The Caribou’s Marabou was a strange sort indeed.

And they met on the night of some New Years Eve,

At a party so decadent, that cake slid from the walls,

And chandeliers lay shattered, amongst dancing hooves and paws.

The otter looked around again. “There!” he announced as he fixed his gaze on something moving through the water. Something smaller than he that Jemima could not see. A small steam engine of a creature was hurtling towards the otter, and it was only when it had stopped and climbed onto the otter’s belly that Jemima could see it was a shrimp, or maybe actually a small lobster. “A shlobster” Jemima said to herself.

She looked like she was made from the milk of the moon, although very few could imagine such a thing, and she sounded like an oracle when she spoke with wisdom split into fragments, hidden like jewels amongst her nonsensical being.

Every night, for the past I don’t know how long, the noise was so loud that he could not sleep. So remedy after remedy, of mugwort and red poppies, he stopped drinking his potions and took to the streets at witching hour.

The big head in the big top was too big for most people to bare.

Most people, or person in this case, would step through the laminate stripes in search of wonder and dazzlement, but when met with the ghastly stare of the bloody big head, one was frozen on the spot, unable to turn back.

But the menacing mudlarks just couldn’t resist, as they shrieked and cackled in joyful bliss, and bathed in the glorious mud as they hatched a plan, one that was both bad and good in the making.

“Hands off my guppies!” said the smoking kipper as he slapped the boy’s hand away from the kettle on the table, and flicked the ash from his long cigarette with his finned hand, before inhaling another deep breathe of black smoke. Elijah was an unexpected visitor to these parts and clearly, did not know the correct etiquette for sitting amongst creatures at the Belvedere Tea House.

For a moment, Hamish thought his imagination might have gotten the better of him, and he was doomed to live in his head rather than in his room, so he decided to check his state of mind by performing a little test.

She was scornfully marked by time, and spoke in the strangest tongue, sometimes in rhyme, and although ragged and riddled with a scramble of mind, she was in good company, all the while, by a companion that lived in her jacket.

The birds knew what they were up to, they’d tut at them in disapproval as they swerved overhead.

“Why not let this one wander, they have dreams to follow and a world to see. Why keep them stood in order, why not let them walk free?” cooed down a crow.

A few sunflowers looked up and scowled. “Trouble making owl!” one scorned, not the brightest in the field.

Stanley was born, as a giant black rat, with the longest of tails and a stomach so fat! He wore a crown on his head, made of bones from the dead, and he roamed every dark part of the city.

The tea master of the house, was the wisest of rats. He was royalty after all, under a dynasty of cats. They kept him as a familiar for his wisdom was vast, but in the regal cats eyes, he’d always be second class, but not to his visitors! That came for his exceptional tea, souls from realms within realms, that wished to see more clearly.

The whale sank for a moment, so Cedric looked back up at the lighthouse to see the fox dancing to himself under the moon. The fox caught the sailor’s eye, so he held his drink high and then called down “I’ll go get the harpoon!”

“You’re wailing again!..To come whaling again! I told you last time young fox, it’s not good practice amongst men! To take land animals out to sea..”

The fox raised an unimpressed eyebrow and stared at Cedric, blankly.

“That’s a funny tree” said the girl to her father as she passed the tall, sparse tree on the edge of the beach. “For a start, what’s it doing here? It’s right by the water papa, isn’t that strange!”

Immediately, a small fruffy feathered headed bird swooped down and perched close by, to face the girl and her impertinence.

“Strange! Strange?! Just look at my tree! Are you deranged?!” the bird scoffed.

The howls echoed through the forest, waking the wanderer in a way that made him feel more alive than before, and then just as the howling stopped, so did his heart.

The wanderer, head down, closed his eyes and let his body sink into the nest he had built on the ground, and just as he began to drop into himself, the howling began.

The wolf was getting closer, he’d been hungry for a while.

When she first arrived at the cookie factory, a veiled mist filled the air, so her vision and breathe were coated in sugar. The world tasted sweet, and looked harmless enough to eat, but when so much sweetness could be involuntarily consumed, she grew suspicious.

Gaukosan was a fine looking frog, and he was rather popular in his large, jade pond. Others thought his closest friend was the Natterjack Toad, but it was in fact the dragonfly, that wore an impressive monochrome exoskeleton. A creature as dashing as Gaukosan would not be in cahoots with a Natterjack, he gossiped far too much, where as the dragonfly, Denoir, was a much more worldy consort to keep.

There’s a place in the North where you can banish your dreams. Not the good ones, but the bad, the one’s that linger within. When those echos of monsters sink into the darkest of depths, they rise again, unexpected, just as the full moon unsets. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, they’ll rise in the coldest of seas, in the North, where it’s white, where time stops and hearts freeze.