Dandelions, Ashes, Fireflies
A long time ago, not long after men came to live on this world, one of the three Aspects took a fancy to a human man and took him for her husband, and went to live with him on earth for a while.
The Blue, as she is called in these parts, bore her human husband a son after a time, a boy she named Indigo. The child was strong and hardy, with eyes as dark as the sea. His mother loved him more than anything she had ever loved before, and began to ignore her husband, preferring to spend long hours cooing over her dear little boy.
Now it came to pass that the Blue's husband, who had fallen for her cold beauty entirely, began to waste away out of the lack of her love, and eventually died. The Blue did not mourn for him at all, and instead took the opportunity to take her son and leave the human village where she had been living with him for the past few years.
It was then that Indigo first met the little collector of spirits. She had wandered in from the forest with a searching look in her eyes. He watched her for a while as he sat in front of his house, waiting for his mother to finish rolling away all of their rugs and blankets.
She was unlike anything he had ever seen before, for while her hair was pale like his mother's, her skin was light and her eyes were a strange and delicate pink. And though he did not quite know the reason why, he called out to her.
"Oh, hello," she said. "What are you doing there, sitting outside of your house like that?"
"I'm waiting for my mother," Indigo replied. "What are you doing?"
"I'm looking for spirits" the little girl said, and her eyes began to wander again in that strange, lost way. "Do you think you could help me find some?”
Now, in all truthfulness, Indigo had never even heard of spirits before. But the little boy's heart was entirely fixated on the pale little girl before him, and it told him to do anything to stay with her. “Sure, I'll help you find a spirit,” he told her, and she smiled at him in a way that made his heart overflow with happiness.
Together, they walked through the forest in search of spirits, and talked the whole way. They did not find anything but strange flowers and stones, but Indigo did not mind this at all. Hours passed before he started to get tired, and asked her to walk with him to the edge of the forest.
“I'm sorry we couldn't find any spirits,” he told her. “Do you think we can look for more together, later?”
“Perhaps...” she said. Her voice was slightly sad, but as it happened, that was just how she naturally spoke.
At his heart's urging, Indigo took her hands in his own. “I promise to find you a spirit,” he told her.
She smiled at him again, and nodded. “If you say so.” And when she slipped out of his hands, she was gone into the shadows of the forest.
When Indigo returned for a final dinner in his old home, he asked his mother about spirits. She looked at him with a curious sideways glance. “Is that what you and that girl were talking about?” she asked him.
Indigo nodded slowly. He was only slightly surprised that his mother knew what he was up to. She had a strange way of knowing whatever she wanted, and he was too young to be used to it or consciously understand it. “She was looking for them.”
The Blue thought about this for a while. “Spirits,” she decided, “should not even be in this world.”
“What do you mean, mother?” Indigo asked.
“My younger sister brought death into this world,” the Blue continued. “I argued against it, but my elder sister agreed with her decision. So, there is death. And because there is death, there are spirits where there should not be.”
Indigo decided that it would probably be best not to ask his mother further on the subject, for her dark eyes had grown hard and spiteful, and it always rained dreadfully when his mother was angry. “What does a spirit look like, though?” he said, after a while of thought.
“They are very small, and they live in the sky,” she told him, “and they have no color. Why do you ask, my son?”
“I was just curious,” he said, and remained very quiet for the rest of the evening.
The next day, as he and his mother traveled with their bowls and their blankets all packed up on a wagon, he searched for spirits in the sky. Though they traveled all day, and for many miles, he did not find anything, and it made him very sad.
However, after they had traveled for three days, the Blue finally stopped atop a hill in a grassy plain, and made a house there for them to live in. She allowed Indigo to wander as he pleased while she did her work, and in his wanderings, he discovered something.
It was a little white something that floated in the air, and it had no weight to it when he reached out to hold it. There were a great many of them there, and he smiled widely upon discovering them. They grew in the ground, it seemed, but they escaped into the air at the slightest breeze. After getting a basket from his mother, he filled it up and tied the lid on so the spirits would not escape, and waited for the little girl to find him again.
He saw her wandering the plains not very long after, in her pink dress with her pale hair, and he rushed out to meet her with the basket in his arms. “I found spirits for you!” he told her. “Lots of them!”
Her eyes widened and she smiled. “Show me.”
He opened the basket and little spirits went flying everywhere, and she began to laugh. It was a very short laugh, but it was beautiful, and he wished to hear it forever. “Those aren't spirits,” she told him. “Spirits are smaller, and they glow.”
Indigo's face fell. “Oh, I'm sorry...”
She put her hand on his. “They are very beautiful, anyways. The way they float on the breeze is very like how spirits do,” she told him, and it made him feel much better. “Let's play together,” she said as well, and they spent the day together.
In those days, there was no sun nor moon, but if there had been, they would have been out together long past nightfall, and Indigo grew very tired, and asked for her to follow him home. “I promise that I'll find a soul for you this time,” he told her again. “Come back soon, I know that I'll have something for you.”
“If you say so,” she told him, and gave him a little smile before walking away and disappearing behind a hill.
“You spent an awful lot of time with that girl,” the Blue said, serving him up a hot bowl of rice, after he returned. “I don't mind her, but I would prefer if you spent some time with me as well.”
“But of course, mother,” Indigo replied, and gave her a smile. “I love you too.”
She stared at him sternly for a good long while, until he began to eat his rice, nervously. She smiled at him, then. “You're a good boy,” she told him, and watched him eat as she made his bed. Indigo had never seen his mother eat.
The next day it was rainy, which meant that the Blue was probably not in very good spirits. Indigo tried his best to make her happy by helping her clean and put up her tapestries, and when the time came for him to eat, helped boil the rice and roast the meats and vegetables on the fire.
Indigo did not often help with the cooking, and he ended up burning most of the meat and under cooking most of the vegetables, but it managed to make his mother laugh, and so the rain cleared up. “You are such a good boy,” she told him again, and kissed him on the forehead before serving him his lunch.
However, as they were cleaning up, Indigo was fascinated to discover strange glowing things in the fire that they had created to cook his meal. Little sparks flew off of it, smaller than the floating things. And they glowed.
Astonished at how soon his discovery had come after the false start, he reached out for the little things and found that they were even harder to hold onto than the fluff balls. He tried one, two, three times, until he finally managed to get one.
It stung slightly, and he let go, rubbing his palm. Nothing was left there but a gray substance, and he frowned, wondering where the spirit had gone. Again, he tried, but no matter how hard he grabbed or how many times his hands were stung by them, they never seemed to take.
He also saw, at the base of the fire, pieces of glowing yellow, where the spirits seemed to be coming from. And although it was very hot where they were, they also seemed to be the most solid things, and he thrust his hands forward to hold one.
The scream ripped through the house and his mother was at his side immediately, holding his hands in her cool, dark ones. “What were you doing, putting your hands in the fire?” she asked him, but he was crying too hard to answer. She shushed him and rocked him in her arms and cooled his hands with her hands, and once he had stopped crying wrapped them in bandages. “You are a good boy, but a foolish one,” she told him, and kissed him on the forehead before tucking him into bed.
He woke a few hours later to find that the fire had died down, and the strange, burning yellow spirit-stones had become a dull orange. They were not nearly as hot as they were before, so he took a spoon and scooped them into a bowl. They glowed yellow with his breath, and little spirits lifted off of them and made him smile. There really were spirits in the stones, and he went back to sleep, happy that they were safe in his bowl.
The orange stones had been reduced to ashes by the time he woke up, to his dismay, and it did nothing but blow up into his face when he breathed on it. And the Blue did not let him get anywhere near the fire in the morning, when she made his breakfast, telling him that his hands were still hurt and she did not want him to hurt them more. Indigo ate his breakfast rather sadly, and went outside with his bowl of ashes, and sifted his bandaged hands through it, wondering how he could get it to glow like it did the night before.
“Those are not spirits, either,” he heard someone say, and looked up to see the little girl standing above him, a smile in her white-lashed eyes.
“But they glowed, and they floated, last night,” he told her. “Not anymore.”
“Spirits are living, though,” she told him, and sat down in front of him. She ran her hands through the ashes in the bowl, and her bone-colored skin grew gray. “This is very close.” Her eyes suddenly widened. “Did you hurt your hands?”
“Picking them up,” Indigo said quietly, extremely humiliated by the fact that he had burned himself for something that wasn't even a spirit. However, he found the girl's gray-pale hands on his bandaged ones.
“Try not to hurt yourself next time,” she said, and took the bowl from him. He watched her as she stepped out onto the hills and scattered the remains of the spirit-stones in the bowl to the wind, and gave the bowl back to him. “I'll come back when your hands are better.”
And she was gone. He sat there alone for a while, before his mother called him inside for his lunch. It was very hard to eat with his hands all bandaged up, but it was his thoughts that distracted him the most. He went outside again to think once he was finished eating, and walked for a very long time. In fact, he walked so far away from his house that he could no longer see it, and he grew rather frightened.
Suddenly, he saw a light. It was a little one, and it floated, and blinked. He began to follow it as it floated away into a cluster of trees that wound in between the smaller hills. Though the forest was small, it was bright-for everywhere he could look, there were little lights floating around.
There were spirits here, and they flew all around him in lazy circles, and a few of them landed on his hand when he stretched it out. He laughed, knowing that he had finally found what he was looking for. Carefully cupping a few of them in his hand, he made his way back home and placed the little spirits in a basket, waiting for his hands to heal.
The pale girl arrived a few days later, after he had taken his bandages off to reveal untouched, dusky skin. He had his basket of spirits ready for her arrival, and opened it outside to show her what he had found.
The spirits flew into the air and lit up all that they could see, for he had gone back to the little forest of the lights and gathered more for her.
She laughed again, and his heart sank. But what she said surprised him: “So you found them. I'm so glad!” And she laughed again, and he smiled widely, enjoying the sound.
In truth, they were not spirits at all but fireflies, but she was so charmed by his efforts that she couldn't bring herself to tell him otherwise. “I'll keep them with me always,” she told him, and together they walked to the forest of little lights, to play with the fireflies together.
From that day onward, the little collector of spirits was always heralded by her fireflies, even when she returned in the following days to play with Indigo, the son of the Blue. And the dandelions and the ashes of his earlier trials are all a part of her rituals today, for when we burn our dead and scatter them to the winds.
And Indigo did find real spirits, eventually. But by then, he had grown into a man and discovered his love for Rose, the firefly girl with the blood-colored eyes. But that is another story, for another time.
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I wish their story had a happier ending.
Holly, spinning stars.
The cast of an upcoming story. Ugh, my scanner totally crapped all over it... But I love the layout and I'm very proud of the coloring. <3 More about these folks later.