Through the Orchard

In one corner of the garden, two rust and bleached wood benches turn in to face a crumbling, bubbling fountain. The flowers grow about them, and clamber slowly upwards over the dusty, sun-red bricks, but in the wall there is a doorway, and beyond the doorway is the dark.

As your eyes focus slowly in the musty, dust-strewn gloom, you could, if you looked closely, see the door that's holding back the soft and echoed sound of falling water just before you, but no doubt your attention would be easily draw up over the brick-laced stairs and into the hazy light of springtime beyond, where the breeze that lingers cool and fresh smells sweet with blossom, fruit and ripened grass.

Should you walk up and into the orchard, the air is full of evening, and the sky is full of dusk. The trees are full of blossom, and the pale moon hares gallop through the grass.

Keep walking, dreamer. Nearly there.

Keep walking through the orchard and past its centre where a cherry tree grows rich and red as plums, decked out in the pale pink of blossom. It grows grander and far taller than its cousins all around it. Walk past the low, iron rail fence that circles it. Keep walking.

On the outskirts of the orchard, there are wide and shallow, pale steps where grass has grown between the slabs. On climbing them, you find that on one side of you is a white marble rotunda, a temple wrought in pillared stone, billowing white muslin and wreaths of laurel leaves, that sings so softly with the sound of distant seas. Its beauty is endearing, but it cannot hold you for too long, for on the other side of you there is a tree that hangs its hands protectively over the velvet grass beneath it, its branches strung with lights that glimmer in the twilight.

There are two figures stretched out there beneath it against the grass and eastern silks. You know me well enough for recognition to be easy, but the other there is, thus far at least, a stranger to you. He is dark haired and with the deepest and most brooding eyes. As handsome as a wild stag. A pale silk shirt gathers hungrily about his throat, and wrists, and waist, and riding boots reach over blackened breeches. There is something in his aura, something in his very essence that seems to make the air itself quiver though with thunder, that seems to make your knees turn weak. There is something there that makes every breath of air around him shiver apprehensively with passion, power, and anticipation.

This is my Oberon...

...And I am telling him about Selene.

“This mortal girl,” he says, his voice like raw silk on skin as he strokes my hair the way a mortal man may stroke a favourite pet. “Knows more than most, I'll give you, but she is no danger to your life, my girl.”

He turns his head towards me. His breath against my skin. A mere whisper. I shudder close against him.

“She is so little more than a child playing with the dark,” he tells me. “Making shadows with her hands. You were quite correct not to recoil from her. You must react with strength. It's true that you must follow what she says, but, my girl, you will soon learn the faerie's craft of the creative interpretation of whatever she may tell you.”

A soft sound something like a laugh catches in his throat.

I smile into his shoulder.

“Now sleep,” he tells me.

And I do.