Chapter 12

The Song, The Sound, The Shadow

My eyes popped open.

I found myself lying in a heap of blankets next to Turner’s hearth. The fire burned so hotly that I could feel the heat from the stones on the hearth. My body ached. A bowl of soup steamed in front of me.

I felt a warmth all around me. Not the fire warmth, but an enfolding. I struggled to prop myself up.

I rested on my right elbow.

Three white wolves slept around me. And even though I stirred, they did not move. That was the unfolding I felt. And I welcomed it.

“Ah—he lives!” said Borean, making his way from the snowflake table to the fireplace.

“Yes,” I said, grimacing as I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “But barely judging by the way I feel right now.” It hurt to move and even blink. “What happened? How long have I been out?”

“You’ve slept the entire day, Will,” said Borean. “It is now late into the evening, many hours since we found you. The bears attacked us on the ridge. I engaged them, but several flanked us.”

“The black bear?”

“Yes, I killed him but did not account for his partner. I also did not account for the shadow of Abaddon.”

“The what?”

“Here on this ridge,” Aylin said, interrupting, “Abaddon draws strength from both worlds.”

“How? Wait. Hold on. You’ll have to go slow. My mind feels like mush.”

“Yes—his drawing of strength from the realm and ours is something we did not account for,” said Borean.

“He draws his bent strength in this one,” Aylin continued. She spoke with a firm tenderness, but the shimmer in her voice that I’d grown accustomed to, even in the direst circumstances was absent. “But, Will remember, he belongs to Thaiudah. The kind of power he displayed on the ridge, taking you behind his shadowy veil, means the threshold is close. We are close to Springer’s Pass, Will.”

Aylin’s eyes widened, but not in her usual whimsical way. I saw desperation.

“Abaddon’s shadow closed over you,” said Borean. “By the time Aylin arrived on the ridge it had you.”

“But, I saw the light—the sword, Aylin running, the snow,” I bent my head low in pain.

“You must rest, Will,” said Borean. “You have visited places no man in your world has before. It’s a wonder you’re alive at all. Even more, that we found you in the river.”

“Where? Where did I go? When I saw the light from Aylin’s sword, I thought the force knocked me unconscious. But then, I saw my sister’s crash, and Abaddon.”

“Abaddon? What do you mean?” said Borean.

“He was there on the lake—the ice—where my nieces—he was there. He spoke to me.”

I looked up to see Borean and Aylin exchange troubled looks.

“Will, you were not unconscious. The shadow took you,” said Aylin. “When the shadow passed, you had vanished. I ran to the spot where you …” Aylin’s voice trembled. “Nothing. You were gone, Will. I’ve never seen anything like it. If not for the wolves, the bears would have destroyed us. I fear my time is short.”

With her words, Borean bowed his head, then rose and moved toward the fire.

“Will, what did you see?” said Aylin.

“It’s hard to explain. I was in the snow, face down. I saw Borean fend off the first wave of bears. Then, a stench and a weight on me. Then you—I saw you running toward Borean. You turned and reached out your arms towards me. The next moment I was standing on the lake where my sister’s plane crashed. And Abaddon was there, holding the tail of the plane. I ran at him but never gained. He remained far away. As I ran, we talked but not with our mouths. It was like he was in my head.”

Aylin reached out and took my hand. I let her.

“I ran harder at him, screaming at him when suddenly I was upon him. But he retreated to the edge of the forest beyond the lake. Balls of fire fell from the sky and two small armies formed; a shadowy army of hideous creatures and an army led by a tall red-haired man. He looked like a giant to me, and his soldiers shown like gold on fire. The red-haired warrior fought Abaddon as the armies engaged in a gruesome battle. The red-haired warrior fought off Abaddon and, standing between us, kept him away from me.

“Then, he turned towards me and said, ‘Will, see!’ As the words left his mouth, the ice broke. I fell through and sank into the dark water. I thought I was dying.”

“You most likely were,” said Borean.

“Then,” I said, and started to cough and laugh as my eyes filled up with tears. “Then I heard them.”

“Who?” asked Aylin, who smiled with me.

“The girls—my nieces. They danced at the base of some gigantic waterfall. It was so high I couldn’t see the top. I was standing with them. No longer sinking in the dark water. They invited me into the falls. It felt … wonderful. The pressure and weight should have killed me. But it didn’t. It felt soothing. And the crashing of the water sounded like a song. It was the song the girls danced to. I could hear it. ‘I hear it too,’ I shouted to them. But they vanished into the falls singing a wordless song.”

Aylin squeezed my hand. I looked at her straight in the eyes. Both of us crying. 

“And then I heard you, Aylin. You asked me if I heard the song of the fire. I shouted, ‘Yes, I do.’ The next thing I remember was the cold pain of the river, the blue sky and Borean’s hand grabbing my arm.”

“It was the wolves,” said Borean. “Somehow they found you and guided us to the river, to you.”

“I heard it, Aylin. I heard the song of the fire,” I said, squeezing her hand.

“I know, Will.”

“I’m not sure where I went, or how I got there. But I heard the song,” I said with such earnestness that I coughed again. “Ugh, I hurt all over. But I also feel new at the same time. Refreshed.”

Aylin squeezed my hand and smiled at me.

“I know the feeling,” came a voice from the table.

“Turner?”

“The feeling, the newness—yes, I know it.”

“What does all this mean, Aylin? Borean? The song—the sound—the shadow?” I said. My body hurt but I felt soaked through with warmth, my mind ablaze. Thoughts, ideas, memories all touched down and moved along in quick succession. The room held a vividness I could see and feel.

“It means so much, Will,” said Aylin. She rose and helped me up to the chair. I stepped over the wolves and sat still huddled in blankets feeling ragged and hungry, but more alive than I’d ever felt.

“Before we get into the saga unfolding here before our eyes, how about some soup for the young man?” said Turner.

Turner produced four fresh bowls, ladled out the soup, and distributed them to us. “I’ve also got some mulled wine brewing. What can I say? When I was young and the weather turned, my parents loved having a batch of it warming. The tradition stuck with me.”

“Thanks, Turner. I’m so hungry I may eat this blanket.”

“I agree with Will. The food and wine sound excellent” said Borean, whose rugged façade from the ridge—which I was now thankful for—had turned more inviting. He felt like a friend.

As Turner served us, Borean moved the snowflake table and its chairs close to the fire. Turner placed the kettle of mulled wine in the center of the snowflake along with the bowls, mugs, and spoons. He disappeared for a moment, then returned with a couple of long baguettes. Borean looked at him quizzically.

“Well just because I’m a hermit doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a hearty meal.”

As if on cue, the four of us laughed. The kind of laugh that comes from sheer delight. And with delight, we ate and drank. Three of us ragged and worn from running and crashing and fighting and falling. One of us joy-filled and earnest, happy for the company, hoping for friends. We had our fill, Borean tended the fire, and Aylin moved to sit next to it—her favorite perch.

I tried to think back to the porch, before all this unfolded. The rain, my pipe, and the quiet. The feeling of waste so thick and annoying. How hard it was to block out everything and let the solitude of the cabin strip me down to where I’d been before—who I’d been before. For years Uncle Joe told me to use the cabin.

“We never go up anymore, Will. Someone in the family should be up there, checking on things, takin’ in the scenery,” he’d say. Early on I took him up on it. The remoteness of the place unnerved me. And no one would ever go with me. Those first few times were busy, but not the good kind of busy. The kind of busy that keeps you from what you should be doing. I wrote little when I went up here. I thought less.

That was the professional me. I came up because I thought that’s what writer’s do. They get away and think great thoughts and report back to the world. But as I sat in the chair, huddled in blankets, surrounded by wolves, that notion melted away and the truth flashed upon me like a flaming arrow. I had to go further back, to college, before all the professional me took over. I smiled at the thought and simply began talking to my unlikely band of compatriots.

“You know, there was a time—wow, it seems so long ago, so far from here in my mind. A time when this right here,” I said, holding out my arms with my palms down as if I was pushing down on an invisible thing that filled the room, “was all I ever wanted.”

“What was it like?” asked Turner.

“It was Panther Falls,” I said, laughing to myself. Aylin smiled and closed her eyes.

“Will you tell us about it?” she said.

“I was no older than twenty—maybe even nineteen, I can’t remember exactly—and was attending a private university. They had strict rules; curfews and dorm supervisors and all that. A couple of buddies and I convinced our dorm supervisors to go camping. The school was surrounded by state and national forests, but camping wasn’t very popular among the students. But the supervisors agreed, and we headed out to a place called Panther Falls. Borean, I can imagine you loving this place.”

“It does sound intriguing, Will,” he said smiling and sipping his mulled wine.

“It’s remote, at least it seems remote for city boys—which most of us were. We made it out to the falls and hiked to the top of the falls. I built a huge fire on a flat rock at the top of the falls. It was dusk, so the woods filled with dark grey as the fire roared and danced its light on the canopy of trees surrounding the falls. From the top of the falls to the pool at the bottom was about thirty feet. And the water was deep.

“The firelight bounced all over the water and made it look like rippling glass. We ate steak tips and cut loose around the fire for a bit. Then, when the night was full, we stripped off our clothes and spent the next few hours launching off the top of the falls into the pool below. We laughed like little boys as we screamed into the dark and hit the water, then climbed, bare feet and naked, up the side of the falls to do it again.”

I laughed at the memory and couldn’t keep the raw delight from spreading across my face. Aylin laughed while Borean and Turner roared.

“I remember that time, Will,” she said, looking down with what I thought looked like a tinge of embarrassment.

“You were there when we were all naked?” I said, laughing.

“I was,” she said with an innocent pleasure, “and I laughed with you all in the shadows.”

“Funny, because at one point I remember one of our supervisors thought he heard something in the woods. We blew it off as deer, but he walked out in the woods a bit to check.”

“Yes, I know. It was not a deer, Will.”

“Don’t be embarrassed because we were naked,” I said still laughing.

“The naked form does not embarrass me, Will. I blush now only because I remember the moment of delight, its power, and its glory. I walked around your camp that night as you laughed and screamed and launched out into the dark waters all alive with fear and wonder and accomplishment. I was wrapped up in the life you gave to the woods that evening, Will.”

I sat smiling at Aylin and looked at Borean and Turner. They drank in Aylin’s words like gospel—wonder strewn across their faces.

“That night was so … pregnant with life. I can still feel it,” I said. “My heart races with the memory. After we dried off and sat by the fire, I remember thinking, ‘There’s no place I’d rather be.’ Cliché, yes. But true. All my anxiety about picking a major and finding a job and everything that stresses out a young college kid, all melted in that fire. We sat around it and roasted more steak tips and laughed. Then we sat in quiet and just watched the fire dim. We belonged there, together, at that moment.”

I reached down beside my chair for my mug of mulled wine and sipped on it for a few moments.

“What is it, Aylin, that we hear in moments like Panther Falls or when Turner gets lost in the snowflakes, or the sound I heard in the water with my nieces?”

“I am so thankful you could hear the song, Will.”

“But what am I hearing?”

She smiled “It is the song of a young girl searching for her brother. One day I’ll tell you of her song and her lost brother,” she said, again smiling to herself. “It is the song of hope and pain, Will. Of distance and closeness—what you call intimacy. And so much more. It is fullness. The spiritual shape of this world ringing with completeness. That’s why you feel so settled in those moments.”

“But what happens when we forget those moments—when we move away from them,” asked Turner.

“The song always comes to you to do its work; to awaken what you think you have lost. I have labored in your world. I’ve tried to bring this same song to your world through myself. But as the Tempest wears on, humankind reduces me to platitudes, generalities, and tropes.

 “This world has ransomed its sense of place and time to the pace of the Tempest,” said Borean, who was now moving wood around the fireplace with an iron poker. “People used to venture into the woods near their homes, or even the more untamed wildernesses where I make my rounds, to explore and listen, take it all in. Now, the idea of the wilderness, the remote, has replaced its reality. People would rather take a photograph and plug it into their rectangular devices and send it to one another than experience it for real themselves. No time to see, no time to listen.”

The edge in Borean’s words and his preoccupation with the fire made me anxious. On the ridge, he was confidently calm and focused. Now, after the attack and my river experience, his words fell heavy on my ears. His gaze, was weighty with concern.

“My cousin speaks the truth,” said Aylin.

“Your cousin?”

“Yes, Will. Borean’s father is my father’s brother.”

“Wow, the rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper,” I said, chuckling a bit.

“Ah yes, a reference to your favorite book, right Will?”

“It is.”

“Do you aim to call me Alice now,” she said, smiling and sipping her mug of wine. Then she looked towards the door and spoke as if no one was in the room with her. “If only the world took time to listen. If only they walked more. If only they talked more, together, face to face. If only they ventured out of their homes, into the wilderness, into the openness of light and sky. If only they turned from the world of comparing, of judging, and let themselves feel the fullness.”

She spoke these words as if she were praying. 

“What is the song, you ask?” she continued. “It is the song of existence—full, crowded with wonder. It is the wordless song of the eternal ringing in the seashell of the finite—your world.”

She began to hum, then sing.

“Come with me for just a moment,” she sang. “Into the air and light. Pause with me. Close your eyes. Let your mind fly, your heart settle. Do away with your anxious thoughts and see.”

She giggled to herself. “I mean it,” she said. “Close your eyes. I want to take you somewhere.”

Then, she pulled her hair back into a bun. I looked up at her. Her face glowed in the firelight. Her hair a huge mound of crazy locks silhouetted against the glow. Her eyes danced, aflame with thought, caught up in the conversation, glinting with a childlikeness that said, “Follow me, I know a secret path.”

She saw me look up and gently pushed my eyelids closed. “No peeking,” she said.

I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. Listening to her talk, now on the other side of the river experience, I felt a strange exhilaration. I wanted to explore.

“Walk out with me to the coast. Do you see, there? A sunset, as you call it. Sunlight beams early in its setting across the landscape in front of us. You see, light by itself is beautiful indeed. But in this world, when it collides with everything in its path, it produces awe beyond measure. When it is cast across the sky, colliding with the roundness and whiteness and luminescence of clouds, spraying the countryside with rays, rays that beam into the wood, a wood cast about with shadow and breeze, ah yes the movement of the breeze—a dancing of light that touches your eye and causes what you call wonder. I call it joy. And all this from a collision of one thing with the many.”

 “It’s like a book of light, this land of ours isn’t it,” said Turner. “It speaks to us. It sings to us. It shows us something beyond it.” I looked up as Turner spoke. His eyes tightly closed; his brow furrowed. He was seeing.

“No peeking, Will.”

I closed my eyes once again and listened as she took us to another scene. “So, I see the images, but what should I be really seeing?”

“The many in the one, Will. Unity. Abundance. What do these aspects of the world say to us when we stop and consider them? If you could remove a raindrop from the sky, from its fall, from its course and examine it on its own merit, true you would discover an essence deeper than your eye can see.”

“Science!” said Turner, interjecting with a quiet chuckle.

“Yes, yes, Turner. But the raindrop was never meant to be taken out of the sky, driven off its course. Reduced to a thing. It serves a purpose. It falls to give life, to ease, to refresh. And so, it does. This is the nature of a raindrop. Do you ever see a raindrop by itself?”

“Never,” said Borean. “You see many raindrops. Storms and driving sheets of rain.

“Yes, the raindrops wave and sway in the wind, the giver of movement and mystery. And in their moving and swaying the drops may find room to sparkle, caught as they are in the dimness and lightness of sky, or fire, or reflection. How magnificent a dance to discover a pond or lake or river or ocean pelted with the course of raindrops.”

“I have seen this before,” I said, now captivated by the exercise. 

“Even in darkness of night the drops find the sparkle of day captured in the collision of water. What veil can hide the everness of raindrops driving into the earthen gatherings of water? None that I know—that is to say, no veil extracted from that given by the One you call God. Have you not found yourself along the shoreline in the late hours of night in a driving rain? The sand beneath your feet yet barely visible. The smell of salt, the mixture of fish, the sound of mystery itself in the waves moving in closer and closer. You cannot see their caps of white, but you hear their movement.

“Yes,” I said, “I have seen this.”

“And the rain—the freshwater splash into the salty tumult. Yes, even in darkness the raindrop finds its compatriots and joins in orchestral thrall. There is song and the song haunts and excites and thus the drop of rain becomes more than itself. It becomes a fall, a sheet, a storm, as Borean has said. The raindrop, the sky-fall, the particle of water caught in air—it finds a meaning, not unlike love when the seer beholds it together with the sky and earth and wind. And, as I have already said, if you were to peek into the drop itself you would find whole worlds. Much like a snowflake.”

“Yes, yes,” said Turner. “How many nights have I sat outside my cottage and listened to the rain mix with the roar of the river and found myself driven to my knees searching for that place beyond the sound, that place I always imagined must be my true home.”

Aylin let out a quiet sound of satisfaction at Turner’s words.

 “Ah yes. Let’s consider the snowflake, Turner’s muse, shall we? It is like the raindrop. Singularly beautiful, yet also given to a greater whole, a greater vision of wonder. Your world explains the snowflake through science but fails to consider how the silent wonder of snow can heal the human mind and heart.”

I peeked once again to see Aylin climb up onto the hearth again, folded her legs and continued. She caught me with her eyes and smiled. I closed my eyes once again and listened to her.

“Sleet and ice fall as frozen water. But snow is not freezing water. There is more magic to it than mere temperature—this Turner’s mother knew well. A snowflake vapor-laces around a particle already in the air, dust perhaps, a microscopic mineral, even meteor dust from the far worlds. Think of it: space-snow. How surprising to think on the literal heavens cascading to earth in precise and individual peels of space. What shapes the vapor-lace?

“Temperature, humidity, the speed of the air current, the shape of the particle,” said Turner.

“Yes, all contribute to an unduplicated bit of delight. Can you hold the billions of snowflakes that have fallen since the dawn of weather in your mind, Will?”

The question, I gathered, was rhetorical. She was charged up and spoke with a passion and precision that set our hearts on fire—well, at least mine. 

“Of course not. They fill up the universe with their infinite number and infinite shapes,” she continued, answering her own question. “The flakes form differently at varying temperatures as Turner suggested: needles, prisms, pyramids at one temperature, then platelets—six-sided wonders, then the coldest flakes. Yes, the coldest form dendritic crystals, matchless designs impossible to duplicate in all the universe. Men and women of the mountains, you call them Eskimos, they can see the different wonders of snowflakes. They name them—snow but not snow. Each snow bears a different name.

 “The snowflake, unmatched in its rare form reminds us that singular objects can still possess the wonder of distinctive form, but then we also see the snowflake in its habitat.

“The sky, the wind, the forest, the cold sleeping ground. Here the snowflake joins with other objects and aspects of its own habitat. And what you see is the togetherness of different objects that make up one scene.

“And you call this beautiful. And so it is. But when you take time, Will, to look at the snow. To hear it. To touch it. To smell the hardwood burning in the fireplace. To feel the warmth as you sit in your favorite blanket.

“When you slow down enough to see how all these elements make the snow beautiful. Make the sunrise beautiful. Make the rainfall beautiful, you realize the depth and richness of beauty. This is my power.

“And in this pause and slow pace of your life, you find nourishment.

“You see events, like your sister’s crash, Will. The loss of the girls. So lovely are they. And they are yet glorious are they not? In your memory. In your love for them. They yet remain in their glory.”

“They do,” I said, tears now spilling from my smiling closed yes.

“But, oh Will, this is the lesson you have learned only a few hours ago, yes? Pain pulls at us, and closes us in. We bend in. It’s so much safer this way. Here in this cave of safety a man cannot pull himself away from himself. His own hurt blinds him to the beauty of the event. When isolated the event brings only pain. As well it should. But when joined to the snowfall events of life that singular awful event changes.

“It is the mingling of things, Will, that works magic on the ashes of life. How often have you heard someone talk about how beauty comes from ashes? How can this be possible? How can beauty form out of annihilation? It is the mingling of things! Isolation suffocates and kills. And when a thing dies within a box, in a box it will remain. But if we take death and mingle it with seeds, it feeds the earth, it nourishes roots, it gives its power, its nutrients, to the new living thing.

“Does not the bloom teach us this each year? Do not the seasons testify to this? Does not life and death mingle and create the wonderment you call beauty? I am a mingler. I reach out my hands in this world to mingle, to feed, to nourish, to give power, to make all things new over and over again.”

“I have seen this,” I said, squinting my eyes in pain.

“Take last evening as your archetype event,” she continued. “There you sat, Will, in the sulking mind of one running from his own story. The rain and mud ministered to your thoughts of despair. And then the bear. Thus entered the danger and it mixed well with your regret and sadness, your selfishness. Yes?”

“It did. Yes,” I said. The confession whispered off my lips. It felt good to say it. To hear myself say it, embarrassing though it was. 

“And then the snow came, mixing then replacing the rain and mud. It changed your evening. The snow brought a softness to your mind—a sad memory, yes, but also a kind of homesickness, in the best kind of way. Do you now see how when we isolate events or images they can be and look so much like muck, so much like death? But when we back up and see them joined like the love-lace of Turner’s falling snow caught on the bedpost of his mother, the event takes new form. It joins with other forms and becomes, beautiful. Your own greatest poet, Coleridge, wrote about this. Do you remember, Will?

“Yes,” I said, intrigued and remembering. “How the many contribute to the whole. This is how we see beauty, he says.”

“Yes. Your eyes are new, Will. You now see how I thread myself through this thing you call time—this Tempest. And like any new thing, they need time to adjust, to focus.”

Without warning a gust of wind blew open the front door of the cottage. Borean ran to the door, then stepped outside. The wind howled in through the door.

“Borean!” yelled Aylin, snapping out of her almost prayer-like state.

Turner walked towards the door, then stopped. The kitchen curtains flapped furiously, a loose cupboard door slammed back and forth.

“Borean!” yelled Aylin once more as she rose and stood on the hearth.

But the wind sucked up her words and only the night answered, with more wind and darkness. 

TO BE CONTINUED …

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