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| Picture by Eryn Nikkole, edited with Photogrid |
One day, the decking above him creaked, the piles shifting as someone thumped their way across the bridge. Just as soon as they reached the other side, they turned around and did it again. So alarmed was he, that he climbed over the parapet to see what was causing the racket. It was a grey satyr, pipe in hand, her hooves clicking as she skipped.
“Stop skipping across my bridge or it will fall into the water,” he felt one of the boards on the decking, found it loose.
“But Troll, have you heard the sound the boards make as I trip across them?” the satyr demonstrated.
“Stop that!” Now that he was on the bridge he could feel it shimmy and roll, “We’re heading towards a catastrophic structural failure!”
The satyr paused her gallop, a puzzled look in her dewy eyes. “You are. Just wait until my sister comes,” and with a flick of her stubby tail, she cantered across the bridge and into a stand of trees.
“You are,” mimicked the troll. He reached under the bridge for his leather sack, removing a hammer and a pouch of square-headed nails, “listen to the sound as I destroy your bridge, Troll. Don’t you like it, Troll?”
After a good deal of hammering, the bridge felt stable. The troll returned to his spot beneath, flipping through a book, mouthing the words silently, “Pilaster, wing wall, footing.” Stillness preened its feathers inside his mind, every wing a schematic.
The sound of rapping awoke him, and he scampered up the side of the abutment. A white satyr stood in the middle of his bridge, jumping up and down. The troll had never seen a satyr jump before and stood agog as the creature sailed ten feet in the air.
“A-hah!” she called out, spotting him, “You must be the troll that wants to eat me up.”
“Yes,” his voice oozed with sarcasm, “that’s exactly why I put a bridge here, so I could eat the little satyrs that cross it.”
“You don’t want to eat me,” the satyr batted her eyes at him, “Wait for my brother, he’s much juicier.”
The troll hissed out a sigh. But before he could explain, the satyr dashed past him and into the woods. Making his way to the center of the bridge, the troll bent to examine the decking. It was cracked where the satyr’s hooves had hit repeatedly. He dolefully retrieved his tools, setting to work on repairing his bridge.
He had just sat down to soak his feet when he heard a flute playing. Curious, the troll stood and poked his head above the lowest part of the bridge. A satyr with curled horns stood above him, tootling on a set of golden pipes. The satyr was so startled by the troll’s appearance, that he dropped his pipes, the flutes landing square between the troll’s eyes. The last thing the troll heard as he sank into unconsciousness was the satyr’s voice. “I am not afraid of you,” he bleated.
The troll floated down the river a mile and a half before passing under a towering draw bridge with turret towers. One of the bridge’s trolls, a fellow goblin by the name of Irk spotted him and dragged him to a platform of steel mesh. “Who are you?” Irk’s words came out in a billow of steam.
“They just call me Troll,” he coughed.
“And you are a musical troll?”
“I’m not-” the troll looked at the flutes clutched in his hand. Had he really held onto those pipes the entire time?
“I’m Irk. We’ll call you Dint, if that’s okay?” Irk pumped his hand, “Love to chat more, but it’s a Satyr Year and they’re all trying to cross the bridge.”
“Wait, what?” Dint looked up as the bridge above him groaned. Countless satyrs swarmed the bridge deck, biting at the tension cables and butting the support beams. Trolls were retreating to the watchtowers, clinging to the brick with their rubbery fingers and leathery toes. “And here I thought it was just me.”
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I've been wanting to write my own version of the Three Billy Goats Gruff for a while now, but I could never get the story to work. Then one day I was reading a different version of it that ended with "and he was never seen again." Goldilocks, interestingly, is also never seen again. Sometimes the Big Bad Wolf is never seen again (and sometimes the pigs eat him). It's a little bit of Fairy Tale Deus Ex Machina; if you have no idea how to end the story, just have the villain ghost everyone else in the story. Done.
Anyway, I wanted to know what actually happened to the troll. Where did he go? Did he find other trolls? Did the goats eat him?
I've been wanting to write a story about a wendigo, so I decided to make my goats satyrs. Silliness ensued.