Ceridwen paused a moment, giving my father his space as he climbed the tree and rested a hand against the Maia. “What does she tell you, Diarmid?” Ceridwen asked in a hushed tone so as not to disturb Diarmid’s communion with the Maia.
“We are close, Cer. She grows stronger. The Maia is ready. Tonight could be the night. We need to gather as many as we can. We need a full circle.”
“They should be arriving momentarily. I, too, felt as much after last night’s dance. It produced the strongest cone yet.”
“Each cone should be grander than the last. Each dance leaves residual energy in the stones. The stones have nearly reached their capacity. We have to be close. When Michael told me to be patient, I never dreamed it would take this long. How many dances has it taken, Cer?”
“Hundreds. Maybe a thousand or more. We are close, I can sense it.”
I heard the sound of crunching leaves in the distance. Another figure appeared at the forest’s edge. He was about Diarmid’s age and height, but he possessed a frail frame and delicate features. The man’s long, blond curls fell to his mid-back. He was dressed more modestly than Diarmid, with simple, lightly tanned pelts draped over his shoulders to cover his torso, and another darker-skinned pelt skirting his waist.
Diarmid turned to acknowledge him. “Taliesin!” he exclaimed as he embraced the man. “My master Bard! Are all the musicians prepared?”
“They are, my friend,” Taliesin said as he returned my father’s embrace. “I have composed my greatest hymn to date. We are ready on your cue.”
“Fantastic.” Diarmid pulled from the embrace, holding the musician by his shoulders. “This is it. We are so close. Even some of the initiates were able to perceive the cone in all its wonder during last night’s dance.”
Diarmid turned toward the woods. A large contingent of men and women, all dressed similarly to the master Bard, approached the clearing. Diarmid’s constant smile grew even wider. He turned to Ceridwen. “Good work, Cer. All the regulars are here. It appears we have perfect attendance among the initiates.”
As the crowd gathered around the Maia, Diarmid stepped forward to address the rapidly assembling troop. “My fellow Druids, welcome! Since I was a boy, we have danced before this Maia. At first, I alone could see the wondrous cone. Soon, Ceridwen and Taliesin did as well. Our dance has never been more powerful that our offering last night. Many of you saw the cone rise high about our dance for the first time. Like me when I first witnessed the great wonders of Annwn, you were captivated by its beauty. I have spoken to the Great Oak who bears our Maia. Ceridwen has read the signs of the cone. The testimony of each is the same. We are close. Tonight could be the night when all we’ve hoped for, all we’ve danced for, is revealed. Hold nothing back. Be one with the song, with one another, and with the Oak and Maia. The dance in which we partake tonight will rival those of legend. This is our legacy. Take your places, Bards. Assemble, all Druids. A full circle, unbroken. Let the dance begin!”
A roar of cheers resounded throughout the clearing as hundreds of Druids now took their places within the stone circles. Taliesin joined a troop of drummers and players of stringed instruments. A few of them held horns, apparently hewn from bone, around the outer perimeter. The flautists lifted their primitive reeds into position. There was hardly an empty spot remaining on the grounds.
So as not to lose one another, Joni, Emilie, Tyler, and I joined hands and formed a semicircle around Diarmid and Ceridwen at the circle’s center. I stood with Joni to my right and Emilie and Tyler to my left.
Diarmid stretched his arms outward, holding his staff in his right hand. At the gesture, Taliesin signaled his troop of musicians. A steady drumbeat began to sound.
“Emilie,” I said, “can you pay attention to the musicians and what they’re doing? There’s so much to see, hear, and observe. We should divide and conquer.”
Emilie nodded, released her hand from my grip, and headed toward the perimeter where Taliesin was conducting his primitive symphony.
“Tyler, see if you can make any sense of the energies. See how they react to the dance, to the stones.”
Tyler nodded. It was something he was likely to study regardless.
“And me?” Joni asked.
“Stay here with me. Make sure I don’t miss something.”
Joni smiled as she shifted her hand in mine from an overlapping, folded grip to a more intimate grasp, fingers interlaced.
The drumbeat was increasing in volume and pace. A green glow began emanating from my father’s eyes, coursing through his right arm to his staff and back again.
Dancers all around began flailing their bodies, gyrating with the beat. The pluck of stringed instruments accompanied the thud of the drums, and the flutes and horns soon followed with a joyful melody.
Diarmid extended his staff upward, and with a shout, a surge of green energy shot high into the sky above. Several other streams of energy, some green, others orange or blue, consumed the stones all around and together shot rapidly upward in a fountain of colors, joining Diarmid’s green glowing stream at its peak.
With a quickening beat, the melody became more vigorous. The dancers added their impassioned voices to the song as they danced, rotating their positions clockwise within the stone circles.
Together the energies gathered and twisted into a tornado of color. The vivid cone ascended high, far beyond the treetops, extending into the clouds above. Ceridwen danced around the Great Oak and Maia as Diarmid continued channeling energies through his staff.
With a coordinated shout, Diarmid and Ceridwen joined the chorus of voices encircling them. The vortex of light continued to rise and spin until the various colors began to blend at its peak. It was difficult to identify where the cone ended, as it extended high beyond our view.
From the peak of the cone, a bright, white light descended in an instant upon the Maia, which rested securely in the grips of the giant Oak.
The bulbous Maia absorbed the light, aglow in alternating hues of purple and green. The emotion on the faces of my father, of Ceridwen, of all the dancers, was too much to contain. Tears filled every eye, but none wavered from their respective positions. The dance continued. The song, both in instrument and voice, continued to sound harmoniously.
Then it happened. The Maia began to pull apart at the top like a blossoming flower. The shell slowly curled down like petals. The light from within was blindingly bright, too difficult to fully take in. I shielded my eyes, but tried to peer between my fingers. There was something moving within the light, something alive.
A single branch of the Oak began to move, with a loud series of snaps and pops, toward the center of the light, reaching toward whatever the Maia was birthing. I knew it would be a Dryad. My father had revealed as much before. But what was a Dryad, a wood nymph? What would she look like?
As the single branch descended into the blossoming Maia, what appeared to be hands grasped it. The tree lifted the nymph from the Maia, the other limbs previously holding it now parting for her exit.
The light surrounding the Dryad made her too luminous to describe. A bright, human-like frame, continuing to absorb and radiate the energies of the dance, clung to the oaken branch as it gradually carried her toward Diarmid, setting her at his feet.
Ceridwen signaled to Taliesin, who in turn silenced the music. All dancing ceased. Hundreds were gathered, but in a moment all were silent. All were focused on the creature who had emerged from the Maia—a creature of Annwn.
As the light enfolding the Dryad faded, her features became clear. Her long hair was green as jade, falling to the small of her back. Her skin was pale and white. She stood naked but unashamed. Her build was slight, but not at all frail. Her muscles were clearly defined.
Joni and I stepped closer to her so as to get a better look at her face, which was currently locked in a curious stare with my father’s. When I saw her face, I gasped. Her eyes were the same emerald green I had inherited… from my mother.
; “It’s… Mom…” I said to my friends, trying to hold back the tears welling up in my eyes. “Mom!”
Emilie and Tyler gathered behind me. Tyler rested a hand on my shoulder. Emilie and Joni each took hold of one of my hands.
Immediately, all went black.
12. Conjecture
I WAS VISIBLY shaken, practically inconsolable. Mom… I grabbed my mug from the table. Not even coffee would bring me out of my shock. I felt a tingle settle into my brow.
Joni retrieved the necklace from the table and pulled it over my head. The tingle subsided.
“Careful, Elijah,” Emilie cautioned. “I know this is hard…”
“My mom…” I took a deep breath. “I just wasn’t prepared to see her.”
Joni tightened her grip on my hand as Emilie placed hers on my opposing forearm.
“I know,” Emilie said. “I know.”
“She’s not even human. What does that mean? What does that make me? I’m a freak…”
“Your mom wasn’t a freak,” Tyler added. “I remember her. Remember that time we were horsing around at your place? I threw that Nerf ball at you, missed, and broke her lamp. I was crying. I felt so awful. Your mom, she just hugged me. She said, ‘It’s just a lamp.’ Your mom was more human than most people I know. She wasn’t a freak. You are her son. You’re no freak, either.”
I chuckled a bit through my subsiding tears. I remembered the incident. We were such destructive children. “Yeah, Tyler. I remember.”
“I’ve seen freaks,” Joni added. “People who let magic turn them into monsters. That’s not you. When I learned about my own family history, I discovered that the human beings on my pa’s side had done horrific evils for several generations. My momma’s heritage, however, was nearly as strange as your own mom’s. But they were noble. What makes someone a freak isn’t their genetic makeup—it’s the choices they make, the path they follow.”
I took another deep breath. “Okay, maybe I’m not exactly a freak. But this means something.” Another sip of divine java calmed my nerves more than the first one.
“Let’s consider the facts,” Emilie said as she pulled out a pen and pad of paper. “What do we know?”
“Well, my mom was a nymph, apparently. A Dryad.”
Tyler was about to say something. I knew where he was going.
“Don’t even think about it, bro. Nymph is not what you think it is,” I said before he could embarrass himself with an inappropriate joke about my mom at the worst time possible.
“Sorry, man. You know how my mind works.”
Emilie rolled her eyes.
“Nymphs,” Joni added, “were in myth the guardians of Annwn’s forests and springs. The Dryad were thought to dwell within the trees.”
Emilie was writing something on her notepad. “More questions to ask… on May 1.”
I nodded. “Nesbitt might know something. Of course, he might just be a loony toon who knows nothing at all. He isn’t our only source of information, though. I say we go back in.”
All three made eye contact, seemingly communicating between themselves something I was not privy to.
“What?” I questioned.
“I think we agree,” Emilie said. “It might not be the best idea to use the stone again. Not right away.”
“What are you talking about? Without the stone… my father’s memories… we’d know exactly nothing.”
“And the memory we saw was clear,” Joni added. “It was a warning. You don’t have a staff to protect you.”
“Dude. It could kill you,” Tyler insisted.
“My dad wouldn’t have left it to me if…”
“We aren’t saying don’t use it,” Emilie clarified. “But that’s twice now in one day. Until we know how much of this you can handle… just give it some time before jumping in again.”
I sighed. “Fine. I guess that makes sense. I just want to know. Whatever memory is next, it has to have a lot of these answers. Answers about my mom, and answers about me. I mean, if I am half-Dryad, what I do might not endanger me like it did Dad.”
“Might is the key word,” Tyler added. “Look at the evidence. That business during the anatomy midterm, you passed out. You summoned the tree, and you fainted. I can see it in your eyes now. Dude, you’re exhausted.”
“It gets easier every time something happens. I don’t know…”
“Exactly,” Emilie said forcibly as she interrupted my wandering thought. “You don’t know. None of us do, which is why we should be careful until we do know.”
I nodded. They were right, of course. My instincts, though, were rebelling against my common sense. I had just seen my mom and my dad. But it wasn’t the information I had recently acquired that bothered me. It was the unanswered questions that remained which haunted me the most.
“Well, while you’re jotting down questions,” I told Emilie, “we still don’t know how my family ended up here, in the twenty-first century. In the very first memory father showed me, he looked me in the eye through his reflection and told me I was the only hope. What does that even mean? Hope for what? There are big questions about what I am, and what I can do. Don’t get me wrong, these are important questions. I have a feeling, though, that there are bigger questions looming. I’m a part of something, but only a part of it.”
“I agree,” Emilie added as her pen scribbled furiously across the page. “The problem, at least until we meet this Nesbitt guy, is that we can’t unravel the mystery without pulling the string. And we don’t have much of any string to pull.”
“And we aren’t totally sure which strings are connected,” Joni added.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s start with what we just saw. Emilie, could you make sense of Taliesin’s music?”
“I got the gist of it.” Emilie turned her notepad my direction, pointing to a staff and some notes she had scribbled in the upper margins. “I could duplicate the melody, or something close to it. I’d need some time to play with it. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever attempted. I’m pretty sure I can figure it out, though.”
“Awesome, Ems,” I said. “It might not be important, but we need to make sure all our bases are covered. Tyler, did you note anything worth mentioning?”
“I think so.” Tyler hesitated for a moment before reaching under the table and removing his left shoe.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Give me a moment.” Tyler proceeded to unlace his shoe, replace it on his foot, then held the lace between his two hands, allowing it to slack in the middle. “What do you see?”
I shot him a blank stare. “A shoestring.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Tyler rolled his eyes. “The shape, I mean. When it drapes.”
“A parabola?” I asked, fishing for whatever answer he was looking for.
“Technically a catenary,” Tyler said self-assuredly. “But yes, close enough. It’s a naturally occurring shape. It’s how suspension bridges carry load through a heavy-duty, draped cable of some kind. It carries all its load in tension. It’s almost the same shape as an arch, just inverted and off by a few degrees.”
“Like the Arch, here in St. Louis?” Joni asked.
“Exactly,” Tyler affirmed. “The earliest arches were circular rather than parabolic. Arches carry load totally in compression. Old Roman arches appeared circular, but that was deceiving. They were big and heavy arches. The actual load pattern that fell within these circles was nonetheless parabolic. When ancient architects figured it out, arches grew. Like the tall, pointed, Gothic arches. Eventually, the Gateway Arch here in St. Louis. A perfect parabola.”
I shrugged. “Okay, interesting lesson in architecture and engineering. So what?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Tyler added. “I mean, all matter is essentially energy. The energy in the dance for some reason naturally fell into that circle-patterned, conjoining parabola. When the dancers were spaced apart and arranged perfectly, the energy pattern traveling between the st
ones was not circular at all. It was parabolic. It was more powerful—stronger, in some sense—than a circle.
“But even more interesting was the vertical plane. Like I said, an arch carries load in compression. But this…”—Tyler held up his shoelace again, just as before—“entirely in tension. The way the cords of energy came together in the cone were really a series of rotating arches seeming to fall into shape, in tension. It was like this shoelace, but upside down. It looked like an arch, but it wasn’t. The catenary, like the shoelace, takes its shape as the rigidity of the cord reacts with gravity.
“I think what we saw wasn’t formed by the centrifugal motion of the dance. It wouldn’t necessarily produce that shape if it were. It was the gravity of another dimension—Annwn—pulling upon the energies of the dance and breaching our own plane of existence.”
I scratched my head and scrunched my nose. “So… I’m not going to pretend that I get all that,” I prefaced, “but you are saying somehow the vortex of light…”
“Catenary of light,” Tyler interrupted.
“Whatever. The catenary was actually a gate to Annwn?”
“Not the gate itself,” Tyler said. “That seemed invisible. But the energy evoking the gate, taking its shape from the gravitational pull on the opposite side of the gate, came from Annwn itself.”
“If that’s true, “Joni asked, “what could it all mean?”
“That’s the thing,” Tyler continued. “If—and I emphasize if—my theory is correct, it may somehow also factor into our little time-travel dilemma. It might explain how Elijah’s family ended up in our century. It’s all explained by Einstein.”
“Which means?” I asked.
Tyler cleared his throat. “Imagine that our world exists on a fabric of sorts. A fabric of space and a fabric of time. Now presuming that Earth and Annwn exist in separate dimensions, which Ceridwen’s Genesis-like story about Annwn seemed to describe, then each world’s fabrics of space and time typically cohere. Space on Earth is always relative to its time. We experience it like one event, then the next. Annwn exists on its own fabric of space, clearly. It also exists in its own fabric of time.”
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 15
