Flash fiction: Inciting Incident

HROUGHOUT the Huldrealm, preparations for the Chosen One's imminent appearance were underway. The hidden entrance behind the abandoned church was swept and tidied and discreetly garnished with violets and tuberose petals, festooned with crystalline rocks that glowed subtly in the darkness to light the Chosen One's way. The clearing into which the Chosen One would enter, pushing through the choicest cobwebs and the ferniest undergrowth, was exquisitely misty and mossy and mushroomed. The Hulda fiddler tuned his instrument to entice to the wild dance, and the Hulda bakers created a magnificent twenty-layer pavlova lashed with passionfruit jam and dotted with silver dragées that would drive any child into a mad sugar frenzy.

But the Chosen One was playing Candy Crush on her phone that day, and did not come.

Puzzled but undaunted, the Hulda tried again. In a few years, they prepared another entrance through an overgrown bike path at the end of the Chosen One's street. Beyond it, in a meadow lush with long grasses and purple wildflowers, waited a glorious coal-black mount, fiercely wild yet willing to accept an apple in tribute, and prepared to convey the Chosen One deeper into the secret recesses of the mystic Huldrealm.

But the Chosen One was posting pictures on social media that day, and again she did not come.

Now carefully considering their options, the Hulda next spun up a castle of ice and moonlight (accessible through the disused final stall in the high school's basement restroom) and in its exact center, like the stamen of a frozen flower, arose the ever-youthful ruler of the Huldrealm -- snow-haired, sloe-eyed and fine in deep blue silks, haughty, sometimes cruel, but possessed of a feral beauty and grace, and obsessed with dancing.

But the Chosen One was busy texting her crush that day, and again she did not come.

So time passed, and again and again all the beings of the Huldrealm expertly stitched together scenarios of tantalizing and dangerous enchantment, always close by and discoverable with just the tiniest bit of digging -- and the Chosen One simply refused to dig.

Until one particular day like any other, a fifty-year-old woman with bushy hair graying around her temples stumbled into the most hidden sanctum of the Hulda royal palace without anyone noticing.

"Wait," cried the palace guard, "how did you get in here?"

"Well," said the Chosen One, shrugging, "it's the weekend, there's an electrical storm and all my devices went down. I had nothing to do and I guess... I guess I was just bored, so..."