Page 27 of Office of the Lost

“Yes, well, thank you.Mother Fae always said I was….”Wait, what?Something stuck in his craw.“I’m sorry.Could you repeat that last bit?”

“Which bit?”

“You didn’t saydinner, did you?”Crispin stared at the fuzzy slipper tops and finally saw them for what they were.Eggs.Strange blue fuzzy eggs, to be sure.But eggs, nonetheless.

“Ah, right.It does tend to freak out the new arrivals a bit.”Morris blinked again.“Molly always leaves the explaining to me while she’s out, flitting about.Me wings are a bit… vestigial.”He lifted them up, and they did seem far too short to carry his weight.

That’s not important right now.Crispin’s most urgent goal was extracting himself from his current culinary destiny.He had no desire to be food for anyone.“Well, yes, I can see that.And it has been an absolute delight meeting you and the… children.”

Had one of the eggs just shuddered?

“But I really must be going.”He turned again to look out over the edge of the nest.Something was happening to his right shoulder where his now-missing wing had been, but he wasn’t quite sure what.It felt… squirmy?He didn’t have time to figure it out just then.More important things and all.

He stretched out over the edge of the mossy branchy surface to look down.

Down down down down down.

The nest was cradled on a shelf along a bright red cliff face, studded with bits and pockets of verdant growth and a few other nests like the one he was currently sitting in.It was a nearly vertical drop, hundreds of feet down, ending in a roiling layer of fog.Or clouds?How high up are we?

He turned back to his host, determined to put that long drop out of his mind.“So do you always chat with your… meals?”

Morris shook and wheezed in what might have been laughter.“Oh, I won’t eat you.I prefer bugs and berries.Molly always brings me back a bit of something special.”

Crispin sighed with relief.“Oh thank the seven gods of solstice.”With luck, Leo and Thea would find a way to rescue him, and then they’d all be on their merry way.“I really thought you meantI’dbe your dinner.”

Morris huffed again, flapping his little wings.“Oh, I can see how you would have gotten that.”

Crispin laughed with him.“Yes, I was quite worried?—”

“My dinner.You.Imagine that.”He shook his head, his eyes watering.

Now Crispin felt a little offended.Why wouldn’t he make a perfectly scrumptious dinner?Not that he wanted to be eaten—by giants or by giant moths, and why was this becoming a running theme?—but he liked to think that, if someone did actually eat him, he would provide a satisfactory, perhaps even exemplary, dining experience.

“No, you’ll betheirdinner.”Morris pointed at the fluffy blue eggs, which were most definitely starting to quiver.

Fear gripped Crispin again, sliding her icy fingers under his world-appropriate onesie.He suddenly missed Leo—as messy and lost, in both senses, as he was—and even Thea, despite her new habit of playing strange Earth songs and not actually doing her job.“I, um, see.”He most definitely did not see, but he wasn’t going to give his host the satisfaction of noting his fear.

“So, we have a few more moments before the birth.”Morris settled in, staring raptly at the eggs.“Life gets a bit boring for a house husband like meself.Why don’t you tell me a little more about you and yours to fill the time?Molly should be back soon and will need her frumbles licked clean, but until then I’m all ears.”

Crispin refrained from mentioning that he didn’t see any ears at all on the strange little creature, and he had no desire to find out what part of Molly afrumblewas.“What are you, anyway?”He started to work his way around the nest, hoping against hope that there might be a cavern entrance at the back, or even a Crispin-sized crevice he might wedge himself into in a probably doomed effort to keep himself safe from the coming mothpocalypse.

“We’re ferykens, often mistaken for faeries from afar.But we are clearly superior.”

“Wait, did you say faeries?”Maybe there was an easy way out of this mess.“Do you know Cerillia Ailedrin Moss’caladin?”His mother had explicitly forbidden anyone from harming him.

Morris cocked his head sideways.“Don’t know that I do.”He watched as Crispin rummaged around the back of the nest.“No way out there, I’m afraid.Wouldn’t do to put a nest where food could just run off, after all.”

Crispin blinked, conceding the point.“I don’t suppose we could work out some kind of trade?Like… maybe you let me go, and I find you some even better food?”

“You know of some better food?”Morris’s wings seemed to brighten.

“Well, not here.No.”Damn his honest streak.“But once I get home—” He rubbed at his itchy shoulder, surprised to find a bony nub there.

“’Fraid it’s too late.The missus has returned.Oooh, and she brought a little something with her.”

Crispin looked up to see the dark form that had grabbed him descending on the nest.Mrs.Morris—Molly—was truly an awesome sight, like a cross between a moth and one of the fire dragons of Ferkin Four.No one knew what happened to the worlds of Ferkins One through Three, but it was widely assumed that it was the dragons’ fault.

She carried something in her claws.

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