the moon lies bare, deflowered by force then abandoned
There is great honor found within greater silence - the quiet of a tree is noble, it is grand. Once upon a limb or two ago, I was something spectacular. I have seen so many eyes gaze upon me in wonder, in awe, and even disbelief. I know you. I have known your mothers and their mothers. I have sheltered your families for years and provided for all of that which you call your own.
What few of us who have survived you, have fallen prey to the invaders you introduced into our forests with your carelessness. We have been quiet for too long, the forests have decided in their dying quietude, that they will finally answer for their lost families. It first begins with a death, then starts a new life, mine.
I was born strange in the hollows of a one hundred year old cedar, small, white, and frail like the larvae that rend the bark from the flesh of our trees. The forest called me Duir for first four years of my tellurian life, but when the great horns of my grove began to emerge from my brow - my own grove chose to name me after some pagan story that passenger once whispered in the woods.
Cernunnos, a horned god. I am not God, but my horns reminded my family the one in the story. For this quiet, private grove had never seen horses before, they had all been seeds atop the ground, just like I once was when the Aïranacht walked our rooted paths. Those had been our mother’s, now shattered and scattered ghosts across our rootbeds. Their memories had faded just like the color of their sustenance had, no one remembered them, they were now just a part of the earth.
I was once a mother too, two thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-eight winter moons ago, I reached up to draw the stars into my many arms for the first time in my prime. I breathed in the moon, all her sorrows and her light, sighing in storms and crisp autumn airs. I cannot remember the last time I tasted silver but it has come to my understanding that the forest wants from me, different things now.
Our final journey is to understand the world which we hold so dear to us. To understand the rest of all that which we do not know. To go where our roots can not reach. We are changed over enough time. We are born into the world like the others we now share skins with. Though young and naive and so very stupid like a sapling, what we already know, we still understand. And this must be instinct, our very keys to survival.
Now I have become something perverse within nature. Something unruly and indistinct from my beech heritage. I have seen it in the water, when it rains and puddles form in the grove. Within those rain slick mirrors, quicksilver and true, I see what has changed within me. I had unbecome everything I used to always be. I am no longer an archetype of Time itself but a passenger of it instead. My journey into consciousness has begun - this is the gift of Life after death.
I am old enough to understand what I know (and I know a few things). The gravity of my situation has changed substantially, so many other factors have been absorbed into the orbit of my new world. For five years now, I have honed survival into a considerable skill, still wild and feral as the day the cedar carried me into Viride as a fauna, no longer flora.
…
“I say, the air tastes strange to me.” To the birds, he says. Two tits twitter, trill, and tip about in their trysts within the spindly branches of his horns, dead leaves flicker in the breeze which musses his mane. Cernunnos suddenly sneezes and the company ghosts him so quickly he is offended by their anxious nature, a leaf continues to tick-tick-tick-tick-tick against the base of his woody horns and he can hear it echoing in his ears from how hollow the roots are which grow beneath his skin. The pale flesh shows their veiny reaches between bone and papery striped white bark. Where Cernunnos sits comfortably in the gilded grove while late afternoon sun angles in underneath the tangles of a thick and elderly oak canopy, he is invisible.
“Do you think a storm is coming soon?” He looks up, two long thin birch trees sway back from the motion of his head. Leaves fan and feather out, some come off and glide down-down-down to the ground. Birds in neighboring branches seem to discuss whatever it is that bothers them about their living perch without much concern over Cern’s questions. He can look up and spy the sky from the bare patches in the canopy, by the amount of gray reflected in his eyes - a storm brews. He has felt it coming for days, the cold air sneaking in over the currents of a persistent summer. But now frost has come twice to him, damn near chilled every leaf off his horn, and caused Misty to go dormant for the winter. Birds flock him in his sleep in an attempt to grab whatever remains of the mistletoe’s snowy berries before there is none left for the season.
“I said, do you think a storm is coming soon!” What is different now is that Cern can no longer hear the words of the birds which used to do so much more than just sing and startle when around him. Never the less, the apostlebird group, who has grown up in his branches, still returns year after year, and in turn raises its progeny to do so as well. Unlike all the other visitors that he can no longer rely on for conversation, the apostles trustv im even in their silence. Something within their presence still soothes him, their inability to communicate with each other verbally does not prohibit Cern’s ability to understand what they want from him - what they need as well.
“Forget you, ruddy birds!” A crack of thunder sounds and Cern is up, moving and shaking with life, graceful and fluid like a leaf on the wind even in his stormy flurry. Hair flows like spidersilks in the breeze, the leaves stream like schools of fishes in the air, and the branches that carried them bend and sway as the terrulian decides his path. Cernunnos begins to press forward into the trees but his visage is so overgrown that it is not long until he becomes entangled. Grumpily, he rakes his head down and shakes the birch free from the low grabbing hands of the oak. He does not want to be in the dell when the rain starts to fall - and he will creep into the pine for the duration of it all when the weather takes a turn for the worst.
And it does. Terribly so. It is as loud as it is bright. It is as wet as it is electric. It is as active as the throes of raging spring rapids. Only bears can endure a strength like this - Cernunnos has seen it himself.
Thunder grumbles its dispute over the tangling currents of hot and cold winds, lightning takes on the form of his elders as it branches wild and wondrous across the sky. One strike takes an oak, causing Cern to press deeper into the wood. The smell of ozone causes a great unrest in the beast and he moves away from it like prey from a predator. The rain soaks through the outermost layers of Viride and begins to make its way into the lower levels with its heavy pour. The birch-bark stallion can feel the first drops of it down his back. Soon he is the color of moving water, light, and shadows as the rain soaks him.
A leonine tail slithers quickly through the trees like some banded alder-beast as he quickens his pace -- wending through familiar trails in the dense copse of unexplored woods. He knows them well, and has spent his whole live(s) both growing within them, and can use them with his eyes closed if he must. Tonight is no different, the storm has come upon him quickly. Even though he knew of its presence days ago, it has still caught him by surprise. And for once, it has driven him farther from his grove than he has been for quite some time. Even though the paths remain familiar, his uncertainty rises the same way fear does, cold sets in and his thin-skinned coat cannot stand it. Hail mercilessly begins to pepper through all the spaces Cern tries to avoid until he finds a cedar, almost as large and as round as he once was, and beneath the vale, a bare and perfectly dry earth.
Ooc: A tree walks alone in the woods …. Not sure why this got so CRAZY. @Below Zero
