Higgens: Sleep Stories from the Whispering Woods

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 12 of 12, the Season 1 finale.

The Mother-Hearth of Underhill has been cold for two winters, and on the first morning of the third spring the town begins to leave. Hazel comes home with a keeper, a dragon and the seventh and final lost page, only to learn the hearth cannot be re-lit at all. A fire given away every day for nine hundred years lives in every kitchen it ever kindled, and can only be returned coal by coal, by every family that received it. The greatest errand the company ever ran, and the end of the first great road.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. The story continues in Season 2, Higgens & Wendel.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 11 of 12.

There is smoke rising from Higgens’s chimney, and Higgens is not home. The next lost page leads back to the little house under the oak roots where the journey began, and someone has been living there for months, minding the tomatoes, watering the moss, paying the squirrels. Pinned to the door, in a small careful hand: “I have not eaten the jam. Except one jar. I will explain about the jar.” The warmest homecoming of the whole road.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 10 of 12.

Once a year the canal city of Lumenmere floats ten thousand paper lanterns down to the sea, a wish on each. The old tale says that once in a great while one lantern comes back, up-current, to find the one who needed it. Thirty years ago a poor boy folded a shining scrap into his lantern and wrote the only wish he had; it went the wrong way up the dark Old Canal, and he has stood on the Long Bridge every festival since, waiting.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 9 of 12.

There is a door at the top of the sky, and it opens only to dragon wings. Higgens, Pip and Nimbus climb through the cloud-deck into an ocean of white where green islands sail, trailing waterfalls into the air. But every island is empty, washing still on the lines and bread still proofing, and all of them are running before something. One, the Isle of the Seven Mills, is falling behind the fleet and riding lower every mile, like a swimmer who is tiring.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 8 of 12.

Hundreds of great trees stroll their valley like a grazing herd, and the third lost page rides in the crown of the tallest tree in the world. But the herd is walking the wrong way, toward the stone barrens, with winter behind. You cannot catch a forest; you can only join one. Higgens and his friends walk with the trees and discover the matriarch’s secret: she is the last who remembers the Song of the way home, and she has forgotten the middle verses.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 7 of 12.

The only road to the Walking Forest leads through the mountain the coast folk call the Sleeper, which nobody has entered in a hundred years. The passage is one dwarf wide, so Higgens goes in alone with his lantern and meets the mountain’s two secrets: Torv, a three-hundred-year-old troll who has never felt warmth, and far below the black lake, the Cold Coil, a vast blind serpent who takes the warm. Nothing in the dark has ever been shown a little kindness before.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 6 of 12.

The second lost page lies in Bellhaven, a drowned town sixty fathoms down, where sea-snow drifts over silent rooftops and a great dwarf-cast bell has hung unrung for a hundred years. No friend can follow, so for the first time Higgens goes down alone, with the old dwarf art of breathing under water. In the deep he finds Glim, a lanternfish holding the last light of a coral garden, and Inkling, an elderly octopus who has spent sixty years knotting a bell-rope.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 5 of 12.

Seven pages of the Book of Ariel lie scattered across the worlds, and the first has fallen on an island no boat can reach, sealed behind a storm that has turned for thirty years. To get there Higgens must befriend a dragon and leave his friends behind. This is the story of Nimbus, the last sea-dragon, moon-grey and heartbreakingly shy, who will carry one small passenger under her wing across a silver sea at dawn.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 4 of 12.

In the great dark hall at the border of everything, the Book of Ariel finally opens. Pip climbs the hidden wick-ways inside the Lantern, Orlo polishes the great glass and then does the bravest, gentlest thing in the whole story, Amara remembers what the Nine Halls were built for, and Higgens climbs the keeper’s stair to give the flame. The book’s last instruction: when the light rises, the dark will come. Do not bar the doors.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY

A cozy fantasy sleep story for grown-ups, told slowly in a calm voice with soft rain and fire sounds. Part 3 of 12.

The company follows the Long Stair down beneath the floors of all the worlds into the Deep Country, a glowing land of moss meadows and crystal trees, where nine great Lantern-Halls are slowly going dark. There they meet Wick, a weary salamander lamplighter who has kept the lights alone for sixty years, and learn who the Dark Rider really is, and what he has been searching for in the dark for a thousand years.

No cliffhangers, no sudden sounds. Dim the lights and let Higgens keep walking while you dream. New stories every week.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAJlReoN_ttY