The valley below was obscenely beautiful. I have hiked these hills all my life, but this time it was as if I had never seen it before. The trees were taller, greener. The river was clearer. The sky was bluer.
“No!” I shook my head and chided myself, “Don’t fall under that spell.” The little pixie had stolen my stardust and I was going get it back, no matter what.
I knew that she was headed for The Circle, the border between the ‘real’ world and the world of Faerie. Most people avoided this place, but I knew the rules. That stardust was given to me by my mother and I, in turn, was going to give it to my wife to be. “A gift received to be given” is sacred, untouchable, both in this world and the other. I would be allowed to pursue the thief through any realm…or so I had heard. It’s not as if this ‘rule’ had been tested; it was just something that everybody ‘knew’. I was sure that I would find out, one way or another. I laughed out loud at the thought of a book of laws outlining human/faerie relations.
As I approached The Circle, the trees moved to keep me out. I felt a sinking feeling that both justice and my stardust would be out of my reach forever. However, when I touched a tree, I discovered that is was soft, barely even there. I was able to walk right through it, as if it were a blanket or a curtain. As I did so, I thought that I heard a childlike voice whispering, “No sin.”
I passed through or around many more trees until I emerged into a clearing. At the center of the clearing was a small pond of clearest, calmest water I have ever seen. It was like crystal. Around the pond were several toadstool circles; Faeries had definitely been here recently, but there was no evidence of them now.
“Well,” I told myself, “what’s the worst than can happen? Maybe I’ll get wet.” And with that, I jumped into the pond.
Strangely, it wasn’t until that very moment that I finally asked myself why the pixie had stolen my stardust and broken the law in the first place. I figured that was something else that I would be discovering soon enough.
I rolled a six-sided die (aka D6 ...geek) and got a 3, therefore my assignment was to write 300 words. This one came in at just under 400.
Posted by: CosmicDog | September 02, 2009 at 12:18 AM