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Fancy a Snippet of My New Novel?
In the city of Orlaenas, on Flamehurst Row, is small old-fashioned shop, displaying rows of Faerie shoes on techna-silk, some of the new satiny material developed by the Faeries, desperately attempting to overcome the rundown feel to the shop. The wooden sign above the door creaks eerily, and one wonders where the shop owners dug up such an old antique thing. The letters were burned into the weathered sign by out-of-date firebranding, spelling out ‘Faerie Cobbling’. In the display bay window below was a ragged looking sign:
Customs and Premade
All Occasion Faery Shoes
And below that, on a slightly smaller card:
Help Wanted
But no one in their right mind would ever have replied to the ‘Help Wanted’ card, in no one ever had, even though she sign had been taped in the window was Glitzen Gold Tape for nigh on five years. There was only one shop girl, and she had no choice but to do her duty to the weary little shop she had called home for sixteen years herself.
Brigit straightened her shop girl’s ridiculous uniform hat in the wet reflection of the display window, tugging angrily at the frilly lilac lace. It never fit right and clashed horribly with her painfully short, drab red hair. Her mother never would let her grow it long. It ‘didn’t look professional,’ she said. Brigit never had the heart – or the cruelty – to tell her mother that since no one ever came into the shop, no one would care whether they were professional looking or not.
She sighed and looked down at the rows of shoes in the windows. A shoe shop. And her mother a faery cobbler! One of the most respected and legendary positions of faery dogma and her mother made it look like a joke. Sandals adorned with sweetly smelling flowers – so sweet one could smell them down the road and required a good stasis charm to stop the scent. Boots made of old dragon scales Ashwind, Brigit’s pet faerie dragon, had dropped over the years. Out of style evening slippers, made of false glass, which her mother swore would come back into style one day. Her mother’s arrogant tone rode into her mind, accompanied by the memory of laying the new slippers out in the window.
‘You watch, m’girl, they’ll be right back in. They were all the rage in my day!’ Her eyes gleamed for a second, remembering past conquests of the faery fashion empire. ‘I wore a pair just like this to Seelie Festival in the Year of Lady Flora, Pearl-Spring…’
Brigit sighed and let her mother prattle on. She knew the shoes would never sell – no one had worn anything like it nigh on thirty years. Besides, the molded magic that should have twinkled like crystal seemed dull; one of the heels was already chipped. ‘It looks like it hasn’t been worn in thirty years, all right,’ muttered Brigit, but she spread out a fresh color of turquoise tecna-silk and tried to arrange them in an attractive manner. After several attempts of layering them, setting them side by side, and even conjuring a few magic twinkles of her own, the shoes still looked like hopeless garage sale relics. No one would ever buy these things.
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