High in the Mountains

Moon Dancer came to visit me this time, and had some things to say I don't think I consciously saw coming. But, honestly, it makes sense if you read the previous sections where I wrote of the coming of age and even the NSFW scene. Shadow of the Stag returned too, but he was much older and more tired than I remembered him. He's got some stories to tell, Moon Dancer's, I feel, are still to come. Perhaps Seer of the End has something to pass on to help that along, perhaps not. There was a moment in writing her coming of age sequence where I thought that maybe Moon Dancer or the Medicine Man would play a role. They still might, but they did not belong in that moment.

I seem to be gripped by an ideas sleet at the moment, and the time to indulge it, so I am not complaining nor standing in the way of it.

Analysis once again provided by the reliable 750words.com

Rating: PG (sexual-content[? I don't see this at all])

Feeling mostly self-expressive, and concerned mostly about religion - huh, I guess so!

Mindset: Introvert - Positive - Uncertain - Thinking

Time: The Past; Primary Sense: Touch; Us and Them: Them

26 minutes at 43 words per minute

"What makes a man?"

Darkness fell through the leafless branches of the bush and the high crowning canopy, animal noises were softer in the blanket of frost this high in the mountains. Weak sun dipping low beneath the far horizon, lighting the underside of the clouds scudding high above.

"What makes a man or what makes a man a man?"

A pause, time to think, such things were the preserve of the journey and the wilderness. There was no pressure, no impetus to answer immediately. Cracking timber, naked wood sheathed in bark, licking flames from the dry tinder and the use of a flint to spark. Sudden crackling of the dry grasses pulled from a pouch taking light and heat, adding the sticks and the steam rising as frozen water was turned from solid to liquid and thus to gas in short order, steaming in the cold air about. No shelter needed to keep the heat, no rain and no moisture not hardened by the time of the year - ground hard underfoot as though turned to the timelessness of the mountains themselves.

"Yes."

Shadow of the Stag smiled, but said nothing, fixing Moon Dancer with kind eyes - the eyes of an old man. The eyes of a dying man. "It has been long since asked you advice of I. It is good." And he took a sharpened point and drove it into the carcass of the rabbit that he had brought with him from the valleys below. Like the first time, like the time when Moon Dancer was young and still learning, but firmer and with less care. Almost careless, a sign of faltering concentration or, more likely, a symptom of having his thoughts turned elsewhere.

A larger set of wood added, the steam becoming infested with small fragments of bark and dry wood in the brightness of the dancing flames, themselves providing the music of the night as it came in waves. Long silence was kept, the warmth burning the skin on one side allowing the cold to scald the back where furs were not as thick. Calloused hands and gnarled tree-root arms roughly pushed at the wood and turned the smaller looking rabbit over the colour, so that the flesh seemed transported, and the smell from it cooking would travel far. Soon others would seek to join the meal but Shadow of the Stag, for all his talk of light and dark, was never too afeared. Besides, Moon Dancer knew a fair share of how to deal with most visitors of the night being of the dark.

Roots in the ground broke the hunched positions they took, softening mud providing a more comfortable lodging for the lean haunches of the pair of them as they watched the light in their own ways. Above the sky bled its colour to allow the pinpricks of the stars to wheel and spin in the dome, for the great lights to abandon their furrow and for the birds to give up their joy. Cold was coming and yet neither moved to keep it from them any more than they had already done. Stars were the perfect accompaniment for the deep discussion and making warmth would require a means of separation.

"When questions asked become an answer," intoned Shadow of the Stag slowly, "Then discussion conceals." A sense of him not being done, pregnant pause in the air hanging by a thread as the flesh cooked and the fat bubbled. A leg offered, taken, and they ate together companionably. "Medicine is not your calling. Spirits come but do not tarry."

Not entirely true, but Shadow of the Stag did not know of the dreams or the visions that Moon Dancer had, nor could he know. "I was visited."

Shadow of the Stag looked up again, fixing Moon Dancer in his gaze, but said nothing and, as if for the first time, his expression was unreadable. He waited, food held in one hand but no making no movement to eat nor to continue talking. It was an invitation, a moment of respect, but also curiosity and some confusion.

"Words came, but not language; feelings without name. They visit still."

"Even now you surprise and move quickly, cub. Man does not need to explain. Man can understand. But you, cub, you..."

Understanding again, passing without any means of transmission - no vibration in the earth, no sound in the air, no touch on the skin, no thought in the eyes - a feeling of being understood happening only in the mind.

"You are not Man, nor will ever you be."

It was not meant as anything other than a realisation, a statement of a fact that both had known and long ago recognised but gaining definition for the first time. Nevertheless Moon Dancer felt a pang of hurt, a blade drawn and used across the roughness of skin, to bring forth the red of a human's blood through the redness of a pelt. Enough to sting. Enough, perhaps, to wound.

"More. You are more."

"Or less."

"I have taught you better, cub," a darkness of a frown, a power of the voice communicating some irritation, "Men do not bring warmth, only gifts. Men bring cold. You are not cold, cub, you do not bring warmth or life. You give gifts, you have received gifts but also warmth, been privy to the bringing forth of life in ways few match. No, cub, you are not Man. You are not life-giver. You are more. Less, perhaps, in some ways. No life grows in you, no gifts measure you, but you bring not cold and not fire. No destruction, no creation. And yet... And yet, cub, and yet."

Words ended. No drumming would follow. No music but that of the mountains in the frost, no song but that of the animals nearby. No warmth but that carried within and held by the skins worn. None was shared, but none was needed, there was only companionable silence. Until the late time came and Shadow of the Stag spoke once more: "Be at peace, cub, to ask is to have an answer. But not of me. Of the spirits."

And Moon Dancer saw.