Aderyn and the Snow White Stag

Legends are made of big things to widen the eyes of small children. Immovable, intractable things - timeless, immortal things. Strength, honesty and courage. Wisdom, love and honor. These things alone have life, have spirit; like a river, they trickle, build and wane, harsh paths cut in soft stone. And in gentle eddies, in the fringes and the fading, sometimes - just barely - you can make out the shape of what once was.

The forest had grown quiet. As Aderyn walked the narrow wooded path, pleasure trails carved by hunters, horses and dogs, there was nothing but the dim, dry crackling of autumn leaves beneath her feet. A deep, musty smell hung thick in the unstirred air. It may have reminded her of an old campfire, wet by the rain. But there was nothing else; not the soft clamor of birds, the chirping of insects nor the rustling of diminutive forest voles. It was an unnatural thing; it was a silence with a presence.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before, the land on which the forest stood had dwelled beneath a shallow, placid lake basin. In the village, small children played with twine-wood toys, decorated with the colorful shells they collected, once buried within the earth and shifted upwards by the slowly rising trees. And even deeper beneath that soft, still soil, far beyond the roots of trees, and slick layers of forgotten marsh, lay the remnants of forgotten ancients.

Aderyn stopped. She waited. She listened: eyes unfocused, mind stilled, breath caught. She could hear her heart beating. She could feel her blood flowing. Expectation surrounded her - a warm, familiar glow across her skin. Perhaps now she bade her quarry to reveal itself: a snap of a twig, a soft vocalization, a scent in the air. But there was nothing there; these forests were dead. Even the trees seemed hollow. Even the plants seemed to wilt. And even the air was stale, colors pale and faded.

In some tales, Aderyn was a fresh new maiden, desperate to prove herself to her village by bringing back the hunt, which had fed the town's wealth for generations beyond memory. In some tales, Aderyn was a devoted young mother, a colorless outcast to her own village, who thought only of her children and their hunger. In some tales, Aderyn was nothing more than a traveling stranger, a capricious nighttime spirit, who came from the ether to answer the villager's fervent prayers.

Aderyn found herself standing within the soft shades of a lake like mirrored glass, the only sound the gentle trickle of a distant, feeding stream. Her eyes scanned the sunlit waters, looking for familiar, darting shapes - and finding nothing upon which to hang her gaze for purchase. But if she was discouraged, if she was desperate, if she felt panic settling into her heart, or fear within her chest and lungs; if she felt anything at all, this was her secret, locked now within the stillness of time.

Aderyn froze: breath, mind and heart at once, froze. Far beyond the glossy, too-still sky-strewn lake, beneath the empty skies and within the hollow woods, she saw only the breath of a movement. At first, just a flicker; a trick of the eye - light dripping its way through bright sunshine leaves. And then it resolved, sharp, to both eye and mind, sharp. It was no trick. It was the movement of prey. It was the movement of a snow white stag, now standing still and faintly glowing.

Did Aderyn know the myth of the snow white stag? As it had passed from lips to lips to mind over the countless generations, surely at least once they had found themselves caught on the piercing attention of this hunter woman. Surely if she were a maiden these myths would still have been fresh on her mind, imparted in sleepless night hours by attentive parents. Surely if she were a mother she would recall whispering these very same stories to her own children, as their eyes widened, rapt, at attention.