On the Night of the Full Moon

In the meadow beneath the wheeling stars, Eshin sleeps before the camp-fire that cracks and flutters in the fragrant, singing moonlight – filled with nightjars and wild flowers and whispering trees, all cast in tinted silver. The warm light of the fire turns his skin to glowing amber and his hair to fronds of golden bracken painted in an autumn sunset. There is a peace in him that stills and awes the mind, but I cannot sleep beside him...

... My mind too occupied elsewhere...

And so I rise from the seeding grass and heady flowers, and I walk into the night. I pass into the meadow...

... And out of all remembering...

... And into the velvet woods, rapt in the eerie moonlight and carpeted with daffodils and the silver-violet, starlit bluebells. The pollen hangs like anticipation in the cool air of nighttime: fragrant and intoxicating, calling me away from worry, away from bitter heartache and to the tender comfort of the waxen embrace of darkness. The grass and flowers are rich as velvet between my toes, and the nightingales are the forest's siren song...

... I pass deeper beneath the lazy, groping fingers of the trees where phantoms drift and mist creeps tentatively between the heads of blowsy bluebells...

A clearing. The grass grown long and wild, unkempt and untempered by the interfering hand of man but for the sky-washed, dusty purple of the altar stone, half-eaten by the grasses at the centre of the clearing, and reflecting back the hungry light of an already swollen moon.

Something moves me with all the deliberacy of a puppeteer. I am heavy and tired by the starlight. I stretch out against the altar... And I sleep.

I am woken by the gentle pressure of hushed voices like the ocean on my ears. I rise as the dreamer must surely rise from sleep, to see a face above me. She is far older than I believe I ever was, with raven hair and a raven's dress. She is crowned by the crescent moon. She smiles. There are others gathered near her, like shadows trying unsuccessfully to conceal themselves in darkness. I hear them. I feel them. I feel the pressure of their minds...

“I am in the Waking World,” I say, before I have chance to find my faerie voice, the voice that says: 'I am above you. I do not concern myself with mere statements, child. What I speak is my demand and you shall obey me, mortal!' I shall regret not finding that voice then, I know it too well even now.

“Yes,” she says, this woman, this moon-crowned, raven queen. “Tell me your name, faerie.”

I am compelled to answer.

“I am the lady Rosalie,” I tell her before I am indignant: “Now tell me, dreamer, what is yours?”

“I am Selene,” she tells me. “And you will do my bidding one year and one day from this silver-sculpted night... Although perhaps we may also become friends with time.”

“Selene,” I say to her, smiling to find my faerie voice at last. “It is not I shall do your bidding, but you yourself, and what is more you shall do mine besides... Although perhaps we may also become friends, with time.”

She smiles back. She does not seem concerned, but then... neither am I.