Of Magic. After the Mountain.
Of Magic. After the Mountain.
Part Two August & A Short Story
OF MAGIC AFTER THE MOUNTAIN - A SHORT STORY
Magic stirred in the darkness of the rock wall where it had lain resting for centuries. It hadn’t moved, not even to breath, in all its time dormant. The rock, which was part of a big mountain, shivered and trembled knocking magic from side to side until, like ejecting a fish bone from its throat, it threw magic into the high blue sky. In a thousand sparkling crystals magic was carried by a drifting breeze into the world that had once been its home.
Ethan reached into the babbling brook whose water was cold, brown and alive. He remembered the day he’d felt the tingling in his fingers; a gentle wave spread up his arm; the clarity with which he could feel where the fish were, and the lure in his hands.
Trout arrived curious. If they were a good size he’d scoop them out without a fight, bop their heads on a rock and carry their slippery bodies in his canvas bag to his family who wondered how he always came home with a catch. He told them it was just luck but he knew it was the thing that reached through him making his senses see what they’d been blind to. He wondered each time he reached into the water if he’d feel the gift. He did not assume it was his to keep.
Morning after morning, Lorna gazed at the sky-sea become one by the driving rain of winter storms.
She had a knack for talking to sea birds. People had come to know her as the weather woman. The fishermen trusted her reports. She didn’t tell them it was the birds who forecasted storms or fair skies.
She’d always listened to birds call and beak snap and song. She’d seen they had a language of their own. It had been a few years now since the foggy morning she’d gone out to stand on the shore and watch the birds and realised she understood them. Their conversation was clear and engaging. What surprised her most was their vast and specific vocabulary for the types of wind and rain and tides. She learnt words from them she translated into human language that felt like poetry when she spoke them to the people she gladly shared weather news with.
Magic liked the woman who knew her place at the edge of the ocean. It found delight translating between beak and ear. And magic knew it was safe with the fisher boy Ethan who knelt in the long grasses eager to catch his supper and share it with the people he loved.
Still fresh in the world Magic thought often of the cruel man who’d trapped it centuries before. It saw how it should have untethered itself immediately. But it hadn’t. It chose wrong.
Magic remembered becoming a tumultous, whirling disaster. The man who controlled magic tossed it like seasoning into dreams to bitter the joy from life; scattered it on the land to wither green leaves and sour the scent of every spring flower. Magic could do nothing to stop itself.
Eventually the cruel man died. On his last breath magic poured out of him and fell like a dark blanket against the grey stone wall until it was swept up by a woman intent on cleaning the filth and death from the room. Magic was thrown out of the window and buffeted by the breeze into the clouds. It could not hold itself together nor find itself apart. The world experienced wild storms and the strangest weather until magic fell unconscious and in a downpour landed on the side of a great mountain.
The mountain did not care about magic. It did not care about anything other than being exactly what it was: Mountain. It let magic be magic allowing it to settle on its surface and eventually become part of its strong frame.
In the slowness of time magic reformed.
When at last magic began to move mountain was tickled and shaken on the inside. It shifted and groaned as rocks are known to do and ejected magic.
For a long time magic carried a weight of grief that sometimes turned its drifting essence silver. It did not give itself to anyone until it had spent a long time in the world finding those who went gently.
Thanks for reading,
Lucy