Olwing

The morning sun hits me square upon my face, red on my closed eyelids. I squint one eye open, look up... There is a simple tracery of stone wrought branches above me. Forest?

My confusion lasts a bare moment. The ceiling .. . a bird pipes outside on a tree just breaking into blossom. I am in the elf-vale, and it is spring.

She walks barefoot over the lawn. To my eyes it seems that the grass itself leans towards her, yearning for the blessing touch of her feet. I cannot keep my gaze away from this dreamlike figure, breathing in the real world before me. Nor can I look over-long into the radiance of her face. I hover in a twilight of wanting and running. What she is, and what that means in the world, is too great for me today.

Once I went out on a merchant ship. A useful exercise for any of our family, even the girls, my grandfather said. Two days were enough for a child of the groves like me. Before we were out of sight of the land a summer squall blew up. The ship pitching and yawing. 

Every year of my youth I would help with the harvest. Though the work was hard, the break from our routine came like a holiday to my sister and me. Our hands and arms pungent with the scent of the plucked oranges, a mid day meal in the pools of cool shade that were cast by the dusty pines. Olives from our own estate, fresh bread, wine from our own vines. My grandfather's wealth tangible, edible.

How did I, oathbound, come to this? His mouth searches out mine under the grass-green sky. The pink and green ribbons of light arc above our heads; silent, impassive beauty. The ice in the ink black water flushes pale mint and rose. It seems to me that a different dawn rises over a grassy land far across the bay.

I walk beside him through the snow by day and I lie alongside him by night. We are seperate, yet in this extremity we become one thing. One hand cares for the other, as the old saying goes.

Another day's toil is done, watching my back, and now he is sleeping. The sound of Amlarad's deep breathing is as familiar to me as my own. In this small hide-covered shelter we are as close as twins in the womb. We are entwined by air. His outbreath becomes my inbreath. We pass the shuttle of breathing between each other, weaving an intangible cloth of ourselves.

Hill, mountain,dale or wood. I've fought in each - but a true city bred man loves good stone around him. But after so long holed up in this place, even a day or two with the big lad comes welcome. He's like bad weather - smiles one moment, then as wet and dull as a mountain in shadow. Better company than most of these northern lasses though. Which says little for him.

I feed wood into the fire, hunched deep in my cloak, face obscured. He hulks beside me. Returned to our seperate islands, there are no words now.

The firelight flickers and shapes change around us.

The shape of things can change in a flicker. In the moment of a few breaths a man could lay aside that he is stone, a women remember that she could dance.

Amlarad instructs me – 'dig deeper'.

There is a presence in the air since he pulled me from my snowbound tomb. I catch him looking at me sidelong with his steady grey eyes, as though trying to unravel a story. Then I am compelled to look at him, and he shifts quickly away, busying himself with bow or knife or wood.