Tundra

To be born under the sign of the mammoth meant to be an ill-omen child. He had known it from the beginning; he had felt it in his bones and his binds. That was the season when the world plodded on like the caravan, turning into the religious time that took up half the year. Being born at turning time had seen him marked as an outsider. The mammoth people had been reluctant to raise him. Cast out as soon as he could walk and talk, his tongue found only scorn for words. His feet found not the tundra, but only the forest floor, where nuts fell in the religious season, and the carpet was of multi-coloured leaves. On the third anniversary of his birth, they left him at the border of the forest visited once yearly, where it was customary to leave the spawn of ceremonies.

This had made him a prodigy, for he had never needed to rely on anyone else besides himself. When the other druids found him, he rose quickly through their ranks, at twelve years old becoming the youngest person ever inducted into Mossen Grove. He amassed a huge menagerie of spirits, but never understood why there should be a split between the secular and religious halves of the year. No-one had ever bothered to explain it to him. Rather, it was just one of those unquestioned things, and druids so loathed to be questioned.

Then one day, they came to him, offering him the chance to go to earth, to lie not dead but buried and travel on the beams of the setting sun into the astral plane, beyond life and death. This offer, he turned down. He chose instead the life, and the possibility of death, as a renegade.

As time turned on, Grissos was hatching a plan. He knew that there were elder gods, deep beneath the ocean, where underwater rivers ran dark with the life force of the planet. To possess such a god would put one in command of the very tides, for the moon which pulled on the water did the elders’ bidding. To command the tides was to command the seasons, which, in turn, to take charge of every kind of ceremony and magic under the limp, grey sun that hung over the tundra. If the religious season could be made to last around the year, then think, Grissos reasoned, what he could accomplish! He could be virtually immortal; indestructible.

And then, a mortal man had come to him, a man who had shared his selfish vision and was willing to ingest the fungus. Everything he had prayed for –no, commanded of the forces that be– was coming to fruition. The mortal’s name was Erasmus, and now he was animated by the Otherworld– a completely reversible situation, but nonetheless one that favoured Grissos. A druid could not attack another druid, Grissos knew, but he could send another to do his bidding, and the others at Mossen Grove would do just that once the discovered their brother’s ambition. Once they were out of the way, there would be nothing on earth capable of stopping him.

Of course, he had nothing but disdain for the ways of the mortal human beings for whom the secular season was saved. He saw no point to riding; to the endless, tusked migration. He had no interest in the virtue of balance, which sat at the heart of druidic philosophy. Likewise, he saw no point to the gathering portion of the year, and it went without saying that he held nothing but contempt for the histories, oral and otherwise, of the various clans. He had never touched a book, never set one down, breathing where he left them, its pages fluttering, whispering that he had touched it.

Oh, he had such scorn for words.