Trickster's Tread

A short story / legend I wrote. Feel free to comment.

Down in the lake of Wilrijk, on a summer's sunday night, the earth took a deep breath.
At least, that is what the swelling and deflating of the ground looked like.
After deflating, it left only a small hole, the size of a thumbtack. The hole was big enough for little Permidit to squeeze through.

Permidit was more than happy to spread his little white-feathered bird-like wings and use his little webbed feet to swim through the lake as he swam to its surface.
Permidit had been here before, though this time he'd been a little less careful.
Last time, he graciously used the fountain's piping to reach the surface.
That first time, he'd scared the people who were swimming in the lake. Not because he wanted to harm them, but because he wanted to play.
He's a bit mischievous that way.

This time around, no one was there. But Permidit didn't mind, because that meant he could really go wild. He flexed his humanoid arms, bent his humanoid knees, stretched his little blue body and white wings. Then he tricked the fish into opening their mouths to the rythm of his favorite song.
The smile on his face came closest to impish glee. That would tell any creature he was enjoying his mischief again. But in his state of glee, he felt somewhat strange.

When his gaze was finally drawn to his reflection, he noticed he had grown.
Intrigued by this development, he wanted to recreate it in order to find the source for this growth.
Again, he flexed and stretched. But when he saw nothing had changed, he tricked the ducks into swimming in all sorts of formations. The trickery spawned another big impish smile on his face, and in his cackling, he grew bigger. Noticing the growth, his laughter sounded even louder.
It was almost so loud that no other sound could be heard near the lake.
Permidit wanted to have more fun and to grow larger.
Luckily for him, mischief was something that provided exactly that.

So he grew increasingly mischievous and large until he finally had enough.
Though in his mischief, he'd caused the people and animals of Wilrijk to hate him.
They would hunt him whenever they saw the opportunity.
Fearing for his life, Permidit wanted desperately to return to his subterran home and so he went back to the lake.
Once there he found, much to his surprise, that the hole that granted him entry to this realm wouldn't let him back through.
He had grown too big even to submerge himself in the lake's water.

The humans and animals took that opportunity to strike down Permidit and leave his body in the lake.
His end was tragic, but his pain was even worse.
The pain he felt at the hands of the humans' arms and the animals' claws caused his body to transform.
It shrunk back to the size of a single stepping stone. A stone the people of Wilrijk today call "Trickster's Tread".

Permidit's soul however, to this very day, is doomed to return to the lake and his body to shed a single tear.
In the hopes that one day, his body would shrink enough to free the hole for him to pass through to the subterran realm he once called home.