to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
It is already full autumn, this high in the Arma mountains.
The aspens have all turned to shivering gold, the maple leaves are scarlet and falling. August is glad for the bite of the air, despite his summer-thin coat; it forces him awake after his long trek from the city. And he is glad, too, when at last he reaches the little cottage tucked back into the heather, squatting into the hill with a grass roof and weathered gray shingles.
He knocks, though he doesn’t need to; August knows the old hedge-witch’s birds have told her of his presence. Anyway, Macha has known him since he was a spindle-legged colt. He waits for a moment, watching the birds as they pluck at seeds from the bobbing heads of sunflowers that have begun to spend their splendor, wondering which are her companions. None of them are out of the ordinary - a few goldfinches, a small tittering group of sparrows, a dark-eyed junco scratching at the dirt. Yet it seems to him that when he looks away, a dozen pairs of small black eyes shift onto him.
“Come in, boy,” calls a voice, as rough and deep-throated as the bark of a century-old oak. The door swings open, and August steps through.
And out again, a few minutes later, huffing a laugh under his breath. His mother had visited Macha, and her mother before her; he likes to imagine that the witch had been the same even then, her kindness disguised by coarseness, as brusque as she is benevolent. In exchange for the herbs he asked of her (for sleep unburdened by dreams), she’d sent him back out into the woods to gather chaga and reishi mushrooms from their homes on birch and hemlock trees.
It’s peaceful in the forest, in the warm and slanting sunlight. A breeze rifles through, shivering the dry leaves against one another in a sighing kind of music. Other animals browse among the leaf litter; squirrels scream their disapproval at him, and a trio of deer observe him with their dark eyes, almost alien in their mixture of elegance and strangeness. The reishis are easy to find, bright red arcs growing like shelves on the bark of sleepy hemlocks, and soon his knapsack is heavy with them; the chaga prove more difficult.
August is making his way through the bracken, toward a copse of birch trees, when a murder of crows begin cawing from the canopy. He pauses, the ferns tickling against his knees, and looks back over his shoulder, as solemn and stately as a stag, gilded by sunlight.
@open | for anyone! with some EXP earning
