I plunge in, head-first, briny waters sluicing across my body as I dive down, the song of the deep sea coursing through my veins. Glimmers of honeyed sunlight sparkle through the surface of the water, patterns of dragonfly wing and kingfisher feather, paths of light like skeins of gold reaching down into the depths below me.

Brigid stood and watched the sun sink below the rolling green hills. A cool breeze lifted goosebumps on her skin and she felt the chill of the night reach into the vestiges of the day, and lay them to sleep on the earth. Her red hair blazed like fire and she felt the ancient pull, irresistible as time itself. The age-old dance of light and dark, and as the last of the equinox sun disappeared below the horizon, she knew it was time to leave her gentle, fertile valleys and turn her steps towards the north.

Once there was a girl who went to lay on an ancient stone that held a prayer for billions of years.

A lone widow lives deep in the fenlands. She is young and gold-haired with a small girl that reflects the same dreamy strength of her mother. The widow mourns her husband lost this past year, taken by a fever that wracked his body and burned him from the inside out. She lives in a house they built together, raised above the ground that was sometimes earth, sometimes water.

Once there was a woman named Sirasta. She lived in a camp at the edge of the great Arctic forest and during the summer the sun never set and during the winter it never rose; and nor did the crystalline snow melt. The spirit lights shivered overhead in the long night, the honoured ancestors dancing in celestial light for all eternity. It was a good and wild land that tested its people and made them strong.

It was a cold hard winter, frost glittered on bare trees and snow blanketed the ground. The people shivered through the short, cold days, burning the wood they had gathered through spring, summer and autumn and eating all the food they had gathered and preserved. The people hated the winter, how dark and bleak it was. They hated that their supplies dwindled and that they couldn’t go swimming, running or riding. They hated the storms and blizzards, the rivers running in spate or freezing over. Winters were hard, and this one was the hardest in living memory.

Once there was a shadow woman that lived in the cold, hard mountains. The cruel winds blew her around and the storms would lash her. Just a shadow, she had no weight to hold her down against the onslaught of the fierce gales, thunder and lightning, and they would toss her around the jagged, sharp mountain peaks. When the storms calmed, she drifted without purpose through the frozen land, leaving no trace of herself, touching nothing, and nothing touching her. She was as thin as a breath and was of a darkness made by the absence of light, an ashen, empty darkness, with no rest or respite to fold into.

She sat by her fireplace and warmed her hands against the dancing flames. Her hearth was not particularly old or impressive, just a grate wherein sat the wood and a chimney to lift away the sparks and smoke, but it was hers.

She stood at the edge of the clearing, damp earth and glass raindrops filling her lungs. The trees stood tall, dark and silent, impenetrable and waiting. She hung back on the edge for a while, savouring the threshold, drawing out the seconds into eternity. She could feel rather than see the red does that drifted through the mist, cloven hoof barely touching the deep, exquisite forest floor. 

She waits by the small fire. The air is warm and the breeze is scented with wildflowers as it blows between the trees. The NANÎ waits, as she has for days. Her shawl is on the earth and her arms are bare in the sunshine. A smile plays about her lips, her joints ache less in the summer. The sun is shining and the flames of the small fire are almost invisible. The old woman fingers her string of amber beads, passing the well-worn smooth rounds through her fingers as she whispers quiet words of power. Then she hears it; the first.