I won’t begin at the beginning. That’s not how the stories used to go.

A beginning, a middle, an end and a meaning. Those pulp page morality stories are not true fairie tales. I won’t tell you all I know and I’m not running out of threads.

 

Myths, yarns and mysteries are what I spin in, move in. As a witch, as a writer, as a woman. Story weavers are older than time. Celtic society venerated storytellers and their wisdom.

I came to writing as I came to breathing, through being born. 

Broken arms and wounded healer I write onwards, inking down the souls. The oldest stories are sung and retold every day. We can’t exist without them. Do you remember your first story? Do you ever recall your first word?

Viridescence licked and flickered their sides as they ran. Powerful, unseeable and roaming the hounds moved with her.

 

He was crouched in the twilight. 

I will tell you that the Prince ruled the seven Cantrifs but that won’t mean anything to you now I know, perhaps it’s best to say if Pwyll were here today his wealth would be recession proof.

He had gone to the mountain unafraid of wounds. It was said that whomever went to the mountain and sat would receive wounds or would see a wonder. So wonder-seeking, he went.

There is a mountain, the Twm Barlwm, to the north of my mothers village. It is said to be the resting place of a giant, to be guarded by a swarm of bees and a Celtic warrior in green. The warrior is seen on the turning of the year, but as a death omen not a blessing. These stories may be legends and make-believe elsewhere, but they don’t know that and here they walk the woods and lanes.

Rhiannon rode onwards, her hounds at her heels.

Don’t call them hellhounds. I know the iridescence is confusing but it is Hecate who has the hellhounds. She was Greek and Hekate is from the Greek while Hecate is from the Latin translation. I first knew her as Hecate of course, she was my first goddess. Don’t be scared of the dogs, but don’t get in the way of the hunt either.

Rhiannon, the pure beauty, she rode a white mare, and she rode bareback as the Fae do, hounds streaming out behind her. 

 

Hounds, the earthly ones, are funny creatures. We used to see them sabbing, although my friend used to call it ‘going hunting’ which seemed rather mixed up to me. But then she had a rather complex relationship with the hunt, riding their horses home for them. Lovely girl though. She lived deep in the Forest of Dean, you couldn’t get there without a land-rover. Her sister, so Tom told me, could make feasts and trifles out of nothing at all.

On the mountain sat the Prince with his men, and as he looked down into the valley he saw Rhiannon riding. She wore a shift of gold, no, your thinking of Lady Godiva, different all together, do pay attention. Pwyll saw Rhiannon and in that moment date fell into place and worlds shifted.

Mounting, he rode towards her, he had a prized hunter but however hard Pwyll rode he could not catch the woman on the white mare. The faster he rode the further she was from him.

Pwyll tried the next day but it was just the same, he sent a boy after her and the boy was crushed with exhaustion and couldn’t continue. On the third day the Prince was weary of the chase, lonely on the moors beyond the mountains of his home and cried out to the woman to stop.

Rhiannon drew up.

He should have asked before, she told him. Divinity of horses, of justice and of the wild places, embodied in Rhiannon. She sat astride and proud before him. They came together. Rhiannon confided that she as being forced into marriage by her father, but her heart was with Pwyll.

He rode up to her fathers palace, a hundred knights behind him, twelve months from the day of their meeting on the high, stark moors. He rode up to marry her. 

But what happened next isn’t in this story. Nor is a call to action. Nor a moral.

Nor an ending.

 

Image: From the beautiful Michele Thomas – Visual Artist http://www.facebook.com/glassdarkest