How to Rescue a Dead Princess

“You're getting stupid, sire.”

“I know. It's all this stress! I feel like I'm about to go crazy and start biting the ground! I can't take this any more!”

“Shhh ... now just calm down,” said Randall in a soothing voice. “Imagine you're lying on the beach, next to the ocean.”

“Oceans have sharks,” said Sir William.

“It's an ocean so thoroughly polluted that all the sharks are dead,” Randall amended. “It's just you, relaxing. Close your eyes and picture yourself on that beach.”

Sir William closed his eyes. “Okay, I'm on the beach.”

“Relaxing...”

“Being engulfed by jellyfish.” Sir William's eyes flew open. “This isn't working.”

“Okay, forget the imagination technique. How lost can we be?” He glanced around, then noticed a placard nailed to a tree. Welcome! it said, You're in the bad part of the forest! “Is that on the map?” he asked.

Sir William checked. “No. These people need a good lesson in map-making. Followed immediately by a good kick in the—”

“Hold it!” said Randall, cutting Sir William off and leaving the exact location of the intended kick a mystery never to be solved. “I just realized something. This forest is moving! Look at that!”

Randall pointed to a section of ground, about five feet square, that was shifting. Merging, perhaps, is a better word. The word blurmpling is descriptive of the sight, though non-existent, and the word banana is wholly inappropriate. The clearest description of the sight to greet Randall's eyes is to say that one section of the forest was melting into the other.

“Trippy,” said Sir William.

“Maybe if we just stand here, the graveyard will come to us.”

They just stood there. After a few moments, they reached the mutual consensus that it was a dumb idea. After a few more moments, they decided that it was a dumb enough idea to quit doing it.

“Squire, I have a very, very important question to ask you,” Sir William announced.

“Okay.”

“Where's the bag with the princess?”

“I set it down right ... uh-oh...”

He hurriedly began looking around. The bag was gone without a trace. The section of forest they'd been observing before was no longer blurmpling, and had been replaced by a completely different set of trees. As was the section where he'd left the bag.

“I think this counts as an additional negative twist to our little predicament,” Randall commented.

“Oh no—voices in my head!” moaned Sir William. “I'm hearing voices in my head!”

“You've got to control yourself! If you lose your mind, we're dead!”

“Too late!” shrieked Sir William. “I've gone looney! Find me a bucket to drool in! No, Mommy, no! Don't put the ice in my shorts!”

And then he fainted.

Randall quickly knelt down beside him. “Sir William? Consciousness would be a real good idea right about now!”

He began to shake him. When that was unsuccessful, he began to lightly slap him on the face. As enjoyable as that was, it became clear that it wasn't going to work, and so he prepared to jump up and down on his chest. Sir William's eyes opened just as he was about to make the first leap.

“I'm fine,” Sir William assured him. “Just needed a bit of rest, that's all.”

“Our situation isn't as bad as it seems,” said Randall. “So we've killed the princess and lost her body. It could be worse. Not much worse, I'll admit, but it could still be worse. I mean, suppose there were a huge, bloodthirsty dragon behind us.”

Sir William looked at him closely. “Squire, if there really is a dragon behind us and you're just making that comment to be ironic, I am going to be very upset.”

“No dragon. That was just an example of how our situation could be worse.”

“Good.”

“All we need to do is figure out the pattern of shifting forest. One of us should climb to the top of a tree and see what we can figure out.”

“You climb,” said Sir William. “I'm still a tad insane.”

“Okay, I will.” Randall reached up for one of the large branches on the nearest tree.

“Squire, I just realized something important. It was the moving forest that prevented us from following the map!” Sir William smiled proudly at his brilliant new discovery.

“Uh ... yeah, good thought. Missed that one.”

Randall began to climb. The branches were covered with sap, and it wasn't long before his hands and clothes were, too. It was difficult, treacherous climbing, but fifteen minutes later he'd reached the top, which swayed as he peered out over the entire forest.

“I can see the graveyard!” he called down to Sir William. It was perhaps half a mile away, and the trees had been cleared away around it in the pattern of a skull. A misshapen skull with only one eye socket and no mouth, but still recognizably a skull.

A fly landed on his cheek. Randall slapped it, then uttered the type of curse the average person would utter upon finding his or her hand stuck to his or her face with tree sap. Very stuck. He tried to use his other hand to remove it, and thus found that hand stuck to the hand that was stuck to his face as well as stuck to the fly.

“Great,” he muttered. “Just great. Now how am I supposed to get down?”

“Creeeeeeeeak,” said the tree branch he was sitting on.

Randall froze, terrified, desperately trying not to make any moves that would cause the branch to break. The owl that came out of nowhere and started attacking his face made this process more difficult. The owl's feet stuck to the sap, and it squawked loudly as it tried to pull free.

The branch snapped. Randall and the owl fell, landing on the branch below, which Randall had previously gone without noticing was occupied by an opossum. It dove at him. Randall let out a scream, admitting the creature into his open mouth, and then the new branch snapped.

Snap. Scream. Screech.

Snap. Scream. Chirp.

Snap. Scream. Bock, bock, bock.

Several repetitions later, Randall landed on the ground in a heap of mammals, reptiles, and birds. He spat out a small frog. This was not what Sir William, in his half-mad state, needed to see. As a child, he'd been kept up late with tales of the dreaded Etchemendy Beast, a horrific monster that resembled a giant stork. Granted, Randall and the animals didn't look much like a giant stork, but their presence was still enough to trigger these memories for Sir William, who promptly fainted again.

* * * *

THE PROCESS of removing the animals and tree sap was a long, tedious, and fairly disgusting one, but eventually Randall was back to normal. The only casualty had been the fly.

“Sir William? Time to get up.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Sire, I saw the graveyard from the top of the tree. If we just throw out the map and move in a straight direction, we should be able to find it.”

“Did you see the bag while you were up there?”

“No, but we'll worry about that later. Come on, get up.”

“Just leave me alone. Go away.”

“But Sire—”

“Randall, my personal pestilence ... get lost.”

“Look, I know our situation is grim. But it's not the end of the world.”

“Just my world.”

“Come on, don't give up on me. You're a knight of Mosiman Kingdom!”