:rose: | umidis alis et floribus | damp wings and flowers

#alccottagecore

Welcome to a new blog of mine! Just as in my last blog for ALC’s flash fiction, the idea of this writing has been greatly inspired by the gorgeous mood board of the prompt presentation. Besides, I was not going to waste this opportunity to celebrate the beginning of Jimtober with a core so representative of Jimin's personality, a fairy in all its splendour. Even being proud of this writing, let me apologize in advance if there is something unclear or confusing, I wrote this with a message that I wanted to communicate but the rest I was building and writing without any kind of structure.

In this text, there are slight mentions of demise, if this is a subject that affects you I recommend that you proceed with caution when reading or that you tap the back button.

The writing's mine ofc.

Word count: 1000

Date of posting: 10/03/2021     

Without anything more to add, let’s get it!

──── « ⋅✿⋅ » ────

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carson

──── « ⋅✿⋅ » ────

It was as if he was breathing for the first time. As if the sun had never dabbed at his exposed skin before. A ghostly tingle enveloped him like a silk veil embroidered with golden tears. It was as soft as a gentle caress and as a whisper that settles on the skin of your cheeks, setting them ablaze with a stubborn and eager fire.

It could not be fairly described with mundane sensations for that specific one was far removed from any that had been documented in the pages of a book or in the memory of a hopeless romantic.

It went far beyond lily-white wings and lambent halos, it was every sway of the clouds and every shade of blue breathing through them. It was the early morning dew, the chirping of the birds and their lofty flights. It was an explosion born from silence, a blinding light that bestows coloured spots upon your eyelids, tempting darkness that envelops you until it drains all the fear that once gnawed at your heart.

It was as if nothingness could shed its invisibility and endless emptiness. As if everything were compressed to occupy the same space as a speck of dust fluttering around an unexplored room.

It was like dancing to a different beat than the one knit by the rhythm imposed by the rain bursting against the flora and villages that sneak under its path, daring it to follow a contrasting melody. It was like the urge to slow down a corrupted pulse after having scampered through the trees enraptured by the beauty of the woodlands.

Jimin was in a state akin to the purest and most divine transcendence. His mind, far from where his body was, wandered free with nothing to protect it or bind it to what he had ever known and considered true, considered real. It was the closest the fairy had ever experienced to Plato's allegory of the cave. Far from caves and chains but likely close to the mattress of the ocean floor, with pastel hues, diluted and honeycombed with green wisps furrowing the beaded, azure flesh of the water.

Its insides and surface differed as much as those of the lemon, vivid and warm yellow colour blinding you on the outside while on the inside a highly bitter and sour taste is ready to spread itself crudely and uncomfortably across your tongue.

On the outside, the water's diaphanous and tarnished mirror managed to reflect in such a singular yet all the too predictable way all that surrounded it, sifting the appearance and essence of whoever framed it on the surface be it thirsty animals, lost souls just as quivering as a flame in a candle about to burn out, peaceful meadows or vain flowers.

Even so, as dazzling as the ability of water to reflect any being in its own was, alarmingly similar to the cave and chains, that invertebrate spirit conditioned and narrowed the frame where a person or creature could live and define itself, guided only by a nebulous and partial representation of their existence. This reflection cost Narcissus his life, no matter how much self-love he harboured within himself.

That unfortunate event propelled a golden flower with the same name to the shore, an achievement the fairy wanted to accomplish eventually. To find a flower he had never seen before and name it after himself, so that those colours would last into eternity even when the fairy dust in his veins started to fizzle and he found it harder to fly.

If you asked him, two of the flowers he would like to have found first were roses and lavenders, both of which many humans had referenced when describing the scent that reminded them of him.

As expected, there was no trace of their placid mien stippling the serpentine emerald ribbons of seaweed, but Jimin couldn’t complain. The gritty, glossy bubbles making a beeline around his feet after every step he took already made up for the striking lack of saturated colours, their streamlined impulse mimicking the clockwork flutter of his wings when he would spend the day gliding over the fields full of strawberries behind his treehouse.

Jimin had built his snug little home out of twigs along with a few strands of vines, and although the security and solace of feeling accompanied by every season and sheltered by the trees was part of his nature and element, Jimin had never dared to hop over the stones above the babbling brooks that separated his surroundings from the rest of the world.

Until that morning.

Time did not exist down there, but he was proof that time existed on the surface: softened fingertips and the daisies anchored to his hair skittering into the depths given the speed with which Jimin swam past the thin, pliant crust of the calm tide.

The Jimin who emerged was not the same as the one who had rashly jumped into the water, his hair dyed a greenish tint with fine, scanty blond locks, along with bold pink pigment flaring on his cheeks. They were not a usual blush or a radical change of hairstyle, they were necessary phases of his transformation and metamorphosis, the daisies perched and forgotten in the dormant sand having given way to beauteous roses and lavender galore bedecking his dampish hair, skin and garments.

Angel, fairy and prince of darkness in one being.

The forest had crowned him with beams of sunlight filtering through the leaves; the rain had settled between his shoulder blades until assembling wings of slightly gelatinous and translucent material so they would eventually take him to the depths of the ocean to uncover the heaviest (but most revealing) darkness.

There he had hit bottom, unable to sink any further. At that point, there was only one way out, because there was nothing deeper. Instead of staying there, Jimin knew how to use that bottom to gain some momentum and rise again with renewed energy and power.

THE END.

:copyright: for the PSDs used goes to @pinaguchi and @salviagraphics on DeviantArt.

:copyright: for the images used go to their rightful owners.