Three seasons, one shore
We keep three festivals on the same ground at Shediac, one to a season, and the same question is asked at every door. The answer changes with the age. Most guests come to one. Those who come to all three are given the whole of the story.
The Shediac Mascarade
28 to 30 May 2027
Nineteenth-century Shediac, and nobody is quite who they say. You draw a card at the door and it tells you who you are for the weekend. Dancing you’ll be taught in four minutes, parlour games, silhouettes cut while you wait, and a murder mystery running underneath all of it until somebody solves it. The Masked Ball is Saturday night. Friday evening at Parlee Beach comes with your pass.
The Shediac Renaissance Faire
20 to 22 August 2027
The big one, and the loud middle of the year. A merchant village you can walk into, armoured fighting close enough to hear the hits, archery, falconry, a forge, a loom, and a tavern song with a hundred people in the chorus by the second verse. Renaissance and fantasy both, because the dragons refused to stay home. Friday opens at Parlee Beach with the Gathering of the Realms, and every ticket includes it.
Afterland
1 to 3 October 2027
The year is 2285, and the paperwork stopped a long while ago. A salvage market with no price tags, rat rods, fire, a screen with dark water behind it, and music assembled out of scrap. Mostly after dark, in October, on the shore. Nobody asks who you are at the gate. We pour first, and ask after. Friday’s First Fire at Parlee Beach comes with every ticket.
One question, five ages
The three festivals are three chapters of one story. Here it is, briefly told.
Once, the whole world spoke one language, and every word meant one thing. With nothing left to argue about, they built a stair to bother the sky. The sky reached down, broke the language into a thousand pieces, and scattered the speakers. On one warm shore they tell it as the day the world got rich, because a word only means something beside a word that differs.
The scattered came to that shore to trade, and nobody understood anybody. So they used the four things that need no words: a cup handed over, a line drawn between this and that, a fair weight, and a made thing with the showing of how. Four guilds grew around those acts. One afternoon a stranger came up the road carrying nothing, and four guilds sat there with four cups in the jug. The Cups poured for him anyway. A guild went without, and nobody remembers which. That is why the stranger drinks first.
Centuries later, at a crowded ball, a remark landed as a joke and a confession in the same breath, and the room took both. A girl too young to be there asked why everything meant twice tonight. Nobody had noticed, until she said it, that a mask doesn’t hide a face. It adds one.
Then a tea party began and never ended. A word that could wear two faces learned to wear a thousand. Every word meant everything, so nothing. In 2222 the words went flat and language broke. The survivors walked home to this shore, where the songs were in two tongues and couldn’t be flattened, lit fires in the tower’s ruin, and kept the oldest rule: pour first, ask the name after.
Five ages. The Faire is the second, the Braiding. The Mascarade is the third, the Masking. Afterland is the fifth. The fourth is the Long Tea, which is the one we are sitting in, and nobody is staging it. Take a deck of cards out of a drawer: the four guilds are still on it, and that is the only part of the story you can check in your own pocket.
Two of them, or all three
A Diptych is a weekend pass to the Shediac Renaissance Faire and to one of the other two. A Triptych is a weekend at all three: the Mascarade in May, the Faire in August, and Afterland in October. Both are sold on each festival’s ticket page, and the Triptych is the only pass that carries a guest through the whole of the mythology in a single year.
The particulars
The sale opens on the morning of Tuesday the twenty-ninth of September, at ten, for all three festivals at once. The earliest passes are the least dear they will ever be.
The ground. All three are held on the Neptune grounds, 693 Route 133, Pointe-du-Chêne, Shediac, with the Friday evening of each weekend at Parlee Beach.
Friday is included. At every one of the three, the Friday evening at Parlee Beach comes with your pass, and it is where you collect what you carry for the weekend.