Sunday 11 June 2023

Flash Fic Challenge: Daisy Chain

 Daisy Chain

From the outside, the old nightclub looked bare and empty. Nothing was there except dust and a few mushrooms growing up through the damp floorboards. If anyone had stepped inside, however, and crossed the line of the faerie ring, it would have been a different matter.

On the Faerie side of the portal, the nightclub was thriving, full of light and music and dancers.

Glittering beams bounced over wings and horns, hooves and hands and clothing in every style and colour imaginable. Up on the main stage two fiddlers faced each other, and bowed, before tucking their violins under their chins and lifting their bows, each playing in turn for the attention of the room.

The first one, moon-pale and willow-slender, held a fiddle of black wood strung with silver. They drew from it richly complex music that threw interweaving patterns dancing across the walls and sank deep into every heart a memory of beauty, power, and wonder.

The second one, sun-bright and oak-sturdy, held a fiddle of warm red wood strung with gold. When they swept their bow across those strings, they drew from them a simple tune, fast and joyful. The tune danced and turned, twisting back on itself, braiding itself from the simple melody into something as complex as the first, drawing rainbows and celtic knots to twine on the walls and offering a memory of joy and peace to both counter and compliment the first. The second fiddler wasn't finished, however, because the now complex tune unbraided itself under their flying fingers and become once more a song, pleading:

For you'll look sweet, upon the seat,

of a bicycle made for two!