Author Note: So, I was working my way through the wonderful world of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and I came to The Sandman Volume Eight: World's End. The blurb is this: "caught in the vortex of a reality storm, wayfarers from throughout time, myth and the imagination converge on a mysterious inn at Worlds' End. In the tradition of Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales', as the travellers wait out the tempest that rages around them, they share stories of the places they've been, the things they've seen… and those that they've dreamed." There is a panel towards the end, specifically page 141 in the version I have, that shows far more people that we are introduced to in the story (and far more people than an actual inn could hold), which led me to wondering what other people might have been there. (Can you see where this is going? And I suspect it's probably been done before.)
This is the most crossed-over crossover piece of fanfiction I've ever written, but you only need to be familiar with Harry Potter. The setting, main idea and a pinch of dialogue are from The Sandman, but the two main characters, including the narrator, are from Harry Potter. (However, feel free to take a guess at which characters and fandoms you recognise. I've put part of the disclaimer at the end for those of you who don't want to 'cheat' at that game.
Rating/Warnings:PG13 (to be on the safe side) People talk a lot, with a little religion, a fairy tale featuring physical disfigurement, some mild swearing, and Crumple-Horned Snorkaks.
Main Disclaimer: The Harry Potter verse belongs to JK Rowling and Warner Brothers, with some dialogue at the end of this story taken directly from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling, page 413 of the hardback edition published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury. The Sandman verse belongs to Neil Gaiman and DC Comics, specifically The Sandman 8: Worlds' End, from which the premise of this story, a minor character or so, and some snatches of dialogue are taken.
The Backs Of Their Heads
It happened during the war.
(I suppose you're used to hearing a lot of stories that begin like that, but you know what it's like – everything I can remember happened during the war, and even if it didn't I think it did.)
This was after I was caught by the Snatchers and before the big showdown at Hogwarts; a real rainy day in April and there was a bunch of us staying in cottage owned by one of Ron's brothers - the one with the French wife.
She was a bit over the top, Mrs Weasley, like she was trying to take care of us, when it seemed a little too late for that. I didn't talk to her husband much, but then I didn't talk to anyone much. Harry, Ron and Hermione were plotting something, there was this goblin that glared if you so much as looked at him and then there was Ollivander, but he was too beaten up for conversation.
I ended up following Luna around. (Luna Lovegood, a year younger than us, Ravenclaw? Commentated that match in sixth year with the – Yeah, her.) She talked enough that I didn't need to.
She'd go for lots of walks and I'd follow, staying close enough to the cottage so that we were still under the Fidelius. One day she collected pebbles and we threw them into the ocean, thwop after thwop, no arty skimming them over the surface, just launched them in.
This day she said we were collecting driftwood. We did that a lot. There was a pile of it by the backdoor, sheltered under a jutting out piece of roof. We burnt it to keep the cottage warm. I taught her how to lay wood in the fireplaces so it would catch properly, but neither of us had wands to light it, so we needed one of the others to finish the job off. Anyway, gathering driftwood was a useful thing to be doing.
I was bending over, trying to pick up an armful of the wood we'd gotten so far, when Luna said quietly, "Do you think we'd make it if we ran?"
I looked up at her and she was standing close to the water, looking out to sea, with the wind playing havoc with her hair, whipping it about her head so I couldn't see her face. I remember that I stood up, my arms full of wood, to see what had caught her attention this time, and I'd never seen anything so fantastical, so bizarrely magical…which sounds a lot like Luna rubbed off on me, I guess, or at least on my vocabulary.
It was storm clouds rolling in across the ocean, a huge angry blanket of them, churning grey and black with sudden flashes of lightening, and white-topped waves stretching up to meet them before failing and crashing down.
We both stood there staring.
My fingers itched to draw that landscape, but my legs itched too, wanting to run for shelter like the practical-minded limbs they are, and both ached after… well, things that had happened that generally happen in a war and aren't conductive to running.
"We're going to get wet," said Luna.
That was the funniest thing I'd heard in ages. I mean, it was so obvious, but it was just really funny the way she said it, and we were both laughing, and then we were both running. Sort of. I had driftwood in my arms and I wasn't running too fast, because it was heavy and, naturally, I didn't want Luna to fall behind.
The rain came down hard and heavy. It hit the top of my head, hit my face and my hands, and it stung. I could barely see the wood I was holding, never mind where I was supposed to be going.
There was hail mixed in with the rain and I didn't notice at first, then I did and I thought it was strange weather in April, even for Britain, you know? That was the first and only time I stayed on the coast, though, so maybe it was normal for where we were.
Luna's hand gripped my shoulder, but if she hadn't been holding tight I wouldn't have felt it; she was just as cold as I was and just as cold as everything else, even the air. The cold made my aches worse. My feet were heavy and my legs were heavy. I felt like if I stopped a moment to rest I wouldn't get up again, but that not stopping to rest wasn't an option.
"I think we have to believe that there's somewhere to be," Luna shouted near my ear, and that's exactly the kind of thing she says that you think is crazy, because of course there was somewhere to be – the cottage that I knew couldn't be all that far away.
"Somewhere warm, please," she shouted again and my mind jumped to a huge fireplace, like in the Leaky Cauldron or The Three Broomsticks.
I never asked what, or where, Luna thought of, but there were lights in front of us and they came from a pub and we went in.
It was odd, this pub in the middle of nowhere that I'd never seen before, and I could have sworn we hadn't left the boundary of the Fidelius Charm around the cottage anyway, and there were definitely no pubs included in that.
Otherwise, everything seemed normal. It was a pub, with wood panelled walls and large wooden beams above our heads, a large fireplace, barrels behind the bar, and lots of tables, benches, chairs and people.
A woman, with skin a bit lighter than mine and wearing a blue sari, moved out from behind the bar, handed me a firewhisky and gave Luna a steaming-hot butterbeer that she downed. I expected Luna's ears to be like they are after you've drunk Pepper Up Potion, with smoke pouring out of them, but she just smiled up at me and said, "Warm is good."
I couldn't argue with that.
"Welcome to our free house, the inn of the worlds' end." said the woman. "How did you come to be here?"
"Watching storms is more fun than being caught by them," replied Luna and she pulled a face, scrunching up her nose as if something smelt bad.
The woman smiled. "There are a lot of people that have been caught in this one."
There were a lot of people. It was a little like an illusion charm that Professor Flitwick showed us once. If you kept your head very still and looked carefully out of the corner of your eye without thinking too much about what you were doing then you could see that something wasn't quite right. Maybe there were too many people for them all to fit inside the inn and maybe the inn was stretchy and thin around them. I wasn't sure.
They were in groups, most of them around tables but some in clusters of chairs, and for each group one person was talking animatedly whilst the others listened or drank or even, in the case of a nearby cat wearing black boots, slept.
Luna placed her hand on my arm, like I was a gentleman escorting her to a banquet hall or something. "It's an old tradition, telling tales around the campfire and waiting for the dark to go away."
Telling tales until the storm broke. I assumed that was what she meant and what everyone was doing.
It wasn't so 'old' a tradition to me when I'd been sitting around fires in the middle of nowhere for months, exchanging stories to try and find out what was going on in the world and if the war would be over soon, but I think she knew that and her hand was warm through my wet shirt sleeve.
"Wish we had wands," I said. Croaked more like with my voice all hoarse, probably from the whisky.
"We can dry by the fire," Luna told me and I didn't ask how she'd known what I meant. (I'd been following her around for ages and she's not dumb. She's a Ravenclaw after all, so I figure the Sorting Hat didn't think she was dumb either.)
A bench on one side of the table closest to the fireplace was empty, so we sat on that. The people on the other side, in high-backed chairs, didn't seem to mind. The woman opposite Luna even smiled at her.
She had frizzy hair that was a bit like Hermione's and a baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket, and Luna took it off her to 'oooo' over it. That's a girl thing, I think. I've seen blokes talk babyish to little kids sometimes, or in funny voices, but they don't do the 'oooo' thing.
"I was going to church," this woman said, "and now I'm drinking alcohol. God has a sense of humour, you know?"
I turned my head to look at the baby and then looked back at her, half curious and half disapproving.
She grinned. "Only a little bit of alcohol. If I'd gone to church I would have been drinking some wine anyway." She crossed and uncrossed her arms, as if she didn't know what to do know now that she was baby-less, and leaned back in her chair. "Do you believe in God?"
I shrugged. Religion wasn't something I'd thought much about since going to Hogwarts, not that it was something I'd thought much about before that.
"I believe in God," she told me, "but I don't think I believe in the church anymore. I still go though. Isn't that funny?"
It wasn't really, but she was smiling, so I smiled back, being polite.
"We ain't here for a religious debate," said the man sitting next to her. He had scruffy hair, rough skin and a large tankard of something on the table in front of him. I thought he looked a bit like a cowboy from the old West and I swear he had a holstered gun. "We're supposed to tell stories. Leastways, that's what I heard. Stories or nothin'. Not that the Bible ain't full of that."
"Nothing, or stories?" said the woman and the cowboy smirked. "Here's a tale for you then," she said, and the cadence of her voice changed as she slipped into what I assumed was her storytelling mode. "I was lost in the woods once and I came across a large pool of still water, dark with dots of light as if it was reflecting the night sky or as if it was so deep that it went right through to the other side of the Earth itself and the bottom was the night sky of the other side.
'I don't want this', I called out, because I didn't. I didn't want to be lost, not knowing where I was or what I was meant to do. Then I saw a man walking towards me, walking across the water on top of it with barely a ripple."
"Jesus, right?" the man interrupted.
"An angel," she corrected him. "The Voice of God himself, and he told me that no one ever really wants what they have, even him."
"You mean 'it'. Angels don't have a sex, do they?" A bearded man was sat on the other side of the cowboy, with tanned skin that was even rougher than his neighbour's and large hands that were gripping a beer of some kind.
"I think you're supposed to say 'gender'," I muttered.
"Why? What's wrong with sex?"
"What did he have," Luna asked quietly, "that he didn't want?"
"Besides the fact that angels can't imbibe alcohol and can't have sex?" The woman said with a small twist of her lips. "His existence. The purpose of the Voice of God is to say the things that God can't say to his people, because God's own voice is so powerful that if a human being hears it then he or she, well, explodes. As the Voice of God, the Metatron, for that's what this particular angel is called, has to deliver God's word.
He walked across the water and he knelt on it in front of me and, as I stood there feeling cold, helpless and alone, he told me a story.
He told me about a small boy who loved playing chase with his friends and helping his father make things out of wood in a shed behind their house. One day the Metatron is ordered by God to visit this boy and tell him the truth of his life – that his father isn't his father, that he is God's only son and that he's going to live a hard life before dying at the hands of the very people he has to save.
The boy stares up at the angel with wide eyes and begs with him to make it not true, to let him be his father's son and make his father proud by growing up as a good carpenter and a good man, but the angel can't do that. He can only say as God has said.
And the Metatron lifted me out of the water and gave me his coat to stop me from shivering, and he told me something that he said he had never told anyone before: that if he had the power, he would have. He would have changed the Son of God into a mortal man and none of what happened would have happened the way it did."
"Reckon it didn't happen anyway," the cowboy said.
The bearded man shot him a disturbed look, murmured something under his breath and spat on the floor, which was kind of disgusting, but not as bad as someone throwing up after being cruciated, or any other number of disgusting things, really.
Luna looked at the woman solemnly, gently rocking the baby in her arms. "If God could tell your little girl things about her life, would you want Him to?"
"I think," she replied slowly, "that I would want God to tell her things about her life if she wanted Him to."
"Even bad things?" Luna asked.
The woman reached out her arms across the table and Luna gave her the baby, who mewled in protest. "I think she needs feeding. Excuse me."
I looked at Luna's face and I wondered if she'd been thinking of her mum, and how much did Luna know about God anyway? Was it something that she'd read about alongside Crumple-Horned Snorkaks?
The woman who had greeted us when we first came in walked over to our table as the other woman, with the baby, stood up. "Would you like me to make you up a bottle?"
"Thank you, but I think I'll walk with her a bit as well."
The two of them left together.
"You shouldn't be disrespectful of Gods," the bearded man told the cowboy after a slight pause.
"I ain't disrespectful," he said. "I'm just sceptical, is all." He raised his tankard to his mouth and lowered it again with a frown. "Empty. Well, I'll need a refill and then some if I'm to start believin' the tales told around these parts." Then he left too, heading for the bar.
"There's truth somewhere in all stories," said Luna dreamily. "How awfully narrow-minded of him to think otherwise."
"Men of the sea know better," said the bearded man, now our only table companion. He sighed. "I've sailed, as man and boy, and heard more tales than I don't know what, but if I don't believe all of them it's not that I don't believe any of them or any of all of them."
Luna nodded and started combing out her windswept hair with her fingers.
"Why, this one time I was aboard the Greenwitch and we'd docked in Liverpool - lovely docks they have in Liverpool and some mighty fine public houses. I met a fellow with an Irish accent and a full head of hair who bought me a pint and we got to talking.
Now this man knew a man back home in his old country who had a cousin whose village had a man with a hump on his back. It weighed him down so that he was forced to walk bent double and he walked with a kind of limp, all weighted to one side and out of balance. He was a kind man, by all accounts, but awful sick from the weight of this hump. His mother, bless her soul, took him to some doctors, but the men in white coats couldn't heal him nor help him, yet she never stopped looking for something that might.
There came a rumour of some little folk, the fair ones, who'd been singing on a road to town and she took her son and left him on the bridge by this place one summer's night, her last hope being maybe them that as never help but bargain might take pity on him, since she had no other hope.
The moon rose and the stars came out and these little voices start singing, a beautiful tune that brought tears to the eyes of the man with a hump. He listened and he listened carefully and after some hours of this he thought that maybe there was a pause in the song where he might add but one note and make it even more beautiful than it already was. He opened his mouth, took a deep breath and sang out as and when he meant to, and all those fey voices went quiet.
'Who dares to interrupt our song?' they cried out and the man with a hump confessed that it were he, but they were so delighted with his addition to their tune that he need not have feared his confession. They took him down with them beneath the bridge to their summer palace where they bid him cast off his hump and dance with them to this new tune of theirs. He stood up and found that he could do as they said, and he danced until the sun came up. He danced and he danced, and when they morning came they left him clothed as a rich man with pockets full of gold and a smile upon his face.
His mother was mighty pleased and she told all she met of how her son had gained his health, aye, and his wealth too.
Now, word came to a lesser man of a larger village who also had a hump – things in Ireland being such as was they were back then, I reckon – and he thought to stay at this bridge himself for a night. To lose his hump and gain such riches for the price of a song seemed more than fair to him.
The moon came up and the fair ones started their singing with their new song. Not one time through did this humped man hear it before he opened his mouth and let loose a note of his own.
'Who dares to interrupt our song?' they cried out and the man with a hump took no time in declaring that it were he, but he had spoilt their tune and they were far from pleased. When the sun rose up the next morning there was the humped man on the bridge, but not one hump did he have but two – his own and the hump of the man before atop of that. They say his health suffered and he didn't live long after.
Men ought not to anger the Gods, or eldritch-type beings either."
The sailor nodded at Luna and she nodded back, and I felt like I'd missed something.
The inn sounded noisier now that I'd stopped listening to a story and when I turned around to look I couldn't help but notice that there were even more people in the inn then than there had been when we had arrived. I wondered where they had all come from, and not just because there were so many of them.
One table had a bunch of mice wearing little green robes sat on top of it, one of them with a sword strapped to its back, but when I looked again they were as big as human beings and sat on benches at either side of it. In a large armchair sat a huge polar bear wearing armour talking to a raven perched on a curtain rail. A skeleton was juggling small fireballs for the entertainment of young, maybe four-years-old, triplets, who were looking less than entertained, and behind him (or her or it) was a woman with blue skin and scales knitting a very ugly scarf.
The inn worker with the sari returned bringing a tall glass of milk with ice cubes floating in it for Luna and another firewhisky for me. She also brought more people, who settled themselves around our table on a few chairs someone conjured up.
A skinny man with dirty red robes and a battered pointy hat that declared him to be a 'wizzard' sat down next to the bearded man and the inn worker sat down next to him with a tired sigh. The cowboy had come back, his tankard refilled. There was also a muscular man that invited us to call him 'the Shang Bear', a fat man with a velvet top hat and a little girl, who had green tea in a white china cup with blue flowers painted in a pattern around the rim and on the handle.
I wondered if she was drinking tea because she was too young for alcohol, didn't like alcohol, or was against alcohol, or because it was morning and time for drinks like tea and I just hadn't noticed. She caught me staring and stuck her tongue out at me.
"And what people of interest have you met on your travels, Captain?" the inn worker asked the cowboy.
He smiled, without showing any teeth. "I don't rightly know about 'interest', but I do know a man who spent six weeks on a moon where people juggled baby geese for entertainment."
"The man in the moon came down too soon," sang the girl under her breath.
"That's your story?" said the sailor doubtfully. "People who juggle geese on a moon?"
"The only stories I have are war stories," said the Cowboy Captain, "and they're not for company," he added, glancing at Luna and the girl, and then fixed his eyes on his drink.
It was quiet for a minute and I tried not to think about war.
Luna had three ice cubes on the table top and was moving them around and around each other, one at a time, with the tips of the fingers of her right hand, leaving wet swirls shining on the wood. "Do you think the storm will be over soon?"
"It isn't a storm, as such," said the inn worker, a little snappishly, like it was something she'd had to say a lot recently and she was tired of repeating it. "It's a reality storm. Something big has happened and this is the result."
"Butterflies and their bloody wings," the wizzard said miserably. I wanted to ask him if he knew that he'd spelt 'wizard' wrong or if where he came from that was what they were called, but I didn't.
"Cause and effect, yes, but a much bigger cause than that I'm afraid." She glared at the Shang Bear when he opened his mouth. "No, I don't know what that cause is and I don't know when the storm will end. Whilst we're waiting," she said, turning to address the wizzard, "perhaps you might grace us with the next tale."
He stared at our host as if she was mad and then his eyes flickered around the rest of us before fixing themselves firmly on the tabletop. "I had a dream about potatoes once," he said. "I liked that dream."
It was quiet again whilst we all paused to see if he was going to say anything else, but he was finished.
The inn woman turned to me. "And you? What's your story?"
I thought about telling them something about the war, but that didn't seem right, like it wasn't really my story. I mean, I might have been a member of Dumbledore's Army, but I hadn't even gone to school that year, just lived rough, got caught and ended up being this wandless kid grateful to some almost-strangers for letting me stay in their house. I hadn't had anything to do with the big things or anything that really mattered.
Besides, in that place there wasn't any war; nothing but stories.
"Do you know what football is?" I said instead.
Luna folded her arms on the table and leaned forward to rest her head on them, watching me and hardly blinking.
"It's a game," said the man in the top hat.
I nodded, opened my mouth and explained about football. I told them about the matches I used to go to with my dad and my brothers. I told them about our youngest sister and how annoyed she got that she couldn't come with us because she was a girl, so we told her it was because she was too little, only then she grew up and we had to let her come. (We couldn't let her know we'd lied.) I told them how she was an even bigger fan than me and about the time she lost her red bobble hat when she threw it up in the air after a win.
It wasn't a proper story, with a real beginning and a definite end, and it wasn't even a very interesting one, but they all listened until I ran out of words and nobody said that Quidditch was better.
"I went to Sweden with my dad, but I don't think I lost any hats," said Luna. "In fact, I don't think we lost anything at all. We didn't find what we were looking for either, but we found other things. Not hats."
"You have to have your hat," muttered the wizzard and the man in the top hat nodded his agreement.
"Look!" the girl said abruptly. She flung her arm out, pointing at a commotion by the windows along one side of the room, and knocked her cup over. Luckily it was empty, but the delicate china broke into pieces. "Sorry," she said. "Sorry, but you have to look at that!"
The Shang Bear stood up to see what was going on and the girl stood up on top of her chair to get a better view. Then she jumped down and both of them made their way over to the crowd gathering in front of the windows. The others followed, Luna skipping cheerfully and the wizzard bringing up the rear with a worried expression, as if he didn't want to be left behind, even when everyone else was only on the other side of the room.
"Did someone say the storm was over?" a voice shouted. "Is that what it is?"
"Up where?" said another.
I stayed sat at the table watching them all, my head filled with bobble hats and goals.
(That's what I do. I watch. I'm an artist. I watch the world and then I try to make an image of it so that people can see the world the way I see it.)
The chatter, questions and exclamations died down quickly and then there was this awed kind of quiet; breathing and the soft sound of some people crying.
I just stayed sitting.
It sounds stupid, that I just sat there when everyone else was looking at something that must have been terribly great – or greatly terrible, but something they couldn't tear their eyes away from at any rate – but instead of joining the crowd staring out the window I just sat there staring at the back of the crowd itself.
I could see all kinds of hair colours, natural and not, but then there was fur, feathers, horns, spikes, tentacles, scales and textures I had no name for. The collected skin tones covered every colour of the spectrum. The clothing coloured every era and style and then some, besides the people who were naked. I don't know if animals and skeletons and the other, well, things there counted as people, but I could the backs of them too.
I'd thought that I hadn't seen anything so bizarrely magical as the storm clouds rolling in before the storm that had brought us to the inn, but this was certainly far more bizarre.
I could have been dreaming. (Maybe I was.)
I stayed sitting there until Luna came back to the table, on her own, her face grave. "People have to mourn the old before they accept the new," she said. "Apparently people who aren't people are the same."
I nodded, although I didn't understand why she'd said that. (I guess it was enough that I think I understand what she meant. I don't think anyone will ever know all the 'whys' of Luna.)
"Anyway," she said. "It's finished now. The storm's over."
The inn was emptying and it seemed to shrink as people left, but not unless you thought about it hard and that gave me a headache. I finished off the last of my firewhisky, left the empty glass on the table and joined the queue for the door. Luna followed me.
People were putting on coats, adjusting hats, pulling gloves out of pockets, wrapping scarves tighter and generally preparing themselves for the outdoors as the queue moved steadily forwards. I wondered if the blue, scaled woman had finished the scarf I'd seen her knitting so that she could wear it on her way home. She'd been naked except for the scales though, so perhaps she didn't feel the cold.
"I didn't get to tell a story," Luna said, sadly, but then she put her hand on my arm and smiled. "It was lovely hearing all of those other stories though, and yours too."
"Thanks," I told her.
We walked out of the inn and into April drizzle.
The wind was blowing from the sea towards us, making the air taste like salt, and there was a small pile of damp driftwood in the grass at my feet that I picked up to take back to the cottage.
"Do you think it's warmer?" Luna held her arms outstretched, palms up, and tilted her head back with her eyes closed. "People generally ask if it's colder when they go back outside after being in the warm, but I think that if you ask if it's warmer instead then sometimes you actually do feel warmer outside than you did before, even if it isn't."
"It's not raining as hard," I said and Luna beamed at me.
She chatted all the way back to the cottage, still gathering driftwood, and she was talking about Crumple-Horned Snorkaks again when we walked in through the back door, which apparently have "tiny little ears, a bit like a hippo's, Daddy says, only purple and hairy. And if you want to call them, you have to hum; they prefer a waltz, nothing too fast…"
I tried to be interested, but with wood digging in my ribs, cold wet clothes sticking to my skin and the muddy bottoms of my jeans slapping my ankles as I walked all I could be was uncomfortable.
Then Harry walked past and I felt even worse. Being in a kitchen with Harry Potter during a war after nearly being caught and killed was unbelievable, but that was my reality. This was as strange as my life could get. Everything else, then, including strange inns and freak storms, couldn't be real.
I was almost convinced that it had to have been some sort of a dream, or a hallucination brought on by stress or something, and the 'almost' was because I knew that if I asked Luna about it she'd tell me differently.
So I didn't ask. I'm not a chatty person anyway, so she probably doesn't think that it's strange that we've never talked about it. But then what is 'strange', especially to Luna?
Hannah slides a firewhisky towards me across the wooden surface of the Leaky's bar, worn smooth with time, and I reach out a hand to pull it closer to me and stare at the amber. It's dimmer than the colour of the whisky served at the opening of my latest exhibition last week. Stronger too, but then I'd needed my wits about me for all those questions, and most of them about that one painting.
'Why did you only show the backs of their heads? What are they looking at? What does it mean?'
I'm a paid artist these days, famous almost, and even Hannah Abbot has seen my work.
So there you go, I tell her, finally answering. I know some critics have said that I was 'giving social commentary' in a painting, but really it was just something I saw that I can't get out of my head: the backs of people staring at something I couldn't see, and didn't really want to see, with different hair and skin tones and clothes and all, but no faces. Not looking at me.
I don't talk about when I saw it. And, you know, it's probably not even real.
And the rest of the Disclaimer: There are characters and a story from Dogma, which belongs to Kevin Smith and View Askew Productions, and a retelling of a Celtic Fairy Tale, which probably belongs to the Celts. You might (if I've written them recognisably) spot Gibbs from Walt Disney's The Pirates of the Caribbean, Mal from Joss Whedon and Fox's Firefly, Rincewind from Terry Pratchett's Discworld and a Shang warrior from Tamora Pierce's Tortall books, as well as characters from Brian Jacque's Tales of Redwall series, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant, Marvel Comics and various fairytales. Anything else could be mine.