Near the highest hill, nestled into the darkest crag, lived an old skosh. Winter had settled in and the skosh was preparing her quarters for the cold blanket that lay the county to rest. The winds cut with cold – a furless existence was a frightful one indeed around here. But always those without steal from those with: nature had imbued some creatures with the ability to steal fur from other creatures. The skosh held tight to the fribbit fur. Fribbit oil dripped onto the hot coals and when they landed, they wrapped them one at a time in a membrane. The skosh had killed the fribbit that morning and passed the afternoon massaging the oil from its skin with two stones. She’d found it with its hind leg frozen to the surface of a pond that it had fallen asleep nearby. A fribbit frozen to any surface was an unusual site: fribbit oil’s lowered the freezing point of any surface it ran over. A fribbit is close if you find melted patches in deep snow.

At this moment the skosh rested by the fire, her hands ringed the fur like gorged flannel, and she worked on a poem in her head. It was about fribbits and their oil. She already had a working title: Feed Me Fribbit Oil Until I Die. These were the first four lines:

Feed me fribbit oil until I die,

My love is gone and the wind is high,

Oil me up and throw me in the lake,

I’ll melt my way to a watery fate.

A skosh in winter isn’t busy. She planned to spend the rest of the evening on her poem and rinse the fribbit of its oil. And she would have rinsed right through the night and to morning, if it weren’t for a knock at her door. Now, you must understand that skoshes don’t have doors. Or houses for their non-doors even. Instead they cast a spell that projects a vision of a homely estate onto any visual cortex within a one-mile radius. Were anything outside knocking, it held a symbol in their mind of there, a warm cottage, tempting licks of warmth at the windows – perhaps the edge embraced by steam – and a door with confident wood you trust. Perhaps, yes, the scent of fishwish stew you might catch if the wind held up its onslaught on your nose.

HggT had noticed the glow by how it tickled with the crest of the hill. It glowed that warm green, just like on her home planet. That muddy green of the forest floor that she folded herself into at night. That dirty green of the sky after a bismuth storm had fled over off to the horizon and the sun could tend to the drenched surface. Green, the color of love, copulation, and intimacy – the fresh color in the face of a reconstruction. She made her way towards it and in one steps she was almost there. In the middle of her second step she began writing a poem in her head. It was all about the color green and how it looked. She already had a working title: Shower Me With Green Until I Die. These were the first four lines:

Shower me with green until I die,

Moss on the ground, grape in the sky,

When my time has come and green turns gray,

Save my color for a greener day.

The skosh hadn’t had a visitor since the first snow of winter. Anyone lost out in the hills at this time of the year when not one sun rose, well they were certainly delirious. These fools usually had poor circulation to the brain and their organs would be too sickly for potions. Lately she’d felt more broody and it unnerved her that she even considered the option of releasing the visitor. She was at the illusory entrance to her dwelling and began to lower the magic door, on her face she planted a smile wider than the swings of a grandfather clock. She opened the door, expecting a soul so frozen it couldn’t blink its eyes. The skosh found, instead, the doorway filled with the gaping black pupil of a large eyeball.

HggT stared at the green light and poked it with her finger. It vibrated, it wobbled, it was a bubble or shimmer but not what it should have been. Instantly she was hit with a feeling of betrayal. The light that had promised her an antidote for her homesickness was a fraud. This was no shrine of her people. She was still alone, stranded on this world full of tiny people. Tiny people that always tried to prod her with sharp sticks, or tie annoying thread around her legs. In large groups they were as cumbersome to deal with as grat swarms, but at least they did not fly. Exile to this tiny world where the highest peak was up to her shoulders! It was cold and weightless and frightening and she wished she could jump into space and blacken her mind in a bubbling, boiling, bloody explosion. But the image of such a grotesque end locked her muscles and they would never oblige when she tried. All this came rushing back to her as the peered at that wavering green light. Then the light moved in a peculiar way. As if to hide inside itself like a hermit crab, the space around the light folded back and a figure – tiny person! – took its place. A tiny, old crone who was visibly shaking. Was something dripping in her hand? HggT didn’t let this question stand in her way for long. She crushed the green light, the old crone, and whatever was dripping in the crone’s hand under the palm of her hand.