chronomouse

And many told him:
Leave behind your dead, to the wind their ashes and their spirits to songs,
Let their bodies rest and their memory go,
For where it takes them no breath, no touch, no presence belongs.
But he refused, he burned his way through the bones and tombs,
He said it was justice to those whom death had wronged.

In his words:
For those who bow to the fear and folly, they should stumble and fall,
And pick their crumbles at the table of rich, where forever they crawl.
But the minds of great shan’t be thralls to the insult of death.
He swore that night to descend beyond and below, for a soul:
And out of abyss, voiceless and dark, he summoned a wraith.

All people learn:
To leave, to forget, to turn away and yield, for the Lord is taking his toll,
But he wore it as armor, like a shield, he shut it down and let it burn:
For remember great kingdom once – they knew the right way to mourn
They left it alone, adorned in gold, and called for the fire and beasts from below
(Beasts roared at their call!)

He sought what was hidden
All the secrets that rot at the roots, at the pits, in the mines and wells,
To collect all the voices, all darkness, all broken and mended in deserted nests,
The name of her, horned and silken, clad in white dress, whose head never rests,
Wind bore it like a plague, far from the dormant depths where she dwells,
From the places of dead, to the world of men which before was forbidden.

Deep, deep is the oldest of all forests: like an ocean abyss is it cold, and pitch-black, and full of strange creatures and ancient relics that rest below its waves. Or not like an ocean at all, but a sky instead – darkness mirrored, countless and infinite between the piercing torches of stars, breathless and yet inhabited by things lifeless, by speeds unconquered.
Turn of a coin (turn of a page; turn of a wind. Turn of a tide;) – and on the other side is that forest, growing out of the bottom of the sea and the height of the moon-dome. Its roots struggling like living hands, grappling for soil, its ground full of whispers and moaning, the trees reach out with their innumerate fingers and catch the wind as a bear would catch fish in a creek. They grumble and curse and cry, and their leaves and mosses curl and fall and flow, and fail to fly. Winged wood, angel-forest: thousands of wings, hundreds of eyes, a shape outside of mind and beyond conscience.
A bird. Between black and ink and grey, its feathers a shade of iron ore. Its beak is open and soundless. It looks around. Eyes are curious and curiously colored, of no color in particular and of all colors. The eyes search. A worm!.. It sweeps down into the writhing of the roots. It attacks it with its beak.
There is no worm. The roots are smooth and slippery like eels, and the tree is old and spiteful with age. But so is the bird; the bird’s feathers rust with centuries. It crushes and breaks the nest of the roots with its beak. No worm! – but something bright, something wonderful and sweet and shining.
A red berry rolls out, and the bird marvels. How warm is it, how beautiful, full of all that is foreign in the forest. In the wet and slippery and dark, a gleam of living fire swirls within the berry, and the tree shakes in impotent rage having lost it.
What the tree and the bird don’t know, or have known and forgotten, or know and don’t understand, is that the fiery gleam is no berry. Beneath the roots, sleeps a thing older than even the forest itself. Its eye is now glowing in the bird’s beak, but in its slumber it cares not. Far will the bird carry it, over many lands of many creatures, over the mountains and planes and waters, in the countries of living and in the places of dead.
What it knows, and the bird forgets (and will forget again, over and over): the eye always returns. The bird rises; a shadow falls over the earth, and the freeze crawls beneath its wings like a hound.

***
Mabrin is the name of the bird; the forest is made of children of the Black Tree that grew in the desert of the red and white sand, with streams of fire flowing from its roots.

Not all the creatures of dark fear fire and iron; those who dwell deep in the northern swamps, those who haunt the bogs, who lie dormant in peat lands under the water and turf and rustling reed – they fear no metal nor fire nor human hand.
They crawl sometimes out of their dark sleep, flesh and blood and bone of the mires: peat that gives birth to the hottest flames, sword iron from the deep marshes, and the dead ditch water in which so many little things live. Not the hounds of heather from the milder places, and not the wild spirits from the greener and brighter fenlands would stand up to them; those are creatures of an ancient age, crude and horrible. They know of no spells, and no magic would stop them; their minds have only two things in them – either the sleep under the bogs, or the terrible hunger when the time comes to hunt.
They are different kinds, all of the same design: too crude, too base, all equal in their ugliness. Long worms clad in steely scales, not grace nor greatness of their later kin; or the heavy built beasts that look as if they were born of the mud and stone; or the hissing and poisonous birds, giant and bald, blind as bats and relentless in their chase, who eat the dead and haunt the living.
They, in the night of the year, take rule over the wetland. The iron lock would fall down at their touch, the fires do not harm them, and all the tricks and tools would be useless. Against a blind force a force would win, and nothing else – and nothing less.
***
An old woman bent over the pot, threw a couple of skinny fishes into soup and began stirring it. It was dark, cloudy, and smelled of marsh water.
“Worst things happen in the autumn,” she muttered. “All the good ones fall asleep, and the bad ones rise up. The sun goes away, looks on the other side – ‘tis far now, the Gold One, on the other side of the winter. And all from the ice realm are sneaking back. They will stay until He comes back from his journey… then they’ll run.”
She laughed dry and wicked.
“They, bunch of cowards. Hunger got them, their place is cold and empty, and do they want to come here!.. oh, yes, them sly rats! I see them! I get them, old as I am.”
Her fur coat hung from the wall, long and black with silvery dapples on the sides.
“Where should I go, huh?” she says, “Not to the fog place, that one is a weak land, poor soil. Not to the high one of grey rocks. No, I shall stay and live where I belong.”
Dark, bitter triumph colors her face as she says it.

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