Peaseblossom in the Widest Eye of the Sun

Nobody, from the woodlouse to the ancient yew, quite knew why Titania had left the fairy court after three millennia. Not least her four fairy attendants. In her sudden absence, their dandelion-seed theories scattered the forest.

Cobweb suspected Oberon, the fairy king, may have, at long last, stepped over a line with his japes. Before he left to find her, his lips had been sealed as tight and as spiked as a horse chestnut case.

Moth thought Titania had flown by moonlit night to a richer woodland, where the sound of the chainsaws and lumber trucks wasn’t so pressing.

Mustardseed was the only one who came close to the unsayable. The owl would be the most likely one to do it, he said. Or the ferret. Or the human - there are fewer of them in the forest, but the ones which are, have blighted intentions.

Peaseblossom suspected another culprit: the tome Titania hadn’t been able to tear herself away from in recent weeks. The Ecology of Freedom.

‘Peaseblossom,’ she had entreated her, the evening before she disappeared. Peaseblossom startled: not once in three-thousand years had their nightly lullaby failed to send Titania to sleep. Moth, Mustardseed and Cobweb slumbered in their respective corners of the bower.

‘The domination of nature by fairy,’ she’d pronounced with solemnity, ‘stems from the very real domination of fairy by fairy.’

‘My queen,’ said Peaseblossom, stroking the side of Titania’s face. ‘It is my honour to serve you.’

Titania took Peaseblossom’s hand, kissed her fingers. Paused.

‘I shouldn’t have disturbed you,’ she said. ‘Your bed of ferns awaits, my love.’

And now she was gone, the fairy king Oberon was gone - and they were leaderless.

Each of the fairies had descended into their own repetitive miseries, and Peaseblossom hardly knew where to begin in trying to heal them.

Moth’s sorrow came as an outpouring. She turned to each living creature which had the misfortune to come into earshot, hauling them into a vortex of lamentation.

‘We should have sung a better protection song!’ she cried. ‘Why include just the snakes, the hedgehogs and snails? Snails, for crying out loud!’ she shouted at a hastily retreating caterpillar.

‘The snails are metaphors,’ snapped Mustardseed.

The glade was beginning to look somewhat sparse as even the foliage began to run from Moth’s outbursts. She held a leaf as big as her in two hands, berating it at close range.

‘Nature is abandoned!" she wailed. ‘The woodland isn’t sacred any more. We’ll all be paved over now that Titania isn’t here. She must have known it!’

Moth held her head in her hands and the leaf snapped quickly into a tight scroll.

Mustardseed kicked up a spray of dirt, showering Peaseblossom, who began picking it out of her hair.

‘Thinks she doesn’t need us any more,’ he muttered.

In the week after Titania left Mustardseed had externalised his torment by picking at the plants. He’d disrobed every love-in-a-mist in the vicinity by peeling back their cloaking sepals, leaving them yelping and vulnerable. With each unmantling he gave a grin, which lived briefly and malevolently, before passing away.

‘Nobody needs me,’ he glowered.

Peaseblossom held her temples and readied her most even voice.

‘To get its wings, the caterpillar must endure the dark,’ she intoned.

And endure much more, she thought, as she saw Moth leave in hot pursuit of the fleeing inchworm.

‘I hate that saying!’ Mustardseed screamed. He hurled himself to the floor.

A sound rose above that of his pummelling fists: a gentle and aimless singing which seemed acquainted with words, but not meaning.

‘Oh no,’ Peaseblossom groaned. ‘You’ve started Cobweb again.’

They looked to the corner of the glade. There sat a small figure, embracing his knees, eyes closed, rocking. He hadn’t done anything else since Titania left. He wouldn’t eat, only accepting small mouthfuls of dew which Peaseblossom fed him at the sun’s first light. His wandering melodies were interrupted only by bouts of weeping.

The days were so long. Midsummer was nearly upon them and offered them no relief. With each agonising minute, Peaseblossom hoped she would see through the trees a glimpse of a wing, a crown, an eye glinting with a renewed sense of regal purpose.

With another day spent on the precipice of endless anticipation, fairycide was on the cards.

But - what was that?

A noise; a flutter in the bracken.

Cobweb and Mustardseed turned their heads, suddenly alert.

Moth rushed back into the glade. She took Peaseblossom’s hand.

A shining light pierced through the leaves.

‘I knew she wouldn’t leave,’ breathed Peaseblossom.

The fluttering grew closer, became a swishing - the gentle steps of Titania as she approached. The fairies drew closer.

‘It is I!’

A voice emanated from the woodland. Strange in tone, but familiar.

‘Your queen!’

Peaseblossom’s wings lifted her, Mustarseed rushed forward, Moth gasped, Cobweb even got to his feet - all of this happened at once, as a gleaming-eyed figure rushed from the obscurity of the forest, into the glade, not poised, not gentle, but wild, and bright -

- and maniacally laughing.

Not Titania.

‘PUCK.’

Mustardseed projected his name like a missile and rushed, fists flying. Puck danced out of the way, preening.

‘Felicitations,’ he said, his arcing frame mocking Mustardseed’s earnest lunges. ‘When I saw what a pitiable state my attendants had been reduced to, I thought, right. That’s enough. Titania’s back, darlings.’

‘Oh, give it up,’ said Peaseblossom. ‘You don’t even sound like her.’

Puck hopped into the nearest tree and Mustardseed unclenched his fists. Cobweb returned to the corner. Languid despair settled on the glade again.

‘God, it’s miserable here, isn’t it?’ said Puck, wrinkling his nose.

‘Thanks to your tricks,’ said Moth.

‘Look,’ said Puck, swinging from a branch. ‘Here’s your big choice. You can rot here. Compost your little fairy hearts out - I’m sure the moss will be enriched by your magical mulch. Or,’ he flipped a full rotation of the branch. ‘You can go again. Look into the widest eye of the sun and, well, fuck things up. See where it all lands.’

‘There’s nothing left under the sun,’ said Mustardseed. ‘Humans have ruined it.’

‘They’re destroying the forest,’ said Moth.

Cobweb uttered the first words he had since Titania’s departure. ‘They don’t look at the wild the way they used to,’ he said. ‘They don’t hear the sounds of the woodland.’

‘So make them,’ said Puck.

‘How?’ asked Mustardseed.

Puck shrugged. ‘That sounds like a you problem, darling,’ he said, leaping down from the tree. ‘But call for me if you’re serving - you know I love the taste of chaos.’

He shimmied, flung a kiss.

‘Happy midsummer!’ he called, and laughing, vanished into the forest.

Moth, Mustardseed and Cobweb settled back into their various shades of discomposure.

But Peaseblossom began to think.

Midsummer. The obstacles that separate the worlds - thinning. Maybe, with the right kind of shock, a sense of the wild, a flash of something wondrous… Her fingers gently brushed the leaves of the love-in-idleness flower. It wasn’t unheard of, that with a little merriment, the hearts of mortals could be forever changed.

* * *

It had taken a day of persuasion before Peaseblossom could convince them of her plan - gradually stacking its kindling twig by twig.

‘Midsummer is our chance,’ she said. ‘To help snap the dead wood, in their heads.’

She carefully placed her arguments, fairy by fairy, filling the gaps with tinder. Her ideas for them, like sparks, fell in bursts and expired, until just before sunset - when darkness was falling, they caught.

She saw the burnished dusk of Midsummer Eve reflected in their eyes, as their ideas for magical mischief lit up. Together, they conspired.

So at first light they crossed over, to the city which year on year, crept ever closer. They went unnoticed, unseen even by those who herald the urban dawn: the partygoers, the placeless, the professionals of the night, the perpetually awake.

They flew on, passing over concrete, slate, brick. This was a rough landscape, with sharp edges. Doubt began to weigh, just slightly, on Peaseblossom’s wings.

They gathered on some guttering, huddled on a patch of moss - a little breakthrough of the wild on a street with an otherwise commercial soul. The dawn flickered. Below them, the city revved up: windows scraped open, engines coughed into life, voices cawed like territorial magpies.

It was time to begin.

Mustardseed went first. Dew held on, jewelling car roofs, seats of benches, weeds thriving in liminal spaces. His enchantment waited in the water as quiet expectation: a joke, expecting a punchline. As an unsuspecting foot might brush past the dewy greenery - a burst! A miniscule reviving eruption, a kiss of mist. Within the houses too, where there was water, it fizzed unexpectedly. Taps hiccoughed, drinks sneezed; it was like rain falling upwards.

Cries rose - first startled, then laughing. The surprise, a snake in the undergrowth which turns out to be a slow worm. The fairies watched as passers-by stooped to look at the benches, the flowers, the drinks, before Mustarseed’s spell pounced again. They would stand, laughing and blinking.

‘You shady bitches,’ called an accusatory voice from the rooftop. Peaseblossom turned to see Puck, hands on hips. ‘You forget to invite me to the ball?’

Mustardseed didn’t even have time to roll his eyes before he was interrupted by yelling below. Kids spilled joy like water. Literally - the explosions had escalated into a water fight, bottles and straws turned into improvised pistols.

‘Nice work,’ said Puck, giving Mustardseed a nod before leaping down the guttering to join the fray.

Peaseblossom placed a tight arm around Mustardseed, who was smiling for the first time in a week. Eventually, the fight wore itself out and the kids were rounded up to slosh their way to school. In their wake, a maintenance team wandered the city streets, searching and testing and shrugging when they could find nothing - no indication of any earthly reason for the watery disruption.

It was Peaseblossom next. She held her breath until mid-morning, then shut her eyes and willed her vision alive.

Tendrils at first - small, shy - curling through cracks in the pavement, sneaking past open windows, winding softly round lamp-posts.

In every available space, grasses grew. Climbers climbed. Ferns fronded. The city bore fruit. A metal bench gave itself over to moss. Pea shoots threaded through the holes which before, had only marked out an absence. Nature filled this place.

The machinery of the day faltered and stalled. People emerged from their hard-edged casings, doors opening like flowers blooming. For a moment, no one dared disturb the beauty. Then an older woman, one who Peaseblossom couldn’t help but think may have retained the glamour of a certain sprite, picked an apple. With its theatrical crunch (Puck would never be known for his subtlety), permission was given and the city feasted. With cameras and boom mics, reporters came to the city, but even the news couldn’t pretend not to feel it: one broadcasting journalist took an orange in hand, exchanging her story for a bite.

The humans sat, stayed and stared in pockets of the city that had once been only stone and shadow. They saw their city in a new light: the long daylight of Midsummer.

Peaseblossom began to see what it was to break, in order to renew.

Mid-afternoon, Moth’s moment came. Like throwing stones into the ocean, she threw out a handful of golden specks, which spiralled and dispersed over the crowd.

Nothing, at first.

And then before the eyes of each person, there came an apparition. Something barely-there - a wrinkle in the light. People blinked. Batted away invisible flies. It did not disappear. Each shape, one to each person, was formed of light and shadow, contours and coruscation, flowing and flooding its watcher with recognition.

Naturally, this was how Moth wanted to bewitch.

Peaseblossom flew closer to a woman, reaching out to touch the version of her in the apparition. She saw herself dab water onto the cracked lips of an elder, her own lips trembling. Next to her, a young man watched his own face with curiosity. He sat across from two others, their shadow-selves separated by a table of unfinished conversations.

Moth lingered beside a child who gazed at a shimmer of herself, curled in a quiet room, crying. The real child, who didn’t see the fairy at her shoulder, did not cry. She had the softened expression of someone who was listening for the thunder, only to hear the roar has become a grumble.

The mortals were mesmerised in Moth’s cinema of memory. Peaseblossom knew what hers would have been. There was a Midsummer with Titania, and now, without. The worst part of loss was not the absence - it was the present that couldn’t believe it was real. Time had moved on without consent. Even in thinking this, Peaseblossom felt a little unstuck.

The visions dissolved into air. Under the wide, still-bright sky, people walked amongst the rebel foliage until dusk fell. At the gloaming, it was Cobweb’s turn.

Sitting at the roots of a yew tree, he placed a strange, beautiful drum in his lap - shaped like a turtle’s back, edged with engraved petals. He began to play.

He used his fingertips to tap a simple, repetitive melody - Peaseblossom heard echoes of the notes which had drifted through his song of madness, but now they became cohesive, purposeful.

He sang an incantation for the gloaming:

We turn to face the widest eye,

The open sky where daylight lies.

We stand beneath its endless gaze,

And know our place under its haze.

Like the great network of mycelium which lies underfoot in the woodland, every voice joined the song in unison - until eventually the verses ran out and the sonic halo of the metal drum and the voices resonated across the city.

Everywhere, the people looked at each other, the world silent other than birdsong. They looked as though they had just awoken.

‘Time’s up,’ said Peaseblossom. ‘We should go.’

‘For this year,’ said Cobweb, as the fairies formed a line, joined hand in hand.

And as they flew back to the forest, they passed over streets, rooftops, and waterways that had been cracked open - not broken, but blooming in their fracture. The enchanted city lay behind them, its edges softened. For millennia, the fairies had sung songs of protection - of guardianship. But Peaseblossom no longer wished only to preserve. She had looked into the wide eye of Midsummer and seen a reckoning. As the forest welcomed them home, she felt it: healing not as restoration, but as risk - the wild, fluttering possibility of regeneration.