Just a random thing I started writing; not sure if it's going anywhere. Tell me what you think.
I. Homework for the Faerie Princess
Bright and wide, the ocean sparkled with a scattering of sunlight. It rolled as it always had and washed gentle waves over the warm, sandy beach, its shore dappled with reeds and rocks. A short distance up the beach was a forest, its green turrets rolling on towards the other horizon, another ocean with its own sort of depth.
“What is the ocean’s name?”
Fee imagined that in the oceans dolphins laughed and played and swum, free and happy, and the kelpies that doubtless danced in the water with them, their lives a place of between, somewhere between the ground and the sky, but never trapped to either.
“Fee! What is the ocean’s name?”
The images of smiling dolphins faded and Fee looked away from the waves that, to her, were quite huge. She was sitting on an immense boulder (it was a rock about the size of an apple), and she looked up from her daydreaming to see her mentor scowling down from his perch, one of the thin petals hanging from the reed.
“I’m sorry, Sindri. I was someplace else.”
He groaned and growled and fussed with his excess of robes. “Yes, well, isn’t that something new. To imagine that Fee would be daydreaming. Now there’s something I wouldn’t expect. You must learn these things, Fee. Every fairy princess . . .”
She groaned herself and flung the mop of purple hair out of her eyes. “Yes, I know. Every faerie princess must know the names of all things. You told me, father told me, mother told me. But I don’t need to know the names! I know the feeling, I know the sounds and I know the beauty of all things. Why can’t I just enjoy them, instead of being busy learning what they’re called? They’re just made-up names, anyway.”
That threw Sindri into a fit, and she couldn’t help but giggle. If anything got under Sindri’s skin, it was irreverence to the names. He stood up quickly, in a rage, and took a step forward, then got tangled in his robes and tripped, and slipped from his petal, tumbling and falling into the sand.
“Made up?” he huffed as he struggled to climb back up to the reed and maintain a proper tone of disapproval. “How dare you use such, such, oh my, I am getting old, how dare you, this confounded beard is always getting in my . . . Fee, how dare you talk so?” He scrambled back onto the petal, now entirely disheveled and not very happy at all. “Now I will have sand in my clothes and my boots for the rest of the week, you know. Why are you so hard on me? All I do is what I’m ordered. It’s not my fault that I’m the wisest faerie in the kingdom, you know, and it’s not my fault that you won’t learn!”
“The wisest?” Fee snorted.
“Well,” he shrugged with attempted modesty. “Not everybody can be the wisest, it’s true. For that matter, nobody wants to be! It’s very tiresome! Very tiresome indeed. Especially when nobody will listen to your wisdom or learn from it, when you’ve worked so very hard to get it. I know these lessons are boring, I know it’s hard to pay attention, but could you just try, please? Just try to focus for a little while, that’s all I ask. Just a little while each day. It isn’t so hard; you’re a bright lass. Just an ounce of concentration, and a bit of listening, and you’ll be fine!”
“What?” she asked distractedly.
Sindri started to bluster again and nearly fell from his perch a second time, but scrambled and flailed to keep himself aright. She giggled, then smiled her appeasing smile into his deep frown. “I’m just kidding. Yes, I will try to listen better. I’m sorry.”
“Very good. Now, where were we? Ah, ah yes. What is the name of the ocean?”
“Hmm.” She thought for a moment. “I like to call it Ocean. From the ancient Oshius Eanius, meaning the big blue thing.”
Sindri almost laughed, then remembered to scowl. “Oh, Fee, I wish you could take one bloody thing seriously in your life!”
“I don’t,” she shrugged happily.
Sindri cleared his throat pointedly.
“Fine, fine, sheesh. I guess you traded your sense of humor for all of that wisdom. The name of the ocean, the name of the ocean . . . Yemaria, right?”
“Yes, yes, very good, Yemaria. What does this mean?”
“Uh, it means Ocean.”
“Yes – No! Fee! Be serious here! Ocean means ocean! Yemaria is the name of the ocean!”
“So why doesn’t it say that on the map?”
“Because humans make maps, and humans don’t know how to name a blasted thing. They don’t even know how to name themselves; how do you expect them to know how to name an ocean? Did you know that some humans name each other ‘Dieter,’ ‘Rainbow,’ or ‘Dwayne’?! And you’re going to trust their wisdom to name something as important as the ocean? That would be madness.”
“I guess so. Why are they so bad at naming? It doesn’t seem that hard.”
“They’re too busy reading and writing silly nonsense, and they think that an ocean is just a big bucket of water. They think that just because oceans can’t talk with words that oceans aren’t people too, which is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard, I’d say! Could you imagine not thinking a baby was a people, just because it couldn’t talk in our words? I dare say you couldn’t, now! Now, who is Yemaria?”
“The voice of the ocean,” said Fee proudly.
“Yes, that’s very good! . . . How did you know that?”
“Easily enough. Someone carved ‘Yemaria is the Voice of the Ocean’ here on this stone I’m sitting on.” Fee pointed to it, where some other faerie student must have sat on a different day. Sindri frowned.
“No cheating! I’m going to have to check these rocks before I hand out tests now. What a botheration, I say. Children these days. No respect, that’s the problem, don’t you know it?” He sighed and ran a hand over his face. “Now. Yes. Good. Yemaria is the Voice of the Ocean. What is a voice?”
“It is . . . it is the truth of things,” said Fee, her statement more of question. She stretched her gossamer wings in irritation. This stuff was so boring. She wanted to go swimming.
“Now, if that isn’t a vague statement. It is the truth of things. You know, back in my day, children liked to learn the truth of things,” lamented Sindri.
“So, I’m wrong, then?” asked Fee halfheartedly, who didn’t really care.
“Oh, no, you’re not wrong. But if you asked what a cat was and got the answer, ‘It is what it is,’ you’d have gotten the right answer, but not a very good one. The Voice is the Truth of things . . . What does that mean, Fee?”
“It means . . . Who cares what it means, that’s what I want to know? I want to swim in the ocean, Sindri. I don’t care what it truly means to swim in the ocean, I don’t care what the voice of the ocean is or what the truth of it is or any of that blather! I just want to swim in it, and love it! I don’t want to chop it up into a whole bunch of word pieces that have to be put back together again to have any meaning! I just want to swim.”
Sindri smiled and nodded, but frowned again, as he usually did. “You sound like a human. Humans don’t care about truth either. You know, if you just went about doing things because you loved to, you might end up doing some pretty awful things, my dear princess. I will let you swim today, and cancel the rest of the day’s lesson. But you have homework. Tomorrow, I want you to tell me why the water doesn’t speak. Tell me that, and maybe I’ll cancel lessons for the rest of the week. Is that a fair deal?”
The faerie princess grinned and nodded, then leapt up into the air and flapped her gossamer wings to give Sindri a big hug. He sputtered and acted out of sorts, then sent her off.
“Enough of that, enough of that! Go do your homework, and swim, you scattered daisy!”
She didn’t need to be told twice. Fee took off her green and silver dress, a big leaf sewn together by her mother, and the single, tiny jewel she wore as a mark of royalty.
“Stay out of currents and away from kelpies!” shouted Sindri, but it was too late. She had already dived into the bubbled water, a devious smirk on her little, sharp features.
