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Showing posts from April, 2021

The Wind's Secret

There was once a young witch who was terribly lonely. She lived in a cottage by the sea, and did her best to make friends with the gulls and the tide pools and the wind. And while she listened close, and was occasionally blessed with a few of their secrets, it was not the same as having another body near to whom one could simply chatter.             She had made the decision a few years before to steep herself in isolation. There was something about the ideal of a witch who lives in a remote fashion that appealed to her sense of prestige—for in all the lore that she had ever read, the most powerful of witches lived alone.             At first, she felt the strength in her decision, and was proud to have made her choice. But then she began to suffer from lack of company—though she made her peace by thinking that she had made a great sacrifice for her art.             But it did not take much longer than a year before she felt nothing more complex than sorrow.             It was

The Chimes

 There are the bells. The ones that ring on a string at the beck and pull of a ringer. They sound on the important days, the ones where we are forced to pay attention, sounding loudly like a solute that turns the head with a knowing — for one always knows for whom a bell tolls. But, dear friend, don't let it confuse you with the other ringing sound. The one that echoes through the trees and at the back of your mind. For the bells, they are not to be confused with chimes.      Perhaps, the chimes, they are more important. They are the ones that tinkle at the meeting of an old friend, at a laugh, at the gentle fall of twilight. They sound softly, easily missed. It matters, for if you miss their sound, you miss the beating of your own heart.      And then there are the subtlest of them all. The kind that are only heard with a straining ear and a desperate soul. The chimes that call you to fairyland.     Do they matter, these last ones? These chimes of another world?      That, my frie

The Fae Wood

There are those haunted woods. You know them. The ones you walked through that night when the mists lit up with an eerie luminosity and you knew you’d regret it if you didn’t follow the light to its source.             The source was moonlight, of course. There was no surprise in that.             But the twilit pond did surprise you.             Not because it was a pond, but because of the Fae creatures that danced about it with their tiny bodies gliding about on shining wings, all gossamer and glow.             When you stripped off your jacket and dove into the pond, that surprised you, too.             Not as much as the Fae creatures on the other side who pulled you up as you gasped your breaths and told you that you would be there for the next hundred years.             You didn’t mind.             It had always been a dream of yours, a fancy of wonder and fairy tales. It was a fine way to spend a hundred years.             But when you came back, the world was n

When the Earth Cried Out

 Once upon a time the earth cried out.     She cried out with a sound so tremulous that the universe paused.     It was the cry of bereavement, of trouble and sorrow.    She did so without agenda, only as one who bears witness to her own struggles.     And when the pause had ceased and all turned back into the natural rhythms of their motions, the trajectory of orbits and expansions and contractions all carried forth with infinitesimal difference, the change trickled down to the apex of the small planet who sighed and carried on.

A Tale on the Faults of a Utilitarian Calculus

Once upon a time, a little girl—the daughter of a great shepherdess—was gifted a sheep. The girl loved the sheep as though it were an extension of herself, caring well for it every day, and snuggling against its warm coat every night.      One day, a dragon flew down, eyed the sheep, and said to the little girl who had thrown herself in front of it, ‘if you give me your sheep willingly and with no fuss, I won’t burn your village to the ground.’      The little girl’s eyes went wide, then narrowed in a calculating fashion as the wheels of her mind began to wrestle.      ‘Dragon, sir,' she said, 'I cannot give you my sheep, not even to save my whole village, for I have promised to care for it. But you may eat me instead.'      The dragon blinked once, then twice, and then flew away from the sheep, the village, and the little girl, for he did not have enough logic in his heart to contend with that.