by Elsa Bridger
“Oh!” came the surprised Nightshade’s muffled voice, also slightly winded with the ferocity of their impact!
“Now, for a toast….” Queen Tara interjected. Drinks were hastily handed out to everyone.
The two girls and Nightshade had regained their composure on stage. They appeared completely at ease together, standing with their arms linked, glass in hand, as if they’d always been the best of friends.
“To Sophie and Felicity!” Queen Tara called to the crowd, holding her glass aloft to toast the occasion.
“To Sophie and Felicity!” echoed the enthusiastic crowd, heads tilting back in unison as everyone drank. The crowd then resumed chanting, “Sophie, Felicity! Sophie, Felicity!”
“I feel funny,” muttered Felicity, swaying slightly. “Oh, we’re going home aren’t we?” she added, remembering the sensation and that bitter sweet taste from before.
“Sadly for us, yes my child, but no doubt we will meet again,” Queen Tara answered, her beautiful eyes resting kindly on them.
The happy chanting of “Sophie, Felicity!” continued, but began to fade until it seemed to be just an echo in their heads…..
“Sophie, Felicity….. Sophie, Felicity…!” The girls smiled at the sound of their names being chanted by a grateful crowd - only it didn’t sound quite right for it to be the collective voices of the fairies. Sophie, her eyes still closed, frowned trying to make sense of it.
“Sophie, Felicity, wakey, wakey!” Mrs Vincent was clicking her fingers in front of their faces, trying to snap them out of their stupor.
They blinked, still disorientated.
“This is no time for taking a cat nap!” With that she gently but firmly helped them to their feet and steered them by the shoulders into the school hall.
They just had time to take in that the clouds had melted away and the sunshine had returned as it had done in Serenia – Serenia! The girls smiled at each other broadly as recollections of their adventures flashed like clips from a film through their mind’s eye.
Felicity indicated to Sophie with her eyes to their very own magic book, tucked safely in her blouse; Sophie acknowledging their special secret with just a wink in return.
Mrs Vincent began to speak, more to herself than to the girls, “Oh, this crazy weather will make up its mind what it’s going to do soon, I hope! I’ve never known anything like it. They say it was only raining over our school, the rest of Horley has been completely dry and sunny – how strange?! Oh well, let’s get you back to class.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs Vincent, I have a feeling that it’s going to be much sunnier for the foreseeable future,” Sophie beamed up at her.
That afternoon, when their mother met them from school, she asked her usual question. “Had a good day at school today girls?” she braced herself for the now expected sulky answers.
“ONLY THE BEST EVER!!” chorused the girls with great enthusiasm and huge smiles.
Now she wasn’t expecting that!
The End.
Well, yes, it’s the end of this adventure but……
little did Sophie and Felicity know at the time, that there were to be more!
Why wait? I've included a sample of their next adventure, right here, after my 'About the Author' and 'Other Titles' piece, just to 'wet' your appetites - pun intended! If you'd like to read the whole book, simply follow my handy links below. Oh, and just as a warning, you might need your swimming costumes for this one! Happy adventuring.
About the Author
I've always had a vivid imagination (so I'm told) and since childhood I've spent many a happy hour reading books and writing my own stories.
Now, with two like-minded children of my own, Sophie and Felicity, with their love of fairies and magic, I had a reason to write the stories down - well, the girls were very insistent actually, and I was more than willing. Not satisfied with just one story though, they asked for another then another, so here I am, still writing!
My mother, Margaret, wrote, illustrated and hand bound a story each for me and my brother when I was 8 and we treasure them still; plus I now share it with my children too.
I've since found out that my Grandmother, Nora, also wrote stories, which I've just read - much to my delight - so it must be in our genes!
We hope you enjoyed this book, and I would very much like to share my other stories with you; to sweep you up into another dimension, one full of new friends and their adventures together. Whether you are 4 or 104 I hope you enjoy them as much as we do, and just perhaps, they might inspire you to write your own stories too; shh.... don't tell anyone, but it's great fun!
I'd love to hear from you, with constructive comments or to tell me which parts you enjoyed the most. My contact details are below. But most importantly, if you did enjoy this book, or any of the others listed below please do tell your friends and family.
The Magic Book series:
Saving the Fairies of Serenia
This is where it all begins! When a book isn’t just a book and when a school isn’t just a school, Sophie and Felicity start to wonder if what they understood to be the mundane and hum drum is in fact only the surface! They are drawn into a battle with The Wicked One to save not just Serenia, home to the fairies, but Earth too, the very place we all call ‘home’.
Mermaid Secrets - out soon!
The second story is in two exciting parts (but each can be equally enjoyed on its own) and takes on a watery twist of two tails!
Felicity makes a hasty decision to dash into the waves after a glimpsed sighting of what she believes to be a mermaid! A short while later, with an unforeseen and dramatic turn of events, both girls find themselves once more in the thick of the action - with a difference!
Their newly acquired Magic Book is urgently needed for the first time outside Serenia, (home to the fairies) to help their new friends, but has been left behind, high and dry, back on the beach! Luckily, it has a few surprises left to reveal!
Mermaid Secrets and Lies - out soon!
Their underwater adventure continues and, Sophie and Felicity, having spent some time away from home now, start to feel quite desperate to return to their parents.
But in order to get home, they need a potion, made with special shells only found within the mermaids' enemies' territory, deep in the ocean!
Their quest to recover the shells, with the help of The Magic Book, leads them to discover more than either human or merfolk could ever have imagined!
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Book 2 Sample: Mermaid Secrets
A Day at the Beach
Sophie awoke with a start. Eager anticipation flooded her consciousness as she remembered that her parents had promised to take her and her identical twin sister, Felicity, to the beach if it was a nice day. She flung back her covers and wound her way to the window through their toys strewn haphazardly on the floor. Poking her head up through the bottom of the curtain so as not to flood the room with light in case it woke Felicity, she looked east – YES! The sun was already burning off the damp morning haze – it was going to be a perfect day for the seaside, and probably warm enough to even swim in the usually cold English sea.
She turned from the window to see what the time was, her clock said 5am – still really early, well not to her, but her parents would think so! She’d have to amuse herself until someone else woke up. Her gaze fell onto a brightly coloured shoulder bag which hung from a clothes hook on the wall next to a full length mirror. She felt a flutter of excitement, knowing that it contained a very special gift from the fairies of Serenia; a magic book! She decided she’d settle herself back into bed and imagine she was there once more, making up her own adventure, until it was time to get up.
The family set off early in the car to the coastal town of Eastbourne to make the most o
f the day. The girls always wanted to do everything; skate, cycle, scoot and have a picnic on the beach – not forgetting the ice cream! They always made their way from the furthest car park, to Eastbourne Pier by whatever mode of transport took their fancy – usually roller blading, as they did today, and enjoyed a cooling ice cream there before heading back to the car park. Their father insisted he needed one too, ‘to maintain his energy,’ he had said!
Once back at the car, they changed their transport to bicycles and cycled back to the ramp park – which was about half way to the pier. It was exciting to watch the other children scale the ramps on scooters, bikes and skateboards, doing tricks that defied gravity. Much to their mother’s relief, Sophie and Felicity were happy to watch and not join in.
By the time they had returned to the car for the second time, all four of them were more than ready for lunch on the beach.
Just half an hour later, with tummies satisfyingly full and already a good deal of ‘beans’ burnt off, they all felt a little more relaxed.
Felicity and Sophie left their parents chatting about this, that and the other – all very mundane stuff Felicity thought; like what they were going to do next to their garden back home - and crawled into the little beach tent their dad had put up so they could sit out of the glare of the sun. They stretched out side by side, and relived their adventures of the week before at school with the fairies in Serenia.
“I never would have imagined that The Great Oak would have been so special!” Felicity enthused.
“Mmm, that was the best week of my life, meeting REAL fairies - and saving Serenia!” Sophie agreed.
“Have you got The Book with you, Sophie?”
Queen Tara of Serenia had given the girls a special book as a gift for saving her Kingdom. It looked just like an ordinary note book, but they now knew differently.
The Queen herself was a Keeper of the original Book. Her Book was essential to the wellbeing of Serenia and all who lived there. In turn, Serenia was directly linked to the human world, so when the girls had saved Serenia, they had also saved their own home, Earth. One thing both the Queen’s Book and theirs had in common was that they had the ability to give life to anything they drew on its pages. They were to use it very wisely, and only for the purposes of good.
The heat was beginning to build up inside the tiny tent, and they closed their eyes while they chatted about what they thought the fairies would be doing now, and asking each other questions like – did fairies go to the seaside too? Did they have a seaside in fairyland even? Would they ever have cause to use their Book? Absorbed by their own musings, they began to doze.
Felicity thought she heard a sound and her eyes flickered open. She sat up and looked outside the tent towards the sea where the sound was being carried inland on a warm salty breeze. There was something a little way out in the water. It looked like a girl, but then in an instant the image was lost behind a bigger wave. She stood up outside to see more clearly, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.
There – a movement, like a fish jumping! Then just a couple of the smallest ripples were left which dissipated back into waves again.
“Sophie!” Felicity called. “I’ve just seen something in the water – I’m sure it was a mermaid!”
Without a backward glance, Felicity raced down the beach and into the sea. She hardly noticed the frigid water rise up her legs as she ran in deeper in her eagerness to get closer to where she had seen the last ripples disperse. Suddenly, there wasn’t any beach beneath her feet – the bottom must have shelved away. A memory flashed through Felicity’s head of her parents warning her that this was sometimes the case on beaches so you had to be very careful, but it was too late! She bobbed under the water and as the tide was going out, it pulled her further in. She couldn’t swim hard enough to get back to the beach and she was beginning to tire – where are my parents - my sister? That was her last conscious thought.
Through the groggy haze of semi consciousness, Felicity became increasingly aware of a rhythmic ‘shhhing’ sound that faded in and out. It was a gentle, comforting sound that she vaguely recognised but couldn’t quite place. Trying to make sense of it, she frowned with her eyes still closed; they seemed reluctant to respond to her need to open them.
She was aware that she was lying down on a bed and under a cover of some kind. She must be in the tent on the beach and , having dozed off, someone had put a blanket over her.
With immense effort she finally managed to open her eyes, expecting to see the red and blue of the beach tent overhead, but instead she saw she was in a different room. The plain white walls gave the space a clinical feel. She squinted against a soft light coming through the strangely translucent ceiling. Felicity felt like she was in a box and with no windows or light fittings to soften the room she was beginning to feel claustrophobic, completely confused and disorientated. Was she in a hospital of some sort, she tried to rationalise. Everything seemed to shimmer and wobble - she then concluded she must still be dreaming, a thought that calmed her a little. It even felt quite nice as more of her senses came in to play; she felt strangely light.
She sat up and the green bed cover fell away from the top of her body as she did so, with the top edge seemingly to float in her lap like some giant, flat, enchanted dancing snake. This was a very strange dream! Her hair was actually floating about her, gently swaying as if in water, like it did when she was in the bath at home.
A door opened over at the far side of the room, and there, much to her astonishment was a mermaid – or to be more precise, a very smartly turned out mer-man!
This is where we leave Felicity, with her new friend, but life under the surf isn't always tranquil. There's a sudden turn of events just ahead which could have life-changing consequences for them all! So, quick! Don't get left behind - dive right in to their next thrilling adventure where all will be revealed!
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