Lili held her shield close to her body and pressed even further up against the wall of the pit, wishing that she could, like the Gnomes, melt right into the earth. She didn't at all like the tone of this conversation with the Sylphs and she didn't know what she could do about it.

With her left hand holding onto the shield, Lili thrust her right hand deep into her pants pocket, as if she could protect some small part of herself in there. Of course, her hand encountered the acorns and the gold coins which she had put in there earlier, but neither felt quite right. Curious, in spite of her current situation, Lili pulled one out.

Amazed, Lili examined the small object which rested in her hand. It wasn't a coin, but it wasn't exactly an acorn either. Well, not an acorn like any Lili had ever seen before. What Lili held bore the shape of an acorn, but it was gold in colour and engraved with a pentacle! Lili dipped her hand back into her pocket and pulled out more of these strange items, but found no coins and no regular acorns. Lili shifted her shield into her right hand and checked her left pocket but found there the same thing. Somehow, the gold coins which the Gnomes had given to her, and the acorns which she had collected earlier had all transformed into this mysterious hybrid.

By this point, the Sylphs too had become interested in the contents of Lili's pockets.

"What is it that you carry with you, human child?" one of them asked.

"These are just acorns," Lili responded. "At least, they were acorns."

"Ah!" cried one of the Sylphs. "So she has brought a means to redeem herself after all."

"What do you mean?" Lili asked.

"Trees help to clean the air," explained the first Sylph. Although she still could not make out the location of any of the speakers, Lili was quite confident that she recognized which voice was the first Sylph to have spoken to her, for it was decidedly less hostile than all of the rest. "If you plant those acorns in the ground around the top of this pit, they should soon grow into a grove of trees which will remove some of the smog from our air and release us from this prison."

"I don't know if these acorns will grow," Lili worried. "I had them in my pockets with some gold coins which the Gnomes gave to me, and something has happened to them. They don't look right for acorns anymore."

Just as Lili finished speaking, a gust of wind swept the acorns up out of her hand. Lili watched them swirling around in the whirlwind and was certain that she had lost them -- whatever they now were. As surely as the wind had stolen the acorns from her, however, it soon returned every last one of them right back into her hands.

"Those acorns have been blessed by the Gnomes," pronounced the first Sylph. "Nothing Gnome blessed can fail to grow. We will lift you up out of this pit, and you can plant the acorns now."

With that pronouncement, and before Lili could protest, the whirlwind increased in intensity, spinning faster and faster until Lili, her shield and her acorns were all lifted from the bottom of the pit and spun around and around, rising steadily up the pit until they were eventually flung out of the top.