Pip had the longest mane in the whole enchanted forest. It was silver and silky and it trailed along the ground behind her like a very slow river. This meant Pip had to walk carefully. No rushing. No leaping. Just one quiet step, then another.
Tonight, something was wrong.
The patch of pink roses where Pip always slept had gone dark. Every flower had pulled its petals shut — tight as a fist. The soft glow that usually flickered between the mushroom caps was simply gone.
Pip blinked. She leaned down and sniffed one closed rose. It smelled faintly of rain and waiting.
Slow and steady, Pip told herself. Slow and steady.
She gathered her mane gently in her teeth — all that long silver length of it — and set off into the ferns to find out why. The fern fronds brushed cold against her nose, one after another, and the forest floor was soft and dark beneath her hooves.
Then she heard a small, whirring sound.
Between two tall mushrooms, a tiny moth was flying in confused circles. Round and round. His wings made a sound like someone shuffling a very small deck of cards.
"I can't find home," the moth said. His voice was barely a sound at all. "I always follow the glow-light through the mushrooms. But tonight there isn't any."
Pip thought about this carefully. She had stepped very close to a mushroom once, long ago, and heard something sleeping inside — a tiny, humming kind of sleeping. Fireflies. Of course. The fireflies slept inside the mushrooms, and their light was the glow, and the glow was what warmed the roses open.
Slow and steady, she thought.
Pip leaned her nose right up to the nearest mushroom cap. It was cool and faintly damp, and smelled of earth and old wood. She wasn't sure she knew the right hum. But she tried one anyway — low and slow, the kind of sound a long day makes at the very end of it.
Mmmmmm.
Nothing. Then — a faint pulse of gold, deep inside the mushroom. Like one eye opening.
Pip hummed again, a little longer this time. The mushroom cap flickered. Then the one beside it. Then the one beside that. One firefly rose up through the gap in the mushroom top, then two, then a whole warm, blinking crowd of them, drifting upward like tiny questions looking for an answer.
The clearing filled with amber light.
And the roses — slowly, petal by petal, as if they had simply been waiting for the warmth — began to open. First one. Then three. Then all of them at once, until the whole bed smelled like roses do just before you fall asleep, which is the best that roses ever smell.
The moth gave one small, grateful whirr and followed his firefly home.
Slow and steady, Pip murmured, to no one in particular.
She let her mane down from her teeth and spread it out across the soft petals — all that long silver length of it, fanning out around her like a quiet tide coming in. She curled herself into the roses. The mushrooms glowed warm and steady between the trees.
Then something landed on her horn. So light she almost didn't notice — just a whisper of weight, a single breath of wing.
A butterfly, perfectly still, its wings the colour of the inside of a peach.
Pip's eyelids went heavy. Her breathing slowed.
The fireflies drifted. The roses held her. The butterfly did not move at all.
