(Page 1 of 2) Thumper by Dan Bieger
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SUMMARY: Based on Radthorne's art: http://www.kevinradthorne.com/Graphics/Kiri%20and%20Troll.jpgThey came at her from a thousand directions, front, back, sideways, up, down, off-center. Like a cloud of gnats, the pixies assaulted the poor faerie, nipping, tucking, biting, slurping as if she were a mobile delicatessen. She defended with a series of spells murderously effective though each was confined to a specific target. Battling pixies one at a time sapped her strength, vigor, life force. Worse, it completely destroyed the effect of her lip gloss.
Such an ambush didn't count as a particularly unordinary occurrence in the Forest Primeval. Enmity between pixies and faeries rivaled that between Republicans and Democrats, a little more bloody, perhaps, but this physical ferocity was balanced by their reluctance to employinvective, rhetoric, and blather. A lone faerie shouldn't be. Simple as that.
The Forest Primeval contented itself with voyeurism, taking no sides. Mary Margaret Elizabeth Clearwing should have lost it right there. Certainly, her family would have been aghast, even angry enough to re-swear eternal enmity against pixies and send most of her brothers out to collect trophies for the display cases in the family library. The collection already numbered several thousand, but, hey, evolution changed the colors and markings of pixies as much as it did Emperor moths. You could never have a fresh enough display.
Besides the blood feud between pixies and faeries, what could be more normal in the Forest Primeval than a magical occurrence? With Mary Margaret Elizabeth Clearwing on her last flash of CoverupGirl blush, normalcy kicked in. Down the path that the faerie herself had tramped came tramping a troll, huge, appropriately ugly, armed with the standard bludgeon, bludgeoning trees, plants, and flowers along the path, singing "thump, thump, thump..." in time with his bludgeoning, quite thrilled with the syncopation between club and "thump." If the troll could verbalize its thoughts, he would have expressed a wish that his little sister could see this performance, She was always calling him names like "uncoordinated" and "spastic." Hah! She should see this! "thump, thump, thump..."
The pixies ignored the troll entering their clearing concentrating instead on removing polish from the faeries's finger and toe nails. Most involved gagged, sputtered to comrades that the girl should have better taste but whether they were referring to nail polish or Mary Margaret Elizabeth's aesthetics was not clear. What was clear was the comprehension that dawned in the troll's mind. "Thump, thump," the troll said, a monstrous grin spreading across his face. If the pixies had been paying attention, they wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between a smiling troll and a not-smiling trolling. Either version was ugly.
The faerie went to her knees just as the troll began to swing its club spraying pixies in more directions than from which they had attached. Each swing terminated on a tree trunk, the pixies caught by the swing mashed into the bark. Some pixies were lucky enough to be deposited in the depressions in the bark but most were smashed, their screams of terror cut short by the sudden impact.
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