The Foundling

(Closed for Drunken_Angel)



Serene crept out into the slowly lightening darkness of the pre-dawn, closing the cabin door quietly behind her. This was always a good time of the morn, the mist still clinging tightly to the still hollows of the forest and meadow, and rolling along the lowlands above the river. Soon the birds would sing. Soon the sun would peek over the distant ridges and a new day would begin. She slipped across the dew covered grass of the clearing and onto the narrow forest path, into the cooler darkness of the shadows. She needed no light to find her way, so often had she walked this path, but she carried a small candle lantern anyway. She would need the light to locate her desired prize later this morn.

In the small woven collecting basket she carried was her white handled knife and some linen cloth to wrap her hoped-for prize in. If she were fortunate enough to find what she sought, she would need to protect them from the sun's morning light to preserve their potency. Her stroll took her down by the gentle stream and she indulged herself in a refreshing wade in the cool water. Kneeling, she soaked her kerchief in the clear water, and brought it to her face, washing and refreshing herself.

She sighed as she reflected on the lonely solitude that was her life. It wasn't so bad to be alone if you could find joy in the simple things, like harvesting the ingredients for her potions this morning. But when the day's activities came to an end, the long lonely nights were almost a torture of a sort. The exceptions were on the nights of the full moon, when she could commune with her Goddess. That was the one time she felt fulfilled as on no other night. She sighed as she realized it was still weeks away yet.

********

A faerie ring! She couldn't believe her good fortune at the find. Quickly she counted silently to herself the number of round thick fungus heads that had pushed up through the grass of the meadow overnight; twelve in all, a perfect number. Three times three; and three left over to renew, one for maiden, mother, and crone. Perfect! And the nine she would harvest was also a number sacred to her Goddess. Chanting a sing-song rhyme under her breath, she knelt and began to harvest the plump fungi heads with her white handled knife.

She had nearly finished when she heard a sound, faint, but one that stood out as not belonging here. It had sounded like a voice, a moan perhaps, or something murmured too quietly to make out. She paused, listening for it to repeat. When it did not, she went back to her work, but couldn't concentrate. She’d just collected the last toadstool when she thought she heard the sound on the wind again. This time, she was sure there was something out there that was out of place. Call it a feeling; call it a hunch, but she had to find out what was making that sound.

She gathered up her basket, carefully covering the toadstools with the damp linen cloth, and made her way back towards the stream. She hadn’t taken half a dozen paces beyond the brush line before she stopped in her tracks as the sight before her brought a cold shiver. There, in the leaf litter from last fall, lay a naked body illuminated by the pale light of dawn, curled on its side. Reflexively, her hand covered her mouth, opened in a silent gasp. She stood that way for only a moment, but time seemed to stand still as her gaze took in the details of the gruesome scene before her.

I dark puddle of coagulating blood spread out from the small pale body, the morning’s insects only beginning to gather. It looked for all the world like an animal that had crawled away here to die, but it wasn’t. She knelt beside the body to examine it closer. It was a human girl, young, by the look of her, but who could tell for sure with humans. They lived ridiculously short life-spans compared to Elvin-kind. Small and frail, a child almost; certainly she would be considered so by elfin standards. Hair that reminded her of strands of golden wheat laid over a base of fiery red autumn leaves splayed out from the waif’s head like a halo marking an angel of fire.

The girl’s skin was streaked in mud and blood, and now that she was closer, Serene could see why. A gasp escaped her as she noted the dried blood covered, deeply carved wound in the young woman's back. It appeared to be some sort of sigil or rune, but unlike any she'd seen before. It was hard to make out, under the mud and blood, but it looked like other smaller symbols appeared to be scratched or cut into the pale flesh around the larger wound that took up most of the poor girl's mutilated back. The smaller symbols were those more commonly used for a type of summoning ritual, she knew, and the larger symbol would be the name sign of the entity being summoned. But she didn't recognize the larger sigil.

Serene gently rolled the body over to get a look at her face. As she touched the young body, the shock of sensation knocked her back and she cried out. Empathic ability was her gift from the Mother Goddess, and normally it helped her in her healing efforts, but when it kicked in unexpectedly because of this level of trauma, it could really be a curse! She eased forward again, after a moment to recover herself, this time with her mental block in place. A tentative touch brought a moan from the girl through lips parched and dry from thirst and fatigue. Serene tried to be as gentle as possible, but the carved wound was cruel, jagged and deep. Another wound, a deep gash on her side, looked to be even worse than the carvings on her back. What had happened to this child?

Tearing loose a strip of her skirt’s hem, she bound the wound in the girl’s side, and then examined her for further injuries. Tears welled up in her eyes as even more cruelty was revealed. Once graceful, slender fingers now were broken and swollen. Abrasions around her wrists showed the marks where shackles had been and pulled against in resistance, eventually slipped through by small hands scraped free of most of their skin. Serene could scarcely imagine how the girl could have made it this far, and yet she still lived.

Closer study of the girl’s face showed that she wasn’t anyone Serene had seen before. She couldn't say for sure whether this girl was from the village; not many of the villagers came to see her out this far, unless their need was great. They were simple folk, and superstitious of her mysterious origins. Her father’s contribution to her heritage was to blame for that. His Drow features mixed with those of her Elvish mother left her with a look of eternal mystery and, some would say, sinister appearance.

But if she had her father’s features, she had her mother’s heart. She knew she couldn’t leave this waif to die here, though death might have been a mercy. She stood and removed her long cloak, spreading it out next to the poor pale body. As gently as she could, she eased the girl onto the woolen cloak. That was the easiest part.

Steadying herself with a sigh of resolve, she gathered the hood of the cloak in her two fists, and began to drag the body along, the make-shift transport sliding over the forest detritus jostling the girl’s body as she went, despite her care to avoid the worst obstacles. Silently, she mouthed a prayer to her goddess that this girl would remain unconscious for the long and arduous journey back to her cabin.

Lethal. The term means death, but it carries a hidden meaning: to forget. It is in the waters Lethe that one bathes before passing from one life to the next. Here, submerged in the goddess’ waters little by little her sense of self was pulled, taken. Childhood memories slid away.. parents.. siblings. Very soon only soul memory would be left, without words, undifferentiated reflexes of events. What was left clung like brambles to the fringes of her mind.

Deep within the womb of the Great Mother she still remember the sound of her feet thudding against the marsh’s soft mud. She could feel the grass parting before her, begging to conceal and a stream’s urgent murmuring promising safety. She was a child of the earth, this one. Celtic blood flowed through her veins and the Mother’s magic was held in her soul. She understood the wind’s howl. She knew what it meant when the coyote yipped. When the morning birds greeted the sun with their song, she greeted it as well. She was a child of the Earth, and Gaia protected her own.

Memories floated. They were storybook images, snippets of the life of one whom may or may not have existed. This is the stuff from which myths are made, floating down river, slowly dissolving. Memories become seeds, stripped of all but their essence, they sink into Lethe’s bank, only to be scooped up when her mud is used to fashion another form. It is they that give a new soul, blank and unwritten, its definition. Even as she watched the memories, she had already begun to forget that they were hers.

She saw a running girl stagger and almost fall, a broken hand moving to her side. There was something familiar here, a slow recognition. Then the image was upon her and it was her body screaming in agony, stumbling. It was her hand pulling the obsidian throwing shard from her side. She knew the blade was poisoned. A few more steps and she could feel it creeping into her, deadening her nerves. She could feel its influence subduing her muscles with internal spasms, overloading.. making it miss her desperate signals to run. Bit by bit her body betrayed her and what was once an graceful though macabre flight of terror became disjointed, lumbering, and slowed. The creek’s normally musical notes sounded shrill in her panic. They urged her to hurry, just a few more steps.

If rivers are boundaries between worlds, creeks are fords from one place to the next. Thud became splash, became tumble, became soft mud and finally, blackness. One moment Luna filled the sky with her fullness and the next she loomed large against the horizon and time held Gaia’s child, wrapping her like an infant in its dark embrace. Somewhere lights were dancing, twelve of them. They marked the passage, playing in its timelessness as they twirled and sang, leapt and fell, celebrated and then slept. In their place, the sacred mushrooms grew, a signal for those with the eyes to see. It was all the Earth Mother could do, for even she has limits.

The memory faded. It was sticky, bloody. It clung to her soul like a child reaching for its mother. We tend to think of death as peaceful, and so it is, but its quietness is a lie. It is the silence left in dying screams’ wake as bits of us are taken forcibly and we are pulled apart cell by cell. The silence only approaches near the end, when there is not so much noise to drown out. Forgetfulness is the soul’s anesthetic.

Blood flowed, now a trickle rather than a torrent and poison continued its inexorable conquest. The twitching and cramping had stopped when confused muscles simply gave up and, still as death, only a tired heartbeat remained. Gaia’s child, so near the end that her life’s essence was no more than a veil shrouding death’s bride, felt something. Someone on the other side had touched her, and for the briefest of moments she felt.. life. It was a shock to her system, burning and painful. It pierced her serenity in a lightning flash and and sparked her will to live. Lethe’s waters churned with a sudden intensity and what had been a dangerously peaceful slipping became a panicked and increasingly desperate attempt to survive.

Only the dead can pass to the other side. It is a law to which even Hades must yield and as the waters relented, she felt her panic ease. The crisis had passed. She would not awaken for some time, she wasn't even sure she knew the way back. What she did know, however was that this tiniest of lights to which she clung would guide her. She knew she was not alone.

It hadn't been easy, quite a trial, really, getting 'the girl' back to her cabin. But Serene had finally managed the task. It had been touch and go for a while. The jostling as she drug 'the girl' over the forest ground had caused her wounds to open again and bleed. Serene had to stop several times to apply her healing skills just to get 'the girl' home alive. Each time it took a little out of her. Several times 'the girl' had come close to swimming up out of whatever darkness she was lost in, judging by the soft moans, whimpers, or murmurs that escaped her from time to time on the journey back.

Serene let out a weary sigh as she gently bathed the girl's wounds with an herbal tincture. Now with the mud and blood slowly being cleaned away, she could see more of the wounds covering 'the girl's' back. They appeared to be sigils or some sort of conjuring runes, carved without mercy into tender flesh too fair to be abused so. The evidence of this cruelty brought tears of sympathy to Serene's eyes. She hadn't dared yet to open her empathic senses to 'the girl's pain, perhaps a little afraid of losing herself in the intensity of it.

She had placed 'the girl' in her own bed, having nowhere else to put her. The mud and blood she was washing away was staining the linen sheets, but there was nothing she could do about that. It would wash out. The wounds would not be so easily taken care of. As she let her mind wander over these mundane details, she thought that she ought to come up with something to call her besides 'the girl'. It was better to occupy her mind with these little musings. It kept her from the horror and worry that the whole incident engendered in her, that threatened to overwhelm her, lurking just below the surface of her consciousness. There were questions she would have to face, eventually. Questions like 'who did this to this girl', 'why', and 'who was she anyhow'.

But those questions would have to wait. If 'the girl' survived at all, there would be time to find the answers. That she was alive now was nothing short of a miracle in itself. When she had cleaned 'the girl's' wounds, and dressed them in fresh linen bandages, she allowed herself a moment of rest. She'd done what she could. So much of this girl's fate was in the hands of the Mother now. Serene reflected on the purely coincidentally seeming way that she'd discovered the girl. But that was the way of magick sometimes. Things happened in ways that could often be explained away by other causes, but she knew when her goddess was at work. And She certainly was working here, leading them along a mutual path, at least for a time. But a path to what, she wondered.

She must have dozed. She opened her eyes with a start, felling somehow guilty that she had let her vigil over the girl lapse. Somehow, she felt like she should protect this child, even though her cabin was as safe a place as she could provide. Wearily, she drug herself out of the chair, leaning over to check on 'the girl'. She really needed to think of a name! But at least she was breathing easily. It seemed like she was improved slightly, at least Serene wanted to think so.

She crossed to the hearth and poured herself some water for tea. It soothed her and restored her lost energies, but it wouldn't keep her going for long. She sipped slowly, watching 'the girl', her girl, sleeping. When had she begun to think of her as 'her girl', she wondered. The thought brought a smile to her lips. She set the tea cup aside and banked the fire for the evening, then settled in the chair again, wrapping up in a spare blanket, and resumed her vigil over 'her girl'. Her last conscious thought of the day was that 'her girl' wasn't a name either, but it sounded slightly better than 'the girl' at least

There was sound. It was the dull flaking of embers as bit by bit, layers of wood turned to ash. Hearth-warmed air lay against her cheek bringing the still lingering scent of the once bright fire. It was friendly and gentle and it coaxed her awake. “Open your eyes!” it said “Open!” and she did.

Light greeted her, but even in the night-darkened room, the shock of waking senses proved too painful and her eyes closed against it. She was tired of pain, tired of struggling against the inevitable. Many times on her journey she had wanted to surrender and let herself slide back into Lethe's merciful embrace; it was only the spark that kept her going. She had held with all her strength to that tiny bit of soul and its promise that someone important waited for her.

She lay unmoving, alternating between spirit and flesh. She could tell that this body had been sleeping. She could feel the sluggish warmth from its exhausted muscles and somewhere inside she knew that it was broken. An experimental movement of fingers, no more than a twitch, yanked her mind painfully back the dream of the running girl with curled broken hands. Could she be that girl? She had scarcely asked the question when a cry of pain shot into the room as the body shifted from laying on its side to its back and in response, the dream again asserted itself. It dragged her mercilessly through the stabbing and the long slow stumble toward destiny. It pulled her and she felt again the cold gritty granite, wet with her blood, and the burning in her back as cold metal carved ancient symbols into flesh. She screamed. Again and again she screamed as each drag of the athame’s point tore home that this was not a dream, but a memory. It was her memory and it was written in her flesh.

Awareness continued to rise; more sounds, and this time the sounds had meaning. Someone was talking and running soothing fingers through her hair. She knew this touch, it was warm and familiar and somehow it reached into her, finding strength where there was none. Each stroke of her hair brought more calm, each soothing note of her sounds brought peace and pulled her from that place of terror. This time she was more prepared and when she opened her eyes and her vision was greeted with a strange sight: an angular face and eyes like swirling moonlight. The woman’s skin was the gray of slate, rich and deep and like the eyes it carried a sense of the otherworldly.

She was not human.

The first scream ripped Serene from fitful slumber, her body jerking awake from the dream she was having. It had started pleasantly enough. Just as in the reality of the morning before, she dreamed she had discovered a plot of plump, juicy, ripe mushrooms. She was reaching to pluck one of them when the events of reality merged with dream in that weird way that the mind has of reconciling the difference. In her dream, just as she reached out for the fungus, a gnarled twisted hand erupted from the leaf litter to grab her wrist, accompanied by a ghastly scream that nearly terrified her out of her wits. Serene was jerked into wakefulness by the scream, along with the jolt of adrenaline that hit her system like a drug, yanking her body out of it's rest.

Blinking once, twice, before she came fully to her senses and realized where she was and who was screaming, she quickly tossed the blanket aside and crossed the room to the girl, her girl, now screaming in pain, she realized, and the thrashing of her body as she fought to escape some dreadful demons of her nightmares was only making the pain more excruciating. Serene knew she had to calm the girl before her struggles opened the wounds again. The girl couldn't afford the loss of more blood. She was already weakened enough.

With soothing words and gentle strokes of her hair, Serene tried to calm her. Her voice, heavily accented when speaking the language of the human villagers, nonetheless spoke clearly and in low cooing tones, similar to what she had overheard human mothers use when calming their babes. It seemed to be working. Until she saw 'the look'.

It started with the widening of the eyes once they finally opened again to see her for the first time, responding to her voice and gentle stroking. But almost immediately, as if watching a fire spring to life from a coal, she saw the doubt and uncertainty as the girl, her girl, recognized that she was not human. It was the look that all the human villagers seemed to give her when they encountered the 'dark witch of the deep wood', as they referred to her.

Serene's mixed racial heritage made her outcast among her mother's kind, and it was out of the question to mix among human society. Part drow, part elvish, all outcast. It made for a solitary life, and at times, a lonely one. Seldom before had she had anyone else in her home, and never a human from the village. They believed her to be evil, mysterious, and untrustworthy. All sorts of accusations were levied on her by idle or malicious tongues, yet none of those rumored misdeeds were her doing. Would the girl believe her if she denied them, or choose to believe the stories instead. This girl obviously already knew true evil, and she must surely know who perpetrated it on her, and now she would know the meaning of kindness and who would deal that to her as well, Serene vowed silently.

In the same soft soothing voice she said, "Easy. No harm will come to you here. You are safe, girl. I am Serene. I found you in the forest and brought you here to heal you. Your wounds are very serious, little one." She tentatively reached out her hands to touch the girl again, easing her back on her side, examining the wounds on her back and the gash on her side to make sure they weren't bleeding again. She felt the girl's reaction to her touch, but ignored it as she continued, "Do you remember anything? Can you tell me your name?" Serene reached into the bucket of cold spring water by the side of the bed, wetting a cloth to apply it to the girl's back. "This will be cold, but it will help to soothe the pain. Brace yourself, girl."