Milk

Milk, it does a body good… especially if you want to see magical creatures. Wait—your mom never told you that? Tsk tsk. Though in fairness, we're pretty sure milk only does this if you live in Fablehaven.

Of course, like most things in Fablehaven, the milk has both dangerous and benevolent aspects. When Kendra starts snooping around the milk, Dale tells her that it's "a bacterial stew" (5.54) and that anyone who drinks it could get "shingles. Scabies. Scurvy" (5.52). Sounds icky, right? It definitely makes us feel a little lactose intolerant all of a sudden.

Kendra's suspicious enough about Dale's laundry list of diseases the milk can give someone to follow through, though, so she gets Seth to drink the milk as an experiment before trying some herself. And instead of breaking out in rashes, it totally opens their eyes to magical creatures, which is pretty neat. The kids later learn from Grandma that the milk produced by their milch cow, Viola, is extra special. She says:

"[…] her milk functions as an ambrosia central to their survival." (15.27)

In this case, "their" refers to the fairies. And of course, in order to see all of the magical creatures, the humans have to drink a glass daily, which helps them tend to Fablehaven. The thing about Fablehaven, though, is that the safest way to hang out there as a human is to not be aware of how much magic is flitting about around you. Magical creatures can't hurt you if you don't engage with them—and once you see them, your chances of engagement increase dramatically which, in turn, opens you to harm.

So we see that milk, like practically everything else in Fablehaven, is double-edged: it both opens humans eyes to magic while also increasing their chances of getting hurt by magic, and it nourishes fairies and can be important to their spells.

Does this remind you of something from another story? We can't help but think of Eve in the Bible. The milk—like the apple she bites—opens people's eyes to the world around them, but this knowledge comes at a steep price (for Eve it's expulsion from Eden; for the humans in our book it's physical harm or death). Does that seem like a stretch to you, or can you find other similarities?