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Once upon a time, a young girl said "If only." She sat outside, on a small stump of an ancient tree that had finally met it's end. "If only, I could also fly." She repeated the littany of her usual phrases.
"If only I could dance until my heart burst."
"If only I could live as part of the forest."
"If only I too were delicate and beautiful like flowers."
What the young girl didn't know, was that her constant 'If only's were always heard. And the hearing was always done by him. The one who owned the forest, the one who was the forest.
The girl stood up and shook out her threadbare, brown dress. She ran her hands through her glistening red hair that shone with bright sun kissed streaks. Her mother frowned at her as she reappeared at their home.
"And where have you been?" Her mother screeched.
"I was out in the woods, gathering berries so that you might make a pie." The child pasted a serene expression on her face.
"Well, if'n you spend too much time out there, the Green Man will snatch you up!" The older woman's hand snapped close to the girl's face and narrowly missed her nose. The girl's wide blue eyes blinked instinctively and she rushed past her mother into the one room cottage. It was hot and sticky inside, since the fire was on. And the fire added a thick haze of smoke as well. How she hated to be inside.
The girl's mother snapped. "Clara!" She barked, "Bring me them berries you got so that I can cook, don't stand there daydreaming!" The girl did as she was told.
Later that night, Clara heard the noises of the woods. She sat up, and watched outside as a tree danced in the wind. It brought her peace as nothing did to listen to them sway.
What she saw however, disrupted it. She disentangled herself from the rough wool blankets and crept from the pallet that she slept on. Her long white shift and it's sleeves were getting in the way as she crept so she shoved the sleeves up and bunched the hem about in her hand. One of the trees moving.
Not in the typical sense of course. But in the way that left Clara's eyes wide, and her mouth agape. It's roots left the ground, and it proceeded to walk into the woods, until she saw nothing else. When she didn't move, she was rewarded by the sight of a tall man walking back out, and leaning against the other tree. He was dressed in a dark green and black outfit. It was more or less a dark green tunic and black hose and a long black cowled hood.
His head snapped in her direction and she dropped to the ground unable to stop quaking with fear. What she'd just seen had scared her, a tree that walked and a man in strange garb. What more!?
His hair had been messy and tossed about, it was brown but she couldn't be sure because the moonlight can play tricks on the eyes. The fire was too dim inside to be of much help either. She crept back to her pallet as silently as possible and didn't sleep the entire night.
In the morning she put her dress back on and ran outside to the tree that was back in it's rightful place. She stared at it quizzically. Tenatively she touched the bark and then leapt back in case it struck her. It didn't move at all.
Her head tilted and she looked off into the woods. What had it been doing, and where had the man come from? She decided to find out and snuck off into the woods. They were quiet and normal and no sign of anything else unusual. She sighed, maybe she'd been having a strange dream.
But she was determined that she wasn't crazy. So she walked deeper and deeper into the woods than ever before. She walked so far that it was beginning to get dark when she spied the ring of huge massive stones. And the man was standing in the center of them. He looked exactly the same as the night before, but this time he was surrounded in a circle of eight other people, also dressed in strange robes. He, however, was the only one that wasn't wearing his.
She shrank back into the forest. The forest that had been her shelter all of her sixteen years. The same forest in which the tree that grabbed her resided. The tree hefted her ungodly far into the air and started toward the circle of stones. She thrashed about, in an attempt to get release. "RELEASE ME!!" She screeched, and the chanting from the circle immediately stopped. The man from the night before gazed at her and motioned to the tree that was carrying her.
It dropped her with an ungraceful 'ooof' onto the ground. The man crouched in front of Clara and reached out to steady her. "Do you know what we are?"
Clara nodded. "You are the Druids. The workers of Evil." She sniffed, her eyes now huge blue orbs.
He smiled, "We don't do evil. Who told you such lies?"
"My mother."
She heard a few chuckles from the circle around them.
"We live alongside the earth, and her forests," He gestured to the tree that stood there still. "And we live alongside the Fey." She squealed and tried to back away at the last statement but the tree again moved forward.
"What is wrong? You have done the same your whole life, and for that we give you this gift." He withdrew a dagger, and cut her palm, saying ancient words that the others echoed. Clara felt so strange, and she felt lighter than air. Once the though 'air' popped into her head she looked down and saw that she had become an insubstantial mist in the wind. "What have you done to me!?" Her voice echoed from afar.
The man looked at her. "Now you may live as part of the forest, dance until your heart bursts, and be as elegant and beautiful as the flowers. You are the earth and the wind, the flowers and the trees. You are now the embodiment of our mother Earth."
Clara wanted to weep, and with that thought came rain. She shook her head, and realized the one place she'd strove to escape was the one place she wanted to return to, and never could.
 The Simi Knows Best · Mon Jun 05, 2006 @ 01:29am · 0 Comments |
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