The Fairytales of Lightfall Hollow

In The Fairytales of Lightfall Hollow , magical creatures from a magical realm share their life experiences and lessons learned to help humanity with its struggles. Included in the fantastical treasury are twenty-one illustrated stories of imagination, wonder, hope, courage, joy, and the like Narrated by Dusty Wonders, an ordinary person with the extraordinary luck of having been taken under a fairy's wing when she was a kid, the fairytales begin with Dusty sharing her earliest memories of Lightfall Hollow and its rustic cabin and then continue, in Chapter Two, to the autumn night she met her first fairy, Luna Shadow. "It happened on a beautiful autumn night. A full hunter's moon lit up the dark crystal sky above Lightfall Hollow. While the air beneath was crisp and rich with the scent of leaves returning to earth. A ghostly wind blew through, whistling a haunting tune. "My father was working the night shift at the steel mill where he was a laborer in our hometown. It was just my mother and me at the cabin, and my mother, being my mother, would not let me sleep in my favorite top bunk like I wanted. Instead, she insisted I sleep with her in a lower bunk. "I was eight years old. So I knew my mother was being totally irrational and ridiculously overprotective. But no matter how hardily I put up a fight for my due rights and deserved freedom, she refused to be reasoned with, and I ended up in the lower bunk of her choice, silently vowing to stay awake all night in a toss and turn protest. A few moments later, however, I fell peacefully asleep, curled up against my mother, like a snug boat in a safe harbor. "Sometime later, I awakened. A light was shining through the cabin's curtainless bedroom window beneath yucky old George and hitting me square in the face. At first, I thought it was the moon, but this light was more golden in color, and it glowed more warmly, like a candle's flame, and besides, moonlight does not eerily tap against a window as this light had begun to do. "The tapping was as faint as could be, barely audible, yet it was frightening. I could imagine the crumbly, dirt-shrouded skeleton of an indigenous person long dead on the other side of the window, puking yellow flames of poisonous gas from the grave and striking the fragile glass between us with the gnarled bones of a long, accusing finger, angrily pointing at me as an intruder on land not legitimately mine. I put my hands over my ears, squeezed my eyes shut, pulled the bedclothes over my head, and nestled closer to my mother. "Eventually though, my curiosity got the best of me. I uncovered my ears, opened my eyes, and peeked out from beneath the covers. The light was still at it, shining and tapping away. I glanced up at George who, I swear, gave me a wink. I know the head of a dead moose winking a glass eyeball at me should have frightened me even more. But somehow it didn't. Somehow, I found it encouraging. I guess because I had long-known from my father that George was a magical creature and an ally under the strictest of orders by my father to always protect and defend me. "Slowly and stealthily, I pulled away from my mother . . ."