The Secrets of Elderville

“But that could take ages aunt Opal! I need to be powerful and strong now! That wasp has all the wanderers fooled and has my siblings within her grasp. What if she decides to kill everyone tomorrow! Then what!” Opal moves a strand of Jessa’s hair from her face, “Listen to me, first let’s drop the aunt part. We’ve established I am your aunt. Just call me Opal and secondly, I am a fantastic coach! I will train you. By the end of the week, I’ll have you casting spells with your finger!” Jessa sighs, “Yeah, look Opal, I know you’re powerful and you’ve got some years of experience up your sleeve, but I don’t think it’s possible for just you to get me at top magical wanderer power by the end of this week. It can’t be done!”

“Just me?” Opal smirks, “hah, who said I was going to be the only one training you?” Puzzled by this, Jessa starts to think that the owl has magic when suddenly Opal lifts two fingers to her mouth and made a shrill noise, a bird-like noise. “What in elderberries was that?!” Jessa screams, lowering her hands from her ears. But before her question could be answered, she heard hoots and hollers from voices all around. Was she going crazy? Did her aunt’s outburst of high-pitched yelling cause her to hear voices?

“Jessa, meet my second family. The Aristocrat Wanderers, who abandoned their trees, and all found each other, creating memory after memory in this tree.” Jessa looks around her, up high and down low, several wanderers surrounded her. Wanderers of all different ages, all smiling at her, “uh, hi?” she says. Opal wraps her arm around Jessa, leading her towards a tall wanderer boy, who looked around Jessa’s age. “This is Matteo, his father was the first wanderer I met, he reminded me of my younger self and when he passed, I took up the responsibility of raising dear Matteo. And then my second family grew with every wanderer we met, there is a total of 200 wanderers living within this tree. How about I let Matteo here give you a tour while I set up for dinner?” Opal gives a nudge and a wink to Jessa. Jessa takes in the sight of this Matteo from head to wings. Quite handsome with blue eyes and a sort of messy brown hair color and his wings…well a proper size. “Right this way princess,” Matteo ushers her towards a doorway that has a winding staircase leading both down and up. “We’ll start from the bottom and work our way to the top,” he starts toward the stairs but halts, “I mean if that sounds good to you? Sorry I don’t know how to address a royal.”

Jessa arches an eyebrow, “Just call me Jessa, please.” He shrugs his shoulders and waves her to follow him down. Several steps later, they enter the lowest point of the tree. Jessa takes in all the random junk around the hollow. “What is all this? I recognize some human stuff but this- “she pokes this huge, yellow thing, “what the heck is it?” Matteo chuckles, slapping the yellow thing he says, “This is what the humans call a rubber duck,” Jessa leans in, getting a closer look at it. “Rubber duck?” she flies up and sits upon the top of it, “what do they do with it?” Matteo joins her on the duck. “The young ones play with it. Usually while they are bathing.” Jessa grows more confused with these humans. “Playing? While bathing? I never got to play when it came to cleaning oneself. It was always water, soap, water. And that was it.” Matteo smiled, “Jeez, sounds like the royal life isn’t all happy thoughts and pixie dust?” Jessa’s face became hard and tense. Thinking of her ‘mother’ and her strict rules. To distract herself, her eyes wandered around the room. Catching her attention, a pile of acorns started to shift. Then a tiny voice cried, “help!” Jessa and Matteo darted to the pile and started to dig. Jessa sees a hand reaching out, she grabs hold of it and pulls. Out pops a petite wanderer. Her hair black as a raven and skin like dark honey.

“Thank you! I was trying to stack the acorns neatly into a pile when my clumsy self-slipped, just as I was stacking the last acorn. It all came crashing down!” Matteo helped her up, “Oh Lily, always trying to keep the place in order,” he lays a hand on Jessa’s shoulder, “Lily, this is Jessa, Opal’s niece. Jessa this is Lily, she’s our hollow’s record keeper. Keeps track of everything brought into the hollow. Like food, books, rubber ducks and just about anything else we tend to find on our journeys to the outside world.” Lily stared at Jessa for five very long, uncomfortable seconds. Jessa’s face began to blush, embarrassed. Lily snaps herself out of the trance, “I apologize, I’ve never met a princess before, so I wasn’t sure how to greet you! It’s nice to meet you Princess Jessa, I hope we can become friends. If you ever want to come hangout with me down here and take record of the acorns feel free.” Jessa smiled, “I’ll be sure to, it’s nice to meet you too.” Matteo sighed, “Well we gotta get going, I have to show the rest of the hollows to princess here. See ya later Lils!” Lily waved goodbye as they ascended the stairs.

Jessa stared at Matteo’s back as they traveled further up. He has quite a muscular body, especially his arms. Like two huge, tanned tree trunks. Not a bad tush either. She smiled, I’ve never really paid attention to the male wanderers at home, not much to look at. But if they looked like him then I would’ve been taken a long time ago. Yet there’s such an arrogance about him to where I can’t stand him. Jessa rolls her eyes, annoyed at the thought of being even remotely attracted to him. They pass by her aunt’s hollow, walking further up to the next. When they arrive, Jessa already knew what this room was. Several tiny beds in rows, medicinal cabinet full of herbs to cure illness. “Your infirmary, I assume?” Jessa walks to the cabinet, studying the different herbs. Matteo joins her, “How’d ya guess?” he said in a sarcastic tone. She rolls her eyes yet again, looks like that’s going to be a regular occurrence, she thought. Jessa walks towards the two small windows at the end of the row of beds.

She takes in the unfamiliar sight of a black road that had one white line painted in the middle of it, stretching either way, way out of her sight. She saw more of the man-made houses and man-made metal things with wheels, “What are those things the humans get into? With the wheels.” Matteo gets up from a bed he had chosen to lay in and stands next to her. He sighs, “Ya mean cars? That’s what they’re called. The humans get in them and drive it. Kind of like a horsefly and wagon but they move a hundred times faster. It kills a lot of innocent insects. Mostly those pesky mosquitos, so we’re better off.” Jessa arches her eyebrow again, Matteo glances at her and drops his shoulders. “You don’t know what mosquitos are? Where’s your tree, in the middle of nowhere?” She shrugs, “basically.” He slaps his forehead, dragging it slowly down his face, “Mosquitos are evil little blood suckers. But only the female ones, which makes sense since females do suck the…” Matteo stops himself. Jessa felt a sudden urge to push him out the window. Matteo lets out a nervous chuckle and starts walking towards the hollow entry. “Uh come on, we have one more hollow to see.” He offers his hand for her to take. She walks straight past him, but pauses at the door, waiting for him to take the lead.

The next hollow sits at the very top of the tree. The most spacious one too, with high ceilings. More and more things caught her eye. Hanging on the wall inside the huge hollow was a map of the entire hollow, shelves stacked with several books with strange titles in a language she’d never seen before. Her eyes focused on a rather large picture. It was not hand drawn, it was a real-life photo of a human girl and a much younger Opal. “Is that?” She touches the picture; Matteo nods his head. “Yep, it’s ole Opal and that human right there, her name is Delilah Jones.”

End of Chapter Five.