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chronomouseDeep, 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.
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.
