It Was Not As Short As I Intended But Oh Well - Tumblr Posts
For a prompt: celebrating a holiday that Isn’t Christmas?
Thank you for the prompt! Here is a quick piece that takes place not long after the banishment of the goddesses.
The village was halfway through preparations before anyone thought twice about what they were doing. The summer solstice was days away, and the biennial festival celebrating the goddess of light was tradition, but without the goddess, the festival seemed to lose its meaning.
What if she came back and saw she wasn’t honored? What if holding the festival wasted resources? What if her followers saw not holding the festival as blasphemous, or the great quester saw that holding the festival made their actions pointless? What if? What if? What if?
In the end, the villagers, after holding a meeting, decided to go ahead with the festival but disregarded the original intentions. The festival was for them, after all, and they entertained any excuse to come together.
In the head of the village’s house, Maggie braided and knotted reflective crystals into her family’s hair. Their clothing matched, as the four of them dressed in pastel thin cotton with gold embroidery along the hems and hiding the seams. Crystals on leather cords matched the crystals embedded in their hairstyles.
Ben hung up strings of crystals in his windows, setting mirrors on the sill and back wall to reflect sunlight to refract through the crystals. His hair was secured in a topknot tied with a crystal-studded strip of fabric.
Similarly, Alex littered the clearing outside their window with loose crystals, hiding them in the grass and trees to reflect light against the guard tower and into their room. Despite encouragement from their mother, they stayed home to watch the parade from the top of the tower.
For once, no one seemed to mind when Cuckoo took casually strewn about crystals from around the village. In fact, when seeing her unadorned, the milliner even gifted her a leather pouch full of them. Guilt and uncharacteristic kindness ate at her until she used the present to decorate the hard-to-reach spots over town – roof awnings, the tops of light posts, and the tops of people’s heads when they weren’t looking.
The village was bright and cheery as the people marched about the streets. Gazes fixated upon the rainbows and bright patches on buildings and clothing and ground and animals as sunlight bounced off the crystals. They laughed and sang, brighter than the goddess of light ever was.