“Oh, come on,” I moaned as Till Eulenspiegel’s natty form floated down from the tree branches as gently as dandelion fluff. “This day was already shitty enough and it’s not even dawn yet.”

  “But my good man,” he said alighting upon the ground in front of us. “I can make it so much better. So much better. Indeed, I have already helped you by keeping werewolves and Wotanvolk from following you through these woods. Something that I have done purely out of the goodness of my heart and with no request for payment.” He cast a sympathetic eye across our bedraggled and exhausted forms. “You are tired, hungry and lost with your enemies in close pursuit. Surly, surly, my help has to be worth something to you now?” He cocked a flamboyant eyebrow at me, and in that moment, I couldn’t exactly tell him no.

  “Just what would your help entail?”

  “Same as yesterday, I would provide you safe passage to Munich. Nothing less. Though I am afraid, I am afraid, that the price has gone up a bit.”

  “I never knew the price before so how could it have gone up?”

  “I had specified a small favor,” Eulenspiegel held his fingers small distance apart from each other before expanding them another inch. “Now it will have to be a larger one. Supply and Demand I believe, I believe, is what you modern folk say.”

  I massaged my temples as a headache threatened to flare to life. The Fey’s habit of repeating certain words and phrases was not mixing well with my adrenaline crash.

  “I don’t know what you consider large, or small, or a favor so all of that is meaningless to me. You could ask me for the same favor and I wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “I would. I most definitely would,” protested Eulenspiegel with an irritated quirk of his eyebrows and an agitated ripple of his hair.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “That makes no difference to me.”

  “Would you two discuss semantics and market prices some other time,” growled Kris, she had her pistol out and not quite pointed at the Fey and she was looking just angry enough to use it. “We do have other concerns right now.”

  “Semantics is very important when dealing with the Fey. Don’t interrupt while I’m talking to godlike being.” I turned back to Eulenspiegel as Kris’s gun twitched in my direction instead. “If you want to make a deal, Eulenspiegel, you are going to have to give me a fixed product with a concrete price.”

  “Even now you are being hunted by elves loyal to Wotan and their hounds have got your trail. Listen to your companion. Surely, surely, this is not an appropriate time to dicker over price like a pair of peasants over a suckling pig?”

  “I am not going to let something like impending doom force me into a bad deal. Besides, you already said that I have a Great Destiny and that your help wouldn’t save my life, just make things convenient for me. That just doesn’t sound worth it to me.”

  Eulenspiegel leaned over my tired, hungry and lost form. “Really, it seems like you can use just a little, a little, convenience, right now?”

  “Tell me about it,” grumbled Kris. “I did not join the Resistance for this scheisse.”

  “What?” I demanded crossly. “Did you think it would be all victory and parades?”

  “No, but I did not anticipate leaving my friends to die before getting lost in the woods and heckled by a fairytale.”

  “I am not, am not, heckling,” protested Eulenspiegel. “I am just trying to help. Make this dummkopf see reason and you will be a far happier a person.”

  “It’s not help if it comes with a price and I don’t like a price I can’t see beforehand. This is like going to the ER for a tummy ache and getting a five-thousand-dollar bill for it. Until you tell me exactly what you want and what you are going to give me for it we don’t have a deal. Now piss off, I don’t have the energy or patience for this.” Looking back on it really should have chosen my words more carefully but I was tired, angry and not thinking all that clearly.

  I had made a big mistake.

  Once again, a thunderstorm raged underneath his voice and his eyes swelled into inky pools. “You will learn to treat me with more respect, mortal,” he spat that last word like it left a bad taste in his mouth. “I might need you alive but the same is not true for your friend here.” His spidery hands twitched menacingly towards Kris.

  “Perhaps I should try threatening what I want out of you rather than trying to bargain?” Power arced between his fingers, white discharges that were neither electricity nor light but instead were pure magic.

  “If you harm her, there is no way that I will ever make a deal with you,” I ground out, fully aware that my mouth had really overdone it this time.

  “I know,” Eulenspiegel’s mouth twisted into a cruel smirk that distorted his features beyond humanity so that it was obvious that his face was just a mask, not flesh and bone, “I will not harm her. I am just going to give you something to think about until we next meet.” He gave me a final, malicious smile and then popped out of existence.

  “Well, that was anticlimactic,” I said to the empty air where Eulenspiegel had floated. “I was afraid that he might actually do something that time. We should probably get going.”

  I turned back to Kris. “We might not have very long…” I trailed off into wordlessness. Kris was not there! I could see a flattened patch of leaves and duff where she had been sitting seconds before, but she was gone.

  I called her name and lurched up off the ground, but it was if she had disappeared with the Fey. It wasn’t until that I stopped yelling and sat down on the log in defeat that I heard the tiny voice yelling back to me. I leaned over and re-inspected where Kris had sat and this time I saw a tiny figure glaring up at me.

  “Damn your supernatural ass, Eulenspiegel,” I growled as I reached down and let mini-Kris climb up into my palm so I could bring her up to my ear. When I say she was mini I don’t mean she was dwarf sized or gnome size; she was about two inches tall. Even pixies would have towered over my ex.

  “You complete and total idiot,” her squeaky little voice sounded a bit like a mosquito buzzing in my ear. “When I reach my full size, I am going to kick your ass.”

  “Yeah, whatever Thumbelina,” I pulled her away from my ear. At least when she was like this I didn’t have to listen to her threats.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  It was a sign of the times that United States Army had manual for dealing with “Sudden Transformations of Essence or Alterations of Shape or Size” and there is an entire section dealing with human miniaturization. One of the first things that the manual recommends is that you, “Place the afflicted personnel in an appropriate receptacle that will prevent them from being harmed due to inadvertent movement by normal sized personnel or hostile microfauna.”

  To translate; that meant that I had to find a jewelry box to put Kris in so that I won’t step on her and also because a spider might try to eat her. Unfortunately; there were very few jewelry boxes in the middle of the woods so one of my coat pockets had to do.

  “Listen,” I said quietly, the field manual had also emphasized not blowing mini-ear drums by talking too loud. “I’m going to put you in my right breast pocket. Don’t climb out, if you do, I might squish you by accident.”

  She had a look on her face that suggested that she wished she had shot me when she had the chance, but she didn’t argue. My jacket was the same black and blue workman’s jacket that I had worn since I was burned back in Dresden and it was starting to take on the distinct odor of my BO with a faint tinge of mule. I could see Kris’s face blanch as I dropped her in but I couldn’t hear her complaining through the thick wool fabric.

  My day had started with a pre-dawn raid by homicidal maniacs, morphed into a chase through an escape tunnel and dark wood and ended with my ex-girlfriend shrunk into a Lilliputian by a Fey menace; and the sun was only barely peaking over the horizon. However, it was still a beautiful day. The sun was shining, there was a faint crisp chill to the air and the birds of southern German were exploding into songs unchanged by the struggles of men and gods. I figured then that my day couldn’t get any worse from there.

  Experience should have told me that a day can always get worse.

  Looting the Long Dead

  Luckily for me, Germany is not Canada.

  That’s not just because I hate that frozen wasteland of Tim Hortons and hockey or even because Germany has better beer and hotter girls. That’s because roads crisscross and towns dot even the largest of German forests. Though I had no idea where I was, I could go in any direction and likely find some landmark within only a couple miles. In Germany I only had to stumble through the woods for an hour before hitting a small country road that led me to another larger road which led me to a small town. There was no room for the endless, trackless forests of Canada where I would have been lost for months before being eaten by a wendigo.

  So, at least I had that going for me.

  The sign outside of the town said Grünbach, and it looked like it once held a little over a thousand people. It had probably been a pleasant place to live; peaceful, quiet and nestled in the forests and rolling hills of southeastern Germany. Most of the houses looked like something out of Thomas Kinkaid painting, before the German Army, the Bundeswehr, had come along and blown the hell out of it.

  I can’t really blame the Germans. They were probably fighting Wotan or one of the other Old Gods and I can speak to personal experience that such activities are hell on the landscape (there had hardly been anything left of Arroyo Grande by the time we had driven the Chumash and their followers out of there).

  Why the Bundeswehr decided to have a little battle in what was really just a small clearing in the woods like Grünbach was a mystery to me. I don’t know if they were attacking or defending or what their objectives were. It’s likely that they didn’t know themselves. Those tumultuous days after the Resurgence featured far too many doomed last stands, forlorn assaults and apocalyptic battles for one skirmish to receive any notice by anyone beyond those who had fought in it.

  Similarly, in a time when whole cities, nations and peoples were being annihilated, the death of a hamlet like Grünbach would only be marked by those who lived there. Burnt out and collapsed buildings were the only monuments to the town’s dead received. Men who had died battling gods only got the shattered chassis of Puma Infantry Fighting Vehicles as their headstones.

  “We’re in some place called Grünbach.” I told Kris after I had taken her out of my pocket. “Do you know where we should go from here?” I held her up to my ear like a radio.

  “I believe so, we are about twenty-five kilometers from the border.” Her tiny voice sounded in my ear like an insect’s buzz. “Once we are across we will have to go to Hof and make contact with the Resistance cell there. They will help us get across the rest of Frau Wyrd’s territory.”

  “Great, so we only have about twenty miles and a border to cross.” I contemplated trying to do that with no supplies, no weapons and no allies. “Is there anyone between here and there that can help us? Any Resistance cells or safe houses?”

  “Even if there were, I would not tell you. No more of my comrades will die because of us. Once we are out of One Eye’s lands I’ll tell you more.” I’m sure that declaration would have sounded more impressive in her head before it squeaked its way out of her tiny vocal cords.

  “Well… crap.” I took a quick tally of the assets that I had, it was quick because my assets weren’t much. Two guns with twenty three rounds of ammunition, the clothes on my back and a German girl about the same size as those misleadingly named ‘fun sized’ candy bars that people used to hand out on Halloween (before that night had turned into a supernatural murderfest, anyway).

  “First thing I am going to do is find a nice doll house to carry you around in. If you are lucky we might even be able to find a Barbie car for you to drive.”

  “Fich dich! Du scheisse…” I dropped Kris back into my pocket and cut off the torrent of cursing (though considering her size it was really more of a trickle) and started to pick through the remains of Grünbach for anything that we could use.

  I only gave myself an hour or two to scavenge. The Wotanvolk were likely still on my trail and we needed to find a place to hide from the terrors of the night. Unfortunately, Grünbach had already been pretty picked over, whatever had not been destroyed was gone. Anything of use had long ago been taken by someone desperate to survive the nightmare that their world had become. I had hoped to maybe find a forgotten blanket, or can of food in the corner of a pantry but there was nothing. The best I could find was an empty sardine tin that would fit Kris and keep me from accidentally squishing her.

  The climbing sun had devoured the last mists of the morning when I searched one of the destroyed Pumas in a final, desperate bid to find anything that I could use. Most of the German armored vehicles looked like that had been ripped apart by something with claws the size of a forklift’s loading arms and then lit on fire leaving nothing but blackened scrap. If I had to guess I would say that Wotan had sent a dragon or few wyrms after the poor, doomed bastards. Unlike its fellows, this IFV was mostly intact and looked instead like it had been hit by a single, immensely powerful bolt of lightning. It was almost too intact as all of its hatches had been welded shut. It was only by crawling through the hole made when the magazine blew that I was able to access the crew area at all.

  The smells of charred meat and burnt plastic assailed my nostrils.

  The Puma had been carrying a full crew and a load of infantrymen when it had been hit. The immense surge of electricity had fused all nine men to the armored chassis by their own clothing as it killed them and even years later their bones still hung from the walls, suspended in the air by melted masses of synthetic fabric.

  Death hung in the air and my every instinct told me to get out and leave this tomb alone. The living were not meant to be there.

  Maybe that’s why I found at least a few things that that I could use. It wasn’t much; a KM2000 combat knife, some bootlaces, a canteen, a lighter with no fuel and even a pack of cookies that was secreted behind the driver’s chair. Sadly, no grenades or rifles or god killing super weapons but I couldn’t afford to be picky. I stripped some mostly intact faux leather from the seats and improvised a quick satchel for my take. I even got a couple strips of cloth to line Kris’s sardine can.

  “Veile danke, meine Brüder.” I said with a nod towards the suspended corpses before climbing out of the wreaked Puma.

  Those men had gone into battle with gods and monsters and likely knew that there was no way for them to win, but they went anyway. They deserved more than the small measure of respect that I could give them after robbing their corpses.

  The sun was already too far along in its arc across the sky and while I was really hoping to uncover the smallest silver locket or bent silver spoon I really had to get going. I munched a cookie, dropped a couple crumbs into my pocket for Kris, oriented due west and began a race with the sun.

  The shadows in the forests around me deepened.