For Lugh, for the Lady, for YULE! -- The Middle of Nowhere

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Date Posted: 21:35:08 12/22/03 Mon
Author: me
Subject: For Lugh, for the Lady, for YULE!

It was that feeling again, that expansive joy, that sensation of her heart exploding out of her chest and dancing gleefully. A feeling like that brought tears to her eyes, and she smiled beatifically into the mingled warmth and cold of bonfire and winter wind.

The fire fed on nothing but spirit, flickering in a stone-rimmed ring around her as she stood, spine straight and shoulders proudly squared. She was dressed in silk and silver, iridescent waves of simply-cut cloth dousing her well-built frame as a peasant's sleeveless dress, and she laughed for sheer joy as the blue flames billowed around her with the currents of the chill wind.

The darkness beyond the fire was supreme, but as she looked up, she could see the moon, a slender crescent of light and beauty immersed in a field of diamonds. The faint, pale light filtered down like spider threads to coalesce into a pool of luminance at the girl's bare feet, untouched by the fire's wild sapphire glow. She smiled and opened her arms to the world around her, feeling the sheer life inherent in everything.

The wind coiled about her, a serpent's cool comfort, and laid a companionable pressure across her bare shoulders. The flames danced, convoluting and undulating like freedom and souls, and the blue light played across her skin like the reflection of sunlight on the ocean immersed in shadow. The pool of astral luminance at her feet grew and splashed against her shins and the hem of her silken dress, soft and sweet like the morning dew and the dawn's first light. The darkness around the fire dipped and weaved like trees and leaves dancing merrily in a good, stiff wind.

"Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna..."

The chant began quietly, slowly, as the girl tilted her face to the moon and closed her eyes. As she began repeating it, two times to a loop, her voice became louder, faster, sharper until she was shouting her goddesses' names to the sky in a dizzying rush of power. Feeling the very air around her breathe in great gasps of life, she leaned back minutely, the fire rushing up in a bout of heat and blued strength to support her.

The darkness was no longer absolute beyond the fire's reach, a strange sort of golden light suffusing the greying shadows. The girl looked to the east with an eager expression, hardly daring to breathe for fear of spilling the gathered power. As the first tentative rays of sunlight reached out to impale drifting wisps of clouds, tiny, nearly inaudible notes of music sallied forth along the tracks of paler sky, falling to be heard like raindrops from pregnant stormclouds. The girl looked up blissfully as the Sun began to rise, and as the sky continued to lighten, the music swelled in tempo and volume until it consumed her.

She raised her hands above her head, feeling the power that she had raised wrap around her body more closely and more tangibly than her loose dress, and locked her eyes on the reborn Sun. "Welcome," she said simply, joyful tears glimmering along her eyelashes as she bowed deeply from the waist. Then, she released the life that she held in her hands, letting the surreal glow from moonlight and fire spiral upwards into the sky; the transparent luminance mingled with the golden sunlight and became as one.

The girl smiled as she dropped her hands to her sides, the sapphire flames dwindling and slowly flickering into nothingness. The Sun had returned, and her soul was warm with His light.

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