Avery clutched the briar’s soil in her small, worn hands. “This is special,” she said to herself in a hushed voice. The soil was speckled with blue and white glowing crystals. Somehow she knew it was a rarity, and carefully placed handfuls in her pouch. Avery looked up from where she had fallen. She was weak with hunger, and hurt from the fall, but still excited about her discovery.
The sun was close to rising, and a morning-lit haze had already begun to heat the horizon, making the blue and purple sky seem to be mournful of its passing. Avery’s companions — the twin boys — were off in the unseen distance looking for anything to eat. Avery’s skin prickled from the morning’s chill. She heard a sharp howl from Val.
Anxious with hunger, Avery hiked up over the thorny hill toward the brothers, careful to not slip and fall again on the wet night-moss, which grew in large baths of emerald against the deep brown of the briar.
“Len!” Avery shouted up to the younger of the twins, who was waiting for her near a steep incline, momentarily captivated by a bright, moving glow in the distance.
Len looked toward Avery. “You have to see this!” he shouted to Avery as he grasped her outstretched hand and helped pull her up to the flat ground above. “We found…”
“Eggs!” the other brother, Val exclaimed, peeking out from a well-hidden stone-encircled hole.
The cave was deeper and larger than it had first appeared. Within a few steps it expanded out, down and up, leading to a trail below, where some small veins of the rising sun faded in through notches in the soil.
“Wow…” Avery said looking all around at the hidden place they had found. The air was heavy with the smell of the earth.
Val had run ahead, now looking at the eggs closely. Avery and Len quickly caught up.
“I wonder where they came from?” Val touched a red egg with deep groves shaped into its surface. At the top it hummed with a fading yellow light from within. “Could they be… ?”
Avery and Len both picked an egg and touched them. Len held onto an orange egg with white dots. Avery found the last, a blue egg with green swirls flowing around it.
“These eggs are special. We have to take care of them.” Avery said to the brothers, knowing that their finding of these mysterious eggs was of no mere chance.
Originally published in Faerie Solitaire Harvest