Background (Rogues): Tristan Ó Cuilinn

[SonofScarlet]

Light and laughter was all there was. Impossibly tall trees and a sunless radiance. Colours dancing along a bed of greenery, soft and brilliant. A speckled hart tumbled through the bower, a trilling laugh coursing through the air. Perhaps it was stag that laugh, perhaps it was the ephemeral hunter that chased after their quarry. The heady thrill of the chase coursed through the white hart, brilliant blue eyes taking in the magnificence of the woodland glade. The air, itself, seemed filled with streams of colour, the sky a faceted prism shattering into a brilliant cascade of vibrant emerald, diaphanous scarlet, embracing vermillion, and soothing azure.

A rustle in the branches caused the hart to freeze, eyes alert, ears pricked. Another gentle stirring of the brush and the young stag was the wind. Long, elegant legs carried it swiftly through the undergrowth, bounding past every obstruction and obstacle. Another laugh seemed to escape the creature, or was it the forest that delighted in the pursuit?

The hart pressed on deeper into weald. Here the shadows grew deep, and the sky became colder. The shine of the saturated skies retracted from this place. These trees were strangers, or were they memories? The hart could not stop to decide instead running on. Further from the light and laughter, the stag tumbled. The kaleidoscopic ecstasy of before was slowly replaced with a heaviness. The world was now scents, and sounds, and tastes. Thought slipped away, replaced by a purity of instinct, as the hart took in this new wood. It slowed, then stopped, trying to remember how it had gotten here. But soon even that notion was gone. Hunger, shelter, safety, these were all that mattered. All else that had been there drifted away. It was now just a hart in the wood.

A sharp pang shot through the stag and a screeching bugle rang from it’s lips. The pain was quickly replaced with a growing darkness. The world itself began to fade, first sounds becoming muffled, then an enveloping blackness, and finally nothing.

***

The hunter approached. Eyes that seemed to shift with the light, and skin so pale it seemed like air made flesh. Hair of spun sunlight, with a grace the defied the earthy baseness of their surroundings. A raiment woven from morning dew and spider’s silk, it washed over the figments lithe frame. The hunter bowed down before the stag as it lay on the forest floor, its breathing shallow and eyes closed.

“Ruaig mhaith mo ghrá [merry chase my love].” The words drifted on the winds, and where the stag lay a pale figure rested in its place. Pale as the irises that surrounded them, with long white hair and soft-spun clothes. They slept peacefully in their flowery bed. The hunter took their bow and quiver, laying it gently beside the sleeping figure. “Ar do shon, nuair a dhúisíonn tú [For you, when you awake].”

Even before the words had faded from the forest air, the spectral hunter was gone and its quarry lay sleeping alone.

***

86 years later

The youth stirred, the growth of the forest a blanket to be cast off. Time had quietly passed, leaving the sleeper untouched. As quietude slipped from their limbs and they awakened more fully to the world they looked around with a sense of sleepy confusion, “Éadrom?”

They looked around more, spying the gift at their side. Thin, dexterous fingers poured over the fine curvature of the bow. A soft smile came to their face. “<I see,>” they said to the trees. “<It is my turn to play hunter is it.>”

Slowly getting to their feet, the young hunter buckled the quiver to their side. They stepped from the circle of white irises that had protected them for the decades, in pursuit of their quarry.

Backgrounds: Sidhe Lover (Éadrom) 2