Today's #flashfiction #TheElfishConcert

“The butler did it!”

Sherlock Holmes* #quote

           Today I traveled to alternate universe where it was fashionable to wear belt buckles around your forehead. It was quite funny to see all celebrities wearing the belt buckles this way. Anyway onto flash fiction!

The Elfish Concert

           All I had to do was play the notes.

           So many elves have done it before me. It's a thing we do. My brother did it. My father did it.

           Everyone does it. It's a rite of passage.

           Maybe I should have chosen to learn the piano. Or the trumpet. Or the harp. Did it matter? I liked the violin so that's what I learned. Sages taught me how to play the songs. The magical songs. The songs we used to speak with the spirits. I'm only ten. And they let us do this. Humans do magic when they're much older. I want to be older. But no. I have to do it now. With a buncha other elvish kids. Right in front of a large lake. A spirit lake.

        We started playing the summoning song. Adults watch. Our parents and other family. Our maigc music teachers too. Like a school play. A few powerful wizards if things go wrong. Should that make me feel safer?

When our instruments play the magic song together the notes go from silent to loud, a rough rhythm to a hard one with better skill I thought. All the kids must have practiced as much as I had. Thunderless lighting starting flying up from lake. How high the lighting shot into the sky reflected the loudness of our notes and the pattern. Loud notes the lighting shot high. Low notes the lighting barely came out from the lake. The rate it popped out matched the rhythm. I saw the song in the lighting. When I first saw other people summon I was terrified. I thought I would be ready when I did it myself but even now I felt scared but I still kept playing. The other kids probably felt the same as they managed to keep playing yet shivered in the legs the same like me.

       Smoke ingrained with rainbows of colors started to come out from the lighting and float towards us. The smoke flew over us covering us first with a shadow then a warm glow. And then out from the smoke came what we played our instruments so hard to summon. The beings who loved music so much they would come from their other world to hear it played if the tone fit their tastes. That's what made the song magic. When the song managed to touch the hearts of the spirits. We feel the same for much of our music and we enjoy many of the magical songs ourselves. I would enjoy it more if I wasn't scared of the forming spirits.

       The spirits looked like people made of water with joints of fire that somehow floated in sky. They had diamond eyes that looked at us. How they heard our music was beyond my little ten-year-old brain. I just hoped they wouldn't attack me. Instead the spirits just came closer and closer and more and more of them emerged from the smoke. The floated close to our instruments. I think to hear it all better.

       We finished our song, then a voice spoke in my mind. A voice that sounded like it belonged to twenty people of all ages and both sexes all mixed into one. “Thank you for song,” it said to me. And all the spirits vanished, along with the smoke cloud and the lighting from the lake.