The silver-leafed forest gave way without warning. One moment Kaelen was shouldering aside another curtain of luminescent ferns, and the next the four of them stumbled into a meadow so achingly beautiful it made their eyes sting. Buttercups, moon-pale asters, and violet blooms Mirael could not name carpeted the ground in dense, swaying waves. The air smelled of warm honey and something older — petrichor, perhaps, or the ghost of rain that had fallen in some other season entirely.
A low, sweet humming drifted across the clearing, and every blade of grass seemed to lean toward it. “Feywild,” Zephyra murmured, pulling her dark leather coat tighter. Her amber eyes swept the clearing’s edges, where the silver trees stood too perfectly spaced, as though arranged by a meticulous hand. “I hate this place. It always smells like a trap.” Grundar the dwarf grunted in agreement, his iron-ringed ginger beard catching the pale gold light. He tightened his grip on his warhammer.
Beside him, Mirael had already nocked an arrow, copper braid swaying as she turned a slow circle. “There,” she said softly, nodding toward the far end of the meadow. A stooped old figure moved between the flowers on hands and knees — tending to them, it seemed, with a patience that bordered on reverence. He wore a wide, stained hat the color of old rust, and his gnarled fingers moved with surprising delicacy.
Kaelen raised his fist, signaling a slow advance. His greatsword stayed sheathed — there was no immediate threat, and attacking an old man gardening in a meadow, however strange, was not the fighter’s way. “Hallo, grandfather,” he called across the blooms. “Are you well? We mean no harm.” The old man did not look up. “Nein harm, ja?” His voice was thin as paper, and the accent was something no human tongue had ever fully shaped. “All harm. Every traveler, always harm.” He chuckled — soft and wet.
Mirael’s boot caught on something. She looked down. Beneath the flowers — beneath all the flowers — pale hands lay pressed against dark soil. Fingers. Dozens of them. “Kaelen,” she said very quietly. The old man stood. He was not old. He had never been old. What rose from the meadow was a compact, grinning horror barely three feet tall, with fingers like iron rivets and teeth filed to iron points. The hat — that wide, rust-colored hat — was not stained. It was soaked, still wet, and it sat atop a head that seemed to generate the smell of old copper. The Redcap pulled something from his belt: a scythe, half his height and wholly impossible, crackling with faint green luminescence. “My garden grows so well,” it said pleasantly, “when properly fed.”
The meadow erupted. Roots burst upward like hands grasping at ankles. Zephyra’s eldritch blast went wide as the ground lurched beneath her; she caught a root with one boot and rolled, firing again from a crouch — the bolt seared the Redcap’s shoulder and it shrieked with a sound like tearing tin. Grundar charged, shield forward, bellowing a prayer to the Forge-Father that cracked the honey-sweet air like a hammer on an anvil. Kaelen drew his greatsword in a single sweep and drove the blade into the earth, severing three grasping roots before they could coil around his legs.
The Redcap was fast — impossibly, horribly fast. It danced away from Grundar, its scythe whipping in a singing arc that opened a line of fire across the dwarf’s forearm. But Mirael had climbed a silver tree at the meadow’s edge, and from there she had a clear line. Her first arrow pinned the creature’s hat to its scalp. Her second caught its weapon arm. The third she held. “Tell me,” she said, her voice carrying cleanly across the meadow. “Tell me how many. Or I take the eye.”
The Redcap glared up at her with eyes the color of old bruises. Then, unaccountably, it laughed — and sat down in the flowers like a creature accepting a long-overdue rest. “Forty-seven,” it said. “Since the first frost.” Grundar’s warhammer ended the conversation.
They worked until dusk pulling what they could from beneath the meadow. Most were beyond identifying, but Zephyra found a silver locket near the center of the clearing. Inside: a miniature portrait of a young man, perhaps twenty, with kind eyes. On the back, scratched in uneven letters: For Elara. I’ll be home by spring. None of them spoke on the way back through the silver trees. The meadow, without the Redcap’s curse to sustain it, had begun to wilt before they reached the forest’s edge. By morning, Mirael guessed, it would be bare earth and silence.
“Forty-seven,” Kaelen said at last, his voice rough as gravel. Zephyra tucked the locket into her coat. “Forty-eight, most likely. He always seemed like a liar who told the truth.” They walked on. The Feywild hummed around them — sweet, and impossibly still, and full of things that were not what they seemed.
💬 Would you have let the Redcap speak — or would Grundar’s hammer have fallen at “forty-seven”? Tell us in the comments! 👇