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- “Beware the fairies,” the lost ones will tell you, their fingertips ashen, icicles burning their scalps. Their hopes have hardened in the ice, but their spirits shout their warnings, whisper regrets: a loved one unseen, a task incomplete, a burden forever encased in the snow. Listen to their wisdom as you patrol the grounds.
- Plant sage around the yard: its blue spires and woody crowns will protect the waystation throughout the year.
- The fairies like to play their games: stealing trinkets, leading travelers astray, through an icy labyrinth, snow eddying around stumbling feet. Drop rowanberries like jeweled beacons along the path for them to find to satisfy their mischief. Wardens past know these treacheries all too well. Honor their petrified remains each time you sweep the perimeter, searching for the lost.
- Leave bread on the threshold for travelers to take as they pass under the rowans’ boughs for luck.
- Keep iron in your pockets as you look for caches revealed where the hoarfrost thaws, slinking away in the sun. You too may discover a little body on your watch, cerulean wings protruding from the earth: a victim of their own games.
- Collect the curios that wayfarers leave with gratitude: pinecones, pebbles, the occasional shell. Line your shelves with these gifts knowing each represents a life protected, a journey mended.
- Ignore the pleas and taunts from the fairy in the cage, its iron bars thwarting their eventual betrayal. Learn from my mistakes.