Holista and the Sun-Dust Field

Column after column of green smeared across the canvas of the day as Holista Lightwing flew through the emerald sunlight. Pedestrians milling about their day pointed and called after her, giggling with all the whimsy natural to a child of the Fey Forest. Though accustomed to their jeers, the young changeling never tired of the crowing calls. Her paint brush ran verdant streaks everywhere she looked; above, green, ahead, green, behind, green, below, green! Always green in the morning and day hours as the sun dripped through the canopy ceiling that was her sky.

"Lightwing," a voice echoed from somewhere beyond the blended hues, piercing through the walls of leaves. It was just enough to pop the daydream bubble surrounding her, caught for a moment by a small stream of sunlight trickling through the cracks to kiss her cheek. "Get your head out of the clouds and back to work!"

"NO!" Holista had been shirking the responsibilties the Pine Night festivities had provided her and felt like running today. "There are much better things to see than that stupid Gem Pine, even if it is the only stupid thing around here that isn't green . . ." Her eyes fell to her hands as she felt that sullen chill of familiarity that was her recognition of self. ". . . or grey."

For miles, Holista ran and kicked up trouble for all the people of her neighborhood within the hut and homes of the Fey Forest. Elf, vixerai, dryad, and those of her own heritage; the changelings. Apart from looking lithe and lethal like the elves, nimble and cunning like the vulpine-humanoids, or beautiful and earthly like her tree dwelling friends, her people were, as she saw them, frightening.

She shook her head as the sunlight began to fade and the bright glow of day slipped into evening. "Night is when the real colors come out, just keep running!"

"Hey Holista!" Her childhood aquintance, Kena Mothsong, chirpped as she leapt from a tree to run and keep pace with grey-blur dashing through the foliage. "Are you here to help set up for the event tonight?"

Somehow, Holista had found her way to the center of the Forest anyways! She must have gotten turned around in the trees and, as she looked up at the countless grey fleshed faces that mirrored her own, she flinched and stepped back on her heels.

"Ugh, no!" In the opposite direction now, Holista tore her eyes from the monolith of sapphire pine needles, the cause for all this frustration, and darted into the deepening hues. The image of all those blank faces, pale skin and shining button eyes that could melt into anything they wanted, drove her from them. The further away, the better.

In all honesty, she hated them. She was afraid of her people and herself for what she knew was beyond their control but terrified her all the same. The question, if you can be anything, what are you really, whizzed through her mind as Holista fought off the tears.

"Just, run!"

Until even after the light of the sun Balasar had faded with her tears, Holista ran. Light drained from the world. Darkness took everything. She looked around and smiled in the blackness of night.

"Finally!" There was no green. No grey. No arrogant blue obilesk silently demanding to be doted on, leaf and root!

"Lissy!" A high-pitched voice, like the hybrid of a bumblebee's drone and chirp of a cricket, rang out from the surrounding stillness.

It was the one voice Holista truly enjoyed hearing and would welcome in any circumstance. "Razz! You made it!" Drifting from the pool of shade around a particularly large oak, was none other than the bright red faerie wyrmling she had hatched herself from an egg no larger than a cardinal's. "Did you have trouble leaving the elders?"

Razz, an extremely small dragon with red scales and luminescent pink butterfly wings, looked exasperated, but thrilled to see his dearest friend. His wings fluttered as he struggled to fly up to Holista's shoulder. Shaking the glowing dusk from his back, Razz coughed and flickered briefly but giggled as she sneezed at the dust.

"It was a breeze!" Razz's wings were burning wildfires with the excitement of his retelling. The dust fell like as and burned as cinders in the ground. Holista, too delighted to have her friend beside her to take notice of the trail Razz left flying to her left. "They warned to not be gone past light because the threads are over our heads. Pfft, what should we care about some fabric over our heads? Isn't that just a hat?"

Holista nibbled on her lip, mulling over the warning she had been given by the elders just before making her mad dash through the Fey Forest. The elders were usually right, though cryptic, and she was determined to see what would happen the morning after the Gem Pine's Light Night. Magic was supposed to be extremely powerful the day after Pine Night, taking form as visual manifestations. Some said magical creatures burst into existence for a moment. Others that wild flowers would bloom and wither in an instant. Whatever the fairy tales she overheard, Holista felt those who spoke them had experienced something transformative. She longed for that herself.

"Don't worry, Razz," Holista smiled, pushing aside a wall of overlapping vines. Years of living alongside a sea of wavering faces that passed like these vines. Faces that belonged to others yet worn by her people. Faces that kept her awake at night as she knew them to be lies and the truth beneath those masks terrified her more than anything. Tonight, accompanied by her friend whose face had never changed, Holista would find her own fairy tale, her own story, her own self. "We'll make the grandest hat there's ever been!"

Sparks of light weaved through her fingers, more real, tactile, than whatever 'Threads' the elders warned of. It was quiet here, the sounds of Holista's and Razz's breaths mixing with the warbling echoes of Holista's motes. Despite the stillness, the sensation of being watched deepened. Something stirred within her ears. A tugging grip lashed around Holista's ear drum and pulled her attention westward.

"Do you hear that?"

Seemingly unbothered, Razz yawned and continued lazily drifting forward. "What was that Lissy?" As he turned, glitter and wing dust scattering with each frantic flap, Holista was gone and he was alone in the dark. "LISSY!"

Swirls of flitting lights and swimming leaves spun around Holista's legs, moving her away from the path she and Razz had mapped together over the last Phase. Tantalized, yes, but equally curious. In the tossed shadows across the broad trunks of the sky holding trees, voices of called to her.

"Hello?"

"C'mere!"

"Closer!"

"Who are you?"

"Who are they?"

All around her the voices poured down as she stumbled through a hole dug by some long gone ancient beast. They poked and stabbed the grey skin painted red as roots and stones battered and bruised her. Pain and vertigo wove through the cracks left by the curiosity and as she came to, Holista was face to face with a new one!

"Well, yu've taken quite the tumble, 'avent cha?" An upside down, red furred vixerai peered nose to nose with Holista, entangled by brissly vines. They seemed to laugh with the voices that lured her from the shadows before, and Holista noticed that the more she struggled, tiny thorns bore deeper in her clothes and skin.

"Doncha fret none, well getcha down!" Holistra pulled away, catching a glimpse of the bloody face of a changeling reflected in the polished moonstone medallion around the neck of the being before her. Instinctively recoiling, it took the repositioning of her rescuer holding her aloft to realize that she was suspended several stories below a a burrow hole by the tangled nettles in her skin.

"I am Paumo Spirit-Waker," they said, offering Holista an extended hand for support as she found her balance. The lights seemed to come from them. Oddly enough, they sat along the silver chain wielding the moonstone like a celebratory laurel. She took the hand and smiled meekly, avoiding looking anywhere but to the resplendent full moon above. "Ahh, Maxiluna, truly remarkable, d’y’gree?"

Like a spiderweb of color, stitched across the sky as the elders had said, Threads seemed to paint the night sky above. With the full moon at the center of the sky she had seen beyond the leafy canopy of the Fey Forest, Holista saw it all with a singular breath.

"Those are Zardons," she whispered, taking in the constellations of stars sprinkled across the sky. Each one seemed so perfectly placed the lull across the prismatic lines of fractures. "They look like dew drops!"

Paumo said nothing else, their navy robes fusing with the vines at their feet again. Silver threads caught in the pallid light revealed intricate designs of stitched vines along the hem and sleeves of their clothing. They lingered only long enough to watch Holista sit comfortably on the ground. Sending a small ripple through the soft earth, they cushioned her with moss, lusher than satin. Reminiscent of another to wander through their woods so many years ago the memory seems a fairy tale, Paumo stepped into the land itself, smiling, allowing another one to be written.

Holista did not dream of fear. For the first time, from what she could recall, she dreamed of light. No longer were there rituals she didn't understand or identical toneless liars. Liars, who changed their face in a breath with no sense of self. Everywhere, like the swaddling leaves above, there were crowds around her. Jovial, diverse crowds of countless colored sparks, not lies, that shone independently of one another but as one vibrant world of light! It was beautiful, breath-taking even to see more than just the endless sameness. In her sleep, peaceful, and touched to the core, she wept.

With a tickling lurch, Holista was shaken from the deep slumber that had taken her. Razz, frantic and casting a veil of sparkling glitter across his friend, shook and wailed with delight she yawned and stretched to cross her legs as she sat.

"Lissy," he cried, pressing his cheek into her's, wetting it with the tears breaking the hard line of his eyes. It was day now. The golden light of Balasar traipsed across Holista's cheeks, but around it, as opposed to the customary walls of green, was a lake of blue with white cotton lilies. "I looked f-, for you, for hours, and when I f-, f-, found you, you, you, you weren't mooooviiiiing!"

Holista embraced him, the most natural muscle memory she had, to comfort, taking over as she was hypnotized by the openness. Above, the center of the sky was occupied by a raging ball of blinding energy. It, Balasar, seemed to draw in everything as the clouds around it orbited in six concentric circles like rings of stark white mushrooms. All the while being entrapped by the largest circle, that of the viridescent walls she knew to be her prison too.

"I'm sorry Razz," Holista muttered, half under her breath. "It seems like that threads made a bigger hat than I could wear. Where are we?" She scanned the expanse for anything familiar, finding only that walls of trees made this clearing's perimeter. Only about an acre was clear of the natural towers, allowing for the sun to touch down on the blooming flowers tangled between her toes. "This is probably the only place in the entire Fey Forest that sees the sun!"

"I dunno, Lissy. I think the trees see it all the time."

"I meant the ground silly, look!" Faster than Razz was ready for, he was sent tumbling off her shoulder as Holista leaned down to pluck a flower within her dainty fingers. "Have you ever seen a flower like this? These colors are magical!" Mesmerized, she twirled the stem across her thumb, beaming as the yellow and blue petals unfurled like the hem of a dancing gown. With a deep breath, she took in the pollen and scent of what could only be described as joy, a mixture of warmth, honeysuckle, and blossoming citrus. Exhaling, every emotion she carried exploded within her chest and it was as if every one of her senses were reborn and enhanced beyond that of a mortal.

With a blood-curdling scream, Holista tossed away the flower! Even thoughts were overwhelming and the flower evoked such emotion by just being, the proximity shook her. Razz cried out and flew to her but was pushed back by a surge of magic from within Holista. As the wave rolled, swelling well-beyond the height of the wall of root and bark, it resonated with dormant seeds beneath the soil.

Millions of small pops shook the earth at once and Holista stumbled, reeling from the power! Cracks and rumbles brought her to her bruised knees as Razz struggled to pull her to her feet! They screamed and were joined by a million more voices as more of the same yellow-blue flowers burst from the confines of their soil.

As quickly as it had began, the tumultuous storm quelled and Holista found her bearings, bewildered as she was. The clouds ringing the sun had dispersed, leaving only three, as light glinted over the petals of an entire field of identical flowers. Yellow and blue was all she saw. Maybe not green, but its parts still, were all around her in a sea of sameness that seemed to be all she would know, even in her fairy tale.

Despondent, she sighed and turned, resigned to return home with nothing more than a half-hearted story, before Razz caught her shoulder and screamed, "Lissy, there!"

There, just in the center of the acre was the stump of a cut cedar tree. Blooming from its center, a blazing sun itself, was a luminous, golden rose. As they approached it, the rose's petals began to pull away and, sleeping in the central bulb of the aurum flower, was a wondrous, once in a lifetime experience that could only be surmised as a fairy tale; a newborn pixie, birthed in the light of a fresh dawn.

Without a thought, Holista reached out to touch the minuscule creature that was so perfect, so wholly unlike anything she knew to exist. But as she grazed a petal, the pixie panicked, vanishing in a vibrant flash of pink, leaving Holista face to face with her grey flesh before a backdrop of gold.

"Oh, you scared her Lissy!" Razz teased and gasped, flying back as the grey form he knew melted away and Holista transformed into the fairy before him. Golden hair sprouted from her head, blood flushed her skin rosy pink, and skies of blue circles burst in her eyes. Holista Lightwing, the changeling, had found her fairy tale and the next chapter was just beginning.