Cerriddwyn's Fire

Gethen rode for his life.



He knew there was no way to avoid it if it wanted him, but he had to try. Hadn't the Foys always said: "We are, each of us, unable to change our natures."



Gethen's mount forded a stream rimmed with frost. He leaned closer to the horse in an effort to stay warm, but the cold of these lands leached warmth from them both, the dead trees silent witnesses to the power of winter. The power of death.



The horse stumbled over nothing, and Gethen was thrown over its head. Grey and white spun around him. In the space between surprise and terror, sudden, excruciating cold encased him, embracing him like his own coffin.



One panicked breath and the freezing grey world around him dissolved into utter black.

*

Gethen regained consciousness under a tree.



He opened his eyes to the frozen remains of foliage. There was a flickering orange light playing across his face, and the lower expanse of the tree trunk he lay near.



Gethen still flew out of his numbing skin when a sighing tenor addressed him.



"You are trespassing in my forest."



Gethen turned his aching head toward the breathless voice.



Sitting near the fire, his long, pale hands held to it for warmth, was a young man. He had sharp, angular features in a face whose beauty lay only in its exquisite perfection of angles. To say his hair was dark would've been to do injustice to hair like the shadow under a raven's wing. His eyes, intensely blue and unnaturally still, bored holes into Gethen.



"I - I beg your leave, lord- ?"



"Cerriddwyn." The boy supplied in the same soft voice.



Gethen swallowed dryly. "Lord Cerriddwyn."



"Simply Cerrriddwyn. I am lord of no one and nothing." He grinned coldly, fleetingly, as at some private joke. "Why have you come here?"



Gethen tried to sit up, unwilling to be questioned while flat on his back. His body, numb with cold, sent an itching, aching fire along his muscles. His bones creaked audibly in protest. His neck and head were formed of molten lead, but he made it upright, scuttled back until he felt the tree at his back. Thus supported, he returned his attention to Cerriddwyn.



"I was - merely passing through these woods. I meant to travel through them as swiftly as possible, but I had a fall... lost my horse..." Gethen shook his head, frowning. Surely he misremembered. He couldn't have fallen into a frozen stream. He'd be dead if he had. Besides, his clothes weren't even wet. "I meant no trespass, Cerriddwyn," Gethen said dismissing his false memory to focus on his host. When it came to unnaturally still-eyed youths claiming to own bits of forest, one could never be too careful. Cerriddwyn could be anything from a dryad or some other minor nature spirit, to an Unseleighe Sidhe; or an angry god.



Gethen had woes enough in his misbegotten life without courting more.



"Where one man comes, hordes are sure to follow; like ants," Cerriddwyn said softly, his eyes following the dancing flames. They ticked back to Gethen. "What manner of man are you, to be pursued so far into my lands? What manner of man pursues you?"



Gethen tried to hold his gaze steady on Cerriddwyn's sharp, pale one, but could not. If Gethen had ever been innocent enough to meet such a gaze, those days were long dead.



"I'm not being pursued," Gethen lied.



"No one enters Cerriddwyn's forest in winter unless they are pursued. To come here is to chase one's own mortality. Know you how far north my forest lies?"



Gethen swallowed again, his eyes still averted. His mouth should have been dry, but was not. He should have been warmed by the fire...



But he was not.



"I know not, Cerriddwyn. I only know that I'm colder than I've ever been," Gethen replied with a shudder. Cerriddwyn's eyes on him were weighing, waiting.



"I'm not being pursued by any man." Gethen sighed like a weary, old man, which wasn't unfitting.



"I'm running from death, Cerriddwyn. That's what pursues me to your forest."

*

After a long silence, Cerriddwyn's whispery tenor drifted across the fire to Gethen, carried on a northern eddy.



"How dare you, mortal?" Cerriddwyn breathed, his voice choked with rage. The fire flared up like the last, desperate pulse of dying star. "How dare you bring the Ravager to this forest? To my forest?"



In a dizzying flash, Cerriddwyn was across the fire, lifting Gethen up by his throat. Cerriddwyn's hands were strong and cold, like iron coated in ice; his frost-colored eyes glared daggers up into Gethen's own.



"Long has man been a despoiler of all things sacred and natural, but to bring death to my forest - " Cerriddwyn slammed Gethen's aching body into the tree, and Gethen, his ears ringing with impact, lost some of the thread of Cerriddwyn's tirade.



" - should spell you as far from my bounds as my power will allow and leave you to your doom!" Cerriddwyn spat, his icy eyes the constant in Gethen's ringing, wavering, freezing universe. Around the two, winds began to flail through the trees, flinging branches and Cerriddwyn's nighted hair at Gethen's face. Both cut like icy lashes from a frozen whip.



Then, as suddenly as the winds had started up, they were gone, and Cerriddwyn was at his place on the other side of the fire. Gethen was lying in a shivering heap at the foot of the tree.



"It is in my forest, now, mortal. You've brought the Ravager to my forest," Cerriddwyn said, his voice like dead leaves scratching frozen earth. Those strange, pale eyes were once again lost in the fire. Gethen sat up slowly, cautiously; there was something warm, wet and sluggish running down his face; either blood or tears.



"You're obviously powerful, Cerriddwyn. Surely you can keep - " Gethen began. Cerriddwyn cut him off with a despairing glance.



"Mine is the power of time, and of secrecy. I can hide this place, and slow its decline. Were it not for you, I might have held this place for another thousand-thousand years. But now... it is over, and all I have protected is soon gone."



The sorrow in Cerriddwyn's eyes - Gethen had heard that the sorrow of an immortal could break the strongest man's heart - wrenched a nearly unbearable anguish from Gethen's cold heart.



"I am a minor elemental who used to be a minor god; immortal, but not invincible. The Ravager is far stronger than I or any other gods I can name. I cannot hold my land against it."



Cerriddwyn's empty eyes met Gethen's again. The hair that moved in the cold eddies of northern air was, Gethen noticed, now shot through with iron gray, much like Gethen's own.



Cerriddwyn held up his pale, long hand. It was creased with fine lines now, as was his face.



"You've brought death to my forest," he murmured, as softly as a sob.

*

Gethen watched the aging elemental stare at his hands for awhile before he found the courage to ask:



"Why do you fear death? You're an elemental, untouched by time. As for this forest - it's already in death's clutches. You would protect a lost cause?" Gethen asked, looking at the bare branches and tumbled logs that surrounded their glade. "There's nothing here to protect."



Cerridwyn spared him an intense, disdainful glance. "What do you know of life? You, who will never bear a life, who would live but a mere century, at most? What do you know of the green beneath the whites and greys of death? You look at this forest and see only dead things, while I see a forest that merely sleeps, until Gwion Sun-lord melts away her mantle of ice." The elemental's sharp features drew in on themselves.



"I was here for the birth of this forest. I was here when the Ice That Creeps moved down from the frozen wastes of the farthest northern reaches and claimed it. And I held its fragile life-spark for long centuries against mountains of ice. I saw the ice retreat and return several times, and still, I wait for the day the ice leaves completely, and my forest wakes up. But now, neither this forest or I will ever see true spring again."



Gethen looked away from the elemental's haggard face and greying hair, into the flames of the fire. He held his hands to it, and felt no heat.



"The illusion of warmth," he murmured. Cerriddwyn either didn't hear him or chose to ignore him.



"How can an immortal die?" Gethen was shivering. The air around the fire seemed to be colder than the air further away. He sat back again, not touching the tree.



"I am immortal because I am the guardian of this forest. If it dies, I cease to be," Cerriddwyn said flatly. "I am bound to protect it, and all that dwell herein."



Gethen gazed at the elemental, frowning. "Even me?"



Cerriddwyn did not answer.



"Why not spell me out of the forest. That might draw death away."



"I cannot. Once you entered my forest, you became mine; my responsibility. With an enemy stalking the land, I could no more cast one of my own out, than I could cast out myself." Cerriddwyn sighed hopelessly. "Even if I could, my deceptions have been breached. It knows where I am, and it knows there is something here worth taking, something alive. Now that it has the scent, it will be able to sniff out the green I have so carefully concealed, and kill it." Cerriddwyn's face was still, cold.



"But why?" Gethen demanded, as guilt settled heavily on his shoulders. He'd thought he'd managed to shrug off that particular mantle forever.



Cerriddwyn simply looked at Gethen for a long moment, his pale gaze flickering with sympathy, or perhaps empathy. Then he spoke:



"Because that is the way of life, and the way of all things born to end. You, mortal and human, should understand that far better than I."



Gethen looked away, tears in his eyes, and pulled his cloak closely around him. "Aye."



They sat silently, listening to the wind blow snow around the glade. Gethen noticed that the snow never entered their glade, no matter how strongly the wind blew it.



Cerriddwyn's magic.



"Tell me a story, human. Your people are great ones for telling pretty lies." An amused and wintry smile. "Tell me a story about a mortal who runs from death. How could any mortal outrun death for so long that they begin to think they can avoid it altogether?"



Gethen gifted Cerriddwyn a humorless smile. At the beginning of their meeting the elemental had looked young enough to have been Gethen's son. He now looked old enough to be Gethen's contemporary. The raven's shadow hair was silvering, and completely white at the temples. Hard and bitter lines were etched around Cerriddwyn's thin mouth.



"As far as I've come from my people, to die with a story on my lips is a deep irony." Gethen smiled a little wider. "Would you die, then, with the only story that it is in me to tell ringing in your ears, Cerriddwyn?"



"I would die with any sound in my ears other than this babbling, idiot wind, heralding the death I already feel in my bones," Cerriddwyn said, a death's head limned in eldritch light.



"Fair enough." Gethen sat closer to the cold, dwindling fire like the storytellers he'd been born among would've done, and began his tale:



"Four hundred fifty-seven years ago, a son was born to Inna and Thadeuez Foy. He was neither their first child or their last, but, like any birth, his was a cause for joy. When he lived past the half-year mark, they gave him a naming ceremony, and named him Gethen Gareth Foy... "

*

Gethen told Cerriddwyn a story, while death raged around the northern forest, the winds, now its agent of destruction, toppling old growths and piling snow against the invisible wall keeping disaster out of Cerriddwyn's glade.



Gethen spoke all night; of a boy who'd lost his family to plague and prejudice, fire and fear, then was raised among magicians and hedge witches with no small amount of power of his own.



He spoke of a young man who, living cheek and jowl with death, came to fear it. This man used his own channeling abilities to suck the life-energy out of those who trusted him. In this fashion, he extended his own life by several hundred years before his thirty-fifth year.



He also spoke of a man who'd lived hundreds of years longer than all he'd ever loved or cared about; a man who no longer had any place or power in the world of the living. He spoke of a man who'd begun to fade, even to himself.



This man, Gethen said, had forgotten how to fear death. He was invisible to mortal eyes; he began to believe he was invisible to mortality itself.



One day, walking along the outskirts of a market place, ignored by all save small children and animals, he'd felt eyes on him. It was a feeling like a mosquito on the back of his neck. He scanned the crowds around him, seeing no one who could have caused that feeling of being - seen.



After four centuries, one learns to trust one's instincts. The man fled his city, without stopping to pack. He lived in hiding, on his wits and off the land. Like his parents before him, he was a sometime horse-thief, sometime pick-pocket. Whenever he got that mosquito-itch feeling on the back of his neck, he ran, not stopping for miles before he felt safe enough to sleep.



Now, after a dozen years of running, crossing and recrossing the globe, he'd found himself in a northern forest, sitting at a fire that gave light, but no heat; telling his own story to a dying elemental while the wolf howled outside the door.

*

"Dawn will be here soon," Gethen murmured, eyes on the dying flicker of the flames.



"It doesn't matter, now," Cerriddwyn said quietly.



Around them, the forest raged, and crashed as death came to what should have died aeons ago. Gethen felt this was as good a place as any to die.



"Perhaps it's time for us both to go," he said to Cerriddwyn, who smiled sadly, frozen tears glittering in his eyes. He looked like he could have been Gethen's father, now, his hair snow white, his face a map of wrinkles.



"You fight death out of habit, Gethen-Gareth. I fight death out of love."



Gethen waved a shaking hand in concession of the point. "But life is a habit I came to love. Even when I hated it, I loved it fiercely. And yet... it wouldn't be awful to let it go." Gethen was surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth, but it was true. He was tired of running, tired of fading; tired of outliving all love but the love of the habitual.



"For humans, there is whatever afterlife or rebirth their gods see fit to give them. For me there is only dissolution, loss of sentience. No one will remember Cerriddwyn or his forest. It will all come to ruin and I will come to naught."



For that, Gethen had no answer. So they sat, listening once again to death as it made its way to their glade in the heart of the northern forest.



"It is very near... " was all Cerriddwyn said before lapsing into what seemed to be a state of catatonia. His aged, infirm body toppled over, eyes open and sorrowing. Suddenly, the fire in the center of the glade flared up, pale and green. From it came, at last, an alarming heat that singed Gethen's eyebrows.



The flames shot up to twice the height of a man, shooting off defiant sparks. Gethen stood, and faced away from it. Just beyond the edge of the glade, a gathering shadow crept around the bounds of the firelight, as if testing the strength of Cerriddwyn's walls.



For a time, the walls held, but slowly, the shadow made its way toward the heart of the forest, and to Cerridwyn's fire.



Gethen backed towards the fire until he was forced to shed his bulky clothing, or have it catch. Behind him, the fire slowly began to dim, as the shadow crept closer and closer.



Finally, there was nowhere to run to anymore for Gethen, no one to turn to now that Cerriddwyn was almost dead. At that thought, Gethen felt grief as well as guilt settle into him.



"I am so sorry," Gethen said, just as a flame licked his back. It burned his skin, hungry in the way only living things are.



The very first tendrils of shadow had touched Gethen's feet, and he felt its searing cold kill all feeling in his toes. He imagined that hungry nothingness devouring him, body and soul, and he knew he could never give in to the shadow. Better to burn in Cerriddwyn's living flame than be subsumed into a dead void.



Gethen turned to face the flame. It was shrinking as he watched, as if cowed by the vampiric shadow at Gethen's back.



"I can think of no better place to die," Gethen said to the flame. It seemed to flare brighter for a moment.



Gethen was almost smiling as he opened wide his arms and stepped into Cerriddwn's fire.

*

There was nothing left alive in the Shadow's wake.



Toppled and uprooted trees were all that was left of the great northern forest. As dawn came to the grey northern sky, the total devastation of hundreds of miles of forest greeted the new day.



And though the sun shone hotter on the land than it had in aeons, melting some of the icy mantle that covered it, there was nothing left alive to appreciate it.



Satisfied - as satisfied as it ever was - the Shadow that covered the land like a blight retreated south, back to the life it scorned, yet could not do without.

*

Deep, deep within the newly warmed earth a dormant seed took root, as it sensed the passing of the Shadow.



The Earth wrapped her arms around her newest child, willing it, loving it into being. Into life.



With life came spirit. The spirit of the forest that had been, the spirit of the forest that would be. There came also a knowledge of death and endings, and the sacredness of endings as well as beginnings. As the seedling grew, there came all manner of knowledge from the whispered stories that passed through the Earth. There was the rememberance of wind and of sky and of snow; of walking and talking and being.



The strongest memories were of icy-blue eyes and hair like the shadow of a raven's wing.



When, in its own time, the seedling's very first, tender shoots poked warily up from the ground, it tasted wind and shivered, saw sky and bowed its head. At the thought of snow it knew, finally, fear.



One day, a warm breeze swept round the empty glade, gently ruffling the sapling's leaves. This zephyr was chattier than most, and spoke of things the sapling only half-remembered.



Gethen-Gareth, Gethen-Gareth, it sighed around the trembling shoot, then laughed, flirting through the confused sapling's leaves. The sapling was about to tuck itself back into the safety of its mother's arms when the breeze said:



Stay, and I will tell you a story -



The sapling's leaves slowly uncurled, it's shivering lessened, stopped. The warmth of the breeze made a lie of all fears of snow, and its laughing, whispery voice went on:



I will tell you a story about a tree that was once a man and a breeze that was once a god...



And how they both outran death.

*