She looked out at the wasteland around her. Dead and dying, all was a dry, grey lifelessness of entropy. There was no rich darkness, no fertile black to rest in and hold the dream of rebirth. There was no effervescent and profuse light of life and joy to animate the land. Dispirited curls of dust spiralled in the desolate wind, clouding the perpetual half-light.

The first winter that came to this land was long, bitter and cold. Snow lay thick over the land, icicles adorned stark, bare trees and rivers froze in mid-spate. Many animals had not prepared for this deep and seemingly endless cold, and many died, hungry and frozen. Some of the animals could find no shelter and the ice leached the colour out of their fur, turning them a pure white. That is why in winter now, fox, hare and ptarmigan turn white, in memory of their ancestors in the long first winter.

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.

Springs bubble up from the land, overflowing with prayers of joy and new life, bursting exuberantly from the earth. Snow melts on distant mountaintops with the coming of the spring, songs of fresh icy water racing down mountain sides to reach the awakening valleys, white, yellow and purple pushing up through the dark soil of winter death to bring the prayer of spring’s kiss.

She awoke in the dark, separated from the night sky only by a thin and permeable cloth. She could feel the stars singing out in the dark and laid wrapped up and warm in her flimsy shelter until dawn light shaded the sky. The grass was jewelled with morning dew and mist lay on the ground like an ethereal cloak.

I remember the afternoon I met her. I had wandered down to the rocky beach by the house I had moved into some months prior, in the cold and windy February. The weather was starting to warm up now, after a short and gloomy rainy season. I wasn’t brave enough to get in the water yet, it still felt chillingly cold on my feet, lapping vestiges of the winter, but as I looked out across the rippling turquoise water, I saw a woman gliding over the sparkling sea. 

She is slim and delicate-looking, a young woman shining in the beauty of her youth, she is nonetheless past her first blooming and into her self-contained strength as a woman. She still has the unfettered freedom of young womanhood, without a babe or serious lover to anchor her in the protective, but sometimes restrictive shell of a family.

She is the wise ancient one of the sea, a witch that seems to hold all of the secrets of the world. Her cave is wondrous to behold, with shells and pearls, living coral of every hue, as well as drowned statues, coins and ingots, stretching back many thousands of years. Tales and stories of this wise witch spread into every cranny and canyon of all the seas and oceans.

In the beginning, all was dark. Rich, warm, velvet and silent. The dark was like a blanket, thick and welcoming. It was safe and infinite, welcoming and tender. However, nothing changed in the darkness, no time passed and nothing happened. It was static and endless.

I lay nestled and protected between high sumptuous bosky slopes, where honey sunshine drips through the tree branches weaving their magic, to dapple my sacred waters. I am a nexus in the winding path of this bright and sparkling river that murmurs and sings with prayers of wide skies, Atlantic winds and flowering gorse.

Once there was a woman that wanted to sail to the other side of the wind. Whenever the wind blew, it blew her away, and no matter how hard she fought, she couldn’t fight her way through to the other side. When the wind dropped, she couldn’t find it again to try again. 

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.

There is a tree, bare and stretching up into a grey sky, clouds racing overhead. The earth around it is brown and empty, but both the tree and the earth are a deep rich brown of expectancy and potential and life. They are wet, not dried and dusty and dead. 

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.