#02 Smoke

Hidden in her crystal cave, there was a small cauldron made with scraps of bronze, iron, and pewter and decorated with swirling inscriptions that she didn’t understand or recognise. She had found the vessel during her foraging trips, sideways behind some juniper berry shrubs, as though someone had dropped it there.

The cauldron itself was rather content. It felt like a disco room, with the coloured lights from the crystals refracting against the cauldron’s patchwork body. Whenever the cauldron coughed puffs of blue smoke, a girl with bright orange curly hair would rush into the cave with a plate full of food. There were apples, cured meats, cheese, berries, and bulbs of lettuce on the rusted silver plate. The girl poured it all into the cauldron’s mouth, stirring it with a wooden ladle until the pot stopped coughing. The colour of the cauldron’s smoke coughs had determined the different needs and wants of the spoiled pot. Blue was hunger, green was want of attention, and red was absolutely insatiable.

The girl has never seen red smoke, but the cauldron had warned her once before. It told her that when red smoke is sputtered out of its mouth, storms will wash away the mountains, and the earth will open to eat up all that walks upon it. The girl never dared to stall on any of the cauldron’s requests.

In reality, red smoke was an effect of the cauldron being summoned. You see, the cauldron was one of the Dagda’s most prized treasures, it was a source of bottomless food meant to serve the poor and needy. However, the cauldron felt that it had been taken advantage of for far too long, and escaped from its master the moment it had the chance.

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I am definitely taking a lot of creative liberty with Irish mythology and would love to expand this further one day. I definitely feel that there's a lot of information packed into this little drabble and should have been paced out slower.