The human town was nothing at all like minch-wiggin towns. There were no nests or vines or hammocks. There were no minch-wiggin babies scurrying along the branches of ancient trees, or minch-wiggin grandmothers huddled over a game of Sniksnak, with dice in their hands and tiles hidden up their sleeves.

The human town was made of grey stone buildings and grey stone streets. It was smelly and noisy, and a hundred times bigger than Minchfold, where Flax lived.

No, a thousand times bigger. And ten thousand times more frightening.

There were dragons everywhere. They roared past Flax and the pup, puffing smoke and howling around corners.

There were hounds, too, of all shapes and sizes, though none as big as a Spellhound.

There were birds (not many), and mice (a lot). There were earwigs and cockroaches and spiders.

And there were humans, who looked like giant minch-wiggins (except for the ears, tail and whiskers).

Flax knew they couldn’t see her. She knew they couldn’t hear her or smell her.

But still she trembled and flinched and folded her ears, trying to keep out the noise. And she longed for the soft, winding paths of the Floating Forest, and the quiet green leaves above her.

So when she saw a tree standing in the middle of a grey stone street, she ran towards it, with the pup loping beside her.

It wasn’t a piplum, a droopy oak, or a spider-nut tree. Its leaves were a strange shape, and its acorns were small.

But it was still a tree.

Flax pressed her ear to the bark and listened for the deep, slow song that only a minch-wiggin can hear.

It wasn’t there. Unlike the trees of the Floating Forest (which were filled with magic from root to twig) this tree had no song at all.

Flax’s heart fell. No wonder the World Below seemed so dull and strange. The trees were alive, but not in the same way. They didn’t sing. They didn’t speak. They didn’t even hum.

She sighed, and peeled one of the acorns. ‘Pup, does this smell all right to you?’

The pup swallowed something dead he had found on the other side of the tree, and dipped his nose into the palm of Flax’s hand.

‘Yup.’ His big red tongue looped around the acorn and carried it to his mouth.

Flax peeled another one.

She nibbled on it carefully at first. But it tasted almost like the acorns from the Floating Forest, so before long both she and the pup were eating them as fast as they could.

When they were no longer quite so hungry, they sat beneath the tree and watched the dragons race past.

‘How are we going to find the right one?’ asked the pup.

‘I don’t see how we can,’ said Flax. ‘They all look the same. They all sound the same.’

She peeped at the pup out of the corner of her eye. ‘I guess it’s time to give up and go home. Won’t it be wonderful to see the Floating Forest again?’

The pup ignored her. ‘The first one we met was green, so … ’

Three green dragons roared past.

The pup’s ears drooped. ‘We need to know what they’re saying. Then we might be able to find the right one.’

Flax didn’t want to know what the dragons were saying. It was probably something terrifying.

In one of Grandpa’s stories, the dragon stalked through the Floating Forest, reciting:

Fat or thin,

Small or big ’un,

I. Smell. Minch. Wiggin.

No, it is not a very good rhyme. But you don’t need to be good at rhymes when you weigh half a tonne and can breathe fire.

I mean, would you walk up to a dragon and say, ‘Excuse me, that was really dreadful’?

Before you answer, please note that dragons do not take kindly to literary criticism.