green children #1

This is the first segment of my green-children project where I write their story from several different perspectives, each one illustrating a different theory about who they were and where they came from.

This one is from the perspective of the forest/mountain/mine shafts the children wandered into after leaving, in this theory, St. Martin's land, aka a magical faerie isle. It is definitely the most abstract of the theories. Of course, it would be hard for it not to be abstract, considering it's told by a mountain.

i’ve lived my life for a thousand years and i will for a thousand years to come. i watch the sky and the sun rising and falling and feel the earth changing and shifting around me: in my roots, in the stone walls of the caverns within me. bitter winters don’t shake me. i am more than what i seem. you can’t blow me down, can’t pull me up or knock me over.

the children were so young. a blink in my own eye, really, just beginning their already fleeting lives.

there was a girl, a boy, skin green as spring. i felt them, watched them, listened to them for so long—

they were within me. in the mine shafts, among the trees. and i came to know them as they walked, they came to be my own—

a part of me in a way, a way that’s hard to explain. i knew of their past, knew of the land they’d appeared from. remembered the forever-twilight and the river that churned, gushed green-black-blue all at once. now they were broken off from st. martins. lost in an unfamiliar place, that’s what they felt they were.

i wanted to tell them. i wanted to tell them i was here, i was all around them, i knew them. they were safe within me, i watched over them every moment until they went out the other side.

there were scattered bands of wolves throughout the woods. desperate creatures, bone-thin. their eyes always brought to mind the thick ice on the pond come winter: gleaming and dull at the same time, heavy. dark. cold.

i watched those wolves as much as i watched the two of them. not letting my guard down. i wasn’t going to let some ferocious part of me take them down. no.

pan and gelsey is what i called them. pan for the little boy and gelsey for the girl. named them like they were my children.

in a way, they really were.

i knew they wouldn’t stay forever.

how could they? i loved them but there was no way they could know that. i was not the place for them. i never could have been.

the last passage comes out on the fields where the reapers are. i knew they would be found. i pushed them along on that last leg of their journey, cleared their path of rocks and pitfalls, held myself steady so the rocky ceilings closing in the caves inside me wouldn’t fall down on their heads.

as soon as they took a step into the field they were gone.

there is a blindfold over my eyes forevermore. i can’t see them now that they are gone from me.

but still as much a part of me as before, always.