hwango

Huh? What? Oh, it's you children again. Don’t you have chores or something? You've finished them, eh? You want a story? You must really be desperate.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a faerie named Selasko Timmertamblin. Selasko was a farmer by trade, and he –

What? No, most faeries aren't farmers, actually. Most of them don't have any sort of jobs at all, which means that they have plenty of free time to sneak about in the human world stealing socks, putting spiders in people's shoes, and pouring nightmares into the ears of children who don't go to bed when they're supposed to.

Anyway, Selasko's farm was famous for its pumpkins. The pumpkins were amazing in just about every way you can imagine. They were so orange that they practically glowed. They could be made into pie so delicious that you would forget that there was any other kind of food. They were so huge it would take two men to lift one, assuming of course that ordinary men could get close enough to touch one without having their souls destroyed by their eldritch power, which of course they couldn't. If you carved one into a jack o' lantern it wouldn't just frighten away ghouls and demons, it would actually eat them. Yes, it's safe to say that Selasko's pumpkins were the most amazing pumpkins in all the land, and that if for some reason Selasko wasn't able to provide them to the faeries who wanted them that he would probably be weighed down with stones and flung into the Well of Despair by his enraged former customers.

Anyhow, one morning Selasko went out into his fields to check on his pumpkins and discovered that some of them had been smashed to pieces during the night. This clearly hadn't been the work of any of the usual garden pests – slugs, moles, crocodiles, woodchucks, gnomes, or lost humans whose souls had been destroyed by the overwhelming pumpkinity of the pumpkins. This was something else entirely. Something that hadn't tried to steal or to eat the pumpkins, but had just broken them for no readily apparent reason. Naturally, Selasko was very upset.

What? Did he cry? Don't you children know anything about faeries? No, he didn't cry, because wasn't sad. He was furious.

I was going to gloss over the details because some of you children are quite young, and I didn't want to scare you. In fact, I'm still going to skip some of the details. But I will tell you that smoke rose from his footprints. That when he picked up his scythe to sharpen the blade, his handprint scorched itself into the wooden handle. That he glared at a bird that annoyed him with its singing, and it keeled over dead on the spot. Nearby statues wept blood. That sort of thing. That's what happened in the first few seconds, when he saw that one pumpkin had been smashed. Things only got worse when he found out that four of them had been destroyed, but you'll just have to imagine for yourselves what else happened.

Anyway, Selasko was, as I've been forced to elaborate upon, really, really angry. So he made a scarecrow.

He started with a few straight pieces of wood, but his wrath made them twist and warp in his hands. The soft green vines he used to tie them together blackened and became as tough as wire. The twigs he used as hands contorted into gnarled, talon-tipped claws. He took the most whole of the ruined pumpkins and placed it on the top as the head, the gash in the side shifting to become a maw of jagged, vicious teeth. Selasko carved it a few slitted, sinister eyes so that it could see, and then took a step back to admire his creation. It was a hunchbacked monstrosity, every aspect of its construction saturated with his rage. It growled and quivered with barely-contained murderous impulses, flexing its dreadful claws all the while.

Selasko was pleased. Satisfied that anything that tried to damage his pumpkins again would meet with a horrific doom, Selasko went to have some tea.

A bit later, as Selasko sat and enjoyed his tea, he heard a polite knocking at his door. It turned out to be Grool, a troll who lived under a bridge a mile or so up the road. Grool said that he was very embarrassed and ashamed, but that he had woken up that morning with some pumpkin seeds stuck between his toes, and he was afraid that he might have inadvertently stumbled through Selasko's pumpkin patch on his way home last night.

It had all been an accident, and here the guilty party stood before him, apologizing! Well, you can imagine how Selasko felt. It was a lucky thing for Grool that Selasko had already poured all of his anger and hate into making that horrible scarecrow, or he probably would have killed Grool right on the spot and buried the pieces of his body in seven separate graves before moving on to even more gruesome acts of revenge. But Selasko was in such a comparatively sunny and pleasant mood that he just placed a terrible curse upon Grool and all of his children, and all of his children's children, and Grool went away wondering at his miraculous good fortune.

Then, since it seemed the scarecrow wouldn't be needed after all, Selasko set it free, and now no one knows exactly where it is or what unspeakable things it might do to you if you meet it.

The lesson to be learned here is that if you don't go to bed when you're supposed to, faeries will come and pour nightmares into your ears. That, and if you act without first learning all the facts, you can end up wasting your time creating an unspeakable abomination that will last for hundreds of years and leave a shadow of terror over the land long after the original reason for creating it no longer has any meaning.

Now, run along and go to bed.