Pumpkin Fairy's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Pumpkin Fairy wanted the prettiest patch in all the land, but her vines were dying. She knelt beside them at dawn. The leaves hung gray and limp. Three days of hard sun had baked the soil to dust. She pressed a finger into the ground. No damp. Her plump pumpkins had stopped growing. One had gone soft on the bottom. She lived in a cottage shaped like a pumpkin, with a curling stem for a roof, and she had planted this patch to make it the loveliest home anyone had ever seen. Now it was drying up. She carried water from a puddle behind her cottage, cup by cup. By noon the puddle was mud. The vines drank it and still drooped. She needed a real source, and she needed it today, or the whole patch would be lost. She flew low over the fields to search. The grass crackled brown beneath her. Then she saw it past a hedge: an old stone well, its rim thick with soft green moss. A wooden bucket hung from a rope above the dark mouth. She dropped down and gripped the rim. Cool air rose from below. She leaned in and saw water far down, still and clear. The hanging bucket was too big for her to lift. She flew home and fetched her own small carrier, a smooth vessel shaped like an acorn cap, with a curved handle just her size. Back at the well, she tied a thread to the handle and lowered it. The little bucket kissed the water and filled. She hauled it up hand over hand. It rose heavy and dripping. The trip home was long. She flew slow, arms aching, water sloshing over the rim. When she reached the patch she poured it at the roots. The soil turned dark and drank it fast. One bucket was not enough. So she went again. And again. All afternoon she flew between the mossy well and her vines, filling the acorn carrier, hauling it up, pouring it down. Her wings burned. Her hands blistered on the thread. By dusk she had made twelve trips. She stood back and looked. The vines had lifted. The gray leaves showed green at the edges again. The soft pumpkin was still lost, but the rest would live. She had found her water. Then she noticed the trail. Behind her, a wet path ran across the dry field, straight from the well to her patch. Dark spots marked every place a drip had fallen. Anyone could follow it now. And the well sat far past the hedge, on ground she did not own. She had saved her vines for one day. But the water was not hers, and the whole land could see the way to it.