Author's Note: So we begin the end of Part 1. There are 8 Chapters that narrate Ostara (The Sabit Spring Festival). We switch both POV and tense here, because there is ALOT going on at the Festival and in everyone's heads at this point, and I want you to experience real time along with the narrators. The first chapter belongs to Cernunnos, of course. Here we go!
Song for the Chapter: Cernunnos by OMNIA
Cernunnos' POV
I never take sleep on Ostara.
I usually take whiskey, straight. Liters.
Of all the Sabaats, Ostara is the one I dread the most these days.
The truth is...I've never been very religious. The Eight Sabaats were for the people, a way for them to feel the connections to the seasons, a way for them to keep balance, a way to pray, to allay their fears. I don't need the Sabaats for that. I was engendered from the power of living, growing, greens things. From the breath and beat of running beasts. I don't need to keep the Sabaats to feel the earth power-I am the earth power.
Nope, the Sabaats were just a big hassle for me.
Except for Beltane.
Beltane was the day I made Cerridwen my Goddess, and the Beltanes for the first few thousand years after that were epic. Humanity was still coalescing into organized communities at that time, and still craving our mystic power for their own growth and vitality. Their priestesses petitioned for our blessings. They would set huge bonfires the night of Beltane, hoping the God and the Goddess would bless them with our presence and perform the Divine Act as they danced and drummed around us.
Carrie always made me talk her into it. Sometimes she would even refuse, and flee me, fleet as a red deer, making me chase her over moors, or through forests, laughing as I caught her and carried her, still mock protesting, into whatever human village whose prayers had caught my attention. But once I set her down in front of the Beltane fire, and the priestesses encircled her, worshiping her, offering her wine, disrobing her, bathing her body with milk and honey and bathing her soul in their adoration, she transformed into the Mother. She extended benevolence to her human maiden children who were all begging her to mate with me, to create new life during the Divine Act, to make the magic, so that their bodies would yield to her fertile cycle, and their men could get them with child that same night.
She didn't love humanity as broadly as I did, but she loved her priestesses, her witches. She would always bless them, and let me take her by the balefire as they danced around us. Damn, we put on a great show. She would never admit it, but she loved that shit. The one day of the year she was able to really let her freak flag fly.
Yeah, Beltane was good times. But the rest of the Sabaats mostly sucked. My blood-lettings always started on Litha—the summer solstice, and I was an irritable cut-up mess all through Lammas and Mabon. After Mabon, I was slowly dying, and I got sacrified at Samhain—today's Halloween—and resurrected on Yule—believe me, being brought back to life is no more fun than dying. Then, I was layed up all winter in a sick bed, hardly able to even sit up by Imbolc.
But, Ostara was the worst.
Ostara was the day I was fully restored, and the day Cerridwen wept all day for the price she had paid to restore me. Despite my newly returned power, Ostara was always the day I felt most powerless.
The last Ostara I remember was the day I lost my horns. The day Carrie left me.
I haven't seen a sober Ostara since. That's two thousand two hundred twenty seven lost days.
I reach out and touch Dru's leg. She's still asleep. She did much better than me. She spent a week drowning over Faraday. I've spent more than six years worth of days completely sloppy and pathetic, trying not to remember an Ostara I can never forget.
And yet here I am now, sober and on my way to an Ostara festival. Not just going, responsible for the whole spectacle. Ironic, since I've never been to one. The humans never saw Cerridwen or I at the Ostaras of old. Ostara was the one day I attended entirely to Cerridwen. Perhaps the only day of the year, beside the Fertility Rites of Beltane, where she was my sole divine focus. But whereas Beltane was a celebration of life, Ostara was our rite of grief.
Things change. This is neither the Ostara of old, where Cerridwen needed me and I, as always, failed her, nor is it the in-between times that I wasted self-medicating. This is the first Ostara of a new time. I know the people need a new awakening. These mountains are as good a place as any to start. Actually, probably a better place. The people are traditional here. They haven't forgotten the old ways entirely, and many of them still know that survival can be challenging and that ease is not a guarantee. They still see existence as a continual hunt that must be made, though sometimes they are the hunters and sometimes they are the prey.
I like the people here, and they like these damn festivals. I want Ostara to go well, for the community but especially for...Dru, Lana, the rest of the class. They had worked hard all week to organize the events and marshal the vendors and other volunteers . I'm proud of their efforts; I want them to be proud of our outcome.
It was still well dark before Dru and I began our journey down the mountain from camp to Sabit. I was impatient, not wanting to make the drive, wanting instead to enfold Dru in my arms and simply remake us there in the field where the dawn Ostara ritual would take place, but I did not. The ability to transport into and out of physical space is very recently returned to me, and I did not trust myself to move her more than a few feet in that way. Not yet. But for Stag's Sake, after last night...it can't be long until I am invincible again. Not just immortal, existing in substandard human form, with only minor spurts of power, needing things like cars and cell phones and paychecks, but truly divine again...able to rule beasts, and succor mortals and...create from nothing.
I look over at Dru, who is dozing, strapped into the seat beside me. She hasn't had enough rest to recover from her massive magical orgasms. I feel slightly guilty, pulling her from slumber after such a short respite, but my presence is necessary at this ritual, and her place, whether she knows it or not yet, is by my side.
Surely she's beginning to understand. Surely she felt our potential last night. Last night was but a mere tease, awkward for her at first, and if I'm honest, for me as well, but when she seized her orgasm by her magic, and breached my boundary, pushing them both to me...I haven't felt that in ten thousand years.
I haven't had a witchjob since Carrie was a mortal woman. After we completed the Divine Act, and she was a goddess and her body unbreakable, I was interested in nothing less than each sex act being divine union—I cared little for the mortal forms of sex—even sexwitchery. A release where were weren't both physically and magically and divinely joined wasn't high up on my list. Though I would often ease Carrie with mortal acts, especially during her difficult pregnancies, when the Divine Act was simply too exhausting for her, and my touch could help her sleep.
But I have to admit, even though I only meant my intervention in Dru's pleasure to instruct her, and to raise her pleasure, it turned out...mutually fantastic. Her sexwitchery was better than any mortal sex I've had in the last two thousand years.She raised all my old feelings of being a young god, touched by the love of my moonlight witch, and I came—hard—right there in the damn tub. I couldn't help it...it was crazy intense to feel Dru's magic and I was so distracted, trying to push the thoughts of Carrie away, I got caught off guard and lost control for second. And the second time...fuck, okay, I'll admit it...the second time I didn't try to push the thoughts of Carrie away. I was thinking of them both.
I looked at Dru again, feeling slightly guilty. Had she been thinking of Faraday, as I had been thinking of Carrie, while we were coming together? I thought probably not. She hasn't had the experience with him, and she seems earnest in her attempts to keep us separate.
I feel guilt, but it's nearly impossible not to think of Carrie in any act of sex. Once you've had Divine, there's no going back.
But I think I can love this girl beside me. Dru is sweeter, more yielding, sunnier in temperament...in some ways, easier to love than my moonlight witch. It's natural that it will be a different kind of love, right? I am older—so much fucking older, especially in this sub-divine form— and she is so young.
So what if the love I have with Dru will never be like the love I had Carrie? I want that...I want something different. And it's not just me that's conflicted. Dru loves that lad Faraday, and yet she has so sweetly put her trust, her magic, literally tried to put her honeyed seat into my hands. I realize, suddenly, I do love her. I love her with the benevolence of a god who sees her fragility. After all, I am a god that loves mortals—not like those Roman assholes who are only interested in keeping their own crib supplied with human energy. Surely I already love Dru beyond the mercies of her mortal lad, even if it was not the love I had once been capable of.
Perhaps I will be capable again, though. My horns have not yet returned, but I know they are coming. My head itches constantly, my hunting abilities are returning, as well as other powers. They will sprout soon. Perhaps with the return of my horns, and my divinity, perhaps my heart will pinken again, beat with the light thrum of heady, crazed love, instead of thudding dully as it does now, only with the determination of continued, and improved, existence. Perhaps my heart will blossom with the girl's honeysuckle.
What the fuck, Cernunnos? Are you a god, or a godsdamn poet? Enough of this bullshit. The hunt is still afoot. The magic, not the feelings, must come first. Without the magic, the Divine Act will not be possible.
I think back over the details of last night, how Dru's magic looked, felt, fed me.
Dru definitely is a natural born witch, but her magic affects me much differently than Carrie's. Despite Carrie's feigned, girlish whimsy in her modern aspect, there is much more to the witch I loved. To me, Carrie's magical love is not a song, but a symphony. When I make love to her, she is the maiden, the mother, and the wise woman all meeting my soul. Her magic is at once the pool of desire that inspires me, the mother's milk from whence I draw my vigor, the ore that rights my internal compass. Carrie never needed instruction in being my perfect mate.
In fact, she instructed me. I was a wild beast before she loved me, a god of power, not of love. I raced among the men only to show my prowess, and to feel the thrill. For my early existence, I cared not for the losses in the packs of men I led on my reckless hunts, or their dying women and children in the winters of their starvation.
Not until Carrie. Not until I loved her. When I realized I could not bear for my moonlight witch to hunger, to suffer pain, to age, when I made her a goddess and protected her above all others, I could still never forget her face as it had been before...a fragile, mortal woman-child.
When she came to me that first time in the dark forest, run out of her village for her wild and dark power, she was gaunt with hunger, and ferocious from the lessons of pain and violence that was part of mortal existence. Time was not a concept I understood well then—I didn't keep track of the seasons, so I don't know how long it took me to tame that wild girl into the magnificent maiden that became my High Priestess. Two, maybe three years, I thought, but I was shocked at the age wearing on her face in the short span of time.
I have no idea how old Cerrridwen was the Beltane that I took age from her. I look over at Dru, still asleep. Carrie had probably been younger than Dru, but seemed older physically. Then, at seventeen perhaps, her life would have more than likely been half-over. I couldn't bear the uncertainty of her risking mortality another day. I didn't explain to her what the Divine Act would do—make her immortal, bind her to me as half of a godpair, create a cycle for her as Maiden, Mother, Wise Woman. I simply asked my Priestess to trust me, to yield all her will to me, and she did without the slightest hesitation.
She loved me then. And fuck me, I loved her. More than my own life.
And that became the problem.
Carrie had been human, and something happened to me, in that first Divine Act. It changed me, just like it changed her. The love I felt for my human maiden...expanded more than I thought possible. When I took Carrie as my goddess, when I raised her to the Mother, it was like, I took humanity as our children. And whenever I saw the echo of her now-gone mortal frailty in their faces, I loved them for her sake. I couldn't help it.
Ironic, that the thing that stole Carrie's love for me was the fact that she taught me how to love. In the act of loving her, I grew to love all humanity. She made me a better god, and in turn I robbed her of the partner she needed.
Every year, I died for the mortals. One village or a dozen was always in famine, in blight, in crisis. I would go where I was needed, I would walk their fields from Litha to Samhain, letting the mortals cut me, and their crops would revive, the diseases resolve, or my blood would replace the water withheld by drought. I would walk from place to place, and I would bleed, until I could bleed no more. And then I would fall at Samhain, and the lucky village were I lay would take the scythe to me. My marrow blood would sink into their earth and overflow their fields with bounty for a decade.
In all the long millennia I loved my goddess and the humanity that she rose from, I never knew the time from Samhain to Winter Solstice. I was dead. But I am a god, with a god's eye, and I saw the horrific season of grief in my lover's eyes, when I awoke on each Winter solstice.
Every Samhain, my Goddess was left to clean my mess. She would come for me, pregnant with our child, gather my horrific remains and labor all the late fall to weave my unrottable corpse together again with her witch's spells. But her witchcraft, and her own power as a goddess, could not fully raise a god so far gone as me. She was full of grief and horror laboring over my body every day, while also struggling to grow a godling that fed off her own power. Then her pains would come upon her, but no mortal woman would come near to help her, for Carrie, in the season of her grief, was the darkest witch the world had ever seen, and all rightly feared her.
She would give birth alone, inside a house filled with only her pain and her wailing and a stitched-together godcorpse. I never saw any of the children. Except the first...so long ago...
I can't think about the first. I simply can't. It's too much to bear that I could die for multitudes of mortals to be fed but I was too weak through the long winter after my first resurrection to help Carrie keep one frail babe from starving.
But there were so many thousands after the first that I never saw, and they haunt me.
Each year, as the child was just born, she bled all the child's god power from it by the cord still attached to the child. She made a potion and poured it into me, in order to resurrect me. She would leave me gasping in new breath, and take the babe away—now a perfectly, pink and squelching mortal babe—delivering it into the arms of a human mother, because Cerridwen knew she would have no means to suckle the child. She would put every ounce of her energy and soul into making more magic to rehabilitate me. Beyond that, she had no measure of fuel left to make milk for our babes. All through the long winters, she nursed me, and showed no tears, no weariness, no remorse. She showed little tenderness, but she was calm, competent, and always there, the Wise Woman restoring me, through my convalescent winter.
And every year, on Ostara, when I was fully well, a god again in the rising spring—the first day of my resurrection on which I was stronger than her—she would collapse in weariness and relief, and weep for the loss of our most recent child. I would comfort her, and she would let me. By that time, all the winter stores were long gone, but I would not hunt. I would not leave her. I would only hold her, wrapping her in blankets and in my adoration of her long-suffering strength, and smooth her beautiful wild mane.
I would promise her this year would be different, that I would find another way, that the humans would not require my sacrifice, that even if they did, I would not make it. And every year, on that day, I meant the promises I made. If there were any other gods sufficient to take my oath, I would swear before them now, I always meant the things I said on that day. And she would believe me. She would forgive me. She would love me. She would let me comfort her.
But I always reneged on my oaths. Things never changed. I could never change them. The world was always harsh; the humans were always on the brink by Samhain. And so I would do it all over again, and so would she, because she was my faithful priestess.
Until the year she lost faith. The last Ostara, when I rose from the bed where she had nursed me, she did not collapse with relief into my arms. She did not weep, and though she still grieved the loss of our child, she would take no comfort, because she didn't believe me, or forgive me, or love me anymore. She brought me back that last time only so that I would feel the break of trust she had felt so many times, and the loss, and the grief, of her leaving me.
I told Dru she would ruin the boy. The truth is, I know, because I ruined my Goddess. That's the worst part. Not that she left me, not that she doesn't trust me, but that I ruined her. That last Ostara I remember was the first time I ever saw the Carrie in her new aspect—no longer my beautiful, freckled, Creamy Peach, but the pale Fire and Ice Queen—bitter, cold, with a new taste for exacting cruelty. She is beautiful in her new aspect, but she is no longer lovely, or loving, except in the tiniest echoes of the Goddess she was. I stole both from her...her warm loveliness, and her ability to love.
When she left me, the realization of what I had done to her broke my horns. She didn't take them. For more than two thousand years, I have told her that she did, only because it was the only argument we had left, the only excuse I had to see her. In truth, I was glad I did not have my horns anymore. I thought I deserved to remain hornless for all eternity. I gratefully accepted our new cycle, of me seeking her out every few hundred years, of begging for her forgiveness, of having her deny me, and lash me with her cruelty. It was a punishment I gratefully accepted. I deserved to be the one in pain, as penance for all the pain I had caused her.
But I was still causing her pain, too. And for two thousand years, I didn't know how to break the new, horrible wheel anymore than the old. I couldn't stop craving her cruelty as punishment, but my craving was keeping her cruel. I was feeding her wrath, her bitterness, her pain, trying to win her forgiveness.
And then, one day, quite recently, it occurred to me—what good is a god, if he cannot forgive himself?
I had to. I had to forgive myself, and move on, not just my sake, but for hers as well. I'm glad I did. She is happier these last few months than she has been in thousands of years. I would give her up again and again, for the next ten thousand years, to see her smile like she does playing that fiddle for the mortals, like she smiled at me on the moonlit walk we had shared, when I told her of my first new kill. That is the smile she wore the day she was by BrideGoddess. And the only way I could make her smile like that again, was to grant her the only thing she still wanted from me...her freedom.
I wonder if she smiles at Faraday like that? Does she see what I see? That the lad brings out a tenderness in her that she hasn't displayed in thousands of years? She didn't want to help him just to thwart me. She believes in him.
I don't know what she thinks about Faraday, but I cannot suggest these things to her. If I did so, she might dismiss them just to thwart me. I might ruin her second chance at happiness.
I've learned my lesson. You only destroy the love of your life once, through your own selfishness. Once you've seen that kind of ruination, you will never make that mistake again.
This time, I will leave her to happiness. And I will do things differently with Dru.
What do the humans call it? Work-life balance? That's what I will do, this time.
The world is a much larger place now. I cannot save every human, even if I tried, but when my power returns, I will build an enclave for the most intuitive humans, those who still want connection to the earth, to the seasons, and the sun, and the moon. I will teach them; they will teach others. I will learn to delegate. I will hope in the future. I will participate in the cycle of life.
I will breed godlings, and raise them, to give humanity an entirely new kind of hope. Hell, maybe together, my family and my humans, maybe we will even have a hope of diverting the course of things...which at this point, from my god's eye, looks...pretty fucking bad. But no matter how things go down in the next few millennia, by gods, this time, I will go down fighting for my family—my goddess, my children. I will not lay down in the fields every year in a futile sacrifice that taught humans nothing but superstition and dependence. I will find a better way to help them. A way that does not ruin what I love most.
Godsdammit, again with the poetic declarations. The plan, man. Stick with the present. Here and now, Hearne, here and now.
Right.
Well, clearly Dru needs instruction, because she fears her magic. I'm sure that her fear is at least part of her chaotic flavor. But there is something else. We do not make the Greenspark, not unless I force it, as I did the first time I met her, with a vibration of my voice. In fact, naturally we make...red sparks. What the hell is that, anyway? I have never encountered that with any other woman, and I have bedded a few other witches, since Carrie left me, though most of them didn't actually know they were witches. Crazy, how nine out of ten witches these days have no idea.
But Dru knows she has power, and she isn't actively resisting me. To the contrary, she is so openly sweet about how physically attracted she is to me. Maybe the red sparks are an indication of our level of sexual chemistry...a hot, illicit, naughty kind of magic, a mix of pleasure and pain from that numbing, stinging vibration.
But the numbing worries me. Carrie's magic never numbed me. It heightened every sensation. Dru's numbing buzz makes me feel...frenzied, like the vibration might unmake me, if I let it overwhelm me. Until that resistance is resolved, there is no way I can complete the Divine Act with Dru. If I force it, the misaligned vibration might spiral out of control and destroy her. Hell, it might destroy me.
I know what is causing the misalignment. Faraday, on her part. Carrie, on mine. Fuck, back to the feelings. Am I going to have to be in love with Dru like a giddy teenage god in order to make her my goddess?
Maybe not. Maybe it's just a matter of proper instruction and...tolerance. If I school Dru properly, and our mortal sex gets progressively more mind-blowing, how long can it take before our magical chemistry gives way to the the sexual connection?
Yes, everything will just...fall into place. There is no risk of the Divine Act happening accidentally, until in fact I am, once again, fully divine. So until I have my horns back, mortal sex is safe, so to speak. I will make sure Dru samples all the delights, until she is hooked on my flavor.
I will be patient. I don't mean to make her a goddess for some time, but I do mean to show her what I am. To prepare her to be my mate. And I need my horns back for that. I'm giving them until Beltane. If they don't sprout naturally by then, I have a plan to move things along.
We're here. My headlights pan across the field where the tree planting ceremony will be held, and I see the class is already assembled, all wearing white. To my surprise, Carrie is here as well, standing with her hands clasped in front of her, her face composed but solemn, watching the moon that has not begun to set in the predawn sky.
She looks very young, standing like that, with her face raised to the heavens. Her shoulders are bare in the "dress" she is wearing—a billowy off-the-shoulder thing that gathers at her waist and flows in tiers nearly to her ankles. The dress is modest compared to what Dru is wearing, but I find myself gritting my teeth, because time has moved, but I have not, when it comes to Cerridwen. What she's wearing now was once considered a shift...an undergarment—and I fight down a thousand memories of pushing a flimsy covering like this off her body in the moonlight.
I can't decide if I am touched or grieved that she has come, but I guess Ostara is not a day either of us can put the past behind us.
As I'm contemplating how I will handle the agitation of Ostara's past, I catch Carrie's scent push through the ventilation system. Her scent with Faraday's on top of it, letting me know the fucker has recently been all over her. I don't think he's penetrating her yet, but he's doing things to her, she's doing things to him, for sure.
How the hell am I going to tolerate this, today of all days, with all the pain of past Ostaras coursing through me? I'll admit it, as much as I want her to be happy, his scent on her makes me insane. I forget all reason. I forget that she is no longer mine, I forget that I don't like to kill humans. I forget that I made a specific vow to myself not to kill any of the ones she beds. I've only seen Faraday once seen he started sharing her bed, and I had to will myself constantly not to rend him into pieces, the entire time.
I try to file away his scent—rain and oak and musk and...marijuana—wow, that's new, must be the way he's coping with Dru spending the weekends with me. I separate him from Carrie's scent, and focus only on hers, to calm myself. Carrie's scent is hypnotically complex...sandalwood and pomegranate blossom and vanilla bean, and also rain but not the modern kind filled with sulfur, the pure rain of old, and the smell of moonflowers at night, when their blossoms open, and of mushrooms, but before their caps open and begin to rot, and the smell of burning peat and the faint whiff of iron, although I bet she hasn't stood over a cauldron in two thousand years.
And then I lose her individual scent, and I smell his scent on her again. Shit.
I fight down the sense of dread. I am a fucking god. This is one of the sacred days of my tradition. I will not profane this Ostara by killing Sean Faraday.
Right?
As if the little shit is trying to make a liar out of me, Faraday strides into the clearing, and he's got a huge load of simple flower wreaths on his arm, for all the girls and women who will participate in the ritual, but he moves with determined focus to Carrie. He crowns her with a special garland of white and yellow lilies. He speaks to her, I can't hear the words but with my god's eye I see them plainly on his lips.
Your long winter is over, my Goddess. May the Spring renew your joy, Cerridwen.
She smiles at him, and but I don't see it. I'm still seeing the words on his lips. My Goddess. Cerridwen.
He's dedicated himself. He belongs to her already. That means he's under her protection. Well, that makes it simpler. There is no longer any possibility I could let myself lose control. Carrie would move to protect him, and the idea that she would put herself as a shield between him and my considerable, rapid force makes my stomach weaken, and all violent urge fade.
I look at the two of them again. He's seen my truck now, and he's speaking again, telling Carrie that I'm here, but not to worry, he won't leave her side, reminding her of her strength and grace. She steps into his embrace, and she looks like the seventeen year old mortal girl she once was as he tucks his chin over her flower garland, and meets my eyes through the windshield of my truck, and with my god's eye I see the petition plain on his face. He's imploring me...for peace, no conflict. Not for himself, for her. And then I realize...he knows. He knows what Ostara was to her—to us. She has told him about us. Today, she is not just his shield from me...he is also hers.
Fuck. I won't have Faraday running interference between us today. This is a new beginning, but Cerridwen and I are still, at the moment, the God and Goddess of these rites. If she is here, I will honor her as such. We will come together. Suddenly, I know how. Alanna. Our priestess. Our daughter, if only for this shortest time, until Carrie releases her to Dru.
Dru is stirring, and I pat her leg gently. It's time for her to take her place with Carrie and Lana, to show her what her future holds.
"Come, Dove. We must honor the passing of the seasons."
Author's Note: There is so much more in a god's heart than he shows us mere mortals, huh? Why dontcha show Cernunnos a little reverence with the vote button. After all...he's an Effing God, right?