Elizabeth here: This is Ch.03 of The Downhill Fey Forest. Read the other parts if you haven't already. I hope you enjoy it: happy reading!
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Alban stared at the sign. "
Fairy village ahead!
" it read. Sleepy had told him that there would be fairies, but she didn't say that there was a whole village of them. Two was a pain to deal with; what might a whole village want to do?
At least Sleepy had reassured him that they didn't kill people. Maybe he'd be alright after all. He moved forward down the hill, still dreading what was ahead.
It occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, they might be less aggressive at home, since surely they had other things to do than harass outsiders, like knit hats, or farm, or whatever it was fairies did when young men like him weren't around. He held out hope that this was the case.
After Alban had trekked down the slope for an hour, he noticed crack-like fissures in the ground every now and then, about two inches wide and just as deep. They grew as he travelled: by the time the slope flattened out again, they were a foot wide and a foot deep. Inside the fissures, Alban saw exposed roots and little pebbles.
Sleepy had mentioned something about the "wooded canyons". Was this it? Alban trekked forward. The fissures were getting larger, but thankfully, more spread apart. When they were three feet wide, he could just step around them.
Soon, the fissures stopped getting wider, capping at five feet wide, but they still got deeper as he travelled: five, ten, then fifteen feet... and bigger and deeper tree roots were exposed within. The walls and bottom were all packed dirt with pebbles, save for the occasional little fungus or bit of plant life growing inside. When they were twenty feet deep, Alban saw bluish-green vines hanging from some of the trees on the surface. The inch thick vines hung from thick tree branches and some of them extended deep within the trenches; they looked climbable enough. Maybe if he fell down a pit and wasn't too hurt, he could climb out on one of those vines.
The chasms got deeper still as he travelled, and soon, he heard a giggle from above, the telltale sign of a fairy.
"Who's there?" Alban said. There was no reply. Alban picked up a six foot long stick that had fallen by a tree, and started gently prodding the ground ahead, veering off course every now and then to seek out invisible and hidden things in addition to holes in the ground. If fairies had used illusions to trick him twice already, then certainly that was their favorite way to trick people.
Three more giggles from above, one after the other. A minimum of three fairies looming unseen in the canopy above. Alban kept going, and tried not to tremble. What would they do this time?
Then all at once, there were too many giggles to count from above. They kept snickering up above from all directions. He looked up in a brighter patch of the forest and saw several shadows flickering through the canopy. How many were following him?
The fairies went silent. The trees thickened again, and he couldn't see their shadows anymore.. He tried his best to stay away from the ravines. When he was forced to leap over a ravine, he looked around carefully before jumping to the other side, and jumped only where there were vine-laden trees nearby.
Alban came to a spot in the forest with fewer ravines: that was a relief. He passed by a tree covered in the hanging vines.
Then something grabbed his right ankle.
Before he could react, his left arm was also bound by an inch wide vine, already tightly wrapped around his arm several times. He panicked. He tried desperately to sprint away, to escape, to pull himself out of the vines, but he could only stumble in their grasp as another vine grasped his other arm, and his other ankle. The vines curled around his arms and legs, cementing their powerful grip and tightening. He tried desperately to thrash out of their grasp as the vines started to pull him towards the tree.
Fairies laughed above him, unseen in the canopy. He was pulled with his back to the tree, and when his backpack rubbed against the bark of the tree, the vines started to lift him into the air. The vines went rigid when he was six feet off the ground, locking him in place with his arms and legs spread.
Unable to move, all he could do was watch and listen as about two dozen fairies descended from the canopy. Like Sundrop and Snowdrop, they were tiny elf women with dragonfly wings, but all of them were distinguished by their varying hairstyles and unique dress. One fairy was in a green leaf dress, another one had a silk maid outfit, and a third wore an orange dress made of petals. All the fairies were either giggling or smiling. But, Snowdrop and Sundrop were not among them.
The one in the green leaf dress spoke. "We gottem!" she said. Her voice was confident and mature, though still high pitched. "Buttermint, do you have Snowdrop's list?"
"There's just three things on it," the black-haired fairy in the maid outfit said. "Ruined clothes, being messy, sexual pranks."
"That's all they tried?"
"I'm telling you, this is just the list of things they said he hates."
"Can you let me down?" Alban said. But, just as he said the last word, three thick vines slithered down from above and covered his mouth. They wrapped around his head and muffled his speech, but weren't terribly tight.
"Shh," the green leaf dressed fairy said. "I'm trying to get a plan for you going over here. Okay, uh... you know what, screw it, let's go crazy and just tear his clothes off!"
"Yay!" the mob of fairies shouted with glee.
Alban tried to speak, but the vines grew tighter around his mouth. He couldn't move, speak, or defend himself. All he could do was struggle in place and make muffled cries as the mob of fairies flew towards him and started to grab at the fabric of his clothes.
