Canto 11 – Battle Plans
The meeting that followed the feast was limited to the Mouse King and Zam his wife, Prinz Flute and his three companions, Lord Lancelot, and the Rascal, who was forced to sit next to PoppenSparkle because he was apparently no longer welcome as Lancelot’s Squire. Schtinker, of course, wanted badly to be there, but he was taken to the bathhouse with the other Sylph children that didn’t pass the smell test before bedtime.
“I think the solution is obvious. We use Poppy’s Polymorph Spell to turn as many Gobbuluns into Fairies as it is possible to do. We bolster our army with the converts from theirs.” Prince Flute looked pleased with himself as he announced the plan to the whole table.
“Nonsense!” Lancelot sat with his arms folded in front of him and his reddish, tired eyes glaring at the map on the center of the table.
“Why is it nonsense?” Flute insisted.
“Because we are doomed here. The Stoor has his ugly army, and Lord Toxiss brought his vast army all the way from distant Sheek-a-go.”
“The Slow Ones actually pronounce that place Chicago,” Tod corrected helpfully.
“I don’t care what you call it. The point is… we are so outnumbered, they will overwhelm us, slaying everybody who is not immortal, and then swarming down to Cair Tellos to do the same to them. We have only one play here. We make a glorious last attack, kill so many of them before they overwhelm us that they can’t muster a big enough force to overwhelm Cair Tellos. We will die heroes.”
“You won’t die,” pointed out the Rascal. “You are an immortal Storybook. The rest of us will all die for your glory and you’ll walk into Cair Tellos to claim all the credit.”
“You wound me, Rascal. Did I not save your life a dozen times over in the Battle of the Arcanum?”
“You did. But you decimated the entire army doing it. We would have sold our lives better defending the castle rather than fighting them on the open fields.”
“Okay, perhaps we choose to die on the parapets of Castle Cornucopia. Maybe we can take more of them out if we make them climb our walls and pour down the hot oils as they try to climb up…”
The Mouse King cleared his throat. “Zam and I have three little mouselings to care for. And there are hundreds of Sylph and Elf children left orphaned by the war that could use new parents. We don’t want anyone to die who doesn’t have to. And don’t we know that at least a few of the Gobbuluns out there are citizens of Cornucopia that have been changed by Lord Toxiss?”
“We won’t do ourselves any good to change a few of the Gobbuluns the way the girl did today. It won’t make a sizeable enough difference, and she will just exhaust her magic getting Gobbuluns changed so other Gobbuluns can kill them. It would be futile… a wasted effort.”
“I think, Lord Lancelot, that the point where your heroics are sorely needed, is at the gate where you and your best soldiers can defend and gather the changed ones into the castle as we change them.” Flute smiled as he obviously was trying to manipulate Lancelot’s ego.
“You cannot change enough of them with one little girl casting one little spell.”
“We can do better than that!” said Glittershine. “I helped PoppenSparkle write the spell into her spell book. I already am familiar with the spell. Tod and Flute can also study it. We will have four Wizards, not one, changing bad guys into good guys.”
“If we should happen to accidentally win the war that way, what will you do with all the new Fairies? Where will they live?”
“You know good and well, Lancelot, that the Castle Cornucopia is huge. We have thousands of towers, secret rooms, mushroom gardens, Fairy houses, businesses, and entertainments in this big, old barn that haven’t had enough Fairy people to live in them since King Pallas and his army were destroyed by Darvon Redsoul, the Great Dragon.” The Mouse seemed to be getting a bit hot under the collar to Poppy.
“And as Glitter mentioned, there will be four talented Wizards helping to repopulate the place,” said Flute, grinning like a fox.
“Very well, then. It is obvious that you have to learn the hard way. I will go along with this plan if only to prove you wrong.”
“Will your plan really work?” the Rascal whispered to Poppy.
“I think so. I am not as confident as any of the rest of you, but I am just learning how to be a Wizard. But if Flute believes in the plan, then, I think I believe in it too.”
“I hope so. I thought it was a great honor to be chosen as Lord Lancelot’s Squire. But right now, I just need to see him proven wrong… even if it kills me.”
Catch a Falling Star 
How Good Things Grow from Bad Things
In the deep woods of the Pacific Northwestern portion of the United States, a great tall pine tree is struck by lightning. Of course, the threat of fire in this day and age is very real. But luckily, this time as the tree falls in flames and ignites the brush around where it falls, the sky opens up and a deluge of rain extinguishes what the lightning has ignited.
Time passes as time always seems to do. The burned area heals. The slain giant is broken down by bugs and heat and bacteria and rot. And before you know it, flowers begin to bloom there. The tree’s carbon-based flesh has fertilized the ground. And where the tree once created shade, there is now a hole to let the sunshine in. Life gets wildly busy growing.
Because of what the tree suffered, the forest floor, especially the part of it where flowers bloom, got its chance in the sun.
The same sort of rule of nature happened in politics in 2016. Bozo the Crime Boss got elected because the wave of pus and anger he surfed into power on had been festering under the skin of the country since Reagan brought judgemental, self-righteous, and fear-mongering rich-types into the political power pinnacles in 1980. The boil finally burst. De-regulating environmental protections has been a Republican priority since Ronnie Ray-Gun put James Watt in the job of Secretary of the Interior just so the forests in National Parks could be opened up to logging and oil exploration. And we have seen in the past few years how badly those changes in policy have affected our lives. The environment is on fire. We don’t have enough trees to absorb all the carbon dioxide that is causing the warming. Most of this country’s fresh water is now contaminated with an industrial waste of one sort or another. But Don Cheetoh’s recent implosion is threatening not only to wither the poisonous fruits of Republican policies but fundamentally destroy the evil-making machinery that the Republicans have worked so hard at maintaining for decades. We human beans who actually value human life over money thought 2016 was a deadly disaster. But it may instead have been more of a lancing of the boil as the twice-impeached Prexydent of the Disunited States did all his high crimes and misdemeanors in the public eye and then was routinely given a pass by Republican leaders in Congress. It reached a point with the stolen presidential documents that his crimes can no longer be covered up. The poisons may well be draining out of the holes the spoiled mango of a man poked into the very skin of our government. Look at how much climate-correction legislation was recently passed by the new, non-Cheetoh President. And look at how polls are suggesting that Democrats might not have to endure the traditional punishments for doing something good for the people that Republicans were so looking forward to. Good things are seemingly growing where the manure of the previous Republican administration has been spread.
My own life is also an example of how something terrible grew into something good. As a victim of childhood sexual assault, I spent many years grappling with trauma. But the incident made me a school teacher, determined to fight dark things like sexual assault, violence, and a will to do harm to others with the power of education, empathy, and love. As a retired teacher, I have fully embraced naturism, and am nakedly honest about many things. One of those things is that you really need to endure some badness in your life to truly understand and appreciate the good that directly comes out of having survived that evil.
I should be very clear about the fact that when I was a teacher, I was not also an active nudist at the same time. I never suggested that any child should be naked in public and never saw any of my students nude (a feat achieved by never being a coach of athletics in charge of monitoring behaviors in the shower room after events and practice.) My nudism is entirely practiced after I retired and mostly at home by myself. But it is also a good thing to grow out of the badness that occurred before. It is a chance for me to finally be at peace with who I am inside my own skin (hopefully free of boils.)
As I am now a Medicare recipient, I have to face the badness on the horizon that comes with reaching an age considered a fully-lived life. There could be heart attacks, strokes, and possibly Parkinson’s in the near future. I could lose so much of my mental self-control that I end up being charged with drawing child pornography (though I don’t believe I have done any of that. Former President George HW Bush didn’t believe he sexually harassed any young nurses from his deathbed either.) But whatever badness comes, I do believe there will be some mitigating goodness that follows because of it.
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