Fridays seem to come faster and faster as the world shivers with a blink and a breath…and sometimes a bang.
Faerie reveals that evil exists, but cannot triumph. Though shadows threaten and shroud, there is a way through…a glimmer of light; an ever-expanding force of truth and goodness, of thoughtfulness and kindness.
Though it may take a fight.
Lettie Hempstock is one of my most favourite characters. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (one of my most favourite books by one of my most favourite authors) Lettie Hempstock fights evil beside a nameless, friendless seven-year-old boy. And we stand beside her.
In the myths of Faerie, there is hope and heroism that transcends worlds and enlightens.
Lettie Hempstock held me tightly. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, and I was going to say something, to ask why I shouldn’t worry, what I had to be afraid of, when the field we were standing in began to glow.
It glowed golden. Every blade of grass and glimmered, every leaf on every tree. Even the hedges were glowing. It was a warm light. It seemed, to my eyes, as if the soil beneath the grass had transmuted from base matter into pure light, and in the golden glow of the meadow the blue-white lightnings that still crackled around Ursula Monkton seemed much less impressive.
Ursula Monkton rose unsteadily, as if the air had just become hot and was carrying her upwards. Then Lettie Hempstock whispered old words into the world and the meadow exploded into a golden light. I saw Ursula Monkton swept up and away, although I felt no wind, but there had to be a wind, for she was flailing and tipping like a dead leaf in a gale. I watched her tumble into the night, and then Ursula Monkton and her lightnings were gone (89).
