Fusainne

3000 years. For 3000 years I‘ve been sitting here, peacefully, I might add, sitting in my mountain home and guarding my hoard. And I'm a lot older than that, too, but I started off small, as all dragons do. When I first hatched, I wasn‘t much bigger than one of these furry creatures, you know, the ones with the tails...I think the humans call them...cits? Katties? Something like that. Anyways, I was drawn to glittering things – a weakness of my kind, I will admit – so at night, I snuck into people's homes and took whatever I could carry. Coins, gems, jewelry – if it sparkled, it was mine. Sometimes the humans woke up while I was in their homes...that was a little inconvenient, but I just blew some of my sleeping dust into their faces, and back to dreamland they went, not remembering a thing in the morning. See those red and yellow sparkles coming out of my nostrils right now? That‘s the sleep dust...no, don't you go breathing in too deeply now, I‘m not finished with my story!

At the heart of the forest, there lives a nymph. Not the kind of nymph you might know from the fairy tales – no slender, young thing, with soft, green hair, sparkling eyes and limbs like young trees. Her hair is green, in fact, but it‘s damp and matted, like moss growing on fallen trees. Her eyes are dark and deep, like the pond beneath the willows, that hasn‘t seen sunlight in decades now. Her skin is wrinkled and gnarly, her limbs bent and wry, like the old oak at the centre of the forest, the oak she has seen grow from an acorn. Back then, when the forest was young, the nymph was young herself, singing and dancing in the meadows, her eyes bright and full of the sunlight shining through the light canopy. She hasn‘t danced in a long time now. Still, her stride is strong and sure – she might be old, but not frail. During the day, she wanders the forest, slowly, carefully, as if not to disturb it, although she could never disturb the forest – the forest knows her, as she knows the