When you find the cold unseasonable and the clouds hang just a little too low, when rain falls like needles upon the new grass and the wind howls outside your window so you cannot set foot beyond your threshold, why would you go anywhere else? Stay home today, where it’s warm; sit with me a while. A hot drink is needed. A comfy chair and your favorite sweater, a crackling fire to your left and a good story to pass the time…

 I know a tale, ancient and strange. A tale of sorcerers and dragons, a tale of betrayal, torment and salvation. But more than that, it is a tale of true love.

Tell me, do you believe in such a thing?

Perhaps you consider yourself too practical, too cynical to consider it. Or perhaps, like me, you’ve already found true love.

Or could it be—you’re still searching for it? 

Then my tale is for you, Dreamer. Though it starts…

With another tale…

The bards sing of a sleeping maiden hidden deep in the Aelph woods, down a lush woven trail nobody knows.

They say she was a damsel most fair, born to a powerful sorcerer and a sage druid. The perfect blend of their love and their great ability, she had a fairy-like ability to command the seeds within the earth and all the plants and trees around her. With a word she could make flowers bloom or summon healing waters that would turn dry deserts into oases. With a touch she could weave garments of softest grass or send great choking vines to swallow up and crumble the mightiest fortress.  

She was the jewel of her generation, beloved of everyone, and yet she was unhappy, for she had lived to her twentieth year, and she had not found her one true love. And so, she determined to look for him.

The maiden walked from village to village, searching every hill and glen along the way. She walked the coastline of the great island and probed again at its very heart, but her true love was nowhere to be found.

Desperate, the maiden went to her mother, knowing her to be the wisest among her druidic order. She besought her mother to peer into the future on her behalf, but she would not.

“It is forbidden,” she said. “The secrets of time, its comings and goings, we must not look into. Find the answer on your own, my child.”

But her daughter persisted.

“I have searched the land over for my true love, and I do not know where he could be. If I do not find him soon, I fear I shall die of a broken heart.”

But the woman would not be moved for her daughter’s pleas.

The maiden persisted. For a month and a day she besought her mother, though the answer was always the same.

“It is forbidden!”

And each day, the maiden grew more weary and heartsick. She cried upon her mossy forest bed and would not be consoled, not by the gentle roots that enfolded her in their embrace, nor by the forest spirits who alighted on her trembling form, who with all their great love for her endeavored to pass some of their life force into the maiden. But it was all for nothing. Her soul rejected life itself if she could not have her one true love.

Seeing her daughter wasting away and hearing the pleas of the girl’s own father, at last the druidess relented. She sought the truth of time’s waters; she looked into their flow and saw many great and terrible secrets in her search for the maiden’s beloved.

But the truth was more cruel than any of them had imagined.

When at last the druidess came to her daughter, her eyes overflowed with tears.  

“I have seen your true love, my child, but you will never find him in this lifetime, for many centuries must pass ere he shall be seen upon the earth.”

At this news, even the girl’s father began to weep.

“What then shall we do? Are we to watch our only child waste away for sorrow? I would rather place her in a deep slumber, and know that she will one day wake to be with her heart’s desire, than watch her die like this.”

And so it was, with unspeakable sadness in their hearts, the maiden’s parents used their power to lay their daughter in a deep, ageless sleep in the roots of a mighty oak guardian. Her mother burned the image of her daughter’s true love into the treant’s tender green heart, so the ancient tree could wake the sleeping maiden when he came for her at last. But not, her mother charged the treant, before the tree had tested his courage in battle, and proved his worthiness to claim the fair maid’s hand.

Over the next several years, many challengers came to try and wake the sleeping maiden, but they could not best the ancient oak. Decades of unworthy suitors fell, their corpses nourishing the tree and strengthening it for battles to come all while the maiden remained blissfully asleep, cradled by her ancient guardian, dreaming of her one true love.

Centuries passed. The tale of the sleeping maiden deep in the Aelph forest turned to legend and myth. The only challengers that came looking for the mighty tree were children, their imaginations fueled by bardic songs of ages past. But no one ever found her.

Until one day…

Victor

The twilight deepens to darkest blue. I stand in the hollowed out gorge of what was once a dense grove of ancient trees. All around me splintered stumps smoke and settle, innocent casualties of a fierce battle that raged more than four hours.

My foe, a great shuddering treant, falls amidst a cascade of its own loosened leaves, and goes still. I stagger a few steps, naked and bleeding, blackened with soot, crisscrossed with lashes and bruises and bearing in my body the weight of several broken bones, till I come to her at last.

Forest spirits in the image of white, faintly glowing butterflies rest on her sleeping form, their wings folding and unfolding gently, leaving a fine layer of shimmering mist to outline her body.

 Even now the great tree’s roots enfold her, though they begin to retreat at my approach, leaving her exposed in an elegant, timeless gown of purest white. Her long hair the color of ash is gathered in cascades all around her body— I’ve never seen so much hair. It looks like spun silk, gleaming in the dying light.

“At last I’ve found you,” I gasp, just before I collapse. I find myself staring up at the first evening star, not really knowing myself, nor what has happened, nor what is to come. I only know it’s finished. It’s done.

She’s mine.

I sleep as though cradled to my mother’s breast. It’s no ordinary rest, but deep and complete. My dreams are long and pleasant but without meaning.

I see earth and feel wind and rain. I see an acorn buried in soil, I see its tender roots shoot out, I watch it sprout and grow as the sun passes over the great dome of sky thousands upon thousands of times. I watch the animals come and go, the birds that shelter in the oak’s branches, the squirrels that come to collect the nuts that fall to the floor below. I watch the seasons pass without end all with a deep sense of connection, as though I had become the tree itself, tall and silent, passive and unhurried, at peace with myself and the world around me.

Time loses all meaning. All around me I watch the plants wither and decay only to spring up again out of the soil, verdant and new. It is nature’s song, rich and poignant and sad, yet hopeful, eternal. It hums in my ears and resonates with my very soul, pulsing within me. Healing me. And then another voice joins the frequency. A woman’s voice. A lonely, distant soprano carried on the wind across the ages of time, for me alone, so beautiful, I can but weep.

She’s calling to me, calling.

Victor… Victor…

“Victor!”