Pay the Piper
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Magic: The Gathering.
Summary:
When the Prismatic Piper comes a piping, children better hide their dreams.
Every parent knows the story of the Prismatic Piper.
Younglings are taught the surreal sounds it makes, in plea they won't hear the threnody anywhere else, and about how it chooses to eat children's reveries and decorate the webbing of its dream-catching coronet with coloured beads exteriorizing their stolen fantasies.
It's all one creature. Unbroken, beginning with an inky shadow that slicks the soggy, fallow rock. The bending black tethers become splashing blue waves on the green leaves of a sturdy utopia tree. At the height of this trunk, volcanic crust forms the cylix for red embers scorching gold straw from fields thick and white.
As with any shapeshifter, it is potentially everything. But this shapeshifter, it is everything and nothing.
What is it?
Mana confluence animated?
The hollow toots through its pipe are as dead as the emaciated set of hands alternating along the instrument's holes. Those unpropitious to listen concede it isn't epiphanic.
If it passes your hut, pay the piper your dues. If not, its brass mask will be the disturbing partner luring your spawn toward a dreamless paradise.