They came visiting in dreams, a gangly pack of Rackham gnomes, with long skinny arms and legs and eyes like saucers, dry-voiced like cattails rattling in the wind. Their tunics and trousers were a motley brown, their green and yellow caps pushed down unruly thatches of wild hair. Sometimes she sensed them outside of sleep, their wizened faces peering sharp-edged from sudden corners or, shy as fawns, soft-stepping behind her through parks and vacant lots— shadow companions who capered in her peripheral vision and were gone when she turned her head, dry voices piping strange music that became only the wind when she listened closely. Rarer, they stepped her dreams in the shapes of tall and stately beings, like the children of fabled Dana or Tolkien's golden elves. When they came as such— the women in long embroidered gowns and the men in jerkins of soft leather, with their pale green eyes and silvery hair all braided— they told her ancient histories of the Otherworld and its people in voices liquid as water— tales that she transcribed in the light of day and wove into the fabric of her novels and short stories.
