Of Guides and Glittering Flames

“I have something vitally important to tell you,” Eshin whispered in his usual dreams-and-glitter voice.

It was nighttime, and we were lying in the meadow that stretched out listlessly beneath the rose garden. The grasslands, and the woods beyond them were filled with sound: owls and cicadas and nightingales, their voices blending into one another beneath a shifting canopy of stars and the crackling rasp of our campfire that painted everything drawn near it in the sunset hues of autumn. Beyond, the grasses and the treetops, the flowers and the distant mountains, were all cast in silvered moonlight: ghost-like shapes drawn in chalk against the night.

I shifted, my head rested in his lap and my eyes resting on the fire. I turned until I was looking up at him and could reach out with an amber hand to twist the locks of his fire-golden hair.

“What is it?” I asked, although my voice felt loud and clumsy in the bonfire-tempered hush.

The flames danced apprehensively against his eyes. He took my hand in his, and the warmth of his skin reminded me of the chill held in the sharp, night air. I shivered, and he pulled me closer to him, drawing the frail, cobweb blanket up about my shoulders.

“I need to tell you,” he said again. “That everything will be all right.”

I felt, for a moment, as though he had struck the delicate keys of my soul with his elegant hands, and now my whole world reverberated with the shock of it. I looked away, gazing back into the fire, looking at anything but him. I tried to find my most convincing disaffected voice.

“Will it?”

My tone quivered. I couldn’t stop it. Once again, my voice had conspired to betray me.

Eshin gave me his most sympathetic smile and rubbed my back as though to warm me.

“I know that everything inside you is frightened and confused, my Rosalie,” he told me with compassion. “You forget, I see it because I am you, and it is because you are me that you will listen when I tell you this: With time the tempest caught inside of you will fade into a gentle rain, and not long after that everything you see, and hear, and feel, and count on will soon soften and make sense to you. They will comfort you instead of horrifying you, and the World Between will soon resolve itself into a harmony of colour and of light. Do you trust me, Rosalie?”

I swallowed hard and gazed into the fire, still far too human to dismiss such silly thoughts and feelings as the ones that ravaged at the corners of my desperately bewildered mind. Eshin caught up my hand in his, and urged again:

“Do you trust me, Rosalie?”

I nodded, and in that instant all of Eshin’s previous intensity broke like a wave that’s run ashore. He smiled, and lay back casually into the grass.

“Then everything,” he said so carelessly. “Will be all right.”

The Shadow Girl's Story

We all stepped out of the void, and to the void we must return…

I awaken in the shadows at the corners of the garden. I awaken in the darkness between the petals of the dying rose. I awaken in the gloom at the back of your mind when, at four o’clock in the morning, you wake suddenly: your heart pounding and your breath coming in short and desperate gasps, while your lover slumbers selfishly beside you.

These places are my home.

I am fear. I am the crippling terror that sneaks and skulks the wind-ridden trees. I am despondency. I am despair. I am the wall of darkness: the moment of dread on the edge of the abyss that comes with the final, breathless seconds of consciousness and life.

I have been tricked into this garden – this awful, painful place. And now the whole world hurts me.

When I rise in the morning, the smell of rotten flowers suffocates me. The hateful sunlight pains my ice-frosted eyes to tears, and I must raise a languid hand to shield myself from the pain and anguish of it all. It burns me. It tries to roast me in my skin and leave me here: nothing but a desiccated husk, a memory of life among the sugar-rotten roses.

I long for nighttime, for its careful, considerate silver light that touches without burning – like pale, rain-waxen flesh against my own.

When I sleep, I dream of the purity of deserts: the red sands wrought rose-silver by the moon, the wheeling heavens vacant and inviting high above me. I ache for the silence and the clarity of things that exist in the static-singing space between that which lives and what is dead: the viscous-growing cacti; the vultures, and the solemn-sung coyotes that feast on what is passing…On what has now all ready passed. Things that make their lives from death.

I yearn – like a young, naive girl may yearn to have her lover – for the distant, storm-raked mountains, where wind howls and rain crackles like dead leaves. Where the chill is absolute and crippling, and the only echoes left of life are the calcium-wrought fossils of the things that come up here to die – their hollow sockets staring blankly without feeling, reflecting what is yet to come… The windows to an extinct soul.

The crow croaks hoarsely with regret…

The thunder rolls…

My thoughts so often wander out of this torturous existence of noise and of decay and of painful, painful sunlight, struggling away from the shackles of existence and drifting like a ghost (Oh! What wishful thoughts those are!) down to the ocean, where the thunderous waves wear the whole world slowly down to dust. Where the white gulls scream and cry and wheel like falling angels. Where life is arduous, and hope is hard to come by. Where the heavy stamp of our mortality is pressed down hard in every single stone, and carved into the stormclouds with a bloody, rusted knife.

I dream of these places, but dream is all that I can do – chained down with ropes of flesh.

We all stepped out of the void… Only I can know how much it wants us back.

As Above, So Below

Just as it is in your world, everything in the World Between has consequences and nothing – and I mean nothing – ever goes unnoticed.

‘Unnoticed by whom?’ I hear you ask.

Well then, I shall say this: unnoticed by the powers that you mortal girls and boys may call your gods, but who we in the World Between (being as we are essentially practical and arrogant creatures) prefer to call the raw forces of Creation, both in our world and in yours.

At the end of the day, the difference is mainly one of semantics anyway.

My point in all of this is that, whichever higher forces called me to this garden (I say ‘whichever’, but, truth be told, I know exactly who he is and with time so shall you), they presented me with what you may well call a Guide, and although Eshin is really part of my own spirit clad in flesh, the label suits him well enough, and even were it not to, he’s far too good of nature to complain.

However, providing me with Eshin did bring about one rather unfortunate consequence that my mentor had not seen wax on the horizon. And so it happens that, while Eshin is with-out me, there is someone or something else that waxed within me by way of counterbalance. Something that is given voice, and voice enough to interfere.

You have met her here all ready, although you may not know it.

She speaks with a voice very much like mine, and yet also very much her own. And just as fair, sweet Eshin exists to keep me in the light, she is always there to whisper of the darkness. She is the constant threat of lamentation like the rumour of a storm in autumn air.

She has no name to call her own, but I know her as The Shadow Girl.

Eshin – A Prelude

The first time that I saw him, I was standing on the boundary where the glasshouse meets the garden, with a basket of cut lavender hooked absently over my arm. Beyond the summerhouse, the land rolls lazily away over a lush, grass-covered bank – the gentle, lilting waters of the stream pressing an uneven line into its swell beneath the shady spread of an ancient oak – and down into a summer’s meadow filled with wild flowers.

The storm of days before had long since given way into the pure stillness of a welcome, sun-drenched afternoon, and as I looked across the garden, the sun was warm as heated gold upon my skin.

He was walking in the meadow with his hands lost in his pockets – a hazy smudge of white and gold against the flowered green. I knew I should be frightened by his presence, that I should be bothered somehow by the first sight of someone else lost deep within my paradise, but somehow I simply could not manage it. Somehow, I looked at him and all I felt was love.

He was walking closer to me now – white linen shirt open at the neck, waves and curls of gilded hair drifting on his cheeks, intertwined with poppies, carnations and cornflowers as blue as his dream-filled eyes. Those eyes were so desperately distant as he walked towards me, gazing out across the valley towards the indistinct shadows of the mountains.

I knew his name, and before I had the time to wonder where that knowledge came from, I found it on my lips:

“Eshin…”

My voice was little more than a breezy whisper, lost easily beneath the birdsong, bee-flight and bubble of the stream, but in that instant he looked up at me. He caught my gaze and I felt a dreadfully ecstatic wave of peace wash over me like blossom-fall.

He smiled, and before I knew what I was doing, I had set my basket down into the grass and I was walking down the bank towards him.
Perhaps an hour later, and not another word has passed between us two. Now we are lying on the grassy bank beside the stream, just out of reach of the shadow-hands cast down upon the grass by the canopy of oak leaves. The languid peace of everything soaks us like sunshine, warming us and painting us shades of idle gold. I am playing with his doll-like curls of wheat-gilt hair, and he does little more than look at me with vague and careless eyes.

Finally, the sound of horses calling sweeps up to us through meadow grass and gives me all the strength I need to speak again, although my voice is temperate as the stream.

“Who are you?” I say, although now the question drifting through my mind is given voice, it doesn’t seem important. And so I find myself adding: “What are you doing here with me?”

“You know my name,” he answers, his voice as distant and as dulcet as his eyes. “I heard you say it once before, or rather, I felt it as you spoke it.”

He turns away enough to roll lazily onto his back, his hands linked loosely behind his head and one knee bent off of the ground. Lying in the grass with a poet’s poise and elegance.

“My name is Eshin,” he says, as though I had forgotten. “And I am you, my Rosalie. I am a part of you made flesh. And I am here to comfort you. I am here to help you through the dark.”

Our Narratress Introduces Herself

By now, dear reader, I should think that you are awfully curious as to who I am exactly, or rather, who it is I claim to be. Well then, allow me to resolve any confusion that may have crept into your mind.

In this place, they call me ‘The Lady of the Autumn Flowers’, but once… once I had a mortal name, and once upon a time, I was very much like you.

Now, however, I have become a part of what we call ‘The World Between’: a place where waking reason has no meaning, a place where you prepare yourself to give up your body and your sense so that you may one day understand what both those things may mean, and so that you may better understand the world in which you live.

My little slice of the World Between is the Rose Garden – a place that you already know almost as well as I. There are many other secrets hiding in the World Between, and if you travel with me long enough then I have no doubt in my mind that you shall see a few of them. In the Time to Come, I shall take you with me to court with ancient Faerie Kings and Queens. We shall dance with animals made flesh around the fires in the fields, pick tiny shells out from the fathoms far beneath the ocean, and braid alpine flowers into our hair high up among the clouds themselves. I shall take you with me as I call on dear friends and quarrel with those who set themselves against me, you shall meet those who teach and guide me as well as those placed in my care, and you shall learn that I – like you – can laugh and cry and love and hope and hurt as well as anyone.

And maybe, just maybe, I shall let you walk with me into your own world and play what games we will with the minds of mortal girls and boys.

Forget what your Waking World has told you… You are stepping into the World Between – A place of dreams, of magic and of madness and of moonlight…

My name is Lady Rosalie, and I am utterly enchanted to meet you.

The Summerhouse

This octagonal mesh of iron and glass…

The door and lower panes of this place are painted with a climbing rose - all greens and reds, thorns and leaves and flowers.

I turn the handle…and step inside.

I hang my dripping sunhat by the door.

In here, the air smells of turned earth and rosewater, incense and candlewax and sweet, ripe fruit.

The door swings shut behind me.

A rattle of metal and glass…

The summerhouse is filled with little terracotta pots and small, chipped teacups that have been set to catch the rain that falls in fat and noisy drops. Shelves of pressed flowers and tiny seedlings. Candles and lavender. Strings of beads and shells and mirrorglass. The floor scattered with a thousand hand-sewn cushions.

On a wicker table, a basket brims with strawberries, beside an open book of poetry (left half-remembered and momentarily unattended) and a cup of hot, black tea steaming thoughtfully into the storm-chilled air.

The rain rattles on the glass. Lightning illuminates the clouds and makes them look like a smoke-painted stained glass window that's been rendered on the sky…

A couch or divan hidden beneath a thousand cushions rests lazily beside the table. Still shivering and soaked, I lie down. I wrap myself in patchwork quilts and doze among the drying flowers until I too am dry and tender once again.

When I wake, the day has long since faded. With the waning of the sky, this place has filled itself with a different sort of light. A thousand candles drip their wax onto the table and the floor. Their flames unashamedly naked, or enfolded in lanterns made of painted glass, they paint the room in a honeyed wash of warmth and changing colour. On the shelf, a jar of captured fireflies shifts and glows with living light.

The summerhouse casts its stained glass light into the gardens, calling ethereal, fluttering ghost moths towards it as the rain gives way to clear-crystal night: the high, dark clouds crossing the starscape far, far above my small, glass house.

An owl hoots in the valley. The garden is filled with the song of nightjars and crickets.

The nighttime smells of lavender and honey…

The feather-down around me is soft and warm and comforting. The garden shifts and shapes itself around me like a quilt.

I smile.

I am home.

Welcome to the Rose Garden

A summer's storm is breaking all around me, and the air is washed clean with birdsong and with thunder. The garden has long since become Nature's battleground, where the ivy and the rose join forces to contend against the honeysuckle and the clematis for possession of the ruined walls, the sagging trellises and the long-forgotten arbours. Cornflowers, poppies and wild jasmine stretch themselves out languidly upon the earth, overflowing from the hollow shells of former flowerbeds. The brambles and the ferns creep silently through the long, seeding grasses. The rain-soaked air is heavy and fragrant with shimmering, golden drifts of pollen.

I run through the garden, wet through and laughing at the rain, my dripping sunhat in one hand and my eyes constantly distracted by the quivering silver of the sky. The ground is forgiving underfoot but for the occasional thistle clinging to the path, but the long, wet grass lashes at my legs as I push myself on with a dreamer's logic through the fast-falling storm.

Deeper in the garden, I can hear the sound of running water. To my left, the wall is more complete. It holds back a hillside with its stubbornness, but it cannot hold back the silver stream that glimmers and glints in the rain-light, falling over the dust-weathered bricks and into a pool at their feet before weaving its way into the garden. As I cross over a small, red bridge, I can see the tadpoles and the tiny fish that swim and swarm in the water. A heron stands drowsily amidst the reeds and ruined statues, beside a weeping willow tree that sways and sings with windchimes.

The gravel clustered together in the memory of a path cracks like split coals beneath bare feet…

A bullfrog croaks.

The sky above me spiders and trembles with raw lightning.

The rain runs down my spine and makes me shiver.

At the back of the garden are the remains of one final, fast-dissolving wall, and beyond it the ground falls away steeply over rocks and scrub down into a vast valley that waxes moonlight-on-water pale in the rain.

Far, far below, a river slithers through the valley floor, and beyond it, there are small, scattered snatches of woodland and great, smoke-coloured mountains stretching up impossibly high in the rain haze against a storm-wracked sky.

The windchimes shiver…

In the valley, horses shelter from the rain, wrought impossibly tiny by the sheer scale of it all. A whinny catches in the funnel of the mountains and rides the wind up to my garden. That same wind brings with it the smell of the woods and weary mountains: pine needles and leaf litter; gorse and heather and stormfall.

The summerhouse is closer now: a lattice of glass and metal, flowers and paint…

It is time to step out of the rain.

Of Ruined Walls and Wildflowers

In the heart of the forest, a high, wrought iron fence stretches out beneath the trees and the pouring summer rain. Beyond it, the world of birdsong and fragrant pine gives way. A small path meanders lazily up a blank clothed in tall grass and wild flowers: overgrown, little more than a fresh-washed strip of hard-baked earth between the lazy blossom.

I stand on tiptoe to peer through the bars…

The thunder rolls…

At the crown of the bank, there is some kind of garden. Once, it looks as though it may have been something that was delicate and carefully tended by tender, loving hands (something that was apart from the world that lies around it, something… private), but now the red bricks that once enfolded it have weathered and crumbled down to ruin: the slumped remnants of a wall; a scattering of rough, rain-polished, red ochre-coloured pebbles; a stray scrap here and there of powdery, honey-coloured mortar.

The garden has grown wild…

The black metal bars of the railing before me sing out like well-struck crystal in the rain as I walk along beside it and run my storm-slick fingers along its rungs.

At last, I find the gate into the garden: wrought iron, twisted into a metal painting of a climbing rose within its arching frame.

I take the rusting key from my dress pocket…

I turn it in the lock…

The gate protests with centuries of disuse as I press myself against it. Slowly, it shudders open.

The sky is perfect silver-grey…

I step into the garden.

The Dreamer's Key

In my dream, I see myself as clearly as I may see you standing here beside me, although I do not dare remove myself from the hemisphere of my own perception. Perhaps it would be better to say that I am aware of myself: that I am certain of drawing a distinction between my waking self and the self that stands amidst the pines.

My hair is long and loose - the colour of sunlight on fresh conkers - beneath a large, straw sunhat. The fresh-falling rain streams off the wide, slack brim and makes the ivy-coloured ribbon tied about it flap and click as I run through the forest in this sudden summer storm.

I am wearing a white, muslin dress: sleeveless and long skirted and so, so simple that it is almost girlish. The cloth is wet and cloying as the fog or ocean foam, it sticks to my calves and ankles as I run as though it wants to trip me. There are deep, secret pockets cut into the skirt (the kind where children may collect and hoard their stash of string and shells and soft, pressed flowers), but all I find in mine is a large and rusted iron key that's turning cold and slick and coppery in all this rain.

The lightning spreads across the hidden sky and turns my pine needle canopy into a backlit skin, spidered with tiny veins of forest green…

For a moment, I feel as though I am beneath the pelt of the wood, beneath the skin of the very earth itself. I feel as though I am a wanderer in the body of some living thing far greater and more awesome than I could ever fathom inside my simple, nearly human mind.

The peals of thunder sound like church bells...

My dress sticks against my skin...

I hitch up my skirts... And I run deep into the trees.

A Dream Beneath the Fragrant Pines

I dream…

The door of my home stands closed before me: interlocking teeth of wood and metal, bared and barring me from the path I know must lie beyond. I reach out a single languid, lazy hand and push against it. With the creak of ancient, resigned hinges, it gives way…

I step into the forest…

The pine trees seem to stretch forever against the hazy, unseen sky: their lower branches bare; their weathered bark as warm as weathered hands; their needles forming and interwoven latticework of fragrant green far, far above my head and a carpet of sharp, forgiving umber velvet beneath my eager feet.

The birds and insects call out to one another through the space between the trees. A warm breeze whispers its secrets across the forest floor. The sun sinks low and paints the dusty forest haze with its subtle tones of gold. The bracken curls about itself with apprehension.

The day itself hangs in the balance…

The thunder rolls…