Love #22: Moon Rider

 

He told her many stories as they waited together the coming of the wolf age.

Within his eye she paced incessantly. Within the prison of his orb, she called for another story about them, told to her alone. A story told to her, where she can see her eyes and no one else’s reflected in his.

At the end of each night, he will speak gently to her, “Come lie here with me. Let us go back in time, when you and I were still young. When you had a different name and I was a different person.”

Each night, she will turn from him, “To fail again in your half-love? To taste your kisses and the mead upon your breath? To feel your fists rough upon my skin and your practiced violence?”

He will insist, “I have changed. I have been into the world. A thousand years have passed. I miss you. We were meant to be thus. Come back to me.”

She drifts back into the center of his eye and looks at the shattered remembrances of her lives. 

She bends her head and thinks, “ You may have changed many small things. You may have adventured far. But you will not have changed. You are nothing more than a shade drifting in this mouse-hell, a frustration of fragments and words unspoken.”

As the last night deepened, his eyes dimmed and he fell asleep to dream alone.

And so she chanted the spell that made him twist and cry one last time.

“Moon rider: ‘Grow fire!’

In your eye, your heartbeat

Tear-fall, free I fly”

Notes:

The Ancients used references to the moon as an allusion to the eye. A "moon-rider" thus became a lover's reflection in their beloved eye. A good cry, with lots of tears flooding the eye and removing the reflection, is needed to remove the spell cast by love.

I have used the images of ravens and a reference to the coming of the wolf age to invoke Odin's ravens, Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory).

Copyright Dark Aelf, 2021 

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