The Water-Nix
There was once upon a time a Miller who lived in great contentment. One morning he rose before daybreak and went out to the open air, thinking to himself, as the first sunbeam was just breaking forth, that his prosperity, money, and land had increased year by year, that perhaps when he lay down after his day’s work, his heart might become lighter.
As he was stepping over his growing reed farm, he perceived the water at his feet begin to recede, and heard a loud rippling sound, coming form the great sea. He walked, slowly to the water, and found a beautiful woman, rising the water around her, lifting herself into the air. Her thick black hair, which sprang in all directions from her head contrasted her light body. He soon saw that she was a water Nix, and in his fright he did not know whether he should run away or stay where he was.
The nix made her sweet voice heard before the Miller ran away, and called him by his name, and suggested that his wealth could disappear, just as it had increased over the past years. Then, she asked him, besides his money and land, what made him so prosperous?
The miller was at first speechless, and struck dumb, but when he heard her speak so kindly, he told the water-Nix that the Good-God once helped him when he was a young boy, and that his father had once lived in wealth and happiness, but that when he was young, all of the world was forsaken, and he did not know what to do.
“Be easy,” answered the nix, “Thou must give thy self to me.” And the Miller thought to himself, “What can that mean?”, and the water-Nix gathered water around him, and the he fell into a vortex, and they descended into the deep.
As water flowed past the Miller, he could not help but think, “Of what use to me are my riches, if I cannot breath now. I may never devise a more simple action, than breathing.”
And he heard the Water-Nix communicate through the flowing vortex around him, “Beware: if thou dost breath water as air, it must be of your own accord.” But the water undertook the miller, and he never let himself take the cold water in, so it was as if coffs multiplied themselves and filled his soul, as he was drawn down.
But as he the light of the water disappeared, the miller began to feel at ease, and he caught sight of light in the distance. Now the Miller floated, day after day, but the water Nix did not show herself again. When he felt he had learnt everything that had occurred, he perceived that, his hands could draw water, and so he propelled himself to a light, where, on the ocean floor, he found a lit treasure chest, filled with gold coins. In the chest, there also lay a scroll with scribbles going in all directions, and lines that resembled signatures at the bottom:
“Be easy”
“Goffon”
and the the same scribbles, in all directions, making the word, “Miller”
Now, a lord of the village appeared, and the miller took him into his service. The lord explained that the treasures he found were indeed his own, and that every thing that the Miller had undertook had now succeeded, and that prosperity had once again returned to his house, and his wealth was greater than it had ever been before, but that he could not rejoice over it, because of a bargain that the Wizard King Goffon had made that tormented his soul. The lord advised, however, to return with him to the village. Without resting a moment, the Miller and his lord swam to the great underwater village far in the distance.
The great palace stood on the top of a large mountain at the center of the village. Along the mountain floor stood great lights emitted from bulbous plants, and the water gently flowed downwards, like artificial gravity. Along the seafloor, with flowers of every color, stood pretty cottages and tall reeds along the base of the mountain. As the Miller flew towards the mountain, he spotted a woman with white hair, floating, in a deep dream. He and the lord ascended to the summit, where quite a different sight presented itself; the blue lights that lit the sky of the village faded to darkness, and high above the dusk-lit village shown the great doors of the underwater palace.
The lord created a light vortex, to land the Miller on his feet, and now at the moment his feet met the front-piece of the mountain, the dreaming woman dawned, and at once resolved to act exactly as the Miller did, as if she were in a dream, mimicking the Miller’s path to the doors. Now the lord said, “Thou hast equal time in the palace, as it took us to travel to its summit.”
When he entered, the flow of the water pulled the water down, so he could walk along a red carpet to a open atrium. Pacing next to a silver throne, combing his long black hair, was the Wizard King Goffon. The Miller could not believe his eyes, when, standing beside the King, who was now mumbling to himself, was a man who resembled the Miller in every way. Then the Wizard Goffon blurted out, as if finally solving a puzzle, “I will help thee!” And he turned to the man who seemed to be a replica of the Miller, and directed him to sit on the thrown, and then gazed at his visitor.
And the man on the throne began to speak, “Greetings, son. Thou must have found your fortune. I am your father.”
And suddenly Wizard started bouncing up and down, with excitement, and said, in a rather high pitched and sensational tone, as if he were playing a game “Please, call me Goffon. My son is Goffonyx, and it seems my Nix found you living at my Mill. More specifically, I believe that you found my Nix.”
And for a moment, there was silence, but the Miller did not respond, so the Wizard King continued, seeming to become more interested as he talked, listening to himself.
“And considering my Nix got you here alive, you must be certain that you are a wealthy man.”
And the Miller’s father interjected, with a slight grin, as if he were also playing in Wizards game,
“You have have come to wash your blood-stained hands, Son.”
And though the Miller stood in slight wonder, he felt comfortable around the two, who almost seemed like close friends. So he said, “Father, a dreaming woman will soon enter, and this is when my time with you is to end.”
And for a moment the Miller’s father seemed to process what his son had said, and began talking to the air, and Goffon’s attention peaked at the Miller’s response to his son.
“The walls aren’t there, first of all, I’m hungry, four thousand, the ground under your feet, be always right.”
Goffon looked in wonderment at the two young men, who looked exactly alike. Now the man on the throne continued. “I understand you… scribbled a note to yourself?”
Goffon, started talking, as the man on the throne awaited a response: “Goffonyx needed to see a natural progression of nature, but nothing is more simple, nothing more direct, than invention. The Nix…”
and the Miller answered the man on the throne as Goffon continued, and presented to him the scroll, with the scribbled lines going in all directions.
“… is identity, and it is conscious, thus I have found it, at the Mill, a treasure.”
At last a shining disc from the heavens appeared above the scroll. Goffon approached the Miller, and looked at the scroll carefully, and then said, “when thou hast done, look at it above the shore, and thou wilt see what it says.”
At last came the dreaming woman, who entered slowly, and a vortex rose, and carried the miller out of the palace. As he was swept away, he saw Goffon the Wizard King and his father enter a deep sleep, and their feet lifted off the ground, but as the Miller passed the dreaming woman, he heard her speak sharply, saying “Be easy.” When the Miller heard the words of the dreaming woman that reminded him of the water-Nix, he broke out of the vortex and pulled himself into the air as Goffon began to talk in his sleep.
He heard Goffon speaking: “The Nix in its form is what I needed, its the only thing I needed, and I would like to give it to myself, if I could find it. It’s consciousness belongs to itself, but you must have found it to be a Nix of wealth, on the land that you ultimately believed was your own. I actually found Goffonyx the same way. Its great to know she is alive.”
And the woman breathed in and out the water, and she stood with the king. “We complete one another,” she said, asleep.
The Miller swam around the palace, listening to the dreamers, he floated to the silver throne, and admired its circular corners, and its wide seat. He pulled himself around the atrium and saw the deep, dark hallways that extended behind the throne.
As he looked around the room, he could hear the woman starting to count aloud in her sleep:
“Ten, eleven, twelve…”
And for a moment he thought to count with her
“Fifteen, sixteen…”
And then the Miller’s father starting to talk in sleep along with Goffon and the woman.
“We look very much alike, at no sooner than your age I became a fossilized man. It is for that reason I would like you to describe, in great detail, the common trees that are found on the surface. For I believe, that just as a shell in our village seems to change its exterior over the course of many years, so too would the interior of a common tree found on the surface.”
And Goffon, got a little excited, in his sleep, and said:
“Indeed, and let it be known that the smallest of particles, according my approach, are counted to be increasing or decreasing in size, as time passes. And indeed, I who have made such a journey, have found that the organization and nature of accumulation, filtration, separation, ending with expansion to be, as you say, fossilized.”
Now the young Miller floated to the woman in the white hair, and looked at her, in her dream. And just as he was to call to her, to wake her from her dream, she moaned,
“Alas, what good would it profit me, that you should be my beloved, only to lose you.” And despair filled her face, and the dream led her to float to one of the bulbous lights, made of underwater vegetation. “All is not yet fulfilled, my father. The full white moon, now a spinning wheel, is spinning my spoon full, and when thou hast done that…”
But now the Miller grabbed the woman by the hand, and there was a violent current that rushed up and bore them both away, and the water Nix suddenly flooded herself into the palace.
The miller quickly fled away from the Nix, with the dreaming woman in hand, but they had scarcely gone a very little distance away from her, when the whole palace started bubbling with a frightful roar, and from the bulbous plant steamed out vacuums of space and bubbles, and the whole mountain started to rise in a frightful roar, and it’s sea-bed steamed out fire onto the ocean floor.
Suddenly, Goffon cried out, in the dream, “Goffonyxec!” And he woke himself, and landed on his feet, and said, “I have already seen death before my eyes, now that I have got you, my nix, you shall fix this mess.” And the Nix was forced to scramble as Goffon wrestled her to the ground of his rising palace; at last, he had found her. The Wizard King threw his black comb over her thick black hair which made her cry out a thousand times, and in an instant the Nix transformed into a frog, and he instantly pulled a glass bowl over her, so that it was impossible for the nix to escape.
Now, the flood of air and space which had overtaken them did not destroy the palace, but instead it carried them to the surface of the water, and when the palace’s mountain had rose out of the water, the Miller and the woman embraced and kissed each other, and she regained her consciousness, but she did not know who the Miller was. The large palace kept flying high into the air, and it had once more broken out of the air of the Earth, where they went on, and as chance would have it, the Miller and the woman got along quite well. She rejoiced that she was no longer so lonely, and Henceforth, the mountain traveled to the moon, which was shining in the sky. When they finally arrived to the moon, the white haired woman saw the Miller, who looked astonished. She asked, “Why art thou in such a frame?” “Alas,” answered he, “This is what my scroll of the sea said:”
“I have found, on my land, the water of life. If the king drinks of it, he will become well again; it is hard to find, but I have managed to find it.”
And on the Scroll, the Wizard King Goffon wrote in response:
“I am the Wizard Goffon, who had beat death, King of the Underwater Palace of the Undying. The danger of this water is too great. I would rather die.”
And, then, the Miller’s response.
“I shall today retrieve the water of life, for my wife has given birth to a little boy”
Now, in slightly different handwriting, the scroll continued:
“I shall present to you a map, with the location of the water of life. It springs from a fountain in my courtyard at the moment, but thou wilt not be able to make thy way to it it, if I do not give thee a map. Strike thrice with your wand and it will spring open: Inside lie two water-lions with gaping jaws, but if thowest ist true, they will be quieted and you brought to my door. With this thou hast won great wealth.”
and it was signed Nix.
And finally, Goffon wrote to the Miller,”Death was once condemned by my hand, because they were so haughty so long ago. I waited a year, and death landed upon a land where war and famine reigned, and the king thought they must perish, and for scarcity sake a prince arose who slew hosts of enemies, who could live and rest in peace. The prince took back death with his sword, and rode on, but after this they entered another country where war and famine reigned and each time the prince gave his sword to their Kings. And so the prince eventually took to a ship, and sailed over the sea. During this passage, the prince found the water of life and not we, so the prince now could rob us, the undying, of all our fortune. My nix then began to seek revenge, and plotted to destroy this prince. They waited until death was asleep, and poured the water of life out of the cup, and now, therefore, a sick King might be cured, because of this Deadly water-nix. Please Beware.
And so he looked at her, with his scroll, on the moon, and they embraced and kissed each other again, and she recognized the dear Miller, and no one need ask if they were happy.
Keeping this here while it is in the editing process. Haven’t worked on it much, or made any major changes yet, but I plan to make changes and still hope to publish on time
Here is the golden book of tales that will be published and illustrated. Please let me know what you think of this rendition. Do the tales work well together? I’m currently looking into self-publishing and having books shipped sometime next month, before the word waves writers conference.
Please critique this work, so I can make any minor or major changes while in the editing process.
Anything I need to rework? Anything feel unfinished? Any parts drag or need flow?
The Golden Book of Tales
(Cover Image)