Chapter Text
The petals around her started to spread open, letting the sun spill on the face of the tiny fae within. The spirit of spring's long hibernation was finally over. Soon she would be free to rejoin her sisters in their dance.
*CRASH*
"Janet, was I right or was I right? This trail is beautiful!" The footsteps of two massive, lumbering old women came crashing through a field that was never carved for mortals. That they had strayed far enough to wind up here without realizing the feat was somehow worse than intentional trespassing might have been.
"Yeah, yeah..." Janet was ragged, exhausted. Sweaty and tired. The total opposite of her chipper guide, barely winded despite the ordeal they should have suffered to reach this point. The faerie stuck out her tongue from inside her flower.
"Don't 'yeah, yeah' me. Get a load of those!"
The faerie froze as Janet's excited accomplice pointed directly at her flower and the ones around it. She hissed, and they heard nothing.
Janet rolled her eyes, but thundered closer anyway. And the little mote inside, just too big to slip out, was forced to watch.
The flicker of a smile crossed Janet's face despite her exhaustion, and she leaned in for a closer look. The faerie ducked inside, flattening herself to the inner wall where she might escape the loathsome interlopers' gaze, but it wasn't her eye that loomed overhead. All too late, the faerie cried out "Wait, n-!"
Janet took a nice, big whiff of the the spirit of spring's flowers, and snorted up the little sprite with it.
Her eyes lit up. She turned to her friend and didn't even sneeze. She felt great! It was like magic... "Huh! Maybe you are onto something, Bev. Let's keep going."
Bev clapped excitedly and the two tromped off into the fields to cause more touristy chaos.
The sprint of spring was trapped, twitching, glued to the nasty nostril of the nastier woman who'd unwittingly stolen the concentrated magic of a spring morning for herself. "Let me out of here, you witch!"
Janet simply sniffed in response, dragging her secret souvenir deeper into the snotty mire...and teaching her a humbling lesson in the downsides of majestic seasons that managed to mesmerize mortals. A lesson that might last for days...