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Walking Alone By Moonlight

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AliceTheOracle
Dreamer
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Aug 01, 2021 3:44 pm
Character Name(s): Alice

Walking Alone By Moonlight

Post by AliceTheOracle »

I. - The Orchid Procession

The Seer learns of the twisting language that hides within the roots of flowers

The house in which the Seer lived was a great manse, filled with many rooms, most beautifully furnished and left empty. The estate's grounds were grand and sprawling; they rolled with fields and woods and ruins; they were filled with small and secret places that were old, forgotten, overgrown, sunken, buried, burned, boarded up or sealed away. Outside the grounds, the woods thickened and howled, the hills clenched their teeth until they became mountains, and rivers drew borders where men would not walk. There was much to be seen, and few who would see it, because the people of the shard had given themselves over to their houses and cities. The Seer did not fit well among them.

The people with whom she shared the house were the sort who slept at night and lived by day, and so she rarely saw them. She spent her nights wandering the old and empty rooms, until she began to feel like a ghost, a thing which haunts rather than dwells. Restless, she began to spend her nights walking the grounds. This helped her to feel less like a ghost and more like a will-o'-the-wisp. Alone, walking beneath moonlight, she felt illuminated.

Once, when the moon was waxing half-full, she found in the woods of the grounds a path that, like a tongue, lead her into a dark mouth of bending willows. At the end of that path she found a garden, surrounded on all sides by tall, old trees with long boughs that shut out the sky. Fences and arches of wrought iron were arranged labyrinthine, wreathed in the corpses of once-glorious wisteria. All of the plots were dead or empty, except for one, which was filled with orchids. They were vibrant, vivacious and healthy, and their petals were lush and varicolored. They seemed to shiver with life and radiance, the moreso because their plot, their island of life, was lit perfectly by a singular pillar of moonlight that breached the choking canopy. The Seer stayed with them, watching them glow, until the sun nearly rose.

The next night she returned. The plot of vibrant orchids was empty. She cast about, confused, only to find that they had moved. The trees had bent and swayed, and the canopy had shifted, and tonight the moon shone upon this plot instead, and the orchids had chased its light. Night after night she began to return, finding each time that the orchids had moved again, always to stay with the moonlight as it traveled. For a rarity, she went home early, so that she could return during the day and attempt to observe.

The next day, she witnessed the orchids' procession. Around twilight, when the sun was low and the ever-shifting canopy had settled for the night, the orchids began to bow their heads. They pressed their flowers into the soil and begin to haul their roots from the ground. It seemed to her a very painful and laborious process. The impression was not helped by the lurching, tortured way the orchids began to drag themselves across the soil and flagstone toward their new plot. They appeared to her like wounded soldiers, ruin-kneed, dragging themselves in agony toward triage. Their roots bled ground-water across the stones of the path. She knelt close, studying the ground-water trails, and became transfixed. She was filled with the unaccountable sensation that in those trails, whose lines described bizarre and visceral arabesques along the flagstone, there was a language she could not read, but which nevertheless was filled with profound depth of meaning.

She returned the next day with sheets of paper and a pot of ink. She waited until the orchids began their procession, and in their path she poured a line of ink along the flagstone, then lay the sheets of paper on the ground. The orchids dragged their roots across the ink, and then along the paper, and thus created for the Seer the first written account of their flower-language. She thanked the orchids, collected the pages, cleaned what she could of the ink from their petals, and returned home. Thereafter, she could never find the garden again, no matter how she searched.

She spent nights poring over the pages, staring as if mesmerized by the lashes of watery ink that crossed them. More and more she became certain of the hidden language therein, though she could never read it. She also discovered, once when she fell asleep at her desk with the pages lit by the moon, that the language, like the orchids, would move. Ink thought dry became unsettled, shifting about on the page as though restless. She had hoped to study longer, to learn the language, but this revelation filled her with pangs of guilt and sympathy. She soaked the pages in water, so that the imprisoned ink was drawn out, and she used that water to feed the tulips planted at the feet of the house's eastern wing.

Days later, the tulips had disappeared. She regretted that she had not witnessed their exodus. She would have liked to follow them.

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Last edited by AliceTheOracle on Sun Sep 05, 2021 2:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"Her feet half-rested half-floated upon the floor; Earth scarcely held her down, so fast was she becoming a thing of dreams. No love of hers for Earth, or of the children of Earth for her, had any longer power to hold her there."
User avatar
AliceTheOracle
Dreamer
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Aug 01, 2021 3:44 pm
Character Name(s): Alice

Re: Walking Alone By Moonlight

Post by AliceTheOracle »

II. - The Rabbits' Waltz

The Seer witnesses an uncanny performance, and receives a gift

On the distant northern side of the estate grounds, up some hills and then down several more, was a forest of birch trees. The tall, thin trees with their high branches were like a garden of grand autumnal columns, and all that could be seen of the house back over the hill was the top of the library tower. Many nights the Seer marveled at the way the trees slivered the moonlight and dashed it through the ghost-pale bark and across the forest floor. The trees gave one another wide berths, leaving her plentiful space for running and dancing. It was a leaf-strewn nocturnal ballroom that unfolded across the hills.

One night, in the forest, she came upon a colony of rabbits, sighting them before they noticed her. She took care not to alert them, content to watch them at their play from a distance. They seemed to her to romp and leap and bound with a joy seldom attributed to animals, an almost intelligent euphoria. Then, as she watched, a hungry-looking wolf loped toward them. She saw several of the rabbits notice the wolf, turning their head toward it to see, but she was surprised to find that they did not break and run. The wolf seemed equally surprised by the nonchalance of its intended prey, and became cautious. The Seer watched as the rabbits, in full awareness of the looming threat, continued their play undaunted. There was, however, a change: they seemed no longer simply to be playing, but dancing. They moved in mercurial coordination-- circling, tumbling, darting, wheeling, rolling, all in tandem with one another. They formed circles and traded partners, just as if conducting a ballroom waltz. She stared as though hypnotized. The wolf did too.

Their dance wore on, growing stranger by the moment. The rabbits began to contort their bodies in ways that seemed impossible. A duet braided themselves around one another. Two crashed headlong together, but kept moving through each other like small, warm ghosts. Four pressed their faces together at a single point, and their skin seemed to shimmer and then crystallize, until they appeared like the wings of a dragonfly, buzzing and flickering and dazzling. The wolf, visibly unnerved, turned and fled. The dance drew to a close.

The Seer felt a tugging in her heart and her eyes, like that she had felt when she'd witnessed the orchids dragging themselves across the moon-shadowed garden. She felt that there was more to the dance beneath what she could see: the writhing letters and symbols of a language older than speech. She felt smothered by a caul of human limitation, and the feverish closeness with which she'd come to epiphany made her heart ache and filled her brain and her throat with the wrenching gravity of a nameless, unmet need. In her reverie, she did not notice that the rabbits had begun to stare at her.

Finally, moments later, she looked and saw the way they regarded her. There was no fear, but nor was there wariness, nor even threat. They seemed to look upon her with a kind of gentle scrutiny, weighing her by some secret measure. All together they turned and began to hop away, but at a pace that allowed her to keep up with them, if she so chose. She did.

The path the rabbits took through the forest was winding, and the moon played faerie tricks on the Seer's sight. By the time they reached the rabbits' warren she had lost all sense of place. They were in a grotto of plentiful small hills, trenches and creeks and little shoulder-high cliffs overhung by curtains of tree-root and ivy. The rabbits took up perches and watched the Seer. One of the curtains parted, revealing a hole leading to a burrow that was wide enough for her to enter if she stooped. The rabbits seemed to want her to enter, and so she did.

She went down through darkness, and emerged into a small cave lit by curious mosses. The center of the burrow was dominated by a kind of umbilicus, a column of tangled and ancient-looking roots that grew down from the ceiling and penetrated the floor. At the center of the amalgam was the skull of a rabbit many times larger than any rabbit she had ever seen. The roots wove through the skull's mouth and eyes, and in places seemed even to merge with it, old bone and living root becoming a single contiguous substance. There was a light in the depths of the skull's eyes the color of sunset that comforted the Seer. Then a voice resounded from the skull's unmoving maw, and she knew from its gentleness and richness and caprice that this was the Mother of the rabbits. "Daughter," said the voice, ringing like an Elysian chime in the cavernous dark. The Seer's heart swelled, because she knew at once that the Mother of Rabbits saw within her, knew the truth of her, knew to call her 'daughter' and not 'son.' The two began to converse. This is the exchange they held:

Mother: "Daughter."
Seer: "Yes."
Mother: "But no daughter of mine."
Seer: "No."
Mother: "But nor are you a daughter of man."
Seer: (Silence.)
Mother: "You do not argue."
Seer: "No."
Mother: "Then how do you name the skin you wear?"
Seer: "I don't. I am lost. My skin is nameless. Sometimes I feel I have no home anywhere, among anyone."
Mother: (Laughter.)
Seer: (Silence.)
Mother: "I will give your skin a name. Just one, and you can wear it if you like. Will you run, daughter, as my children do?"
Seer: "... yes."
Mother: "Will you leap?"
Seer: "Yes."
Mother: "Will you dance to dazzle the eyes of wolves?"
Seer: "Yes."

The Seer began to feel a grasping pressure at her ankles. Roots were rising up from the ground, coiling serpentine around her legs. They slid up her body, rising to the level of her heart. One pressed against her skin, and there was a moment of pain as it seemed to bite, slipping under, traveling through her ribs to seek her heart. She trembled, and she gasped, but the pain was like the gratifying ache of tired muscles, and when her mouth welled up with blood it tasted the way that love is described to feel in ballads. Then the roots retreated. She wiped her mouth but found no blood; she examined her chest but found no wound.

"Run home," said the Mother Rabbit. "Run without stopping. Sleep, and dream. And dance, my daughter." So the Seer ran from the burrow, ran from the warren, ran through the forest for what felt like hours, until once again she could see the top of the library tower over the sloping hills. She never tired, not until she climbed back into bed and fell fast asleep, her heart beating faster than it ever had.

She dreamt that night of a forest of ghost trees and a beach of hematite sand and sky the color of plum and fire. In the dream, and indeed in every dream she ever had thereafter, she carried with her a wooden mask, carved into the likeness of a rabbit. Her skin had been given a name, though the name had no letters, and could not be pronounced. It was the first word she ever learned in the language of drifting flowers and dancing rabbits, and the word had changed her, and now her dances would dazzle the eyes of wolves.

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"Her feet half-rested half-floated upon the floor; Earth scarcely held her down, so fast was she becoming a thing of dreams. No love of hers for Earth, or of the children of Earth for her, had any longer power to hold her there."
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