The Magic Necklace

    To humans, so long as something means a lot to you, it's considered to be valuable. Most of us have to little that we cherish everything, even if a nightmare wouldn't think it was worth anything. 

   I was five when I went to my first and only fair. It wasn't in the Fairy lands, so there weren't an rides, but there were two games if I can remember correctly, and everyone in town tried to put on a show. Work was rare, money was rarer, but we had a good time. There was music, which I loved, and people shouting, which I didn't. There was also a strange women selling knickknacks on a blanket. She didn't have much, only about twelve things in total, but it was still more stuff than I'd ever seen in one place. I stared for a long time, then asked to purchase the one piece of jewelry she had.

   "This thing?" She asked, "It's not valuable at all."

    "I want it." Was all I said to her. I begged my mother to buy it for me. She was a weaver who got commissions from nightmares from time to time, so unlike most of the people I knew, we had the money to buy special things. She refused to buy it until the seller said that she would trade it for a penny. My mother told me when we got home that I'd need to work extra hard to make up for the money she spent getting it for me.  

 I know it's nothing special. It's not even made of diamond or rubies, or even glass. Over time, though, it started to become magical. At first, I just used it as a weapon against Nightmares when I was asleep. Nightmares have a lot of resistances, but humans take damage from anything. Fortunately, beneath their power, all nightmares are human. So long as I remembered that, I was able to hurt them with my necklace. 

   I used it on every nightmare I could, even before I'd figured that out. I'd learned that if a Nightmare caught you, you'd get trapped in one of their illusions, and I was terrified of them. It took me longer than it should have to notice that most of them were very similar. 

  I got better and better at using my necklace, so I worried less about being trapped by Nightmares. Then I figured out that even inside of an illusion, I could use my necklace to attack Nightmares. That made things much easier for me.

    Then one evening my mother told me she wanted me to buy me something at the general store. I didn't want to, since it was late and I was tired, but she was insistent. The man who owned the general store never slept, since he was human, but he didn't keep regular store hours. So few people bought anything from him that there wasn't much point to it. This late, he was almost never open, and I knew that you had to wait until he showed up. 

     To my surprise, he was at his shop. I don't remember what he told me exactly, but I know he'd planned on being somewhere and it fell through, so he decided to man the shop on a whim, even though nobody came by at night. I bought what I needed (I honestly don't remember what it was) and left. When I got home, I said to my necklace, "The seller was wrong about you, you really are a magic necklace."