Trilla and The Mystic Troll

Hey folks!
This is a children's/tween's story I have been working on forever, it seems. Here's a snippet. Any thoughts and or critical comments will be greatly appreciated. Please forgive the justification and formatting issues. I am still trying to figure the best way to post previously written documents.







TRILLA AND THE MYSTIC TROLL
BY M.A Santomieri

CHAPTER ONE

Trilla was only just about the size of boggy wallower when she first heard about the strange forest, an invisible one they said, not all that far outside of her village. Many stories had since been told about the long and unusual road to Mount Aramantee, for sure. She had heard about some of her clan-folks never coming back from that journey.
Today though, she was being as adult as she could manage and kept trying to keep track of her little brother. She was trying very hard to get the little one to pay attention, but he was a he and that was all of that.
Boys! Difficult to no end!
Through shear force of girl, she finally managed to gather him up in her thirteen year old arms and gave him a good smack on the bottom for playing run-around with her. She was just trying to take him into their hut to eat, for goodness’ sake!
He squalled some, but was happy to be sat down and fed in the end. Trilla really did love and like her little brother. He could cause some problems, sure, but he was cute and smart and maybe one day would grow up to be something special. It wasn’t that he wasn’t already special, but Trilla had her own peculiar ideas about what really special meant.
Her mother fussed at her about that all the time. Her father, on the other hand, the loving furry old bear that he was, thought she was just simply the best young lady in the whole world.
Trilla thought that her papa was maybe just a little too confident in her, but she tried really hard to live up to his expectations. She loved him to bits.
Fortunately or unfortunately, what happened after supper that particular evening in The Glade changed everything for young Trilla.
She went out to clean the supper dishes and to toss what few leftovers out to the boggy wallowers when she heard a whistle, like a bird whistle, coming from near the small river where everyone normally went to clean clothes, plates and wash up and such.
She wasn’t scared. She was kind of confused, though. The noise made no sense to her. She knew every living thing around her home very well, the sounds they made.
Once more the whistle came, from somewhere behind her. She turned and looked, but nothing was to be seen. It was just the forest playing tricks on her, she guessed. Or...
When the whistle happened again, she nearly decided on throwing one of her village-famous tantrums. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” she yelled, stamping her feet. “If it’s you, Berry Billywax, I will slap you so silly that your head will spin sideways! And I simply am not, will not, be going to the village dance with you anyway, you bogger. So just please stop!”
“Not Berry, my dear,” said a strange voice just then. “But you might like to go to the dance with the poor guy anyway. He’s a good but lonely heart and you’re attractive and methinks he’s fallen for you.”
Trilla spun around like a top. Her long, raven-haired and braided locks flew every which way, her hazel eyes furiously looking for the source of the voice. She could not find it.
“I’m right here, child,” the voice said.
Out of apparently nowhere there appeared this little man, not much bigger than her little brother, standing right in front of her. He was all kinds of furry faced, like her papa, and he was smiling a toothy, crooked smile. He wore a green cap that had beaded and dangly things hanging off to the right side of his fuzzy right ear. Funny thing, she thought; he was dressed kind of like a village elder. She had no idea what to make of him.
She was beginning to figure that she might be getting sick, maybe getting a fever or had drunk something spoiled before supper. She grabbed up her nearly clean platters and shook her head real hard, closed her eyes. NO!
“Yes, Trilla,” the little man said. “You have something very important that you need to do right about now, besides keeping track of your rambunctious little brother.”
Once again, a tantrum mood came about Trilla; and this time it was getting about her with a passion.
“Just who or what are you and why are telling me anything at all?” She kept shaking her head, as if warding off glade stingers or trying to shake the water out of her ears after a swim in the river.
The little man looked down and seemed to inspect his shoes.
He shook his head and said, “This is something bigger than you or I, my dear. Why you? I don’t know.”
Trilla was completely lost.
“Let me show you something, dear Trilla,” said the little man.
From his tightly woven coat’s pocket he pulled out a small blue ball. He tossed it toward her and she caught it deftly. She always played bounce with most of her friends and was good at catching things.
When she grabbed it though, she knew something was wrong. something was going to change in her life. She all of sudden found herself seeing things that both scared and confused her. But at the same time, she understood--sort of-- what the little man had in his furry faced little mind.
“Why me?” Trilla asked again.
“Like I said before, dear girl, I have no idea. This is bigger than just about all of us.”
Trilla tossed the ball back to the little fellow, maybe a little too hard. It had changed color to an opalescent, nearly pure clear. He caught it like he was a bounce master, like he wasn’t even thinking about it.
“What is your name, you odd little old man?” she demanded.
“I am called many things, my dear heart, but you may simply call me Troll.”
“Okay, master Troll. What do you want from me?”
“Prepare for a journey toward Mount Aramantee. But don’t expect what you might.”
“How can I do such a thing as this? My parents and my little brother need me here!” She couldn’t even believe she was having this conversation.
Troll looked around and did something very strange with his hands. There was a bright, colorful flash and suddenly Trilla was looking at herself, as if in her reflection in the stream, standing right there in front of her.
“Meet your new twin sister,” said Troll. He bowed, grandly, gesturing toward her new double.
“Trilla, this is Trilla. You two know each other, no?”
The Trilla, the original one who was very close to fainting, reached out and touched the hand of her mirror image.
She kind of understood what Troll was doing then.
Troll smiled his crooked smile and said, simply, “Let’s get a move on. We have better looks than time.”
She looked at the scraggly little man, whatever he or it was, and thought to herself that that was a very debatable point.
Her double looked at her and winked. The scary part about that was that she would have done the exact same thing if she had been staring at herself in this very situation.
Oh my, she thought. This is going to be some kind of really scary adventure, isn’t it?
It seemed like Troll must have had read her mind.
He said, “No, dear heart. This will be the adventure of all of our lifetimes put together. But we must be hasty, not tasty. I think we would much rather eat than be eaten, no?”
Trilla couldn’t disagree with that, though she had absolutely no idea what the fuzzy little man was talking about. Being eaten by anything was certainly not on her list of things to do that day.
“What now?” both her and her twin said at the same time, both of them angrily flicking their braided hair away from their faces and staring at each other in confused amazement. Then they both stared down at the apparent cause of their new set of problems.
Troll said, “Trilla, and of course, Trilla...” He seemed momentarily confused. “Trilla the first, come with me. Trilla the second, go home and do what you have had in mind all day. Take care of the family.”
The two Trillas looked at one another, cocked their hips just the same way, drew their braids up and tied them into knots and stared deep into each other’s hazel eyes; it appeared that they seemed to come to some sort of an agreement.
When Trilla one finally whirled angrily at Troll, Trilla two was already on the move back toward their village, cleaned platters in hand.
“I don’t know what kind of magic you weave, little man, but tell me now, and be clear; what am I needing to do? You do so promptly or I am going to grab you by your furry little neck and snap it like I would do to a bad tree snake’s.”
Troll seemed momentarily taken aback, but nodded, almost humbly.
“Follow me, then,” he said simply.
He gestured toward the path that led to the outer forest, which would find them ultimately on the road toward Aramantee.
“But you will most probably need some important things first,” he mumbled under his breath.
Oh, for goodness’ sake! What now?! Trilla thought. The tantrum mood was very much bubbling in her personal stew pot.



CHAPTER TWO

It really didn’t take very long for Troll to make Trilla’s simmering tantrum soup completely boil over and splash into the hot fire.
When she decided to throw a fit, she did it with a scary and amazing energy, always very focused on the subject of her immediate disdain. Even her all-loving father fled when she got angry. She had a dangerous temper when crossed or confused.
Poor Berry Billywax knew all about that...
Troll was learning.
“We have to get onto the road to the, um, forest,” Troll said and then quickly stifled himself.
“What forest?” Trilla asked, not missing his hesitation.
“I meant, well, we need to head toward Aramantee.”
“There’s nothing but desert sand and scrubby bushes and dead things there, Troll,” she said, getting more and more impatient. “I am very ready to pick you up by your beard hairs about now and toss you to the boggy wallowers.”
“Such a hasty child,” he grumbled.
“Hasty? You want to see hasty? Come here and let me show you hasty!”
“Trilla, please! We must go now. I promise I will explain what I know. But now, we must move quickly.”
She looked at the little troll of a man and decided, after seeing what she had seen with him creating her twin, that there was indeed something to be done. She still didn’t trust him, didn’t understand in general, but she thought the better of it for the time being.
“How fast do we have to move, Troll?”
Troll shrugged and then bolted like a furryflea, off into the scrub and tasslegrass.
“Follow me,” he called back from somewhere.
Trilla followed as best she could; she had a good sense of what direction he was headed. She also knew where she was and understood what Troll had said about heading toward the road leading to Aramantee. She further knew that once upon that road things could become very dangerous. Nobody from any village in her area had ever returned from any quest trying to reach that huge, supposed-to-be- magical mountain.
In chase of Troll, she had run herself nearly to the point where her sandals were about to fall off.
“Troll? Troll, where in the bog are you?”
“Right here, dear.”
For the life of her, she could not figure out how he did that. She turned around and saw the little guy smiling, pointing toward the road. It was amazing to her that they had come that far so quickly.
“You said I needed stuff?”
“Indeed,” Troll said. “But we have a bit more of a walk.”
And so onto the road to Aramantee they stepped and began the walk. It wasn’t as scary as Trilla had been led to believe it might be. But the ground was rough and gravelly and her sandals were no longer in the best of shape. Also, the vast distance of desert and scrub and dead things between The Glade and the mountain was now in her sight.
It struck her as impossible. How can we live in a green place and this is just, well, not?
As if reading her mind, Troll piped up.
“Things are often not what they seem to be, dear heart.”
“You keep saying that. What am I supposed to believe?”
Troll said nothing more as they trudged on for some time, finally leaving any bit of The Glade a ghost in the distance behind them.
It was maybe an hour, perhaps more, when they were truly in the desert. Trilla saw how the road seemed to make a perfect line toward the mountain; but it still seemed an insurmountable distance away. She wondered why no one had ever been found any trace of who had tried this journey before.
At last, Troll asked, “Are you thirsty?”
She shot him one her near-tantrum looks and said nothing.
“I see,” he said quietly.
He started whistling the same kind of bird whistle she remembered from The Glade. She had absolutely no idea why he would decide to whistle in the middle of nowhere, no water, nothing to eat. This furry little goblin of a man was really stirring her anger pot again.
Suddenly, she felt herself being tugged hard from the side of the road, jerked very abruptly into...a forest! She couldn’t believe her eyes, her sense of smell, what she heard. She was suddenly in a real forest.
Troll was there too, looking at her with his quizzical expression and his glittery eyes alight.
“Welcome to the invisible forest, dear heart,” he said.
“Can I have some water?” she asked, and then after seeing his face, fainted into the arms of the man who had snatched her up. That man, who just happened to be Berry Billywax’s father--who was supposedly lost on his last trip toward Mount Aramantee--gently stroked her forehead.
“Fetch some water, Troll,” he said. “This poor child is in dire need of liquids.”
“Right away, Sir Billywax! I didn’t intend for her to become this indisposed. I apologize.”
“Move, Troll!”
It didn’t take very long for Troll to get the water and help Jonas Billywax get Trilla to open her eyes. She silently drank every drop that was provided. She was obviously very confused but grateful for the refreshing water.
“I thought you were dead,” she finally managed to say, looking up at Jonas with tears leaking from her eyes.
“Not so, dear one. Just missing, like the rest of us.”
“But how, why...?”
“All in good time, my dear. Now, just get awake and we will bring you some food and more to drink.”
When she saw some of the others from her village and other nearby villages—who had supposed to have disappeared—started to arrive with enormous platters of food and various clear jugs of what looked like such things as winkleberry juice, sweetwater and regular old water. . .she about fainted again.
She managed to sit up on her own and mentally shook her head as clear as she could.
“What is this all about?”
“All in good time, dear one,” said Troll.
She shot him a pre-tantrum look. “I am sick of those words. I want to know now!”
“Well, I see you are feeling better, dear Trilla,” said Jonas. “Please don’t throw one of your famous fits. We have things to talk about. But now! Rest, eat and drink.”
She had no idea what was in store for her at that point. So she stored her fit as directed and ate and drank.
The questions didn’t go away, but the food and the winkleberry juice were too good to pass up, just then.
Later, in this case, seemed better.