Of Spring

Of Spring is a short fanfiction written by DatAsymptote about Sage Idason.

Of Spring
There are three things that come to Sage Idason more easily than breathing.

The slow steady step of the waltz.

Harmonising.

And being genre-savvy.

He knows not to doubt the third and youngest son. Knows to always offer food and aid to hags and sentient bread loaves and that charity is often repaid. Knows that whenever evil spirits or demons come to offer him infinite gold, that he should adamantly refuse, as the “thing behind the garden shed” that the spirits want in return would probably be his dear mother.

Sage overhears all the stories mothers would tell their children whenever they came into his family’s studio. On a whim, he can recite thousands of old wives’ tales and passed down legends. Grafted in his mind are a morphed, twisted history of the World of Ever After. His active imagination ties strings of these stories together, draws up parallels and collections, until Sage realises that he could become a storyteller in his old right.

His mother runs a small dance studio-avec-theatre, with a slightly larger theatre on the side, in the midst of Copenhagen. His father’s a florist, running a shop on the city’s outskirts.

Pinewood floor and a spacious stage, barres running along mirrors without the speck of a fingerprint, light filtering through translucent windows: the dance studio is the place that Sage calls home.

***

People say all the world’s a stage, and Sage claims the stage is the only world he knows.

It’s the only world he can control. The only world where everything is utterly certain to him.

The only thing certain to him outside the stage is the uncertainty.

Sage is certain that he only knows an unfair bit of not much. He is certain that Kings and Queens and Dukes and Duchesses lie, that politics is a precarious game, and he wonders how much of their pretty palaces were funded from the taxes of the plebeians.

Behind the stage, Sage could pull the curtain and forget about that reality.

But he doesn’t, because Sage believes that he’s amongst only a fair few that can discern this truth.

So he writes. Pages and pages. Screeds of paper lining his bedroom desk. Of arrogant power and human greed and consuming pride.

Sage writes of human suffering.

And attempts to show hope.

He’s bad. At first.

But eventually his twist endings are more shocking than jarring, his main characters become slightly more tolerable, and the dialogue is less contrived.

***

He refuses to write skits about Kings and Queens though. Sage values his head too much.

(He once brought a stunning rendition of a famous playwright’s tragic masterpiece on stage: the tale of an vain elderly king dividing his kingdom among his three daughters. People called him out for it. Said he was insinuating something about the monarchy. “I didn’t write the play,” Sage had retorted, but he still freaked out and took down the posters.)

Making snarky commentary on authority is slightly harder when one has to disguise the satire, but Sage tries to manage.

***

Sage once believed that only if he tattoo'd a small globe above his wrist, could he declare that he truly knew everything like the back of his hand. Now, he believes that it would never happen, because once, at 16, he had tried to sneak out to get some asphodels tattooed on his heel – a “reminder of his own morality and mortality”, he claimed – and cried before the needle even made its first incision.

***

The same lucid dream have plagued Ida’s descendants for the past five years. It’s not exactly the same – the partygoers are different, the decorations always change, and the music shifts to match the current popular tunes –, but there's always a dance, there’s always dolls, and there’s always a promise to remember.

A night of twirling, dancing flowers.

That imagery confuses and eludes him.

The party begins at midnight, as the best parties do, and flowers of all sorts leak into the dance studio, swinging, spinning, singing. Wearing dresses of petals, they danced with an enthusiasm that royal balls could only dream of. The Ida’s belongings would join them, too. Handmade dolls, childhood rag dolls, mannequins wearing leotards, an ugly porcelain doll with only one glass eye become the riff-raff of the elegant party scene, but the flowers would welcome them nonetheless.

And the young Ida would watch from a hidden corner, and be on the lookout for sharp heels, in case the flowers make dents on the dance floor.

Eventually, one of the flowers would waltz over to a doll, kiss them on the head, and tell them to promise to tell the Ida to bury them when he wakes up.

The King and Queen of the Flowers would arrive, too marvellous to describe. Later, flowers would bid each other goodnight in bittersweet ways, and the Ida would sneak back into their bed.

That’s when the dream would break.

***

“Flowers don’t dance,” he once said to his mother, while in midst of sewing new costumes. Sage pricks himself on the embroidery needle and immediately pressures the wound. He thinks of Sleeping Beauty, who spiked herself on a spindle and passed out for 100 years. Sleeping for a century sounds horrible to Sage: all that time wasted, and not a single play performed. “And I’m certain that they would die, walking on their roots all the time. Why, it’s like they wear through a new pair of shoes every night.”

“Oh?” His mother brightens. She had that dream once, too. The family curse, his mother would say. ''Passed down from parent to child. An inherited burden, an eternal party.''

“Why?” Sage presses on. “Why is our story so illogical? Are the flowers even real? What’s the point– the moral– the literary beauty of Little Ida’s Flowers?”

She changes the conversation. “Have you visited your father in recent months, Sagey?”

He cringes at the childhood nickname his mother still uses. “No.” His father’s a florist, and Sage is getting quite frankly sick of this flower motif, even when they’re not dancing.

***

People are complex, Sage reckons, and cracks open a book of philosophy to write better.

When he looks over Copenhagen from his balcony window, he doesn’t see a capital. He sees a cave wall, where people are dancing shadows. Where everything is dim and difficult to discern.

When he reads, it’s as if he broke free of his chains and turned away from the cave wall. As if he’s adjusting his eyes to a bright fire, the source of the shadows, the source of the trickery.

When he writes, he forgets about the fire. The burning, shifting figures of a city that he thought he once knew.

When he performs, arranging his plays and advertising them, he takes his cautious steps out into the open.

And when the young children flood into the dance theatre in the early afternoon for the dance lessons, when they beg him for yet another story, Sage feels like he’s leading people into the freedom of the open air.

***

He’s 17, but thinks himself older.

Sage believes he carries worlds with him. People’s hope and faith and stories.

But god, he is in the spring of his youth, and still living in the world of his dreams and plays.