Author’s Note:
I stopped writing Doctor E for a semester of school as updating was incompatible with my schedule, but I did scrawl a little for the beginning of book 2, “Opener,” where book 1 was “Closer.”  This is alternate beginning part 1 of 3. 

Magic, whether you know it or not, is about compromise.

Yeah, there are wizards who are powerful enough to drop mountains onto cities.  It’s not very human, though, is it?  It’s not the way of the world.  It’s not how mountains or cities are used, and the farther you go, the harder it is to change and be part of the world. You become more and more of what is Beyond it.

This is why wizards work with coincidence, with slight changes of possibility.  With the greys, the maybes, the might have beens, the lesser trod of the two paths. With mystery.

It is a crisp autumn day.

Nevermind that about five minutes before it had been the darkest of the “before dawn” in late summer.  It is a crisp autumn morning, and I am walking in a diminutive wood, a bonsai bonanza.  Huge trees had marked my passage, and here I am a giant, and everything is cuter in miniature.

Fairyland is more like us than we are like ourselves. That’s the phrase that comes to mind out of one of Thomas’ sayings, and I see why he says it.  It’s a compromise, not a coincidence.  For it to interpret us (oh bless thee, Bottom!) we must interpret it in kind.  Not in one of those convenient little parables of, “I see it like my mind would explain it,” because then it would be more Star Wars and less Hamlet, but in that to stay stable, to stay in synchronization with our world, these fairylands make compromises.

So I am not in the back of the Beyond.  I am in a tiny forest that comes up to my hips, and I am trying to balance on a tiny path that is a twisty maze of passages that are all alike from this vantage point.  I am clumsy, and I am curiously waiting for a cupcake to say, “Eat me,” so I can better interact with this world that is Small.

Do I synchronize with the place, or does it synchronize with me?  A dragon’s tooth lies heavy in my pocket.  I keep fiddling with it, like some kind of worry stone.  I wonder for a moment what my troll friend does in this place, made of stone and the bones of the earth.  How does a creature that could be twelve feet tall handle a town that fits in a tea cup?

It’s not the size that matters, I guess.

You know, I’ve never met a girl who has actually said that.

How you use it, well, there is a trick to that.  As no convenient mushrooms or cupcakes make their way to me, the forest does become larger, and it’s not just a trick of the distance.  After about an hour of walking (and I do it a good clip so that I don’t keep too cold in the fall breeze) I’m actually into the forest, and trees that would make a troll feel small (little “s”) tower over me.  I still don’t know where the path is taking me, but I take it for granted, as I have an invitation.

Somewhere.  On my kitchen counter, I’m sure.

The forests of the Small Kingdom are not like the ones in the Rocky Mountains I’m used to… no chipmunks running around, no cycle of life and death the way trees lose leaves and needles.  No crisp calling of birds.  Every once in a while a tree settles or sighs, and I freeze up, waiting for it to become a carnivorous beast hungry for my brains.  It doesn’t happen, and after a while, their ambulatory nature just becomes another sound.  At least that’s settled – if one falls, the other trees are going to point and laugh.

These aren’t evergreens, or deciduous, or heck, I’m not a botanist. They’re not normal trees, and sometimes they stare at me as I go past, so I try not to notice.  Nothing’s getting in my way or shouting out, “Beware… for the path you have taken shall lead to certain destruction.”  Heck, maybe they all speak Esperanto.  That’d be funny.  The trunks are black with pink leaves here, and then black with green and red leaves over there.  The shapes, they seem to be the same, the ideas are there, but the execution is by painters who think cutting off their own ear is sane and practical.

I always wanted a children’s book to say, “See Van Gogh.  See Van Gogh run.  Go, Van Gogh!”  That’s a lie.  I just thought of that this minute while trying to figure out if that flash of silver was a flag or a fish or a bird or a stream.

Anything’s possible when your flowers smell like Old Spice.  Well, Old Spice and dead things.  I don’t know if it’s actually possible to be allergic to anything in the fairylands. I mean, wouldn’t my receptors have to recognize the allergens in some fashion?  Sneezes here were probably the work of tiny demons.

That’s a pleasant thought.  I could have angels in my mitochondria to fight back.

It’s a flag.  The trees here are less alive, in that, well, animal nature, I guess.  Mobility is one of those things I was taught separated animal and plant to some degree.  Or was it motility?  Motile telephones sound scary, but maybe that’s the obvious evolution of the babelfish.

This is what happens when I’m left alone with my thoughts.  Not that my brain wouldn’t happily betray me in company with odd meanderings, but I was trying not to think of something.  Something big.  Something important.

Something like a Dragon in my apartment, throwing me through time and space, like I didn’t exist anchored in any reality.

I shivered, and it wasn’t because of the cold.

I had a dragon’s tooth in my pocket.  That dragon’s tooth, in particular, if I believed the Questor’s wife.

What is the Dragon’s tooth fairy like?

And is it really a fairy, or some kind of goblin?

The flag billowed bigger than a bus, the colour of the sky, with a silver lining.  A small man stood in front of the flag pole, made of a particularly straight branch of a tree more like a cactus than a fern.  Which, looking at it, made sense, even if it fails in description.

“Sir Recks-a-Lot, I presume?”