Challenge #04713-L329: Unseen Miracles

A farmer asks Wraithvine and Birbrid to come fishing with him. He needs a few more hands to pull in the nets as he's stocking up for winter. Crops are almost harvested, and he'd need help with that as well. He'd usually have help from his sons, but many have caught very bad colds, and the season for snows is fast approaching. -- Anon Guest

The autumnal weather should have been frightful. There should have been strong winds, threatening storms, and an astonishing dearth of good fish. But it was a pleasant day and the winds took them right to a gigantic shoal of sardines. One that had somehow not yet attracted sharks, whales, birds, or other predators.

Grentyk Bauer was normally wont to store larded meat for the winter, but his usual routine had been thrown off by the family's late summer colds that turned into full Fall fevers. He and the missus could barely keep up with their ailments and the farm work.

The neighbours had been glad to pitch in with the harvests, knowing well that Grentyk would do the same for them in the same circumstances. It was his winter stores that were the issue. He needed meat, and though his cattle would survive the snows, they weren't ready for slaughter. So his only alternative was fish. Which needed strong arms and a barrel of good luck.

Part of that fortune was in the wandering duo that stopped by to help along with the neighbours. A Gnome and an Elf, not in bad shape at all for rootless wanderers, who offered their kind hands and seemingly limited muscle to the tasks at hand, and then performing miracles whenever nobody was looking. And the Gnome had a knack for vanishing, Grentyk noted, but he always ended up doing more than anyone else.

The Elf had the tiller to get there, and the Gnome apparently vanished minutes before they spotted the shoal of sardines. There was something in the water, far below, that made the fish all but leap into Grentyk's net. And the Elf had a shocking amount of power to hir skinny arms.

They crammed each of Grentyk's barrels so full of fish that they creaked, yet somehow the canning was done in one night when he got it all home.

And it wasn't just the work of Emylah, his half-stressed wife. She was bustling enough for a dozen farmwives, but the Elf and the Gnome never seemed to shift a finger yet they always completed more work than anyone running their feet off to get the job done.

Grentyk never caught them at it, and they seemed to treat it like it was some grand game. They accepted a dinner and a space by the hearth as payment, and left small charms for the boys before they left. Charms made of Elf hair and Dragon scale. To guard them against illness.

They never left their names, so Grentyk could not properly thank them in his prayers. But the charms? They never failed.

[Photo by Heidi Bruce on Unsplash]

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