Poetry

Search the Neopian Times

Headlines

"Bright Glade, Shadowed Forest" by cookybananas324
Illusen sat at her table, studying a vase of blue flowers. She hadn’t been offering quests at her glade for very long; she’d started relatively recently, after hearing that Jhudora had started out giving quests back in Faerieland. But Illusen was already feeling so… tired. That afternoon, a little Kougra girl had come to the glade with her big sister. She’d been adorable—maybe four or five years old—and she’d brought Illusen a gift: a big bouquet of freshly-picked blue flowers. And Illusen had smiled politely, and thanked her, because she was so young, and she couldn’t have known that Illusen had personally planted those flowers and had been planning to harvest them later, on the full moon—but they’d been torn from the earth too soon and were now useless for the potion she’d been planning. It was Illusen’s fault, really, for planting them too close to the path to her cabin, where a child might see them and be tempted. If she’d built a garden bed, with a fence around it, perhaps her sister would have stopped her. But Illusen hadn’t wanted little wooden boxes with neat rows of plants. She’d had plenty of that growing up in her mother’s house in Faerieland. Her mother’s garden was beautiful, without doubt, but it was also very much a garden. The girl had seen a patch of wildflowers, had picked them because they were pretty and blue, and she’d given them to Illusen because she wanted to be kind, and that was a good thing, surely.

Submit your stories, articles, and comics using the new submission form.