The Wishing Map is a full-length fantasy that is being posted episodically at this site. To read the previous episode click here. To read it from the start, click here.

Gina was unable to console her brother Zack after his storytelling “game” caused suffering and death among the childlike naims.

Dust from the wheel-scarred road coated their shoes, their lungs, their hopes. Gina’s exhilaration over her brilliant rescue was gone; now all she felt was dread. She watched as her brother shuffled on under the weight of unimaginable regret, and thought bitterly of the task that had sent them here. Resenting everyone who’d had a hand in it, she screamed silently, So, is this our destiny? Well, we don’t want it!

And then she saw the house, if it could be called that. A huge rainbowwood tree had fallen across the road. The path led directly under it, or rather into it, for right where it intersected with the tree, there was a door. There were windows too, with curtains of living fern, and a chimney made from a hollow limb, with smoke curling out it. Soul-warming smoke.

Gina’s first thought was to pound on the door and beg to be let in. It was, after all, the season of Wisdom, when you could see your breath and feel the air gnawing at your skin. But her second thought was, “Hansel and Gretel!”

“What?” Zack said listlessly.

“What if there’s some creepy old lady in there who eats children!”

Ignoring her, Zack walked up to the door and knocked. The minute he did, it swung open. So he stepped inside.

“No!” his sister gasped.

The inside of the cottage consisted of a single room with myriad nooks and shelves carved into the walls. It reminded Zack of Uncle Robert and Aunt Suzie’s RV, except that instead of wood-grained plastic everything was completely natural, almost as if it had grown there, rather than been made. There was a blazing fire in a hollowed-out place, with a fire-blackened kettle above it. Merely being here in this cheery little house softened Zack’s grief. “Hello?” he called. “Is any…”

The moment he spoke, a plump, gentle-faced woman appeared. She was here all along, Zack thought, only I couldn’t see her until I wanted to. This wouldn’t have made sense out loud, but it made perfect sense inside his head. The other thing he knew—though he didn’t know how he knew—was that this was Rhema, the one the naims called the Queen a’ the Fae.

She was as short as he was, well under five feet, with graying hair pulled back in a pretzel twist and held in place by a sprig of bluebells. Her dress was woven from cobwebs, and ornamented with dew drops and red berries. There was no reason why the cobwebs shouldn’t fall apart and the dew drops dissolve. They just didn’t. “Oh, stop gawking, Zack, and sit,” she said…

As though she’d known him forever.

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Thoughts: Have you ever met an “angel incognito,” a stranger who changed your life?

To read the next episode, click here.