Prisma Glitterdust's Arc

Chapter 2 of 9

The next morning, Prisma stood in her empty schoolroom and knew the trouble. Six trolls sat in the mud outside her house. They practiced curtsies in the muck. Not one would cross her doorway. She had opened the door wide. She had called them in for the first real lesson. They only shook their heads and stayed in the reeds. Prisma looked at the room through their eyes. Two long tables. Clean chalk. Bare walls. Chairs with straight backs. The floor shone. It smelled of soap. To a swamp troll, it looked like a trap. It looked foreign. It looked like a place where they did not belong. She remembered what worked before. She had not made the trolls clean. She had gotten dirty herself. She had met them in the mud. So the room had to meet them too. Prisma went outside and knelt by the path. She scooped wet earth in both hands. Her slug crawled to her knee, its glitter collar winking. It left a shining trail across her wrist. Prisma smiled. Mud and sparkle. Both at once. That was the whole trick. She carried the muck inside. She smeared it along the front of one bench. Then she pressed glitter into the wet streaks, so the wood caught the light through the grime. The bench looked rugged now, and dirty, and it still sparkled. She set her slug on top of it. The trail glinted over the bark. "Come see," Prisma called from the doorway. "I made you a swamp bench." The big troll frowned from the reeds. But the small troll crept up first. She peered through the door at the muddy, glittering bench. She reached out and touched the cool mud on the wood. Then she climbed on and sat. "It's dirty," the small troll said. She sounded surprised. She sounded pleased. "It's dirty and it sparkles," Prisma said. "Just like you." The small troll wiggled on the bench and laughed. That broke it. The others came, one by one, tracking mud across the shining floor. Prisma did not wipe it up. She let their footprints stay. The big troll stood in the doorway longest. Then he stepped inside and lowered himself onto the bench beside the small troll. The wood creaked but held. Six trolls sat in Prisma's schoolroom. Mud ringed their feet. Glitter caught the light on the bench beneath them. Prisma picked up her chalk and faced her first true class. But the clean room was gone now. Mud coated the bench and streaked the floor. One dirty bench would not seat six trolls for long. And a schoolroom of muck was not a place to teach grace, the slow lesson, the one they did not yet believe they deserved. Prisma had gotten them inside. Now she had to teach them.