Happy Watermaidens Day!

Small blue winged birds have told me that this is the Official Watermaidens Day.

Not that water maidens are exactly official. Indeed, few of them have even been inclined to do their duty in faerie courts, and their few attempts to establish legal identities in mortal realms (for a few of them are enthralled with the magics of mortals, but find that credit cards are not usually issued for watery springs lacking legal identities, and yet they do not quite have the cash on hand to purchase iPads and the music and art that can flow from them) have only ended in a few trembling water droplets at the edge of the buildings that house bureaucratic nightmares. For water maidens, you understand, cannot survive long on land. Eventually, their water calls to them, or the earth and the air sink into them. A clever water maiden might still manage to return to her river, or spring, or lake, if she feels the air inside her in time. Less clever water maidens may find themselves lost in the earth.

Given this weakness, I admit that I am at loss to explain just how the water maidens have spread throughout the world. But they have: you can even find them in Antarctica, trapped beneath frozen lakes, or riding on the backs of leopard seals, laughing as they chase penguins through the icy waters, and in desert oases, where they wait in warm waters, dreaming of dancing on the solar winds. Some have fallen in the streams beneath erupting volcanoes, their tears mingling with the fires to form the black glass of obsidian, which in turn has sometimes been used as a weapon.

Indeed, any bit of still water might conceal a water maiden – the remote lake, the raging river, even the pond choked with garbage and weeds. Be cautious.

Particularly around water lined with trees. And places where the trees hang over the water, where shadow and light shimmer on the stillness, and your eyes smart against the green of summer and the winter snow.

There.

That motion, that circle spreading across the water.

A fish, you might tell yourself, until you hear the song. A bird, you might tell yourself, until you hear the words, words formed in your own true language, whatever that might be.

A particularly clever bird.

A small flash of shadow. A hand.

Be careful. Be very careful indeed.

For they are tricky, these watermaidens, tricky as a drop of water dropped upon a hand. Tricky as the smoke from fires. They may take any form they wish – a harmless fish, a water bird, a leaf drifting upon a water.

Or, if they wish, they may appear human.

Almost human.

The beauty will catch you first, the shimmering skin and hair, so beautiful you may not even notice the way the skin shifts in color, from green to blue to brown to green to white and back again, shimmering like the water they rise from. Hiding the way the features shift so that you see whatever face you would deem most beautiful, the features you most desire to see. Desire, yes, that is it, a desire as strong as the longing for water when your mouth is dry as dust.

And beneath her skin, the slow ripples, the slow movement of water.

Or you may see nothing at all, nothing but a flash of light, a splash of water, a shimmer in the air. Just enough to make the world spin for a moment; just enough to make you remember your dreams, remember the way shadows shift in the twilight.

Or you might taste something in your water today – just a little something.

Sip carefully. This day does, after all, belong to the water maidens.

(Thanks to Nin Harris for creating the day.)