As first impressions go, my process is to let the imagery sink in. Really sink in, and percolate inside my brain like freshly ground coffee: nice and dark.
The landscape is both familiar and somewhat exotic, the mountains and the vegetation reminding me of home while the white-washed cottage speaks more of faraway, Mediterranean Europe. However, if you?re myopic like me, and your first impression of the prompt was through the metaphorical lens of a tiny touch screen, you can almost see a procession of beautiful fairy creatures marching through the undergrowth rising up like a miniature jungle. All those pristine white flowers, swaying in the wind -- what if they were something else entirely, but still intrinsically linked to the land from which they grew?
I grew up on a steady diet of Scandinavian folklore riddled with stories of littlefolk and dangerous critters; of trolls and dwarves and elves; of a naked man playing the fiddle in the brooks and rivers of the forest (much like the Huldra of Viking lore, but where the Huldra would seduce young men so she could feed off their souls, N?cken would lure children to a watery grave).
There?s always a hint of darkness to folklore, and Norse myth is no different, be it subtle or very blatant... And I do love a good, suitably gruesome fairytale. Perhaps I?ll run with the idea of various congregations of fae emerging from the surrounding landscape to descend onto the cottage. That sparks questions:
- Why the cottage?
- Is it actually a cottage, or something else entirely?
It could be a portal to the underworld (another theme of Nordic folklore: many of the fairy folk dwelled underground). Every year, the Troll King summons his subjects, that they, being his eyes and ears aimed at the human world, can report their observations. It?s a big feast, a celebration of the plentiful gifts offered to the fae by the humans. Human babies are brought to the feast -- stolen by the fairies, a fairy child left in its place.
This isn?t the story of the Troll King. This is the story of his Changeling son, the princeling left in a Human household some fifty or hundred years ago. Raised by Humans, like so many of his kith and kin -- misunderstood and feared and scorned for his Otherness -- and now he returns home. Home: to the cavernous halls of the underworld lit up by bioluminescent moss and fungi. Home: to cutthroat politics and greed and the narrowmindedness of old bloodlines.
Home. To the very things he wished to escape.
Sounds like it could be an allegorical fairytale on the LGBTQIA+ condition.
Yes. I can work with that.
Topic: First impressions in free-form. Footloose and fancy. ;) (Read 2762 times)