Wind Chimes and Faeries
Fiction by Tea Kluey
Lyorra sat quietly on the upper branches of a cedar tree, thinking
about the day's composition. Her hair was a short silvery blue and her
skin was translucent. She flitted her wings rapidly while she thought,
as if the beating would hurry her ideas.
She was an Aire Faery, and
belonged to a clan called the Azure, her clan was a group of mostly
musicians. The Indigo were also artists but they delighted in dance and
visual effects. They would come from far and wide to dance around a
plastic bag and then they would lift it up and take turns sculpting it
in the air, tugging it this way and that, pulling it high then quickly
dragging it down so that it would almost touch the ground. They would laugh
and clap at the spectacle and look around for something else to play
with.
The Greys were the fiercest of the aire faeiries. They were the
warriors. Lyorra had heard the humans call them 'storm'. They were large
in number and could be very destructive when in battle. The Greys didn't
care for humans, not like the Azure.
Lyorra loved mortals. It was a
shame that they couldn't see her, but the movement of faeries is too
quick for humans to see, even when they were as still as a faery could
be, they jittered constantly with nervous excitement. She adored people
and took great pleasure in making them smile. Most of the time she
was trying to compose symphonies for human ears. She would swoop out of
the sky and grab hold of a leaf, twirling it along the ground, listening
to the sound it made as it scraped across the pavement. She would tap,
tap, tap it against a tree, trying to get just the right rythm.
She
liked to hide in pipes and listen to the sound her beating wings made,
reverberating the metal. She liked it when humans came to the window to
watch her banging the loose piece of wood against their houses, she knew
they must have enjoyed her performance because they rarely tried to stop
her, often they left things the way they were so she could come back and
serenade them again, usually late at night.
There was a human couple who lived very near to her and they seemed to
like her music very much, afterall, they hadn't cut down that branch
that scraped across thier roof. Lyorra smiled and decided that she would
visit them today. She stood up on her slender branch and summersaulted
off into open space. She only stopped once or twice to make car antanea
hum.
She could see the old white house throught the trees. She skimmed
along the ground letting her feet drag through the grass. Something was
different. The house wasn't exactly the same as it had been last time
she was here. She flew up to the roof and shook the branch across the
roof, that was still here, so what had been changed. Lyorra looked down
to the front porch. "That!" she exclaimed, "That wasn't here before!"
She ran across the roof and down the rainspout. She jumped up onto the
railing and stared up at the object that was newly fastened to the
overhang. Tentatively, she approached it. It was made of some kind of
stone that had been shaped into stars and moons. "What is this?"she said
aloud to herself,"I wonder what the humans do with this?"
She gave one of the objects a gentle push.
It tinkled against another. Lyorra like the sound it
made so she gave a bigger shove, it responded with a burst of short
chimes. She laughed and flew around excitedly, the comotion of her
actions causing the windchime to dance. She liked the song that it
sang. She played with it for most of the day, occasionaly beating
a branch against the roof to keep time.
The sun made the late afternoon day very hot and she grew tired.
She would come back and play with it later. Lyorra flitted through the
tops of the trees back to her den. When the clan gathered later in the
evening discussing the creations of the day, she would have some
wonderful news to share. News that solidified her belief that humans
weren't the evil creatures that the Greys thought they were. Creatures
that were only capable of destruction and couldn't appreciate the arts.
As far as she was concerned, they had created a musical instrument
that could only be played by aire faeries, and she wasn't going
to dissappoint them. The productions of the Azure and the Indigo were
being appreciated by all, and she was inspired. Inspired to dream of a
great spectacle that would include mortals.
