Tundra

Like the tundra wind, let us strip back a few layers of this tale. While Aais floundered and I rode through fierce winds to slough flesh from bones, Eiron hiked along the deserted shore, alone and without even the company of words. He preferred silence for travelling, for it conserved his strength and allowed him to focus on the sounds of the setting, which was best for survival. Along the sandy strip, the sea sucked on boulders and dislodged any stones smaller, rolling them rattling back into its bed before spitting them out at the beach again. Crows called, picking entrails from smashed sea urchins and stranded, gulping fish. Far away over the hillock of the headland, wolves could be heard, hungry and howling, their voices snatched at intervals by the air.

In the sky, the aurora blazed electric blue as an inkspell for fury curling the edges of a lit piece of parchment. All the stars were coming out– Ikkus the traveller could be seen, as could Gheltar, god among gods, and Cthlaar, the Thunderslinger, but Eiron had not been raised to know such signs. He saw instead Airis, the prow master and Raegon, the fisherman, Heros the seal, Uthist the shell gatherer and sprawling between all, the limbs of the fearsome kraken. Joining them was the moon, tonight a silver sickle in the sky as death sharpened his scythe for all the little owl-hunted animals. The forest was nearing, kneeling down to greet the shore and carry Eiron away from the water that had always been by his side. Then, the forest was all around him, and it was running. The soft padding and scurrying of predator and prey sounded in the palpable darkness, acrid with the scents of fear and desperation. A blood tempo pounded, hearts and feet and eyes together. Unfamiliar with this restless land, Eiron ran, too.

Tall trees sliced the moonlight, brilliant as sunshine as they flashed by. Every exposed bank and rounded hill crest drank it in, filling basins with the ghostly substance. A mist crawled over all, threading itself through vigilant pines and obscuring the night’s other phantoms, the screech owls whose cacophony pierced the glade. Such predators patrolled only the outskirts of this denser heart, where mere woodland became primeval forest. Spirit fences had been erected, wolf pelts and skulls on their spear tips, and these, looming through the fog, kept the animals out of the innermost part of the glade. Even the wolf pack withdrew from this barrier, heeding those vapours that had kissed the sacred line.

Eiron could hear the wolves baying. Yet, there was something else, something worse than snarling and howling that echoed around the fence. It was the whisper of a wolf’s cry, made weak by the centuries through which it echoed to tow his heart from the rhythm of nocturnal survival. In it, too, was a fox’s scream of murder warned or lusted after since many years ago. A breeze silenced the forgotten call for a while, and Eiron shivered. Fog rose from the forest, seeping from stones. It was the hour when ghosts came out to dance.

He let the moonlight enter him as he strode through its beams. Here and there, they left silver coins on the forest floor, while elsewhere their flood was as a cascade of that same, precious metal. At the deepest fog well, he knelt, and let the captured moonlight swim about him. He dipped his face, bathing it in that same. Then, he took off his thin jacket, and draped it over the rock provided. This lump of granite had been smoothed to the point where no lichen would cling to it and the cleansing rains ran off it, removing all traces of dirt. It was the only stone of granite in the clearing, because it served no ceremonial purpose, only a practical one. Every proper standing stone was bluestone.

Eiron recognised this make of ritual setting from his earliest years on the Claw Island peninsula, before he ran away. Old women used to make use of the standing stones left behind by the Mossen Grove for what they called their witch rituals, enraging the village druid. Long pillars of wax they placed on each corner of those stones which lay on their sides, either intentionally or because they had fallen. Bird skulls were also appropriated for the ceremonies, though this was at odds with the carvings of crows on some of the more prominent stones. Some of the less involved women admitted their fraud, calling Eiron astute for uncovering it, but he didn’t feel astute. It felt like common sense. The stones just seemed disgruntled, and that made him disgruntled, too. Of course, back in those days, he assumed that his affinity with the stones was simply due to their being magical objects. How could he have known that they didn’t have the same effect on others?

Neither did he know, on that fateful night off the tundra, who or what would go before or after him in the ring of standing stones. In the glade he was a stranger. He only sought some protection, a safe space to rest. He had come a long way, on by boat and on foot. His feet were tired and raw with blisters to be healed. His skin burned cold where his clothes were threadbare. He made use of the ritual stones the way that seemed most proper, bathing his tired muscles in the silent pool. In the half-moonlight, the stones seemed to smile their appeasement.

Or, perhaps they just smiled knowingly. He, on the other hand, had no way of knowing that the druids of this clearing erased their tracks with a spell that caused clover to grow wherever they scuffed the earth. He had no way of knowing that he was watched.