Mirren's Song The moment I parted my lips, my feet began to tingle. Then a jolt akin to lightening drilled me through from foot to head. And before I knew it, all the world had vanished except for my song. Gone were the warmth of the hearth and the lingering aromas of dinner. Gone were the sounds from the kitchen and the stones beneath my feet. Even my mother’s harping grew faint, for the will of the music conquered my senses and hollowed me out to channel nature’s voice. Words rose from my heart, and I sang them to life with my breath. Forests grew from my lyrics. Animals sprang from my rhymes. Each verse and intonation invoked an essential element until, by the end of my song, I had planted a living picture of the valley in the souls of those who listened. Future Dream The sacredness of Brideswell alone should have granted me pleasant dreams, for the whole valley floated in an air of serenity, and the souls of those who had worshipped there over the ages still lingered. Instead of whispers from the wise, my dream began with the keening of a hundred generations of women. They wept for their children. They wept for their Mother. They wept for themselves. And their cries reached back to their ancestors ~ to me ~ to return a forgotten pattern to the Great Loom, to help them reclaim their magic. "See," they told me and showed me a husk of a world. Steeples and chimneys and towers to vainglory drained the life force from Earth and spewed it into soiled skies. Over the whole of the world, forests fought for survival and lost. Lushness turned to barrenness. Animals vanished, and the seas were putrid with man-made waste. Everywhere the telltale taint of misspent virility poisoned the earth, the air, the water, and the very spark of life. The devas had long since gone underground and the faeries with them. For a world devoid of nurturing is not long habitable for the lighter expressions of God. So, the women wept. Bereft of any potency of their own, they wept and bore their children into dim futures. They sent their sons to senseless wars and raised their daughters to be hollow until filled with some man’s opinion. Worst of all, their only avenues to God were paved with that same misspent virility and the corpses of exasperating women like me. Excerpts II Reader Comments Order Lorcan's Bane
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