Tangled vines have made your bed. Tangled vines had held your hands, had softened cries, had pillowed forms. Now, Ivy softly whispers, softly sings, the Ivy that leads to the beginnings and the endings of all things. It represents the path that all walk and must walk. Even in their dreams...
     Tangled vines lead spiraling inward to a soft-footed path, the dirt the color of salmon flesh. The way is shadowed, as dark as evening, though there is some feeling, some understanding that somewhere the sun is shining. Knotted roots and smoothened trunks, broad and brown and slender and grey, form the forest that you suddenly find yourself within. Do you remember an old oak grove? Where have those trees gone? In their place, the red-barked yew. In their stead, the grey-barked holly. Flowered and fruit-laden brambles line the way, hawthorn and blackthorn, cousins of the rose. And the majesty of ash. And the depth of elder.
     Three rivers course through this deep forest, three rivers running silver clear and brimming with silver salmon. Along the twisting banks, beside the rapids that become cascades as the land drops suddenly here and abruptly there, swaying willow and fruit-bearing hazel.

Young women they'll run
Like hares on the mountains
Young women they'll run
Like hares on the mountains
If I were but a young man
I'd soon go a-hunting
     You know that voice, that voice that is His voice. Smooth and fluent, deep and quiet, as if he is singing in your ears, but there is no sign of him, not with his shortish bronze-copper hair, the form you've come to know intimately. There is a body of Elder trees, with rabbits and hares playing and rolling (and doing what rabbits do best, mating) at the foot of the elder trunks.

     Flesh has gone heavy with too much passion - perhaps not too much, but with temporary satiety, at least. Fiona was exhausted from two days of worry, two days of fear, two days of her impressive (and impressionable) imagination having been given the freedom to run her ragged. And then they were laid to rest - and her rest was interrupted by getting laid.
     Perhaps that's calling a spade by a cruder digging implement's name. What happened - what hit her - she really isn't sure. She's never yet caught up to the idea of sensuality in full; she's tried, but it's difficult to reconcile within oneself after repressing, suppressing it until the edges bulge the way they have, the way she has...
     The dust of sleep has settled on her, and she hasn't yet figured her way out of it. Not that she's trying very hard...
     "I remember summer, with the gold shining through the boughs, a time of apple blossoms and citrus scent. I remember waterfalls, their rainbows caught in yesterday's tears, and the glad laughter of springtime's sigh passing overhead...."
     Fiona whispers it as she sits up within herself, within a dream that does not entirely come from within her (and perhaps no wonder, with what's inside and outside and dimensions that distort and alter). She sits up, without the heaviness of flesh although the memory of the heaviness of flesh, and she looks around. "Lost..."
     Music, and a voice she recognizes. "Davydd?" It's a question; when has she ever been more hesitant than where you are concerned, with your uncanny disarmament of all of her defenses and offenses alike? She scowls for a moment, but it cannot be sustained. It's another newness...
     Birds lift from branches somewhere, and the movement of their wings is echoed in the turn of her head, the sway of her hair against her back. "Well ... this is different."

     The bed rests in the middle of a thicket, surrounded on all side by the forest that is Him. What was a bed is now a leafy bower, holly trees the posts and canopy, with berries clumped and dangling like heavy, Renaissance tassels. And craggy limbs with beautiful blossoms, pink and white and purple, have created an overhanging arch...
     Red-barked yew with its thirteen branches, the tree of bows as holly is the tree of arrows, speaks softly in whispers of Welsh, Cymraeg that lifts from the body of the soil...

And the fires shall burn
And the wheel of Life shall turn
And the dead come back home on Samhain
And in the night sky
On the lunar light they fly
And the dead come back home on Samhain...
     He is not here, not obviously, but he is at the same time everywhere. There is the sensation that he is close beside you (for does he not rest on the same bed in the Waking World?). There is the feeling that he isn't far away (for is he not this land and is the land not he?). And still the yew trees sing...
For Death has come for the Summertime
And to take the leaves of the Spring...
     Hazel fruit fall from the pregnant trees to the swollen, running river. A land that sings of Death and Harvest, but everywhere there is Life. Life not in its beginning but in the fullness of its power, in the wealth of it, a land in bounty, limitless.
     Starlings blur darkly by, the star-pocked blackbirds like swift moving shadows. In between the trees, among the prick-leaved holly, the forms of red stags and white stags meandering along.
     Reverberating softly, with every tread of cloven hoof...
All across the virgin snow
And through the naked trees
On a cold winter's night
His song is on the breeze
Where the moonlight paints the frost
Upon the robin's song
He's come a-calling for us all
Now the summer's gone!
Hark! Hear the children sing
Glory to the Holly King!

     Life, and Death, and everything in between...
     This is different, all right - different and new and ancient as breath in the land. "Davydd..."
     This time, she's just saying it to say it - recognition, perhaps. acknowledgment, certainly. "All right," she says aloud, shaking herself slowly. "Winter's coming - you know, ever since I got involved with you, I've hardly been able to keep the time of year straight. This isn't helping my seasonal whatever disorder."
     Fiona pauses, looking up at a hazel tree, looking at the fruit with a small, curious frown. "Hazel - friend to fairies, I think," she recalls, something read somewhere, some dim and half-forgotten book.
     "The world is altered, and utterly become new... each season passes, one to another. I told you once," she says aloud, sitting down under the tree and looking upwards, squinting, "that my favourite season was always autumn... So what's this all about, anyway, then?"

...Like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel like a snowball down a mountain or a carnival balloon like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon...      The song issues between the trees, and from the leaves. From the trees themselves, and from the river, from the fish and from the hares, from the stags, and from the man among it all... ...Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face ...and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream...      "Hazel," Davydd murmurs, stepping away from the body of a holly tree, clothed not in the anachronistic clothing of a Medieval prince, like the Idea of how Fairy Kings should look, but dressed in the leather and the sweater he wore when you saw him changed. Beautiful still, but his hair as you saw it before he left, an inch or two shorter with the waves more tamed. "The tree of Enlightenment. It is one of the poet's trees. It has to do with the powers of the mind... and connection to the power of the universe..." His hand goes to his chest, to signify where the Hazel's mark upon him lies.      Softly, his Doc Martened feet make little sound upon the salmon-flesh colored soil. Looking at you, his green eyes forest deep, his sings: "Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel, as the images unwind like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind..."      There is power in his voice that is greater than before, there is clarity and there is beauty where artistry and practice made him previously proficient. When he sings, the forest comes alive, and the air, and the energy that surrounds you both. The song slips softly, drowned out at last by the flowing of the three silver rivers. Davydd is staring at you and then he smiles a little. "I went to London to declare myself King before the councils of the faerie," he notes. "It never happened." The smile begins to tilt more to one side than the other. "When one thinks one knows what one is, I have discovered that's when you're most full of shite. I went to call myself the Oak King, King of the Lands of Summer and Avalon. With the ultimate aim of slipping from the Waking World for a while, to build our kingdoms here. That was the plan. Have you bear my babies, be my queen. I had plans, girl. But.." now Davydd smirks, "... I forgot that the universe has its own plans. What the world needs is not for me to slip away and play house in fairyland, but to remain in the world, and to ...lead the rebirth of Things Forgotten, Dreams Forgotten. It sounds a bit... vague, I realize..."

     Nothing should surprise her anymore. So why is it that every day, every night, every turn of another page brings something new to surprise her into silence and then blossoming questions?
     Because life would be so dull, of course, without these surprises...
     "I'd say that you're looking well, but that seems sort of an understatement," Fiona murmurs, in that tone which is forever caught between the urge to bite down savagely and the softer aspect which smoothes her out somewhat. She speaks it sotto voce, as if acknowledging the irrelevance of saying it at all. She moves forward with an element of irreverence quirking at her mouth for a moment. "You know, you always manage to fit wherever you are, but your current outfit.. it's a bit much. But..."
     She falls entirely silent, listening, feeling things move as in strange currents. "You went - okay," Fiona says slowly. "You had plans. And part of them was knocking me up. Wait, wait," she holds up a hand, then presses it to the bridge of her nose. "Okay. I'm going to put my immediate reactions on hold, here." One toe taps slightly, and then she glances up, just as pugnaciously as if her hair were still some colour not found in nature. "Go on... dig your hole, Llewellyn. I'll - give my tuppence."

     "Well, not immediately," Davydd rolls, chuckling as he takes a seat upon the river bank, back to the hazel. He watches the salmon jump. "But," green eyes move over you, linger, move up and down you, and the smile slants. It's as much a leer as it is a stare. "... one night, Fiona..." One night, he will cover you and on a night nine months after you'll bear him a child. He has children in his eyes. They're almost visible, pressing fingers and faces up to the glass of his eyes. And then they're gone. Davydd looks from you to the leaves and nuts of the hazel tree he loiters beneath. "I told you before, there were Oak King and Holly King energies bound up in me, bound up in one man. The Holly King has vanquished him, my energies have changed, and with the transformation, additional marks, and additional powers," he murmurs. "My kingdom, this forest, is a reflection of it. Bounty, Life in its fullest, right before the season of Death, Harvest, Halloween, Rebirth and Reincarnation..." It is there again, the notion of birth and death and rebirth.
     "Sometimes a forest has to burn to grow, Fiona. Sometimes, a man has to die to live. And I had to ... shed that curse. One way or the other. I thought I could have a curse breaker lift it. I thought that by giving in to my own magics I could circumvent it..." Davydd turns his head, he looks to you. "There's no going around your Destiny, darlin'... I've learned that. The hard way, as always, but I've learned it." He pauses. "The Holly King... is here to say. The King of the Waning Year. The god of the hunt, the Mistletoe King, the King of Samhain and Yule. That's who I am," he murmurs. "Only in giving over to it, could the curse finally be broken, by my transformation, by rendering it irrelevant..."

     One night... more than the idea of children or pregnancy or the rest, it's her reaction to it, to you saying it, which disturbs her. It shows for a moment, in the faint twitch of her shoulders, the sudden glance down at the leaf-strewn and living earth at her feet. She looks back up, then deliberately folds her arms over her chest. "Maybe so," she mutters, "but I'm as modern a woman as any - don't expect to get out of changing diapers or being the one to walk the floor with the baby some of the time." Her chin lifts, her upper lip curling slightly in a defiant sneer.
     So there. Take that, Holly King-fairy king-whatever the hell you are now.
     "You've told me a lot of things - I don't think I understand everything you've told me," she observes a moment later, gaze sharpening, honed upon the topic as she observes you with her observations. "And no, destiny's something I don't like to mess with. It's one of those trickster things. Kind of like you..."
     A pause, and she clarifies, "Like you, but also like us - how we hooked up, I mean. Two years of running followed by all the rest. So - you're saying what? That you're the Holly King and you want me to have your red-headed babies, well - that's not so different from being the Oak King and wanting the same thing. You're the god of the hunt - all right. Fair enough."
     She takes a step forward, and it's by her own will that she changes - so that she's clad in jeans and a bright red t-shirt, black leather jacket over that. On her feet are a pair of Docs, as battered though perhaps not as old as your own. Armour for the modern punk. Her hair, though ... her hair remains unchanged, long, uncolored, almost colorless in its pale shading, unbraided and loose down to her hips.
     "So the curse is irrelevant. It always was irrelevant, to me. Remember? You could have been vegan." Fiona takes a jerky, impatiently nervous step forward, chin jutting upwards. "So - does this mean we're going to Aruba on our honeymoon? Or what?"

     "No sunlight for me, darlin', that's still the price of it. Immortality has to come with some price," Davydd notes. "I'll sleep more deeply than before. And the Holly King won't be able to live by holly berries and beef pasties alone. Once a month, at the dark moon, I'll need to drink a sacrificial drink." Blood. He means blood. "Blood," he says it out loud. "It is not only magic that sustains me but Life Itself. To root myself in the Living World, the God of the Hunt will have ... to hunt," he looks at you, he waits to see what you will do with that bit of information.
     "In truth, for you and I not much has to change. This king or that king, this wedding day or another, this child or that child, it doesn't much matter. I am still Davydd ap Owain, called Llywelyn," he softly notes. Died and reborn for the third time.
     "But I'm going to give you the same respect I gave the woman before you. If living at night with a man who looks as I do, who'll drink blood from a chalice at the dark of the moon, who is something other than human, something more than fairy, if it gives your heart pause, there's no shame to admit it. And there's no harm among those who love as we do."
     The woman who came before you left when he showed his world to her. For whatever reason. What will you do?
     Davydd rises after a moment, hand reaching up and taking a gathering of hazel fruit. Nuts are cracked open by his hand, eaten. And what, my dear, if I should wish to fill my cup with you?

     She tilts her head to one side, absorbing this information with an expression that, if she weren't frowning, someone might shove a victrola under her ear. "You're not going to start wearing lots of black and slicking your hair back with gunk and listening to really bad music while smoking clove cigarettes, are you?", she asks finally. She sounds serious about the question, too.
     She doesn't wait for the answer before she's moving on, expression steady, fixed on your face with an intensity unusual even for her. "How I feel about you hunting and drinking blood - well, I don't know. I'm not sure I have any real reaction, to be honest - I'm trying to find a reaction, but nothing seems to be coming except 'and?'. Is this supposed to mean that you won't appreciate my cooking anymore? Because while that's not going to be a deal-breaker, it's going to piss me off."
     She reaches up to rub at her eyes, closing them for a moment, then turns her back to look away, around herself. "I know this is supposed to change things, but I've always known you've got your darker side - if that's what you want to call it. Davydd, I don't /like/ too much peace. I don't trust it - it's usually fake, it's a cover for other things. Nasty things. Things which maggots and worms live in, and ... well, if you're going to be Life and Death all in one, then at least you don't seem to be rotten and that's about all I can ask for from anyone. More, really, than I could expect from anyone else." She takes a deep breath, then chokes quietly, sitting down, shoulders shaking.
     Fiona's not crying. She's laughing.

     "Fuck no, I could eat you and the plate you brought in," he chuckles suddenly and his eyes sparkle, deep green with flecks of periwinkle, flower of death and resurrection. "And probably will," fiery eyebrows waggle and he downs several of the hazel fruit. "And if you are a fan of peace, then you're with the wrong bloke, but then I've always said that. My way... is a bloody way," he whispers that, and he remembers it as he says it. Those were his words to Isabel. The blood on him was not the blood of Mithras' curse, but the blood that was waiting for him...
     My way, said the Holly King, is a bloody way...
     "It is getting close to sunset," Davydd remarks, looks down at you, smirking. "Maggots, bah. As if. Fuck if you see any maggots on me, just fucking take out a lighter and set my ass on fire." He shudders. "Anyway," a breath unneeded in this world. "That's the long and the short of it. New powers to explore, new energy. And... well... we'll see what the world makes of me and what I make of it. Of my Destiny ... our destiny, only time will reveal, oes? But one thing I can guarantee," he begins to stride toward the apple tree growing in the center of the forest, the oldest apple tree ever to exist, the mother of all the rest. Its fruit hanging heavy and low, suggestive, golden and blushed red, holding on it all varieties of apples ever to sweeten the tables of earth, "...there will be music..."

     "If you wanted to eat me, well - you wouldn't be marrying me. You're not the sort of man who could ever be married to a meal. Even the ones you want to roll around in, once you're done with them, you only think about them again once you're wiping your arse and have run out of paper and need me to run to grab more for you," Fiona retorts cheekily. "Now, if you were making a sexual entendre... that's a different story. But you forget." She lifts her chin again, meeting your gaze squarely."
     "I challenged Huw the Hunter to a hunt. Almost won, too - he called it a draw. So hunting doesn't really bother me. It's all part of the grand scheme of things, isn't it? As long as we both remember that I'm not prey and I'm not on your diet plan..."
     Then she moves forward again, closing the distance between herself and you, towards the apple tree as well. She glances to it, one eyebrow arching, then glances back to you. "So things are new again. We're still not on even footing. And that means I'll have to cheat. As for music, well ... How was I supposed to react, Davydd?" She leans forward to put one hand on your hip, as if testing the flesh for firmness and solidity. "You talk too much. I have questions about all of this, of course, but most of them aren't about you. I know who you are. You're Davydd. You're the man I happen to be in love with - the only man I could ever possibly imagine giving myself to in any sense of the word. You're the man I love, even when I hate you I love you. You demand I surrender, and I fight you every step of the way before I do what we both know I wanted to do anyway - and I punish you for it and you laugh. Do you need me to spell out the obvious? Did you expect me to walk away? To stop loving you, to stop being here, where you are, to stop wanting to be here? You're the centre of my universe. Maybe that isn't healthy - I don't know. But it's the way it is and it's the way it has to be and it's the way it's going to be, and the only thing which will get rid of me is if you go to another woman. My pride wouldn't stand for it, you see."
     She pauses, drawing break, then steps up so her chest is up to yours, bodies flush opposite each other. "So the sun is setting and another day is - for us - beginning. Tell me, Davydd... everything's changed, but apart from the fact that now you drink blood and okay, well, you were never going to keep kosher anyway - what, really, has changed? New forms for old things. It's still the world, and it's still us, and ... well." A small smile tugs up at the corners of her mouth.
     "Tell me, Llewellyn," Fiona inquires, voice dropping silkily, "this doesn't mean you're going to forego marrying me just because you're even more immortal than you thought you were? I told you I wouldn't let you out of it. So..." Her hand drops, to where she expects a certain portion of anatomy to be even in dreams, and grips.
     "So," she continues conversationally, "I've read in my abortive studies that sex in dreamscapes is supposed to be even better than the real thing. Shall we have fun waking each other up? Because I've had enough philosophy out of you for one sleep period, Davydd. You have," she looks up with sudden fierceness, "no idea what I've been through the past couple of days, and if I've got any say in the matter, not only will you never find out, I'll never go through it again. So nothing you say is going to bother me. At all. Now."
     Her free hand comes up, and she snaps her fingers, then points to your nose. "Get busy, sex god of the old Welsh kingdoms. I haven't got all night, you know."

Posted by rowan at June 29, 2004 06:59 PM