Today’s prompt: “In a meadow, you find a patch of wildflowers with unique colors and appearance. As you sit close by, what memories or feelings arise?”
Today’s music: Paradise Groove by Pokemon Track. 🎧 Listen on SoundCloud.
The Meadow’s Secret
I thought I saw the joyjay on my morning walk. I quickened my step because either I was going insane or Hearthlight had a magical kingdom component that wasn’t on the brochure.
Not that there’d been a brochure, but you get the idea.
The rainbow-feathered bird was always just far enough ahead that I wasn’t sure if I’d seen it or a slice of rainbow. There had been rain the night before, and the hamlet’s streets were still a little wet, the cobbles shining, and the trickle of draining water a comforting lull in the background of my hearing.
It meant there was a rainbow, vivid and dramatic in a way that they only appear in storybooks, not in real life. It was a gateway for my mind to play fantastical tricks on me, substituting a joyjay for light fragmented in the morning mist.
That’s what the practical side of my mind said, anyway, but the other side kept whispering, What if?
So I followed the maybe-a-joyjay. It led me out of the hamlet and into the fields beyond Hearthlight. I walked down a road that swelled in the middle, no heavy trucks to hammer it into submission. The road wandered around glades and fields and eventually arrived at a section bordered by hedgerow. The joyjay was right there, and it flitted between a gap in the hedge.
I jogged to follow, pushing through the hedge. The gap was bird-sized, not Richard-sized, and it took a little doing. As I burst through to the other side, I emerged into a meadow filled with rainbow-coloured flowers. They reminded me most of dandelions, but painted with God’s brush—each hue a remarkable brilliance stretching out for kilometres ahead of me.
I turned, wondering how I’d missed seeing this place before the hedge, and found no hedge behind me. The field stretched out in all directions, a verdant blanket with a rainbow entourage. I suppose I should have wondered how I was going to get back, but what boggled me was that there was a small table with a book on it. A pot of tea steamed beside an empty cup.
Okay: someone made a magical field with flowers that didn’t exist, hid it behind a hedgerow, and laid out a table with tea and a book? Either Hearthlight had a friendly wizard (I was guessing Hollis, but I’d accept his cat), or I’d had a stroke and this was the afterglow of an Ativan drip.
I walked to the table and didn’t encounter invisible resistance from a hedge that was still there but unseen—which meant I’d arrived somewhere far beyond the road. The pot was still hot, the cup invitingly empty, but it felt wrong to drink someone’s tea without being able to thank them.
The book was old, and appeared to be a handwritten record. It had dates stretching back hundreds of years, which also felt odd because the book’s binding seemed much better preserved than an ancient tome should be. It seemed to be a manifest of all people coming and going from Hearthlight. There was usually an entry like, “Brom Brasselworthy, 12 March 1836, heavy with ennui,” and then an entry a few lines later, “Brom Brasselworthy, 30 March 1836, footsteps of lighter tread.”
I frowned as I flipped forward. Sure enough, there was my name, the date of my arrival, and one word: sadness. I sighed. Whoever the author was, they weren’t wrong. And I hadn’t left yet, so we wouldn’t know whether that was a fixable problem, would we?
That was what made sadness hard. Sometimes it was caused by the world, and sometimes it came from inside, but you were never quite sure which it was. Maybe the world was on fire. Maybe you just weren’t dealing with normalcy well. It didn’t stop what you felt, but it did change how you might fix it.
I almost closed the journal, then flipped back to the first page. There was a name and a date there: “Hollis, 9 April 1801, broken beyond repair by trying to fix the world.”
Well, hell. Was this grove Hollis’s? And was he over two hundred years old? Oddly, his age didn’t bother me—it seemed to fit here. Maybe Hollis had been sad, too. Maybe he was a wizard of great power who hadn’t managed to achieve anything, so he set aside a piece of the world and started a new project: fixing it, but one person at a time.
Was Hollis onto something? Could we even do that? Was it possible for a place to undo all that had been done? And how long would something like that take?
Hollis had been at it for two hundred years. I wasn’t sure I’d have his strength to endure for that long if I were broken beyond repair… but perhaps fixing other people was the toolset he needed to repair himself. And maybe that’s all it ever takes to change the world: one person, one moment at a time.
But no one does it alone.
Roll result? One joyjay sighting (probable), one hidden meadow (definite), and a very old man with a very big heart.
XP gained: 1 radiant field, 1 recorded truth, and a whisper that maybe, just maybe, you’re not alone in this.
Ready for Day 12?
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