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rustleandeddy · 7 years ago

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Chapter 7

Rustle’s mind practically rattled about in his head. He was trained from birth to scrutinize the world around him, moment to moment, to discover anything which might be a threat to him. At home, this meant watching for the twitch of foliage and imagining the hawk that might be swooping above. Confronted with a glowing embodiment of raw magic, locked away in what could only be a mystic prison, his mind was aflame with the possibilities. What had this being done to be locked away here? What would it do now that it had discovered him and his friend?

The sheer weight of the horrific scenarios would have paralyzed a normal creature. Fortunately the same highly trained instinct for spotting trouble also provided instructions for how to react to said threats. Those instructions were always the same. Run and hide.

He darted toward the still frozen merman who had gotten him into this mess and hid behind his fin-like ear. Logically, he wasn’t any more safe there—it wasn’t as though Eddy could defend him—but just being concealed made him feel world’s better than charging out into the tunnels and caves that, as far as he knew, held even greater threats. And he couldn’t leave Eddy behind. Fairies are stronger when they are together.

“Why did I have to be curious? Why did I have to leave the pond? Why didn’t I listen to the others? Why did I come here?” He muttered to himself, eyes wild and voice on the brink of madness.

The golden form before them leaned forward again, testing the limits of the strange spell that kept it in the center of the room. As it drew closer, Rustle could feel his hair stand on end. This being was nothing but power. The piercing glow of the eyes swept along Eddy, then fixed on Rustle where he’d taken shelter.

“How long…”

Rustle didn’t know how he became aware of the words. He didn’t hear them. Not with his ears, at least. He simply… knew that they were intended for him. They slipped into his mind, skipping all of the pesky steps of perceiving them.

“How long have I been imprisoned…”

“I-I don’t know. I don’t come from here. I come from the surface,” Rustle said.

The being thrust a finger toward Eddy, causing a fresh flare of the chains in the ceiling.

“He does not come from the surface… He is from very near this place…”

“B-but he’s sleeping. I used magic, and I didn’t mean to, but it was so strong here, and I froze him and he fell asleep and as soon as he wakes up and we get him free we will leave you be and you’ll never have to worry about us again because—”

Rustle’s rambling picked up speed as he continued, like his assurances were a stone rolling downhill, unable to stop and accelerating out of control.

The being raised a hand to silence the fairy.

“I will wake him…”

The radiant eyes shut and the hands pressed together. Up until now, the general level of magic around him had caused Rustle’s skin to tingle. Now it became more acute, the force of will gaining a focus and edge. The magic clashed and sparked against the mystic barrier that kept the being in place, but a lance of energy pierced through. When it struck the ice encasing Eddy, the thick mound of crystal shattered around him. A galaxy of flakes burst outward and filled the water. Currents of magic pulled the twinkling crystals into complex whorls, tracing out sigils and runes in the water around them before the rising temperature caused them to dwindle and melt.

“Eddy!” Rustle cried, flitting about the face of his sleeping friend.

The merman as floating free of the ice now. His breathing was still quite shallow, but Rustle could see that the icy blue tinge has skin had taken on had begun to return to the healthier teal he’d come to expect from the creature. Gradually the glow restored to the tips of his fins and spines, and finally his eyes fluttered open.

Rustle buzzed just in front of Eddy’s eyes, watching as they fought to focus on him.

“Good morning, Rustle the Fairyman…” He said thickly. “What has…”

The eyes shifted to the figure dominating the room.

“What has happened…” Eddy finished.

“You will tell me what has happened…”

Again, the words wove their way into Rustle’s mind, and from Eddy’s reaction, they’d found their way into his thoughts as well.

“We explored a cave in my mine and you were in it,” Eddy said.

Though he visibly and audibly shared the same feeling of awe that pushed Rustle nearly past the point of logical thought, he did not show even the most cursory evidence of fear. Did nothing frighten him?

“What of the world? How long since the clash? Since the Thieves and the Great Ancient?”

“Too long, I suppose. I do not know of that tale.”

“You do not… And the names. Stuartia. Merantia.”

He shook his head, dislodging a few stubborn flakes of ice. “I do not know them.”

“Dangerous… terribly dangerous… To allow it all to be forgotten…”

“What has been forgotten?” Eddy asked excitedly. “Tell us the story. We are here for adventure, and to learn. Tell us what has been forgotten, of this place and of you—whatever you are. We shall tell the others! I will tell the people of Barnacle and they shall tell everyone beyond. My good friend Rustle will tell the people of the surface. Everyone will know!”

The figure’s eyes shut. Its glow dimmed ever so slightly, as though it was focusing on something distant. Eddy, showing the foolhardiness that Rustle had come to expect from him, swam through the magic circle keeping the being in place and inspected its form.

“Eddy, be careful!” Rustle called, carefully moving no further than the edge of the being’s unseen prison.

“If we were careful, we would never have found this place!” Eddy said. “This is a mermaid. Or maybe this was a mermaid? But I do not know where from…”

“How can you be certain it is a female? The features are so indistinct.”

“Do you not know a fairymaid when you see one?” He said.

He leaned forward. His proximity to the radiant figure’s power caused his hair to billow, yellow sparks running coruscating along the locks. He either did not know or did not care that it was occurring. Rather than backing away to a safe distance, he leaned closer to the motionless mass of power. Slowly he extended a finger.

“Don’t touch her,” Rustle warned.

Eddy pulled his hand back.

“Why should I not?”

“You don’t know who or what she is! All you know is that this place was built to lock her inside.”

“… How do we know this?”

“Because she can’t cross this line. Here on the ceiling and floor. And because the door was locked. Pay attention, Eddy!”

He scratched his head, but looped around her to join Eddy at the perimeter.

“It is not always a dangerous person who is in a prison, Rustle. Mira says they have stories on the surface about princesses in towers. And people like us rescue them. And when I was growing, father would tell me about mermaids who were trapped in shallow pools for the entertainment of bad people. Do you have those stories?”

“… We have stories of fairies trapped in jars. Fairies used to power spells. Mostly we have stories of fairies being… collected.”

“So maybe this is one of those stories.”

“Or maybe it is the story of a terrible witch who the heroes couldn’t defeat, so they locked her away.”

Eddy nodded. “It could be many stories…”

He crossed his arms and watched the being as it remained motionless but for the pulse of its glow. He flicked the edge of his tail fin in little circles. Had he toes, he would be tapping them impatiently.

“What are you doing, please?” he called.

The eyes opened and fixed upon him again. Words flowed once more.

“A heartbeat… I feel it… The Great Ancient…”

“What is this, the Great Ancient? And also the thieves. The tablet my friend found mentioned thieves.”

“What!? You didn’t tell me that!” Rustle said.

“You would have said we should not say the words after that,” Eddy explained.

“And I would have been right!” He darted up to Eddy’s face. “This is even more of your fault than before!”

The words continued. “You come from Barnacle…”

“I do! My sister, my father, my mother, and theirs and theirs and theirs. Always from Barnacle.”

“It would be a fine prison for it… the depths near Barnacle… Has the ground been shaking?”

“Yes!” Eddy said in fascination.

He started to drift forward again, but Rustle buzzed forward and urged him back behind the safety of the line.

“Very much the ground has been shaking. Always some, but now very much! How do you know this?”

“The tale is told…”

The figure turned and raised her hands to the carving. She swam toward the barrier, and up toward the ceiling. The carved chains pulsed with power, but now, the pulsing glow spread outward. Perhaps it was an enchantment of the chamber itself, or some spell cast by the mysterious being, but the carving slowly began to shift and churn. Like a shadow play, the carvings moved and flowed, acting out the tale they’d been carved to represent.

Two brilliant glimmers appeared at either end of the domed roof, so small they at first had escaped notice. One shone yellow, the other blue. They looped and fluttered in place, sending out waves of like-colored light. The light danced and shimmered along the ceiling, until finally two waves of opposing light met in the center with a crack and clash. The two points drifted toward center and met where their light had. First the blue pulse. Then the gold. Then the blue more brightly, then the gold brighter still. Without words, it told the story of two figures testing themselves against one another.

The pulses continued until they were blinding, neither seeming to be any brighter than the other. No sign of which was stronger, gold or blue. So there came other acts. A blue spire conjured forth, curling up one side of the dome and down the other.

“That almost looks like Steep Mountain!” Eddy said excitedly.

A gold pool grew and spread, seeming to smooth away and burrow down into all that surrounded it.

“And that’s Deep Swell!” he cried, pointing enthusiastically.

“What are those things?” Rustle asked.

“Seamarks! Steep Mountain is… Wait. We watch the story first…”

Light of alternating colors now had shifted to forming complex and astonishing shapes. They were so intricate the detail seemed to fold in upon itself, never truly reaching an end. But each time some feat was concocted by one of the colors, the other matched it. Until finally, blue light wove and curled along the looping forms of the creature that dominated the background of the carving. The beast then moved, sliding along behind the details of the other lights and carvings until it came to rest behind the blue point.

There was a moment of stillness, then a faint gold haze pulsed, seemingly from everywhere along the dome. It moved like smoke, gathering into a brighter cloud behind the yellow point of light.

Eddy swam up to investigate.

“It is many small points. Like glowing dust…” Eddy said.

He recoiled backward as the massive, shifting behemoth surged across the carving and the cloud of yellow wafted toward it.

A new clash, infinitely more violent than what had been illustrated before, played out across the dome. Everything that had been created or depicted to this point served as little more than dry grass to be trampled by the behemoth and the haze of light. The tower Eddy called Steep Mountain fractured and tumbled. The magnificent shapes conjured in each color were wiped away. The destruction grew and spread, but there was no sign the battle would end.

Then came white light, the glowing figure of what Eddy had identified as the goddess Tria. Her many arms rose and with them rose a shimmering wall of white, completely encircling the battle. It continued to rage, sundering everything within the wall. Soon the actual temperature of the water around them began to rise. The water in front of the carving simmered, then boiled. Eddy finally retreated to a reasonable distance as the water at the top of the chamber entirely boiled away and, behind it, flames broiled and charred the stone, swallowing all else.

The flames died away. The golden haze was still now, tracing out chaotic, marbled lines across the walled section of carving. The massive behemoth lay motionless, though its eyes were still open. The figure of Tia waved her arms and the six attendants surrounding her whisked through the wall into the blackened wasteland beyond. The three mermen tugged at the limbs and tentacles of the beast, maneuvering it into the position of the original carving and forging the massive chains. The mermaids gathered the haze of golden light just as it began to churn again. The original points of yellow and blue drifted toward the wasteland, flaring to brightness once more, but Tria thrust her arms up and down. The chains pulsed again, and the lights were snuffed out.

With that, the glow of the wall faded, the blackness and char wafted into the water and dispersed, and the carving was as it was when they arrived. The glowing figure turned to them again.

“Do you understand…”

“I understand much,” Eddy said.

“I don’t understand very much at all, but what I do understand, I don’t like,” Rustle said.

“The tall thing. That was Steep Mountain. Very near to the center of the Crescent Sea. It reaches almost to the surface. The top is strange and sharp. It looks like from this story it was even taller, tall enough to be above the surface.”

“You mean like an island?”

“You call them islands. We call them mountains. I suppose this big creature—there is just one of it, so I guess that is the Great Ancient—broke the mountain. That is why there is the jagged top. And then Deep Swell. It is a very low, very flat area. That is the home of the great council. It is our capital.”

He squinted his eyes and gazed up toward the dome of the chamber.

“Steep Mountain was there. And Deep Swell was there… And all of that… fire happened all about here… That would be the Broken Fields. A very large place where the ground is sharp and pointy. Like broken glass. Does fire make glass?”

“I don’t know, Eddy, but we shouldn’t be wondering about that sort of thing while she is still here staring at us,” Rustle said.

Eddy looked to the glowing form, waiting patiently within her prison, watching them.

“You are right, Rustle.” He addressed the glowing figure. “Does fire make glass?”

“That’s not what I meant!” Rustle hissed.

“Fire turns sand to glass…” Came the reply. “And so it shall boil away the sea and turn the sand to glass again if you do not heed my words. In life, I was the mage Stuartia. Many of the feats depicted here are my own. My foe was the dread wizard Merantia. I can feel the heartbeat of the sea… I can feel the waning slumber of the Great Ancient. Each time it stirs, the land and sea shake. If it wakes… The sea will boil and burn…”

Rustle’s blood ran cold at the words of ill omen dripping into his thoughts. He saw images of ruin. This mysterious, freshly discovered undersea world torn asunder. His own forest washed away by a wave sweeping in from the sea. He didn’t know if the images were the products of his own imagination, messages from Stuartia, or some horrid premonition. He turned to Eddy.

The merman’s eyes were twinkling, his face utterly dripping with raw excitement. He reached out and grabbed Rustle by the legs and shook him.

“Adventure, Rustle! Adventure!” Rustle raved.

He turned to Stuartia.

“What do we need to do, Great Mage!” he said, his posture straightening like a soldier preparing for orders.

“I cannot speak with certainty…” the deceased mage replied. “But if the Great Ancient stirs, then Merantia’s spirit must cling to this place as well. You must find it. You must do what can be done to end its influence, to shatter its will, to release its control over the Great Ancient. And you must do it quickly.”

Eddy looked about and swiftly set about collecting his things.

“Quickly, Rustle! We have a job to do! A call to adventure!”

The fairy attempted to form the words necessary to even attempt to convince Eddy to think it through, but the merman’s excitement was impenetrable. He grabbed his pick, gathered the spell book and both pieces of the glove Rustle had used to try to chisel him out. In a flash he was fully equipped and ready to go. He streaked by Rustle, who barely had time to grab his flowing hair as he swept past.

“Eddy! Eddy please, wait!” Rustle called.

“We know the way the Broken Fields were made, Rustle! And how Steep Mountain and Deep Swell were made. I’ve never heard those stories! And we are going to save the day! A good mage and an evil one. A mission to save the world. It will be the greatest story. A story to tell children for the rest of forever!” He glanced back at the fairy entangled in his hair. “They will write songs about us, Rustle!”

“Fairies don’t do this sort of thing alone. We should get help!”

“You aren’t alone. We are together! It is the two of us. A team! And we cannot get help. We cannot leave until the water is high enough. At least, I cannot.”

“Fine. Fairies don’t do this sort of thing at all.”

“Neither do mermen. But we do now! We are the first. Except for maybe the merman attendants of Tria. And they did not even have their own names. They were just Tria’s Left Hands!”

“But what are we supposed to do?”

“This is our story. We decide what we do. Think of what we’ve done. You are curious about things you don’t know, and you find me, able to show you so much you don’t know. And I am curious to find people who can teach me things as well, and I find you, able to teach me so much I don’t know. I show you the place I spend all my time, and you find something new! We venture to that place, and you find something amazing! You freeze me to a wall, and I wake to find a mission to save the sea! It is all falling into place, Rustle. It is our adventure. Whatever happens, Rustle and Eddy can do what needs to be done! And this next piece is easy. We find the other wizard. You found this one. Just look for the same.”

“I don’t know, Eddy…”

“Neither do I! Let us find out together!”

#rustle and eddy #merman #fairy #the book of deacon

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snaliap-blog · 8 years ago

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Project in Practice - Design and Layout

For the Design and Layout for the book I used the following:

Adobe Photoshop - to edit and adjust images as well as to create a few of my own.

Adobe InDesign - for the layout of the inside of the book

Adobe Illustrator - for design the cover of the book

The first thing considered for the design of the book was what size it would be. We did not want it to be too large as we wished to have each character have at least one page each and if the page size was too big there would be too much empty space for some entries. We also decided against having letter sized pages as it would feel too much like a magazine and we didn’t want it to be too small. We wanted the book to feel comfortable in bot the small hands of a child and the large hands of an adult. After cutting sheets of paper we compromised on 15 inches x 9 inches open or a page size of 7.5 inches x 9 inches. The orientation would be portrait.

Cover

For the cover of this book, I passed on the mood board I had created as well as verbal instructions to the illustrator explaining I wanted an eerie silk cotton tree to stretch across both the front and back cover. To give her a better idea of what a silk cotton tree looked like I also shared with her a video of one that I took in Lopinot.

Link to video

The initial cover she gave us was this:

I explained that it was too dark for a cover and that the red sky didn’t fit with the theme of the book, even though Chinelle liked the red. I also wanted there to be leaves on the tree and for the branches to spread more widely across the cover to allude to how massive these trees are. To further highlight this, smaller trees should be seen in the background. Also as the silk cotton tree is said to house spirits I wanted the glowing eyes of jumbies to be seen in the branches. Something bright on the cover like a soucouyant would also be more eye catching.

After a few more drafts she came up with the above image. I directed the illustration to add more light to the tree itself to make it more distinguishable as when printed the the tree would be drowned out by the dark night sky. Chinelle asked for the soucouyant to have a more feminine form and to be rising from the tree so that it would be that she is in transition from woman to ball of fire.

The last image she gave was the one below.

I used Adobe illustrator to take the image she gave us and added the text to create the final version of the cover. The only colour text that would stand out on this image was white. So the title and the text on the back is in white. The font chosen was Baskerville. Also the words Folklore and Superstition was chosen to be a larger size as there were the key words of the book and if the whole title was in that size it would drown out the tree.

I chose to put our names on the front cover in a pale yellow so that it would stand out from the title. The font chosen had no serifs so as to contrast the tile.

Inside

In approaching the Layout of the Book (Inside) I decided that each of the following categories would have different styles (i.e. margins, image sizes paragraphing, etc.):

Folklore characters

Tales of Lopinot

Superstitions

Bush Medicine

Carnival Characters

However for uniformity ans continuity throughout the book, the font would remain the same. When considering fonts I narrowed it down to 5 different fonts (three serifs and two sans-serifs). We decided to go with a serif font as it is considered to be easier to read in print media. Ultimately I chose Minion Pro for the variety of options it has available (bold cond, bold cond italic, regular, italic, medium, medium italic, semibold, semibold italic, bold and bold italic) as this would give more options and make formatting easier for titles, headings, sub headings and highlighting certain text.

To determine font size I took into consideration that large blocks of texts should be between 11pt - 14pt (advice from printer) for an easier read. I also decided, after speaking to a few older acquaintances of mine who has trouble seeing to not use the 12pt font or lower. However I did not wish to overwhelm the images and the reader so I refrained from using 14pt font. Therefore the middle ground of 13pt was chosen.

Another design element I tried to maintain throughout the book, is that if an images was not facing the front, it would face towards the edge of the book. As shown below:

Folktale Character Section

When planning for this section I had asked the illustrator to do dramatic drawings that could be used as a full page. Thus this part was meant to have a full scale image on one side and the text on the other. However when doing the layout, I realised that some entries did not have enough text to properly fill out the, thus I decided to place the text and image on the same page for some characters. As the entries for this section was done in alphabetical order, I also had to keep in mind that for the Mermen and Fairymaids entry I planned to have a two page spread (as there were two illustrations for this entry). Hence all of the entries before this spread had to be laid out to accommodate this.

This affected the layout as the pages where text was superimposed on the images had different margins than those pages with text alone. Another effect was that with mostly black images, the text would have to be white. To make this easier to read, the white on black text was became semi-bold.

I personally had to do minor edits some of the illustrations, using Adobe Photoshop, that were provided to better suit the layout of text in the book. These edits mostly consisted of changing the position of the some of the elements of the image as well as stretching and shrinking other parts.

Another thing that came up in laying out the text was that the testimonials looked to similar to the description of the character.

I felt that to give it the essence of someone speaking or writing a script font might be best. We considered a few texts but felt that Gabriola was best suited as it was easiest, did not clash with Minion Pro and looked a mix of italic (fancy) and handwritten (flowing).

Tales of Lopinot

This section was not planned out much in advance as it was decided to make it whilst transcribing the interviews. During our visit to Lopinot, Chinelle and I took some great photos that we wanted to include in the book. Thus this section was actually designed to incorporate coloured pages. Originally Chinelle wanted all the images to have a sepia tone, but dues to the image of the graves having a some red I suggested that we use colour for that one and to do photo of the house in sepia. I used photoshop to adjust each individual photo. Chinelle also had taken a photo of a cocoa pod that she wished to include in the book. To accommodate this and keep the content to six pages I cut out the cocoa pod and places it in the upper corner next to the heading.

Original Photos:

Edited Photos

Superstitions

For this section the text took centre stage and the images added acted more as an enhancement. The layout also differed from the other sections as the paragraphs on this page were only 1-3 sentences long. Also as each paragraph discussed something different, the image on the page could only be applies to one of the paragraphs. The illustrator was thus given only a small selection of images to draw, depending on which items we felt would stand out the most or was the most familiar to the reader.

Some of the images in this section I composed myself as when doing the layout as I realised additional images were needed that exceeded the amount we had paid the illustrator for. The images I did were:

Bush Medicine

Ideally for this section, each entry would have an image associated with it, and thus could be given its own page. However we decided against using the illustrator for this section and instead used photographs that we had taken, as we felt this would make identifying the plants easier, thus this section also used colours. Unfortunately we did not have enough images for each entry, so they were instead separated by small spaces between them. To prevent too much empty space and to give a symmetrical look to the content, the images were centre aligned vertically to the the page.

Carnival Characters

Due to the nature of Carnival being a festivity in our country I instructed the illustrator to use a white background for all of the images except the Midnight Robber. Even though the literary content in this part was more sparse, I still decided to give each character their own page as I wanted this section to have a lighter feel to it than the Folklore Character section. Even though there was a good bit of empty space for each entry I tried to layout each two page spread evenly, so that one page did not overwhelm its partner.

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k1m-bail3y · 8 years ago

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Mermay prompt 3: Wicked Mermaid

So I spent a lot of time today trying to figure this prompt out. The whole “wicked” thing kept throwing me because I just could not write it straight. And so, here we are:

Pastor Bouffant had been in the village just two days when the scandal broke. Mr Roble’s wife, after years of accusations of infidelity without proof, had finally caught him in the act.

He had been visiting a fairymaid in the forests near the village under the pretence of hunting with friends for the past several weeks. His mistake was trying to go out with friends who were out visiting family in another part of the island, one week after he had complained to his wife about the hunting ban. She had pretended not to notice his slip-up, waited until he had driven off, called a friend with a car and followed.

To say that Mr Roble was displeased to be finally caught was to put it mildly. He had raged and scolded his wife while his lover sat combing her hair and watching the drama unfold. When that did not move her to a shamed retreat, he had tried to “escort” her home, insisting that she was unwell and needed to rest. And when that failed, had resorted to begging her to take him home so that they could discuss the matter privately.

Pastor Bouffant had been visiting with my mother—part of his “get to know the parishioners” tour, or so he stated they did in England where he had trained—when Mrs Roble’s friend came to share the news. The pastor was understandably displeased.

“This is exactly why I requested this posting. These poor creatures cannot help themselves, but Mr Roble made vows. One cannot allow oneself to be tempted to wickedness by these she-devils.”

My mother and Mrs Roble’s friend exchanged a glance and then my mother said, “Well you know, if I know Anne she will not want to leave her husband. They have been together since school. Maybe you could provide them with some counseling. Rennie and I went for counseling before we got married and I think it did wonders.”

Pastor Bouffant nodded at this, and said, “Yes. Mr and Mrs Roble will have my services when they require it. But I think my counsel will be better served elsewhere.”

My mother and Mrs Roble’s friend exchanged another glance, this time with slightly widened eyes and one raised brow. I, pretending obliviousness while I dutifully completed my homework, held my breath. Pastor Bouffant stood up, straightened his suit and said, “It is time someone attempted serious reform of these creatures. I will convert the Devil’s handmaiden to the ways of the righteous!”

"What?”

We all turned to my mother, who made no attempt to disguise her shock. Pastor Bouffant smiled gently at her and said, “I understand that not everyone will be on board with the idea but one should not condemn the savage for not knowing the sin.”

My mother finally closed her mouth, and Mrs Roble’s friend said, “It’s not that, Pastor, it’s just that these ‘creatures’ are not helpless. They know very well what they’re doing, they just don’t care. Arthur just worthless.”

Pastor Bouffant wrinkled his nose at that and said, “No, no. If things are to change, someone has to extend a hand. I will extend that hand.”

Thus decided, the pastor collected his keys and took his leave. There was a moment of silence where we all sat listening to his car rumble away and then my mother said, “Oh good lord.”

The next Sunday, the church was packed. Mrs Roble’s friend had spread the news of the pastor’s decision almost before she left our house. Then, during the week, Mrs Roble announced—by way of the same friend, which is to say she officially did not—that she and Mr Roble had temporarily separated. Mrs Roble had also gone shopping with her sisters for a new wardrobe, which included a blush pink dress with matching hat that she was expected to wear to church that weekend.

Pastor Bouffant strolled into the church in his best suit, wearing his grimmest expression and accompanied by a beautiful shadow. The fairymaid had come, in an old-fashioned white lace dress with a high collar and dropped waist, her long dreadlocks pulled into a demure ponytail and her head respectfully bowed. Several eyebrows went up, and quite a few because the creature had not immediately burst into flame as expected.

"Good morning, brothers and sisters!” said Pastor Bouffant when he stood at the pulpit. “This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

"Amen,” the congregation chorused.

"We are living in troubling times, brothers and sisters. The Devil is a busy man and he would send his agents to tempt the weak and unwary. But I am here to tell you, brothers and sisters, that I will lead the fight for us all!”

"Amen,” said the congregation.

Pastor Bouffant extended a hand to the fairymaid, sitting quietly in the front pew, the picture of innocence, and said, “This creature was until recently, a wicked one. She seduced husbands away from wives, led children astray and cursed the nets of any who displeased her. But from this day, no more!”

"Amen!” the congregation cheered.

"Ha!” said Mrs Roble.

Pastor Bouffant, in the act of launching into his next declaration, stopped with his mouth open. The fairymaid looked up. Mrs Roble stood and said, “If you think this harlot will be reformed, Pastor, then you’re more naïve than my husband.”

The silence in the church was absolute. Not even the babies whimpered. Perhaps they were listening too. Mrs Roble continued, “I will not sit here and watch this happen. No right-thinking Christian should. You do not bring the servant of the Devil into this place and expect peace. Mark my words, Pastor. This she-devil will destroy you.”

She glared at the fairymaid for good measure, then turned and promptly walked out of the church. We all watched her go, stunned. Pastor Bouffant’s mouth was still open.

I was watching the fairymaid. She had looked on as Mrs Roble left, smiled softly to herself and noticed me looking. I stared back. Her smile widened, she winked and turned back to the pastor with her head held high. The opening salvo had been launched and acknowledged. I’m not sure if we were ready for this war.

#mermaid #writing #mermay #mermay31

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