Climbing when you knew how far away something was always felt faster and easier than climbing when you didn’t. Kel was accustomed to spending large portions of every day walking, in the woods, up the mountain. Climbing was as natural as breathing, though usually Kel climbed outside, among the silver-and-green-leaved trees branching everywhere in the woods.

Now that they had a light source, they leaned close to the tunnel walls to look at the scales. Not just red and gold, blues and greens shimmered there, iridescent. And the scales had a tiny space between them that the diffuse light seemed to be coming from.

“Was it grown?” Kel mused aloud. Mama had said that the house was grown, that most of the things around them had been grown long ago.

Kel reached out to touch, and thought, I wish it was brighter.

When the tunnel brightened, Kel startled so hard the pixie nearly fell off their head.

Unsettled, Kel continued climbing, as tiny hands clung tightly to their curls.

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Kel couldn’t find Mama anywhere.

Not in the garden on the sunny hillside which lay nestled behind the small glittering dome of the second story of their house, and not in the bright woods in the valley below.

Kel pulled the rounded front door open, set a gathering basket down on the shaped wood bench just inside, and called out… but there was no response.

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