The next step you take feels a bit squishy and is immediately followed by a high-pitched ruckus at hoof level. MIMIMIMI. You have stepped on a mushroom, and a family of pixies is swearing at you for crushing their beautiful gazebo. Oops!

Rosenthal was sure he had, over the past few days since he had first entered the dungeons, been travelling downwards – yet here he was, as far as he knew miles beneath the earth, above his head seemingly the open day-blue sky. He stepped from the hard rocky ground of the tunnel into a grassy glade, dotted with wildflowers of every bright colour. Ahead of him was a great hawthorn heavy with white flowers, nestled in lush shrubbery, each with leaves a glossy emerald green.

It was a sight he might have seen in the woodlands by his home, on the sweetest of summer days. He could almost feel the heat settling on his back. The friendly shadow of the hawthorn stretched towards him open-armed, and he was tempted – so tempted – to lay down, if only for a moment. Rosenthal had until now hardly noticed the ache of his legs, but in the warmth of the sun, all he could think of was rest. Without his own notice, he stepped towards the shade – then his hoof slipped as something wetly gave way beneath.

The daylight shuttered off as though a door had been closed, and the glade vanished as he looked. What had been a blossoming tree was only a large stalagmite, clustered among smaller ones; the wildflowers mere scattered pebbles. Shrill voices shrieked at him as tiny shapes swarmed from under his hoof, towards his face, and Rosenthal skittered back from what he realised could only be pixies. Angry pixies.

“Apologies – sorry, I -”

He didn’t even reach the end of his apology before he saw how futile it was. The pixies screeched over his words, more arriving every second; now he looked, and without the grass to hide them, he saw the wrinkled lumps like sodden pinecones that they flew from. Hen-of-the-woods, a common mushroom he had often gathered from the woods. Here, apparently, it was home to pixies – that were now furious with him for crushing their compatriots’ nest, and preparing to attack.

But the darkness had revealed something – a faint and familiar blue glow from behind the false tree, with its light marking out a gap in the stone walls. Seeing his exit, Rosenthal was not about to wait around and be bitten to death, or transfigured to some awful thing, or whatever the pixies had planned. He bolted, high-pitched screams of rage echoing after him as he galloped past the blue wisp that had guided him this far.

It was the first time that the wisp Rosenthal affectionately called Willow had appeared to him in the dungeons. Now, as he wove through the thin tunnel from what had briefly been a glade and the blue light doused itself behind him, he no longer feared it was gone for good. He had met feyfolk already; he was still being led. Rosenthal was on the right path.