- Local time
- Today 9:26 PM
- Messages
- 6
- Pronouns
- He, him
Long ago when I still had eyes and could see all the colors of the fading Spring move into that darker, chillier season- I was selected to be in the Autumn Oracle Coven. We read the forest like some read bones, symbols or leaves. It spoke to us in its own language, its own form of color and light. Showing us signs of the coming winter, or other coming storms.
For years it told us of good harvest, bad harvests, the leaves on the spirit-mother trees told the Coven who would die and who would be born at our hearth. Those of the Oracle could rush the revelations, could not stand for heat or cold accelerating the confessions of the leaves. Each hue, each shade had to be waited, and for that time we of the Coven would begin the ardent rituals.
But it was on that one terrible Autumn, that things were not the same in our community. The Fat-Harvest fields began to grow thin. And even without the leaves turning, we knew something was wrong. Our crops sprung up already withered, gourds eaten by tar- too many flies and maggots about the rows and rows of our food. The people turned to us, their Autumn Oracle, and we descended into the Amber Forests to find the first hints of the turning of the leaves.
We were met with absolute horror.
Before our eyes the leaves went from green straight to an iron-black only seen in the coldest of forges. The trees exhaled their lives into leaves of shadow and midnight. Those of the Coven gasped as the pitch expanded and infected outward toward the villages and towns.
Unlike other seasons, there were no subtleties in the leaves, no slight differences of color and shade where we would interpret and judge for the coming epoch. This was utter darkness beckoning, inviting death.
It was no surprise what was to come it had happened ever millennia or so, the Elders warned us.
The onyx heralded the coming of the Beyond-Winter, where the world descended into a pit of despair and hunger. Then the Hide-Tribes pushed their way into our valley. Wearing pelts and bone for armor, they spilled over us like the black spilled over the trees. We heard shouts of villages or towns fall to their pestilence, to the sword or axe of the barbarian scum. The winter harder, colder, wiping out the weak and the sick, making hunger even more miserable- as we watched the leaves continue through their cycle of black.
Too much light brings darkness we always feared, so some of us in the Coven held onto too much darkness brings a speck of light.
While the Hide-Tribes continued to kill, burn, rape and consume us- but some stopped and settled in. Those left, closed a fist and became a mob. That mob stabbed or drowned a single invader, another surrendered to us, weeping...
Thus those Hide-Tribes blended into us and in that blending we saw the hints of the first green blades on the trees.
And that is how we became who we are on this island.
For years it told us of good harvest, bad harvests, the leaves on the spirit-mother trees told the Coven who would die and who would be born at our hearth. Those of the Oracle could rush the revelations, could not stand for heat or cold accelerating the confessions of the leaves. Each hue, each shade had to be waited, and for that time we of the Coven would begin the ardent rituals.
But it was on that one terrible Autumn, that things were not the same in our community. The Fat-Harvest fields began to grow thin. And even without the leaves turning, we knew something was wrong. Our crops sprung up already withered, gourds eaten by tar- too many flies and maggots about the rows and rows of our food. The people turned to us, their Autumn Oracle, and we descended into the Amber Forests to find the first hints of the turning of the leaves.
We were met with absolute horror.
Before our eyes the leaves went from green straight to an iron-black only seen in the coldest of forges. The trees exhaled their lives into leaves of shadow and midnight. Those of the Coven gasped as the pitch expanded and infected outward toward the villages and towns.
Unlike other seasons, there were no subtleties in the leaves, no slight differences of color and shade where we would interpret and judge for the coming epoch. This was utter darkness beckoning, inviting death.
It was no surprise what was to come it had happened ever millennia or so, the Elders warned us.
The onyx heralded the coming of the Beyond-Winter, where the world descended into a pit of despair and hunger. Then the Hide-Tribes pushed their way into our valley. Wearing pelts and bone for armor, they spilled over us like the black spilled over the trees. We heard shouts of villages or towns fall to their pestilence, to the sword or axe of the barbarian scum. The winter harder, colder, wiping out the weak and the sick, making hunger even more miserable- as we watched the leaves continue through their cycle of black.
Too much light brings darkness we always feared, so some of us in the Coven held onto too much darkness brings a speck of light.
While the Hide-Tribes continued to kill, burn, rape and consume us- but some stopped and settled in. Those left, closed a fist and became a mob. That mob stabbed or drowned a single invader, another surrendered to us, weeping...
Thus those Hide-Tribes blended into us and in that blending we saw the hints of the first green blades on the trees.
And that is how we became who we are on this island.