The Harvest Moon was fading behind the peach lace curtain of dawn, and she, that hooded ghost of a once-arrogant woman, bade me sink back into sleep a little longer. The sun would wait, she promised, but the wild hunt would not. I obliged without protest, letting her pull me under the indigo dream-sea of my more wicked and oracular visions, and she wrapped her ice-blue fingerbones around my wrists, hummed a throaty tune of foolish carnage and love lost, and hauled me straight to the bottom.
In those all-too-familiar haunted depths, I readied myself for prophecy. I vowed to befriend my monsters, and the ghost-witch kept up with her mournful song while I built a circle of humble cairns out of shell and stone in the name of dead lovers, soft-breasted but bitter-hearted grandmothers, and the many wounded women I used to be. When I finished my work, the song fell to silence, and I was alone in my sanctuary of shadow with only my will and the dull thrumming of my aging heart to keep me warm.
I knelt at the center of my fragile grief monuments and squinted into the dark, whisper-praying verses of dying hope and intentional awe; all the while, my pulse-beat swelled and quickened in an ancient rhythm only the most peculiar pagans, outlaw ocean currents, and oldest trees remember. The flesh was drummed away from my bones. The niceties were cleansed from my tongue, and my blood spilled into a spectral cloud that danced and twirled without skin to contain it.
I heard it then, a fury of horse hooves beating in time with my own wild, and I stood to meet them the way they should be met, these omens of looming doom. I knew all my foremothers knew in that moment, that the wild hunt was riding with my death-masked rebel ancestors leading the way, that an old dream was breathing its final exhale, and my for-once-unprotected heart called these undead warriors right here to see their bone-daughter in all her rawest glory and grief.
They rode ‘round my hand-built graveyard, encircling my shrines in their frenzied swirl while they howled and hissed, dragging a crumbling, crystal-bone Earth behind them in the dust. A soft song in a language I do not speak rattled from my throat and spilled from my lipless mouth, and I opened my arms to receive the anguished carcass of a fallow planet. The hunters stilled themselves and joined me in my keening, and I wailed from the depths of my most primal soul while the riders rolled the beloved rock of the world into the center of my bone-grounds.
Their black-as-night horses stomped in time, meeting the drums of the wild ones and calling my own heart to pound so madly I feared what was left of me might crumble to dust, but our song kept on. The mud-and-grey marble once called Home quivered between us, and this band of heathens was joined by the wild flame-tending children who had yet to learn apathy. I knew then we were singing green and loamy flesh back to the bones of a dying Gaia, and the ancient dead joined the loving descendants in this eleventh-hour ritual to reanimate a world slaughtered without honor, an elder mother pierced between the shoulder blades by her most ungrateful creatures and left to bleed out in the dirt.
We sang as grief ritual and apology, as offering and eulogy. The resonance was so potent a spirit erupted from the sound, a winged entity born from the womb of ceremony that was the very soul of our song, and we all knelt in the name of good death. Even the horses took to the ground, and we prostrated ourselves before the once-virile mother who bore us.
Live, live, live, live, live, we chanted into the ground, and our tears fed the empty soil.
Live, live, live, live, live, I whisper-wept, and the song’s spirit wrapped its wings around the Earth.
I woke with the words still rolling from over-dry lips, skin blue as juniper berries and eyes streaked red with the memory of it all. I breathed a soft homage to the wild hunt, to the children, and to the ghost-witch who wanted me to see such ritual, then I went down to the sea to pray.
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Those wicked hours before morning found me wrapped in human-skin leathers stitched from the puckered faces of dead kings and wanting a fire. I took my time. I gathered river stones still stained with the blood of my orphaned dreams and circled a feeble bundle of storm-wet pine wood, juniper branches, last year’s sticky grief, and the oil-slick skull of a holy raven who died the good death.
This moment wants a new anthem.
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The Harvest Moon was fading behind the peach lace curtain of dawn, and she, that hooded ghost of a once-arrogant woman, bade me sink back into sleep a little longer. The sun would wait, she promised, but the wild hunt would not. I obliged without protest, letting her pull me under the indigo dream-sea of […] -
The Harvest Moon was fading behind the peach lace curtain of dawn, and she, that hooded ghost of a once-arrogant woman, bade me sink back into sleep a little longer. The sun would wait, she promised, but the wild hunt would not. I obliged without protest, letting her pull me under the indigo dream-sea of […] -
The Harvest Moon was fading behind the peach lace curtain of dawn, and she, that hooded ghost of a once-arrogant woman, bade me sink back into sleep a little longer. The sun would wait, she promised, but the wild hunt would not. I obliged without protest, letting her pull me under the indigo dream-sea of […] -
A soft and sudden flicker of warm candlelight bade me wake, and I knew the wandering hag-ghost was haunting my halls. Every Blood Moon she comes, hooded and hungry for the spice of my human arrogance, skull-faced with bare jawbone dripping, cavernous eye sockets sucking me from my dreams like twin black holes pulsing dead-center in the wild womb of the world. I no longer fear her, this fleshless creature who eats my certainty, who drags her frozen fingerbones down my cheek and tightens her grip around my neck, who steals my breath for a moment before blessing me with her arrhythmic dance.
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