The Faery Circle That Wasn’t
They will tell you it began with music.
That is how LIGHT prefers to start its catastrophes:
softly, beautifully, with absolutely no warning label.
Spark heard it first — a sound like joy being practiced. A little glen. A ring of faeries. Eight… ten… maybe more. They were dancing, “making merry,” as the polite histories will claim.
And Spark — sweet, curious Spark — did what a flying frog always does when the world offers wonder:
He went closer.
Here is the part they leave out:
The circle was not a circle.
It was a mouth.
The moment he crossed the edge, the air stopped being air and started being… pull.
Not wind. Not gravity.
A decision.
Down, down, down — a vortex with manners.
And in the white tubular smoke — oh yes, there was smoke — he saw them:
Eyes. Dark red, black. Watching like they’d been waiting for him specifically. 
Then the chanting began.
Not a song. Not a spell.
A demand.
“Spark… we know you are hiding something… give it to us…”
Now, here is where my personal favorite detail arrives — the universe’s sense of comedy, which is both elegant and cruel:
Spark doesn’t awaken in a dungeon.
He awakens in a version of his home that feels like a dream misfiled in the wrong drawer — same shapes, wrong colors, all purples and pinks and light blues.
And there, like a sugar-coated omen, is Spoof… baking cupcakes… in a bright yellow dress with a frilly apron.
If you’re wondering whether that’s normal, the answer is:
It becomes normal the moment you stop asking.
And then — because LIGHT does not tease forever — the booming voice arrives like a door being slammed by the sky itself:
“If you ever want to see your precious Spoof again, I need the lost potion!”
SLAM. SMASH.
Spark falls through the ceiling of his own life, onto the wreckage of his painting, and whispers a sentence that should have been impossible to know:
“By the powers of the nasty Apovil…”
So here is the off-shoot question that matters:
What if the faery circle wasn’t trying to summon Spark…
What if it was trying to test the lock?
And Spark — being Spark — simply flew into the keyhole.
Now tell me, traveler of LIGHT:
When the music feels too perfect…
Do you dance?
Or do you count the eyes?
- Zosimos







