Maybe life isn’t so bad or so scary?

 

Mirabelle looks down at the city as she sits on the rooftop of a house next to a busy marketplace by the dungeon.

 

She’s nibbling on a snack — a real snack. It isn’t stolen, it isn’t from the garbage. It’s a real, legitimately purchased piece of food that she can eat in good conscience and without shame.

 

The first payments for the delivered boots have come. She keeps most of the money hidden inside the shoemaker’s house, as the human coins — brought in stacks and placed through the mailslot — are far too large and numerous for her to move easily. It took her hours just to stash those away. She did take a few of them to keep in her tree, though. As they say, you shouldn’t hold all of your treasures in one hand.

 

She had given Grace some of that money with the request that he buy her delicious treats. The fantastically haired man came through, and he has chosen well. They had shared many such treats together that same night, and now, on the next day, she continues to nibble her wicked heart away, watching the world go by.

 

It’s warm, the sun is out in full force, and so are the people of the city. Adventurers and the people of the city move about the dungeon, excited about so many other things except her. Sure, she’s certainly the talk of the town, but people do have their own lives to live. The adventurers — those who make their living by plundering the dungeon of its bounties — especially always seem to have so much going on.

 

It seems like an exciting way to live, doesn’t it?

 

Mirabelle nibbles, watching them, before looking at the many other exciting ways to live that are being practiced everywhere. From bakers to sorcerers, every craft seems to be being practiced in some way. She had never known that there were so many ways to exist before. There are even other shoemakers here like her.

 

That thought makes the gruesomely foul ferry stop her chewing for a time as it rings through her head.

 

‘Like her’.

 

Smiling, she leans back and rests against the sun-warmed tiles of the roofed house, basking in its goodness for a time before she then gets to work.

 

---

 

Today’s order is an interesting one.

 

A pair of fabric boots with a soft leather sole. It’s been worn through from heavy usage and needs to be replaced. Unlike the welted soles of the more sturdy boots that she usually fixes, these aren’t so easy to just replace, as the whole construction isn’t designed to allow this at all.

 

Whereas the welted soles of a normal, heavy boot will have many sections that can be simply pulled out and removed, this here is simply a few stacked pieces of soft leather that are sewn directly onto the long, fabric body of the boots. They don’t have any soles like this on the shelf.

 

Mirabelle puzzles, looking around.

 

What they do have in supply however, is leather. Soft leather, exactly the kind that the sole is made out of, is here. However, whereas the sole is made up of several stacked layers, she only has the flat, single roll of it.

 

She’ll just have to make it herself.

 

Nodding, she sets to work.

 

Mirabelle grabs the soft leather, unrolling it. Then, she places the boot onto it, before taking some chalk and tracing the outline of the sole onto the raw material.

 

Honestly, she’s not really sure how to cut this. Scissors are… troublesome for her to handle at her size. What she eventually comes up with is a slow, tedious process of picking up a needle-like knife that she can manage to barely hold with both arms and pressing it through the material over and over as if she were stitching it.

 

It takes hours to cut out the several pieces of the sole from the sheet, but it does work.

 

After that, she glues them together into a single stack that is several pieces high. Then, flipping it over with great effort, she takes her sanding tools and begins working the nubs down on the sides that remained from her cutting process, before then going on to make the form more slender and polished. The leather of the original soles slopes inwardly as they reach the ground, and so she sands and cuts away material until it looks exactly like that too.

 

The old boots, Mirabelle crawls inside of, tunneling her way through the fabric until she reaches the sole from the inside. There, she begins tearing and cutting at the threads that push into the leather, connecting them to the somewhat inwardly folded fabric lips of the boot.

 

The first sole comes out, then the second one, leaving two fabric ‘tunnels’, the upper, and the rest of the boot apart from the now detached soles.

 

Mirabelle folds these flat and then takes a brush to them, flying back and forth with the brush beneath her as she struggles to fight against the weight of the heavy tool as she wipes it over the material many times in many directions until it’s clean. Then she flips them and repeats the process.

 

Once that is done and she’s soaked the soles in a little magic, the process of reattachment can begin.

 

She lays one of her new soles flat and upright and then pulls the first fabric upper over toward it before landing on the sole with a needle and thick thread.

 

This is going to be hard.

 

Mirabelle folds a piece of the fabric in from the bottom so that it makes an inward lip that covers the edge of the sole that she’s standing on. Then, holding a single needle with both of her arms, she puts all of her weight into it to press it down into the soft leather. The ghastly fairy exerts herself, pressing all of her strength into it to make the needle move through the material and back out of the side, where she has to pull it through to loop back inside again.

 

This process repeats itself for a long time. Hours. Well into the night before she has the first boot done. Her hands are red and the skin is peeled from the pressing of the needle, but Mirabelle continues on.

 

— She said it herself. She’s a shoemaker now. This is what she does. This is how she lives.

 

Gritting her teeth, she holds herself against the needle and pushes it into the sole of the boots again, pressing it through the soft leather with the fabric following.

 

By the time she finishes, the morning sun has risen again, shining through the window. She only sees it as she finally crawls out of the second boot, not thinking about how she spent her night inside someone’s shoes and instead staring with exhausted, deep pride at her work.

 

They’re finished.

 

She did it.

 

 

Mirabelle, the very tired fairy, crawls into a corner full of soft things and rests there for a while.