Rhys ap Owen ambled home over the rounded moonlit shoulders of Garth Mountain. If he stumbled a bit, well, what else do you expect after Midsummers Eve carousing? He had drunk his fill, in between the dancing round the oak and the leaping o'er the bonfire.
Lovely Megan had leaped with him all three times. At the end, they had thrown flowers into the fire. She, a wreath she'd worn. He, the posies from his buttonhole.
Rhys fingered the empty buttonholes, then his jacket lapel. Still damp from spilled ale. His mother would get him for that, she would.
He cocked an eye at the full moon. Just past midnight, he reckoned. His mother and sisters would be sound asleep. He could escape the tongue-lashing.
Fern fronds reached out and stroked Rhys' jacket and trousers as he shambled along. Ah, the stroke of Megan's fingers down his arm, the glimmer in her eyes, the dimple in her cheek!
Rhys limped the last stretch homeward. His right foot tingled. He'd gathered ashes from the bonfire to dust inside his shoes for good luck. Must have scraped some grit into the ashes.
He took care to tread softly when he entered the house, and let the latch down silently. As he'd expected, no one stirred at his return.
Rather than chance creaky floorboards and squeaky door hinges, he sank, suddenly exhausted, onto the old oaken settle near the corner fireplace and fell sound asleep.
.
Voices chirped all around.
Rhys cracked open bleary eyes to see his mother and sisters bustling in the morning light, setting the breakfast table. They paid him not the slightest heed. Didn't give him a tongue-lashing - good and well - but didn't even glance his way. They didn't set him a place, didn't call him to join them.
Rhys sighed. The silent treatment, for carousing into the night? He hoisted himself up, coughed, and apologized. "Come now, I won't be so late coming home again, no indeed."
Mother and sisters jolted with fear and looked wildly around.
"Come now, what is it?" Rhys asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost!"
"S-seen?" his mother gasped, lurching away from the table? "Seen what?"
"A ghost!" screeched one sister, and the other wailed.
"Come on, now; no joking," Rhys said, holding his arms out. "'Tis me myself, and nobody else."
Mother and sisters leaped to their feet and clustered together, weeping, backing away. Their eyes bulged as they looked this way and that.
Baffled, Rhys slapped his sides.
His sleep-rumpled jacket felt scratchy, and his right foot tingled again. He saw fern-chaff clinging to the jacket fabric. He ripped it off, threw it to the settle, sat and removed his right shoe. He shook out the ashes from the bonfire, not surprised to see more prickly fern-chaff fall as well.
His mother and sisters yelped anew. This time their gazes fixed solidly upon him. "Rhys!" his mother cried. "You didn't walk through the fern-brake, did you? Not at midnight on Midsummers Eve?!"
The one hour of the year when magical fern-seed ripens and falls and vanishes from this world.
Unless it's snagged by the clothing of a passerby, walking by light of the moon.
.
A tale from Glamorgan, Wales; from "Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales," by Marie Trevelyan, 1909, pp. 27 & 90
Rhys' dialogue taken straight from the tale
prompt: fall
