She would trade all the spells in the world if it meant she could tell a lie.
✥✥✥✥✥
Merle of Thorne is An Anthology of short stories made from prompts under the Fantasmical Contest 2023.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
✥✥✥✥✥
Only a few times did The Resident Witch, Nemredith, have a lot of events happening at once, and even fewer times did she send Merle in her place.
This was one of those times.
She assumed that the Witch did it out of concern for her, but Nemredith dispelled that notion by stating that Merle had to arrive in time to attend the festival that the Witch, Chun-Hua, had invited her to.
Merle also had to pick up a package for Nemredith from Chun-Hua.
As Merle traipsed around the unfamiliar environment, she was grateful for the cloak she wore.
Nemredith had made it for her a long time ago and endowed it with many similarities to her wings.
Its general colour was purple with beige stars dotting it and a mystical blue hue around it. The same blue she emitted.
It was also useful in Winter, to protect her wings from the biting cold it was not used to. Being of The Seelie Court, also known as The Summer Court, meant she was built for summer, not winter.
She glanced around to see every structure had red lamps strung from its slanted, upward-pointing roofs.
She also noticed needles pierced through paintings of snakes, scorpions, and lizards on the walls. Children also wore cutouts of these animals on their wrists.
The people were pleasant. Or maybe they mistook her for one of them because she hadn't displayed her wings.
And there were tons of people flying around on dragons!
It was magnificent, to say the least. The invite Nemredith gave her read, The Dragon Boat Festival.
Merle had presumed they would be riding Dragon Boats, not real Dragons. Dragons were, of course, nothing new to her. After all, she had freed one from a perilous state some long time ago.
She could see individuals in the lake who were paddling long boats, so her misperception may have had some validity.
Although there was a race going on, the invite to her—or rather, Nemredith—did not extend to that particular event.
She arrived at the hall where the event was taking place.
The three-day festival would culminate in the wee hours of Saturday. Merle was unhappy about that since she had to skip the final day if she wanted to meet Nemredith on Friday at the nineteenth hour to receive her weekly dose of human energy.
That was one of the few things she benefitted from her servitude to The Resident Witch. How the Witch could harness and seal human energy in vials, Merle didn't know, but she didn't question it either.
Upon entering the hall, she found it to be a courtyard with very high walls. She could see the sky above and ahead was a litany of dragons.
Today, they were going to be paired with dragons before being paired with another human-dragon pair. Making two humans and two dragons in a group.
She stood in awe until someone spoke from beside her.
"Merle?" The person asked and Merle turned to see a woman.
She had high cheekbones with long ink-black hair running down the length of her dress, a little bit longer than Merle's waist-length hair.
Her close-set eyes lit up from the smile that painted her lips, and her pale skin gave the woman an aura of grace and elegance.
"I'm Chun-Hua." The woman said and Merle smiled partly in relief. Something about Chun-Hua made her feel at ease.
She had anticipated meeting someone as uptight as Nemredith, who was the sole witch around her for so long that she believed that was how they all were.
She was also relieved that the Witch found her because, up until this point, she had no idea how to contact Chun-Hua.
"Welcome to China! Come. Let's go get paired."
Chun-Hua briefed Merle on the festival as they strode.
"Regarding the festival's origin, there are several theories. The most well-known is the poet Qu Yuan, who committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River in opposition to a political coalition that had just been formed at the time.
"According to legend, the folks raced out in Dragon Boats, like the ones you must have seen, to find the body and when they didn't, they dropped balls of sticky rice for fish to eat instead of the body."
The generosity of the people warmed Merle's heart.
"Some believe the festival started before that and was celebrated to request good health as well as a bountiful harvest from the dragon gods."
Merle raised her gaze to the colourful dragons dotting the sky. She had seen ribbons of similar colours on children's wrists.
"What do the colours of dragons mean?" she asked.
"It indicates the kind of dragon. White is associated with purity, red with good fortune and blue and green with nature and tranquillity."
"Are those the only colours?"
"The most revered and rare to see is yellow. They generally associate with emperors. Then, Black is linked to vengeance."
Merle hadn't caught sight of any Black dragon and wondered how the people would react to seeing one.
"Will you be staying for the whole festival?" Chun-Hua asked as they neared the front desk.
"No. I have to be back by Friday to get my weekly dose of human energy from Nemredith." Merle said.
Chun-Hua was quiet for a while before she stopped and turned to Merle, prompting her to do the same.
"How would you like to be able to get it for yourself and stop depending on Nemredith?"
Merle's eyes widened at the prospect. If she knew how Nemredith did it, that would give her some form of autonomy from The Resident Witch.
But Chun-Hua was also a witch and knew what Merle was; so Merle studied her and saw what she desired.
"You want my help?"
"That's a fact. The question is, would you give it in exchange for this knowledge?"
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
✥✥✥✥✥
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
