I Followed William Penn XII Through the Winding Passages
nickname “Humbug Billy”- the sacred ashes of her husband
- two filthy little monsters
- , just ask a librarian.
- forbade our illiterate children
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I followed William Penn XII through the winding passages of Enigma Fortress to a raised veranda overlooking the snow-clogged courtyard. As we stepped into view of the assembled spectators below, I learned that William’s stunt had earned him the nickname “Humbug Billy” and that he did not find it amusing.
But when I strode to the railing and held my arms aloft, the crowd cheered. Having no clue what my duties in the ceremony actually were, I sought my green-lipped advisor. She turned out to be YoYo, which shouldn’t have surprised me. She took her place behind my right shoulder and coached me what to declaim and which puppets I was supposed to use for emphasis on certain points.
I learned the folkloric origins of the Spring Scampering as I conducted the ceremony. A hedgehog seeking a place to store the sacred ashes of her husband‘s failed novel takes them to the library. This part of the story would feel normal to anyone raised in Contraria, where libraries customarily have a whole wing full of such urns and hedgehogs are generally held to be poor writers. The hedgehogs’ children were two filthy little monsters, which all Contrarian hedgehog children of myth seem to be, just ask a librarian. Rodney the fox represented Mr Hedgehog, who appears at the gates of the library to plead for his ashes back, being too ashamed of his work to let it be housed there. My job was to speak his lines, while he pantomimed the action down in the snow.
YoYo fed me the words and I spoke them in a booming voice. “Oh, noble keeper of the book-fortress, who forbade our illiterate children to scurry on the shelving, let me bury these pathetic cinders under a log as they deserve.”
But the librarian had other ideas.
bonus points for using them in order