Of Trees & Stars (Solo)

[Oliver]

Of Trees & Stars

Shining_Moon__Mystic_Island_by_JJCheddar77.jpg

Levity.
I am grace,
Born with wings to fly.
God’s grandeur calls to me like flame,
The paladin of the sky.

Callous,
Not here in this heart seen,
Boiling righteousness is idle,
In the heavens I am keened.

Purity?
No longer.
I was kindred once
No more.
Where heathens tread,
I’m encumbered dead,
For I’ve no will to fight the horde.

False,
Pretence,
On feather’s fall I’m guided.
With father’s call I’m divided,
Have I no choice?
No mandate of self?
Or am I given to life only to serve.

Cydney Oliver

[Oliver]

I have long wanted to see the world beyond Albion’s borders. Ever since I was a young child, I have dreamed and wrote about it. I have pondered what the sun looks like shining down on Scara Brae, and questioned what it would be like to travel the open road with no responsibilities tying me down to one time, person or place. When you are younger, you always expect these dreams to come true. As I tread the lonely path east to the tall and ruined walls of the island’s capitol, I wonder where I would be now if I had dreamt of something else. What would I have become if I had dreamt of something less fanciful, and something that carried less of a cost?

It is in times like these that we find ourselves. That was the greatest lesson the tragedy of Caroline Haven taught me. Though I lost my family, friends and distant relatives to the scythes and screams of the accursed angels, I found something else I had not bargained for. I found freedom.

With a heavy heart I have slowly come to accept that what came to pass has passed. I cannot bring them back from the dead, though I know the ways to cast a circle that would tether them to life. It is infuriating knowing the ways to change the world but ultimately being denied the permission to use them for a good cause. The greater cost to me has not been the emotional scars, nor the heavy burden of responsibility I have placed upon myself to right my wrongs, but the loss of the one thing that made me feel alive.

I have lost the Creed.

Losing the right to wield the ancient rituals of witchcraft has been a bitter loss for me. At first, I struggled. I whispered the ancient calling rites in my sleep, only to wake from a nightmare to the sound of white wings beating with disappointment. They watched me closely at first, hoping I would succumb to mortal temptation so that I too would meet my end beneath their terrifying forms. It was the smell of lavender and almonds, their scent, which kept me on the road to salvation. Whenever I came close to falling from grace again, I took a deep breath and reminded myself of their ever watchful presence.

In the stead of witchcraft I have found myself focussing on the other half of the gifts given to me by nature, ancestry and luck. Sorcery is a sceptical type of magic amongst the villagers of Albion. People do not trust magic which is not fettered by tradition, semantics and ritualistic nuances. They trust the people that possess such an affinity with the natural conjuration of ether less still. My mother had always encouraged me to explore my natural affinity with the elements, but when she died they were suppressed and lost in the limelight of becoming a witch. My grandmother was less understanding than my mother, and twice as stubborn.

On Sundays and nights when all the chores were tended to and my elder siblings were drinking wine and talking about life in the living room, I would be high atop Caroline Haven’s bell tower deep in study. I would call the winds into an updraft about the dusty brick work, snatching leaves from the silent lawns so that they danced like sprites prancing alongside the hooves of the Wild Hunt. Within a heartbeat I would cast away the skies and conjure flickers of fire into my palms to keep the chill night air at bay. I learnt from books borrowed from the village’s mystics that the flame was an extension of my own heart, a glimpse of my inner being given power. I wondered then what the wind represented, and delved into the mystery of my dual nature – sorcery was my mother’s gift to me, and I vowed to not take it for granted, even if it was scorned and unappreciated by the coven of Albion and its set in stone ways.

[Oliver]

As I walked through the forest surrounding Albion’s perimeter, through mud, mire and melange of nature, I continued to explore the origins of my sorcery in my mind. It is a lonely road to travel, so I had to keep myself occupied with arcane rhetoric lest I succumb to madness and dwell too heavily on what had then only just happened. I am grateful that my grandmother pressed me so heard in tutorage, because it is that very same academic spark that kept my head out of the gutter and my sodden feet ceaselessly carrying me under oak bough and over rotten pine. Those heavy and saving footfalls that sped me out from the shadows and into the great outdoors.

The first discovery that impressed me into silence for a good few miles was that sorcery was, and indeed is the greater part of me. It does not vanish when I break the rules, nor does it punish me if I misuse it. At least, I do not think it does, the opportunity for miscreant behaviour has yet to arise. It is as if magic in its natural form is without law, without consequence, without president or tenet. I imagine that there will be consequences in the future, but it is invigorating to not be bound by the constant worry that a word or willing out of place will result in the damnation of my eternal soul.

There are no angels watching over sorcerers, mages and wizards.

I brought three books with me in my pack when I left Albion. They are tomes given to me by my mother, which I had to hide beneath my bed in a pile of long forgotten wool linen and clothes that ceased to fit my tall, lanky form. Hidden in the cross-stitch of a forgotten ancestor, they cradled my interest in the wider schools of magic and the wonders of the world beyond my own. Carefully I removed them from their hiding place and buried them into my travel pack, alongside spare clothes, candles, cooking utensils and a few meagre magical artefacts which I thought I might be able to make use of in some way or another.

The first book is titled The Roots of all Magicks, written centuries ago by a sorcerer named Yeadon. According to my mother, he was a powerful practitioner of transformative magic, able to channel his ether into turning one thing into another. He might be called an alchemist now, but his gold would have been real, and not turned back to lead the second the so called ‘magician’ had fled the scene. The book describes how all magic, no matter its form, name or origin stems from the simplest of seeds – wonderment. It does not matter, according to Yeadon, whether you draw on ritual, heart, soul, ether, wand, staff or horror, all that matters is that you do. All of us brothers in the arcane arts are branches of the same tree, all beings bound to the same roots.

By the third chapter, he begins to outline the various methods of divination and conjuration – the forms with which a magic wielder creates his art. Each is a strange thing, many evil, many dangerous, many more mundane and simple. I have read and memorised the names until they became second nature to me, recited during whatever little time I got to myself when the household was asleep, in a circle or attending the village council meetings. I was always rather fond of physiognomy, reading the future of a person through interpreting his facial features, as well as the more classical chiromancy and metascopy – the lines of the palms and faces of the believers. Fortune telling is a witch trait, or at least I thought it was. Many people in the village are in fact witches, professing to possess ‘the gift’ when in fact they are sorcerers and seers like the rest of us.

The Root of all Magicks concludes with a particularly poignant passage about the origin and nature of magic at its very basic level, devoid of interpretation, school or ritual with which to bind and create. I never really understood it until I found myself reading it aloud only yesterday, with blistered feet, sweating brow and muddied thighs adding to the impact of discovery.

The Roots of all Magicks
By Yeodon of Fallien

"There is magic in all behaviour, however apparently rational. The problem is how to be aware of this without yielding to it."

Which only reinforces the need for me to now forget I was ever a witch, and to simply continue in life as if magic had been a part of me since my birth. I have to use it, without paying heed to it's laws. I have to follow my heart, and let my emotions guide me in coming to understand what sorcery is, and what I am to do with it - what I am to become in the days ahead.

[Oliver]

It is with great irony that I sit here, in the back of a dusty cart on the low road between the Brokenthorn and the village next along the route that I flick through the pages of the second book I took from my home. The Sins of the Mother is a complete history and almanac of witch craft traditions, in particular, those of the coven, the mistress and the hedge witch. It was given to me by my mother in acceptance of my dual nature. I remember her words fondly, from the very moment she handed its olive leather bound form to my young, innocent self.

‘Here within lies all you need to know, devoid of the stubbornness, selfishness and ignorant ways of Albion’s coven. Herein you will find the truth, about the Creed, the way of the witch, and all those who succumb to its most wicked of ways.’ Upon reflection or perhaps it’s just the heat of the midday sun getting to me, in trying to show me an unclouded view of my life my mother clouded it more than my grandmother ever would.

I’m not sure wherever or not she meant to say that witch craft was always wicked, or if she meant to warn me against the temptations of becoming too engrossed in its ways. I won’t get to find out now I guess, the moment has passed, the people who have waited for me to come of age long gone. I wish I had kept a diary sooner, even though my writing is scribbling spider’s legs onto the parchment of my once Book of Shadows, it is making the journey go much quicker, it is making the days once long speed by without drama or boredom.

The book is a stark contrast to The Roots of all Magicks. Whilst the book goes into great detail explaining how all magical arts are different names for the same thing, The Sins of the Mother goes into great detail separating witch craft from other magic forms. It explains that it is a dual natured craft, formed about the two figureheads of modern witch craft – the mother and the father, man and woman, wife and husband, king and queen resplendent. In classical magic mythology, the world and all things in it are comprised of the five elements.

When casting a circle, as the book chronicles in great length, one prays and conjures the four watch towers of the primal elements. These of course are fire, water, earth and wind. The pentacle is formed from these elements, when joined by a fifth. The fifth element is invariably spirit, light, the self – some view it as mankind, as the practitioners of witch craft itself, but most see the fifth and northern tip of a pentacle as a representation of the Spirit, of the Goddess and the God. I used to chuckle at my grandmother when she tried to talk about the spirit to me. She described them as two lights encompassing one body, androgynous save for appearances before people who saw it only in one light – as a man or a woman.

One of the first witches of Albion, the very first man to lead the coven despite our traditions wrote the truth of all witch craft in the simplest and most striking of passages which heads the second chapter of the book on such a duality.

The Sins of the Mother
By Zohar of the First Coven of Albion

“Thus the two lights of divine being have this particular feature: that one, the active is light, are male and the other, the passive light, is female.”

What is more beautiful than that simple sentence? I mean, I can look up now over the battered, worn oak planks of this rickety wagon and gaze over meadows so gold and radiant in the summer sun that my eyes have to squint to prevent blindness, but the bounty of nature has nothing on Akashi – nothing on the creator and soul of the world. So why is it then, that when I see beauty in the world I think of the Spirit, yet when I look deeper into the origins and myths of that fifth element…I am so bitterly disappointed. It turns out that despite the figurehead of modern paganism being distinctly androgynous, male and female without focus on either form, witchcraft and witch societies are so distinctly matriarchal?

[Oliver]

It turns out the answer to that is something nobody has dared consider. The Sins of the Mother goes to great lengths to chronicle the difference between coven tradition and fact. It places the core, elemental and universal pentagram at the top of the hierarchy of importance for all witches, regardless of gender. Spirit, earth, fire, water, air, they are without change, without misunderstanding, without deviance. In the middle section of the book however the author highlights how the pentagram has become gender biased over the years. There are to excellent diagrams which reflect how female and male witches who place their own gender at the heart of The Creed.

The Goddess pentacle replaces spirit with the dark moon – the wise woman. It exchanges water for the full moon – the mother. It alters fire into the waxing moon – the lover, the Queen. It transforms earth into the waning moon – the grandmother. Finally, the goddess pentacle replaces air with the mewing new moon – represented by the maiden. These are the reported faces of the Spirit when it appears solely before a woman, or an all-female coven. I imagine my grandmother would have seen herself reflected in the white aura, and my sisters the maiden, graceful air and passionate fire forming a youthful, resplendent ruler before their eyes.

In contrast the God pentacle depicts the five elements as the various titles a man can possess in feudal and historical classicism. Spirit becomes the lord, water becomes the husband, fire becomes the rollick god, earth the old king and air the young god. Both of these twisted forms of the true pentacle are no different in meaning, so I can only wonder why people feel the need to twist the truth to conform to their own ideals and view of the world. If the spirit is androgynous, why does changing its name bring closure and faith closer to the heart and mind? I guess my frustration with my coven for so many years of being half ignored and shoved to one side for being a man won’t allow me to see anything other than a stale relic of a chauvinist or feminist age.

I remain faithful to the true pentacle, the magic circle surrounding the eternal man. I will forever see the spirit as the ether, the source of all magic. It represents mystery and mysticism is its game. I will always see water as a force of slow love and strong worship. I can see fire only in terms of rage, passion and magic – excessive yet gentle with the same lapping flame. Earth will always represent the bulwark defence of a wise mind and slow paced approach to living. Air will always be for philosophers and sages, blowing whispers and secrets through the skies and cracks in the walls of the towers of the great cities.

Both books do share something in common. They both state that if a magic user or witch is to find themselves, they must stay true to their intentions and their beliefs. It does not matter if the spirit is a man or a woman, or neither, it only matters that the spirit exists in your world and all the beliefs you need to believe in to make sense of it all. I will retain the use of the pentagram as a focussing tool in my exploration of sorcery, wizards and mages and warlocks have used it for centuries without succumbing to angelic curses or daemonic decree…

The Sins of the Mother concludes with an excellent line that makes a lot of sense to be now. ‘My life is my practice’, it attests, and if a life is all about practice, ritual and changing and evolving nuances in the everyday, that is through my new practice that I shall live. Maybe the circle is lost, maybe the winds blow against me, and maybe I must rely on the passion in my heart to power my magic now…but I will not die or lose the spark I’ve always had in my chest. I must change how I perceive the world, because I can no longer expect the world to change around me, my village, or all the things it taught me to uphold.

[MetalDrago]

Plot Construction: (21/30)

Characterization: (19/30)

Writing Style: (19/30)

Wild Card: (6/10)

Total Score: 65/100

Oliver Midwinter receives 580 EXP

[Atzar]

EXP added!