

“’Cus. Checking if Baldie hexed you when you kicked him.”

“Oh. Anything?”

She sniffed again, harder, then sneezed into my collarbone. “Can’t tell. Sniffer needs mana too. Currently my nose is a… regular nose. Useless. Might as well be a potato.”

“Great. Why are you still sniffing me then?”

“Smelling you is relaxing. Mmmm. Your shirt smells like grandpa’s laundry soaps. You’re ‘prolly safe from the obvious curses.”

“Comforting.”

“You’re welcomes.” She grinned. “Let’s go chill in the pilla’ village while I reload. Eating magic stuff should help too.”

She turned and started downhill toward the caterpillar village. My hand, without asking permission, slid over and took hers. Her fingers entwined with mine and squeezed.

The caterpillar village sprawled through a grove of oversized mushrooms and hollow logs along a slow, sky-blue brook.

Mayor Rolls was already waiting for us at the center of the village, on a somewhat flat stone shaped like a half-moon.

He was the size of a delivery van. Thick and green as a cucumber dreamt up by a poet, with velvety short legs in rows along his underside. 

A colossal spiral shell rode on his back, but calling it a shell understated the thing. It was a miniature mountain range made of shiny, colorful river stones, broken roots, enormous spiral seashells the size of barrels, pinecones as big as human heads, about a thousand smaller shells and at the very crown, a trio of dwarf pines growing from a handful of soil along with a bunch of Poppy flowers.

Mayor Rolls was eating a giant honey-pear.

“Princess Aquillianne,” his voice came from somewhere deep inside the shell, resonant, patient and bassy. “Champion Ashton.”

“Hiii, Mayor Rolls,” Shady waved.

“Hello, sir,” I said.

Mayor Rolls chewed once, slowly, and swallowed.

“I am not pleased with how today went.”

Shady scuffed the moss with one foot.

“Princess Aquillianne, when next you elect to expire, I would prefer it occur elsewhere. Preferably on another island.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Shady said. “A creepy, gray, bald pirate stabbed me!”

“The matter of fault is separate from the matter of location. The location was our peaceful island. The expiration deposited Outsider wrongness into our soil.” A long pause. “That is not a gift.”

“Sunny cleaned it up,” Shady stated.

“That she did,” Rolls agreed. “However, much ghastly wrongness still lingers in the air like a foul smell of rot.”

“She?” Shady blinked.

“The Mother of Ascendgard saved us,” the giant caterpillar stated. “For this is her domain.”

“Mother?! Ascendgard?!” Shady growled. “Since when is Sunny a girl and…”

“Since always. She is us and we are her,” the giant caterpillar stated.

“Say what?! You haven’t told us anything like that!” Shady waved her claw-tipped arms angrily.

“You haven’t asked the right questions and I haven’t truly pondered the answer to such until today’s diresome events.”

“I’m sorry, Mayor,” I cut in, before Shady could explode into more Wendigo-princess-ree. “We’re sorry. Both of us. We didn’t know any of this could happen here.”

Mayor Rolls considered me. His eyes were huge and glowing apple-green from within.

“Apology acknowledged, Champion. Acknowledgment is not absolution.”

“We know.”

“You do not know. Yet you respond correctly. This is acceptable.”

“Shady is out of magic,” I said. “We… Can’t go home today. I’m worried that the pirate who killed Shady might return and do it again.”

“I shall study the land,” Rolls turned his massive head, a slow, ponderous gesture like a crane rotating its jib, and the shell-mountain clicked around with him. He made a soft chittering noise.

From a hundred shells fused to various forest detritus, thousands of fat ladybugs poured out. 

A red-and-black cloud of them lifted in a widening spiral, dispersing in all directions across the forest. The air shimmered with the faint hum of many rainbowy wings.

Shady and I watched them go.

“We shall wait for their return,” Mayor Rolls said.

We waited. He finished his pear, then was brought another one by a particularly fat ladybug.

The ladybugs returned in ones and twos, landing on the spiral shell’s various rocks and branches, making bug noises at the giant caterpillar.

After a long while, Rolls spoke once again.

“The visitor Ascendant entered from the Cloud Sea. His vessel remains moored behind the tea-pines at the fourth cliff-shoulder yonder.” He rotated one great eye toward me and pointed with a chubby leg. “Champion, you and the Princess will remove this vessel from our island. It reeks of the visitor’s magic and will likely bring more of his kind to our shores.”

“Can do,” I said. “Uhm, if more men like him come here, will they hurt you?”

“No,” the great caterpillar stated. “If guests of that kind arrive, our isle shall present itself as untamed wilderness without voices. This is our custom for rude visitors. We have practiced it for aeons… until you appeared in our midst.”

I recalled our first month here.

At the beginning of summer, Shady spilling into the library covered in pollen and brambles, both of us utterly convinced that Neverland was a lovely place populated by very cute, large bugs and animals. The caterpillars rolled past us without a word for weeks. The mermaids splashed and dove away upon seeing us. The giant moths fluttered about. Not a single hello. Not a word, not a gesture, nor a sign of intelligence.

Then one day, after we helped a young caterpillar get free from a bramble-spider, Mayor Rolls rolled up beside our picnic and said, “You are both courteous visitors. We shall speak now.”

And then, the whole island started talking to us.

Shady swallowed, squeezing my hand hard.

“Mayor Rolls,” I said, “thank you. For talking to us at all.”

He bowed his great head an inch. The shell-mountain clicked. “Remove the vessel, then we can speak again.”

The fourth cliff-shoulder yonder lay a good walk away, along a path fringed with tea-pines, that smelled of bergamot when we brushed past them. We went on foot because Shady had no mana and I wanted to save my caterpillar dust for emergencies.

The wind at the edge of Shadashia came off the Cloud Sea in long, slow breaths, cool and fresh against my limbs. By the time we reached the tea-pines, my hands had stopped shaking and Shady’s skirt had lost more bark bits and been replaced with a bunch of large fern leaves tied together.

We found the pirate’s boat in due time, guided to the cliffside edge by a fat, ruby-red ladybug the size of my head that appeared above us with a buzz of iridescent wings.

It was a small flying skiff, tucked behind the tea-pines against the cliff’s underside, tethered by a single black rope to a root. It featured a low curved prow, made from dark panel wood which was almost entirely covered in carved spirals. 

A single mast rose from amidships, and a sail lay furled along the boom. A plain bench sat at the stern beside a tiller of the same black wood as the pirate’s sword handle.

Shady circled it once, nose twitching. “Boat.”

“Flying boat.” I agreed.

“Very pirate flying boat.”

“Extremely.” I agreed.

“M’gonna lick it.”

“To… claim it?”

“Obviously. Why else would I lick a magic boat?”

“Aight, you do you.”

She set to work along the prow, running her large, silver-violet tongue along the black wood in long, serious strokes. Her eyes crossed slightly in concentration. A faint silver sheen began to follow the path of her licks, bleeding into the grain, making the wood less jet black.

Occasionally, blue sparks jumped from the boat onto her tongue, making her twitch.

“Are you…?”

“Am fine. Nomming the wards. S’ basic jank stuff, no match for this amazing Princess. Chillax.” She moved like an angry ant to the stern and licked the tiller, drooling and raining more sparks. “Mine. Mine mine mine.” Over to the bench. A firm, committed lick. “Mine.” Along the gunwale, one side, then the other. “All mine. Every splinter. Every magic, ow, bit.” A particularly fat spark zapped her tongue, making her wince.

By the time she reached the furled sail and dragged her tongue across a corner of the canvas, the whole boat had taken on a soft pewter gleam.

In about twenty more minutes of vigorous licking, she finally hopped back, hands on hips, one fern leaf listing. “Claimed. Good flyin’ boat. Princess-approved.”

“Your tongue is glowing.”

“Das’ is normal. Admire mah VERY thoroughly claimed boat! Also, get in!”

She pulled me aboard. The hull showed tight, clean joinery, without visible seams, oiled to a dull luster. The bench held a small lockbox bolted down near the tiller. Inside the lockbox, when Shady pried it open with a claw, sat three items: a folded square of gray parchment, a small compass with twenty colorful needles, and a ring of six keys strung on a cord.

I picked up the key ring. They chimed softly, each one cut to a different angular pattern.

“No touch. Mine.” Shady grabbed the keys, compass and parchment and stuffed it all into her mouth.

I stared at her.

She held up one finger in the universal gesture of wait-a-moment. Her eyes crossed. Her antlers flickered. A small, contained flash of blue-white energy detonated somewhere inside her cheek pouch, making her entire head jerk sideways.

“GfhhFFk!”

“Was that a spell going off in your MOUTH?”

She nodded solemnly, tears of pain welling in the corners of her silver eyes. Another small flash. A muffled pop. Her left ear twitched violently. She held up a second finger. Two moments. Two moments was definitely what she needed.

I folded my arms and waited.