The Year One Hundred,
The sky was dark when the Riverlilly arrived at the eastern shore. Two green ogres eyeballed the boat covetously as it made its way toward them. They cracked the knuckles of their wart-infested fingers and told one another that they were not going to share such a colorful trinket as this, no, not after waiting as long as they had, through the grinding of a century. Behind the ogres a sea of rolling dunes sparkled with the gold that was stowed under the sands. The massive brutes were in the business of excising tolls from those who sailed the river; the coin they bullied from such hapless travelers—one hundred years’ worth of ill-gotten gains—was hoarded in vast piles underneath the desert.
The greedy ogres bent down and scooped the empty boat out of the water, fighting over who would keep it. No larger in their hands than a toy ship, the boat seemed to shrink amidst their fumbling fingers, now the size of a wheelbarrow, now an oak leaf, now the size of a flower petal. The ogres growled and snarled as their fight grew more vicious, their escalating fury honed to a keen edge.
The boat shrank to the size of a penny, then to the size of an El fish, and then it was gone, just as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon and dispelled the dark of night. The distracted ogres froze like ice, their flesh made stone, forming an ominous entryway to the river.