The Great Troll War

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For my eldest great-grandchild.

Sorry about the state of the planet.

We knew what we had to do – we just didn’t.

There was no excuse.

Trolls. I was staring at one just then. He was about twenty feet tall, dressed in a loincloth, a pair of leather boots and on top of his unusually small head was a dead goat. I’m not a massive expert on Trolls, but apparently they wear rotting animals in the same way as humans wear perfume: to disguise their smell and make them more attractive. To each other, obviously. I like to think myself fairly broad-minded but even I would have to admit Trolls are pretty loathsome in manner, looks and eating habits.

So who am I? Jennifer Strange. S-T-R-A-N-G-E. Rhymes with ‘Grange’. Y’know, the sixteen-year-old who was running Kazam, the House of Enchantment?

No?

Then how about this: I was the Last Dragonslayer.

Right, her. The kid with the Dragons.

The Troll was holding a large club that was once the rear axle of a truck, and it looked as though he not only knew how to use it, but already had. His skin was rough, had the colour of mouldy bread and boasted an impressive display of intricate tattoos. Some were geometric and purely for decoration, but others were more practical: owing to a long mistrust of pen and paper, the left Troll leg is reserved for a part of their written history, and the right for recipes, to-do lists and bawdy limericks. But no fools when it comes to data integrity, Trolls back themselves up, just in case – they have often been observed with identical tattoos.

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