Tundra

Raindrops fell, pattering on the physical and spirit leaves alike, piercing the veil between realities. In the spirit world, they dissipated where they fell on smouldering greenery. Other things were hissing and seething, too. Shadows and their opposites rolled forward through the smoke, rising up in terrible shapes and splitting and roiling around solid objects, unstoppable as they moved toward their human and fish-man prey. No matter how hard I concentrated on them, however, their exact dimensions evaded me. I was aware of them only as I might have been aware of a mirage playing across the screen of deception.

Instead, it was the elder druids on which I had my attention fixed. It was difficult to find them at first, so flawlessly did they blend into the landscape of trees, a face cupped in leaves, a body in boughs, a set of claws dug into the earth along with oaken roots. They were the shifting canvas the forest was painted on, more of the grove than from it. As I searched the many forked branches for their keyhole thrones, one spoke to me, a resounding voice that whispered with a thousand rustlings of leaves and carried on the tunes of birds. ‘Why have you come here?’

‘Because I need help,’ I answered. ‘Look at what’s happening in the real world.’

‘This is the real world,’ the ethereal voice replied. ‘Where you spend your time is a shadow of this world. This world is pure and alive. We know what is happening in the world we left behind. We are not blind.’

‘Of course,’ I said hastily, and then added, ‘Who am I speaking with? I want to show the proper respect.’

‘Names are fleeting things,’ said the voice, tauntingly. I was beginning to wonder whether it was only one speaker commanding it, until it said, ‘You may address me as First Druid.’

‘First Druid,’ I said, obediently, ‘we need your help. The natural order has been subverted.’

‘We know,’ the First Druid said, again with a cryptic quality to his tone. ‘Grisson was once one of us.’
‘What happened to him?’

‘He became unhinged. We are at fault. Had we acted differently, had we explained things to him rather than simply expecting him to know his place, perhaps this could have been avoided.’

‘So how do we stop him?’ I asked, feeling more confident now. My hopes were soon dashed on the standing stones that were for ritual sacrifice in the grove.

‘We cannot.’

‘What do you mean?’ I pleaded. ‘Are we doomed? Is that it?’

‘We cannot interfere with the magic of a fellow druid.’ It was not quite an apology. ‘For all his faults, for all his sins and indiscretions, he is a druid. What you do, however, is entirely your own affair. You are almost a druid, but you are likely not bound by the laws which govern our conduct.’

‘How am I almost a druid?’

‘You are here, in Mossen Grove, talking to us,’ was the simple reply. ‘Your body merges with the earth as we speak. You have the blood of the Otherworld in your veins, and its energies flow through you. You have not exactly followed the traditional path to get here, but this is a strange time.’

‘So what can you do?’ I asked again.

‘Any spirit we encounter, we may be able to turn away,’ the voice of the First Druid offered. ‘Our relationships with the spirit courts are complex and individual. When Erasmus arrives here, we will fight his soldiers with spirits of our own.’

This was bracing, and gave me the courage to ask more. What about the fish-man elder?’ I wondered if the druids knew about this yet. Surely, I decided, they must.

‘We can free it from its bondage,’ the First Druid said, ‘but not much else. It has served most of its purpose anyway– its power over the world is what holds the aurora open. Soon, it will not need to do so any longer– the flow of energy will become so great that the aurora cannot be closed.’ I thought of the bright lights that burned like ice in the sky, and how they had been swelling like a slow-moving glacier or a fissure opening in the heavens.

‘And Erasmus?’ I said.

‘Erasmus is kept alive by two separate magics. The southerner spell that heals his injuries, we can delay a little. Grisson, however, is using the flow from here to keep him alive. We are not permitted to interfere.’ Now the voice really did sound sorrowful.

‘So you’ll just stay here and let him kill you?’

‘The tundra endures. It is true that, if Grisson succeeds in his plan, the tundra will become a playground for the spirits, and they will overfeed. We expect them to scour the land clean of human life within a generation. But the tundra endures. Once you are gone, we will still be here.’

‘But he’ll dig up your bodies, surely? He’ll dig them up and destroy them, and he’ll burn this place to the ground, or he’ll have Erasmus do it!’

Faces shifted around the glade like pieces falling into place in a jigsaw puzzle. Two green eyes winked out of clusters of sunlit leaves; a barren twig revealed itself to be an antler. Crows perched on the shoulders of the merged druid bodies, and a flourish of flowers provided a lopsided mouth. The expression formed was intent on me, but also shifted playfully inside its world and light and shadow. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘I’m from Blackmouth,’ I said seriously. ‘We have some experience with vengeful Apprentices.’

The green eyes blinked again, and vanished. Vegetation melted in the breeze, and reformed. The avatar of the druids seemed to shrug. ‘It does not matter. Without Mossen Grove we will be diminished, but not destroyed. We are part of the fabric of the world. We will fight, and we will lose, and it will not matter.’
‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘Stay,’ the voice invited me. ‘You will survive what is to come. Leave your body behind and become one with the grove. Part of you already has.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I have to stop this.’

The branches rustled, the image of a face dissolving as easily as it had gathered, like a spell of clouds. ‘Then you will die.’