Garna

There were no natural sounds in the forest. The trees, once lively with the voices of the wind, had fallen silent generations before. There were no birdsongs ringing out from the canopy, nor any fluttering of wings, or other tiny indications of movement to contribute to the natural chorus. A riverbed lay dry, the only indication of its once bubbling waters the smoothed stones that lay scattered through a subtle indentation in the ground.   No one now living could remember The Fall. All that remained of the World of Before were the stories and legends passed down from one generation to the next - tales of great beings: ones who possessed the powers of the Heavens and the Earth; ones who ruled over life and death; ones who had once been the harbingers of creation… and of destruction.   The old shamans of the ancient tribes regaled the young ones with vivid, lively myths. They spoke of Forrin, bringer of light; of Leyna, the healer; of Garin, the warrior; of Floy, the kind; of Chloris, the Mother.   They described in colorful detail the ancient and well-told tales of the Ancients, and children grew up with dreams of greatness and magic and wonder.   But as time passed, the color began to fade from the stories. The details became hazier with each generation, and the interest of the children grew fainter and fainter every year. The old wisdom began to fade as the lessons from the World of Before began to lose their meaning, the needs and the interests of the world evolving beyond the importance of myth and legend.   Garna, daughter of Jair, could remember an earlier time - one when the stories still mattered, when they still held meaning. She had watched countless generations rise, and fall around her. She had watched her tribe grow to its pinnacle and collapse upon itself, devolving into violent wars and battles between brothers, time and time again, until all that remained were the stories in her mind and the sorrow in her heart.   This was the furthest that she had ever come. The Wald had long been dead, save for the trees that reached high into the sky. No natural sounds came from the forest, and those who dared enter had never returned.   But Garna was alone now; she had raised a dozen children, and had outlived them all. She had watched as her grandchildren and her great grandchildren grew up, each caring less for the Old Ways than the ones before them. They grew smaller with each generation, and more selfish. Their interests had lain in the present, their priorities focused on themselves.   They had forgotten the Old Ways. They could not name the Ancients or the gifts they had bestowed upon the world… and they could not recall any details of The Fall. It had cost them dearly, in the end.   Her haggard breaths, and the crunching of dead branches and leaves beneath her feet, were the only sounds in The Wald as darkness began to fall. It had taken many weeks of travel, and already Garna had spent more time among these trees than she had ever imagined possible. It was true - there were no birds, no wind, no water flowing through the thick labyrinth of The Wald, but it was no more dangerous than the world beyond its borders.   Food would be a problem, perhaps, but she did not want for water. The staff in her hand, carved from the trunk of an ancient Boum tree and elaborately decorated with the glyphs and sigils of her people, was imbued with an ancient power that few could understand. She made camp in a clearing, large, and perfectly round, with a fire at its center. Wards had been carved neatly into the trees along its border, granting Garna an ounce of added security as she settled down for the night.   Water poured forth from the end of the Boum staff into her small cauldron, boiling and simmering away as she idly deposited potatoes and dried meats into its depths. Her eyes closed, and her mind began to wander as she breathed deeply, bringing her mind and her spirit to rest.   She thought of her mother - gigantic and awesome, with blonde hair and blazing blue eyes, and a voice that could command the skies. Jair had been the last of the great shamans, the last who could truly command the world around them. And compared to the Ancients, the ones from the World of Before, Garna’s mother had been positively weak. Where she could summon a bolt of lightning, Forrin was said to break the sky open in a magnificent web of electricity. Where Jair could heal the sick or injured, Leyna could bring souls back from the grip of Death. The Ancients had stood taller, brighter, and more powerful than anything that had been seen in living memory… and with Jair’s death, so many years ago, the world had become that much dimmer.   Her eyes flitted open as the scent of simple stew wafted over her. In the steam rising from the cauldron, Garna could see her mother - great, and bright. Her heart panged in anguish, but she thrust her spoon into the cauldron, waving away the vision. It was just a figment of her imagination - such glimpses into the other side had ended with The Fall.   With a warm meal and a full belly, Garna made up her cot for the night, and settled in, Boum staff gripped tightly in her hand as she laid back and turned her gaze upwards to the stars.   The moons were bright, and full, and the stars here seemed almost impossibly close. Ahren would have loved this place. Like his father before him, he had possessed the power to read the signs and the messages in the skies - the wisdom left behind by the Ancients. It was with this power that Ahren had predicted the gender and the personality of each of their children together, but his gifts had never gone much further than that. On a good day, he could predict the weather, and otherwise he simply knew how to track the movements of the celestial bodies. Perhaps, had the powers been just a little less diluted, he might have prevented their fates.   Something moved, just in the corner of her eye, and Garna sat bolt upright, clutching the Boum staff protectively in front of her. Ahren looked back at her, just as lean and as handsome as the day they had married. Tears welled in her eyes as she extended a hand to him, but the dancing of the flames and a tiny gust of wind blew through the shadow of her husband. He was gone… just as he had been for the last two hundred years.   It did not take long for sleep to claim her; she longed to see them in her dreams, as she had so many times before. And this night was no different than so many others. Blaz and Dagna tussled together, arguing about some undefined slight; Pepin and Zelig conspired off to one side, discussing some new plot and plan; Theobold and Serilda sharpened their swords, their faces set. They were all so young… so small, and so innocent, despite their actions and harshly whispered words. They smiled when they saw her, but those smiles faltered as their eyes turned towards each other across the room.   The cries of battle, of anguish and of vengeance, rang out. No - this was not how this was meant to be! Not here. Not like this. It was too soon. Perhaps there was still time to stop this, to remind them! The Boum staff warmed in Garna’s grasp, the glyphs and sigils glowing brightly as the children stilled, eyes widening in wonder. She stood before them, as grand and as glorious as the Ancients had once been, and one by one they fell to their knees, heads bowed in understanding and subservience before true power.   She could still see them when she awoke - smiling, and alive. But as with the others, the images faded quickly as Garna blinked in the morning sunlight. A frown tugged at her lips, and she hesitated before beginning to collapse her camp. There, in the center, rising from the ashes of the night’s fire, was a small sapling. It seemed almost to glow blue in the morning shadows, its newly budded leaves almost iridescent in the low forest light.   One more night couldn’t hurt. Garna left her camp and stepped into The Wald, careful to mark her path as she advanced. Though faint, she could feel a light breeze rustling through the trees, carrying with it the musty, ancient smells of a place long left untouched. She walked for hours, only now noticing that others had carved markings into the trees long before her. They were faded, and covered in moss, but they were there - an ancient language, one long since lost, but a language nonetheless.   And the deeper she went, the more she noticed unusual landmarks - upstanding rocks and boulders in shapes that could not possibly have occurred in the natural world, and large mounds of dirt in the earth that seemed almost neatly and evenly placed in other small clearings throughout The Wald. People had lived here once - people with society, with culture. She ran her hand over a roughly carved stone, her fingertips picking up the smallest details of carved writings - a prayer, perhaps, or an epitaph. Although she would never know who it was, who or what they had been, when they had been here… Garna knew that this was the resting place of a druid. Of many druids, a people whose magic was the stuff of legends and tales, but that had not been seen for countless generations.   The sapling was larger when she returned to her camp, now standing straight and sporting a half-dozen full-sized leaves, each iridescent and faintly glowing in the evening light. She dared not touch it, and instead made her fire across the clearing.   Thunder rolled in the distance, and Garna’s eyes turned towards the skies as she stirred her dinner in the small cauldron. It was said that storms were signs of unrest in the plane of the Ancients. When the skies opened and the clouds roared, Forrin was bringing forth the light, bringing peace and tranquility back to the warring factions of the World of Before. He was said to have been magnificent, in stature, in power, and in heart. There were no Kings among the Ancients, but he had always been regarded by her people as the greatest of them all - one who brought creation more than destruction, who favored life over death.   As the rain began to fall, for a brief moment, she saw Forrin in the clouds - tall, broad, and strong, hands outstretched before him as he met her gaze, a look of sorrow in his eyes.   It did not take long to build her structure, one that would protect her from the storms. Had she not fallen asleep almost immediately upon lying down, Garna might have noticed that, while the rain fell among the trees, the clearing remained perfectly dry.   She longed to know about this tree - and it was a tree, now, almost as tall as she was, and growing thicker in its trunk and its canopy. It was still too soon to dare to touch it - it exuded something beyond this world, something unlike anything that she had ever seen before. It was beautiful, and seemed almost to whisper to her, uttering something that she could not quite make out. It called to her in a voice that was vaguely familiar, but just out of reach.   There was little to do but take back to The Wald. There were no answers to be found in her clearing, and still so much more to explore. Again, she marked her path as she went, breathing deeply as the gentle breeze washed over her, stopping only as she heard the gentle bubbling of running water in the distance. The stories had all said that this was a dead place - a damned place, one with no water, no animals, no sound. But as Garna cleared a thick line of trees, she could see the sun glinting through the thick canopy of leaves upon a small, babbling brook.   Tears of joy prickled at her eyes as she knelt at the edge of the water, cupping it in her hands and raising it to her lips. She paused, remembering the tales of Floy, who had danced in place for two days and two nights until water had risen in the desert. It was said that Floy was the one who answered prayers; the one who brought harmony and joy to the World of Before. Every oasis, every bountiful harvest, every happy ending was attributed to his unyielding desire to see prosperity upon the earth.   A smiling, encouraging face peered back at her in the reflection in the water - a thin, balding man who seemed to have kindness written into every crease and wrinkle around his eyes. A weak smile crossed her lips as she splashed the water onto her face, feeling refreshed and hopeful for the first time in years.   It was the size of a Boum tree when Garna returned to camp that evening. She approached it now, not with fear, but with awe, and a growing sense of understanding. Something that she could not quite comprehend seemed to reach out to her as she extended her hand towards its trunk, an overwhelming feeling of power and strength, unlike anything that she had ever felt before. It reminded her of the Boum staff; of her mother’s strength;, and of Ahren’s gifts. But this was potent; concentrated and intense, more than anything that she could fathom.   She slept beneath the branches of the tree that night, and was greeted only with the sweetest dreams of the world as it might have been. A world where the Old Ways and the Ancients were remembered, where their lessons and their lives had not been disregarded as simple myth and legend. It was the deepest sleep she could ever recall having, and she felt more like herself when she awoke than she had in centuries.   A rustling at the edge of the clearing caught her attention, and she clutched the Boum staff tightly in her hands, raised and ready to strike… but she lowered it slowly as a deer, limping and bloodied, crossed through the trees. They looked at each other for a long while; and eventually, the creature lowered itself to the ground beneath the tree, now reaching far above those around it, breathing heavily, and bowing its head towards her.   Garna had never possessed her mother’s power. Jair, who could cure the sick and injured, who could call the winds and the storms, who could perform things that seemed like miracles, had not passed her gifts to her daughter. All that she had ever had was the Boum staff, which would certainly do nothing of use here. But perhaps…   Knelt beneath the towering branches of the iridescent tree, Garna gently stroked the creature’s back, and found that she knew all that ailed it. Had her eyes been open, she might have noticed that the leaves and the trunk glowed brighter than ever before as her fingertips passed over its wounded haunch. She could see a clear vision of Leyna in her mind’s eye as something passed forth from herself to the animal, as if the Ancient were guiding her, steering her towards something impossible.   And when she opened her eyes, the deer was on its feet, standing beside a woman of unparalleled beauty, who simply bowed her head towards Garna before disappearing.   The Wald was quickly proving to be a fascinating place, one with countless secrets to unfold. As Gara ventured deeper from the clearing, beyond the brook and the carved Druid stones, other signs of life appeared. The songs of birds returned to the trees, the gentle flutter of wings mingling with the bubbling stream and the wind in the leaves. Squirrels and rabbits moved through the greenery, the occasional deer or fox crossing her path as she went. But where there was life, there was also death - or rather, signs of deaths that had long since passed. Bits of metal, cast into defined shapes, arrowheads, pieces of armor and familial sigils, jewels and other adornments that would have been worn into a final, glorious battle.   Garin was there among the trees in grand armor, gleaming in the low light of The Wald. He was magnificent, but as she approached, he turned towards Garna and she could see the exhaustion, the weariness, the sorrow in his eyes. He looked once around the ground between them, met her gaze, and disappeared with what seemed almost to be a sigh of relief.   Garna returned to her clearing, now seeing the truth of The Wald. Just as her people had forgotten the stories of the Ancients and the World of Before, the stories of The Wald, too, had been forgotten. Life and death had once been in balance here. Perhaps, it would be that way again. She went straight to sleep upon returning, not noticing that the trunk of the tree had begun to twist into an elaborate spiral.   They came to her in her dreams that night - faces and stories that she could not distinctly discern, but ones that spoke to her, ones that called to her, in the same whispered voices that came from her tree. But now, she understood them. The things that were, the things that had been… and the things that may yet become. Their worlds, their experiences, their lives, their stories - fluid and beautiful and terrible and sorrowful, all at once.   And at the center of it was Chloris. She looked like Jair--fitting, really--and the words she spoke were not of a language that Garna had ever heard, or ever read, but somehow she understood perfectly. She awoke the next morning with tears in her eyes, and a smile on her face as she looked upwards at her tree, now twisted into a perfect, spiral staircase reaching up to the skies.   She left her possessions behind as she stepped onto the staircase, and the weight of a lifetime of sorrow seemed to lift from her very soul. She climbed, higher and higher, stopping only once at the start of the canopy, to look back down at her camp. It was overgrown - the fire pit long since covered by undergrowth, her shelter destroyed by the elements millenia before. At the base of the tree, at the opening of the staircase, she could see a single, roughly carved rock, and she knew, now, that it was hers - a Druid marker, much the same as the ones she had found in The Wald.   Birds flew among the trees. Animals roamed around the clearing, coming close, but never across the tree line. It was a perfect circle, with a large indentation at its center, as if something had fallen here from the heavens. What good fortune that she should have found it. In the distance, she could see a settlement, far closer to the edge of The Wald than any from her time would ever have dared.   A breeze rushed over her as she once again began to climb. Garna did not know what she would find at the top of the tree; she did not know how far it had grown, or who, if anyone, would be waiting to meet her there. But she knew that her time upon the earth was long since over. She and her people had been gone for a long time. Their knowledge of the World of Before and the Ancients was gone… but there were a great many things that they had never known.   Garna remembered her family - her mother, Ahren, the children. And she remembered the Ancients, and the stories she had learned about them… in both life, and in death. She remembered the voices from the tree, the ones that had shared their perspectives in languages and dialects she had never heard before. She remembered The Wald, and its evolution from death to a renewed life. Her memories empowered her, giving her the strength to keep climbing, the hope for something, anything at the end. She exhaled slowly as the end of the staircase appeared, and she spared one single, final glance at the world below.   Stories, memories, lessons, tales - they all hold power, even when it’s difficult to see. The powers of the Heavens and the Earth; the power to influence life and death; the power to be both the harbingers of creation, and of destruction. It all seemed so clear to her now, and as she took her final step at the top of the staircase, Garna smiled, finally at peace.