Torsten did not want to go into the house that night.  He wanted to stay in the yard with the fresh air.  In the magically enclosed pocket dimension they were in, he was unconcerned about wild animals coming to gobble him up in his sleep.  But the gazebo had hard benches and there was a padded sofa in the living room that looked more welcoming than anything in the bedroom.  Just before the stroke of midnight, he decided he should give that a try.

He walked in, avoiding a blade that protruded up through the welcome mat and then a poison dart arrow that was fired from one of the hooks in the coat rack.

The living room was possessed by a magical glow.  Candles illuminated the space, but Torsten did not light them, nor did he need to tend them.  The candles did not seem to burn down.  

He approached the sofa like he didn’t know what to do with it.  He picked up one of the cushions and fluffed it.  In so doing he was caught on a razorblade and he dropped it immediately.  The blood that oozed from his thumb confused him.  What had been inside the pillow that caused that much damage?  He picked up the pillow and being a prince with little concern about the things in his apartment, he gripped two edges of the seams and pulled it apart.  It was like an egg when it cracked, except instead of dripping yolk, it dripped needles, pins, and razors.  There were enough of them to cause a clatter when they fell to the floor.

He stared at them confused, but it was at that moment, when he was finally looking down that he saw one of the knives come up between the floorboards and try to stab him in his shoe.  

That interested him too.  

Wisely, he did not try to pick up the bundle of needles and other sharp oddities that fell from the cushion.  Instead, he strode over to the fireplace.  There he found a poker that was used for tending the fire.  There was no fire lit until he approached and then a jolly one awoke inside the grate.  

Torsten ignored it.  Instead, he took the poker and jabbed it between the floorboards where he had seen the knife’s point.  Kicking and prying, the board came loose and if he thought there were a lot of blades in the pillow, there were more under the floorboards.  When they were exposed in that unexpected way, they scattered like night bugs in the light.  

With that discovery, Torsten’s side of the house stopped playing games.

He dodged an arrow aimed at his head.  

Then another.

The poker in his hand went hot like it was on fire and the flame in the grate swelled as it tried to light fire to Torsten’s clothes.

The sofa leg hooked his foot and brought him to the ground.  He received two cuts on his cheek the moment his face hit the floor.  

He got to his feet without another cut, but now there was nowhere to look where a knife’s point wasn’t staring back at him.  They were all coming up between all the floorboards now.  They were coming out from behind the frames of the pictures on the walls.  The padding on the sofa had given up its pointed treasures and had transformed into a bed of nails.  If there were more changes, he didn’t see them because he was making for the door like a thief who had been caught in the night.

Outside, he saw two more arrows hit the grass and a throwing star skid across the turf.

He was breathing hard, but he knew he had the luck of a god to have made it out with only the cut on his thumb and the two nicks on his face.

His first instinct was to cross to the right side of the house and knock.  He thought he needed to have a conversation with Fayette about what had happened.  He raised his hand to grab the knocker and maybe he would have used it if he hadn’t been possessed by a thought that stopped him.

They wanted his blood.

The house was filled with things meant to cut him.  Creating a house filled with knife edges would not have occurred to him if he wanted to bleed somebody, but he didn’t know her culture.  Maybe that was how it had to be done, but an arrow to the head felt like overkill.  

He stepped away from her door.

He needed to stand up for himself.  He had to find a way to defend himself and show Fayette that she could take the blood she needed without the aid of the magic house.  

He walked away from Fayette’s side of the house and started wandering the grounds with a completely different mission from before.  He had been trying to work off some of his boiling energy, but now, he needed just one tool that wasn’t enchanted.  He needed to see if there was such a thing outside the house.  Hopefully, he would find something better than the butterfly net.

Torsten lost a lot of courage to find one when he saw the yellow goat from before.  It had climbed a tree and was perched on one of the lower branches like an owl.  It bleated, but the sound was so off, it could have been made by an owl.

He wasn’t going to find anything that wasn’t enchanted.  

At least, that was what he thought.  

By the woodpile, there was an ax.  He expected it to be enchanted, for it to behave the same way the other objects in the house behaved, but the wood that was stacked there was ready to be chopped, not stacked in convenient little piles.  A magic ax would have chopped wood ready to go, so he hoped it wouldn’t turn on him.  All the same, he didn’t know if it was an enchanted ax.

He approached it and said, “Here Axy, Axy, Axy, I’m coming to pick you up.  I don’t mean you any harm.”  He was mimicking the way his brothers spoke to their horses.  He didn’t think he was much of a horse whisperer, but that didn’t matter.  He needed to be an ax whisperer.  

As he got closer he got more and more afraid that the ax was just waiting until he got close enough for it to safely cleave his forehead.  

A lesser man might have turned away and gone back to Princess Fayette, begging her to draw his blood safely rather than turn her angry house of a thousand knives on him.  Except, Torsten simply could not live with himself that way.  He would rather die a brave man than live forever as a coward.  

He picked up the ax.  He held it to his chest with a solid grip in one hand and stroked the long handle like it was a cat with the other.  “Ax,” he whispered.  “I have never been a man of violence, but tonight I’m going to become a man of action.  Will you join me?  I will break apart everything I see with you in my arms.”

The ax did nothing, which was more comforting than if it had spoken up and agreed to what Torsten was proposing.  

He was convinced it was an ordinary ax and he went to chop down the support beam that held up the roof over the tub.

The Extra Tail in the Fairy Tale

The ax sat very still in Torsten’s arms.  It was so happy.  No ax had ever been happier.  All the other tools had been taken away after the construction of the house with two halves, but he had been left behind.  He had been left with his head on the ground and his handle leaning against a tree for so long… he felt like he’d seen all the different sunrises and sunsets the universe had to offer upside down.  He’d seen the sunny ones, the snowy ones, and everything in between, even the ones where the day took so long to break, one wondered if it would break at all.  

He was so lonely and desperate and… he did not have the same spell cast on him as the blades in the left side of the house.  He was free and if a great man like Torsten wanted to chop the house with two halves down to matchsticks… Well, he could not have been more proud to join him.

The moment when his head hit the support beam of the deck roof, the ax thought it was as great as the hammer of god.  

Thwack!

Thwack!

Thwack!

It was good to make that sound again!