“I am so bored,” the pixie moaned with her head in her hands, sitting on the Daru’s shoulder and not even facing towards the old, mossy trees of the deep forest. The elders warned them time and again not to enter the ancient woods at night and to never stay in the same place for long. Little Zenthelia’s wings hadn’t fluttered for hours, and her normally crispy, white-yellowish glow was nearly a dull gray.

“He’ll be here, I tell you,” the gnome predicted, standing on top of a lichen covered rock on his tippy toes, leaning on an old rotten fallen tree and he could only still barely see over the mushrooms of all shapes and colors and varieties sprouting up everywhere. “He’ll be here,” he whispered.

“It’s just a mythical creature and doesn’t exist,” the skeptical wood elf insisted, squatting next to the gnome and finally swatting the pixie off his shoulder. She jumped out of the way of his slow moving hand and zipped around in front of the gnome, hovering above the mushrooms.

She glowed at in front of his view with her hands on her tiny hips. “You said he’d be here tonight!” she complained in her squeakingly high voice.

“Can you turn that off?” the gnome asked, sounding as grumpy as a dwarf. “He’ll see us and never appear.” The pixie frowned and turned around, landing onto the top of a mushroom and going dark. She was bored again but not for long when all the noises of the forest melted away from the chirps of the crickets to the croaks of the frogs to the rustling of the leaves the breeze puffed through.

“What’s happening?” squeaked the pixie.

The gnome shushed her as the moss of the big trunks its front of them trembled and sprung off the trees, piling up and collecting between in the open space between the trees and continued to grow and formed the shape of an upright walking creature the size of a giant forest bear.

The wood elf couldn’t believe it, and shrunk down behind the fallen log so he wouldn’t be seen. He gulped and muttered, “The moss man...”

The gnome and pixie gasped. Zenthelia became so excited, hopping up and down on the mushroom, that she lit up like a lighthouse. The lumbering elemental saw the light and froze, looking over at the three like an angry forest troll.

“Impossible!” the elemental roared. “But my eyes do not deceive. Gnomes and pixies and elves do exist!” It was the beginning of a beautiful and extremely secret friendship.