Once Upon a Time in Fantasyland

Chapter 5: Crossing Bridges, Making Friends, and Other Difficult Things

Around this time in the afternoon, Phanny should already be preparing for tea. 

Sitting down at the kitchen table as she waited for the kettle to boil. Resting her chin in her hand. Looking out through the window at the blue sky and the glittering Wilder Lake. Dreaming about knights and princesses and the kind of love that breaks curses.

But today, she instead found herself riding on the back of a black horse, staring at a pair of tan, muscled forearms which were draped lazily across her thighs, and a set of strong hands loosely gripping the reins in front of her.

"Alright there, Burns?" Called Wilder. They were so close, Phanny felt his voice reverberate in his chest.

"Yep!" Burns replied in his seat behind Wilder.

They've been travelling up a mountain path for something like thirty minutes. Going slow to give the horse some room to breathe. Phanny imagined it must be difficult to gallop up a mountain with three people on one's back, no matter that one of them is a dwarf and one of them is Phanny.

Burns had earlier explained to her that his wife, Amelia, and their children, were now hiding out in an old, abandoned watermill by the Whisperrun River. They were to meet back there before travelling northwest of Wilderland to the Draconian border.

A few more minutes and they reached the mill.

Phanny's belly dipped dangerously low as she stared at the old rickety, structure. She barely noticed that everyone else had gotten off the horse until a pair of strong hands encircled her waist and lifted her down. And even then, she could only say a weak thank you, too distracted by the horror of the watermill to fully appreciate Wilder carrying her off the horse like a maiden in a fairytale.

The cabin was simple enough. A small, rectangular building made of dark wood which seemed tall enough to be a two-storey, stood against the backdrop of tall Alder trees. She could see the top of a wooden waterwheel somewhere on the other side of the structure.

From where they stood, Phanny could see only one square window, high above the front door, like a barn. The building looked like it would collapse at any moment, but the icing on the cake was the fact that the entire thing was standing on four stone pillars, raised high above the mouth of Whisperrun River, just where it dropped down to pour into the basin-like White Lake, which, contrary to its name, was a dark, murky, bottomless green.

That wasn't even all of it. Standing up as it did on its stone legs, in the middle of the wide river, they could only get to the door through a sloppily made, zigzagging wooden bridge, which looked like it might be more than ten feet across. Now that the urgency of a drowning cat was gone, the rushing water under that bridge seemed once again terrifying.

Burns, as if he's done it a million times before, and there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of, started walking down the bridge, the wood creaking and groaning and making impossibly scary noises under his feet.

Phanny was waiting to see whether the bridge would melt down into the river, and Burns with it, when Wilder finished setting his horse up at the stables and walked up behind her.

"What is it?" He asked with that half-confused, half-annoyed expression, which Phanny was starting to think, was just what his face normally looked like.

"N-nothing. After you," Phanny said. She stopped herself from nearly asking if she could stay with the horse in what looked like a well-built structure that actually stood on land. It wouldn't do well for her to reveal just how big of a ninny she was, this early on in their acquaintanceship.