6th Moon, 144 AC

The Hornwoods

[CW: Vaguely described nudity, hallucinations]

Serena stood at the center of the grove. The moon had risen to its apex atop the night sky and the chill of winter night cut the young Lady Hornwood to the bone. She had hoped that her mother and the others of the Coven would permit her some furs or perhaps a rough blanket. But instead, they had remained silent, waiting. So, she had stripped. Her mother had watched impassively, only indicating to her sisters to take the cloak, furs, and clothing. In Serena's hands was placed a bowl filled with a paste made of a mixture of weirwood seeds and other ingredients gathered from the depths of the forest. Only her mother and a select few of the Old Witches knew the mixing of this brew, although all of the Sisterhood were subjected to it upon their twenty-second year.

Words passed in ancient tongues: motions of impossible syllables that sang in the air as if they had always been sung, always underpinned the lattice of winter's air. The Old Gods were in these words - so Lady Hornwood had said - and soon would drift from them into Serena once she began the ritual.

Then it was silence and darkness, and Serena was alone. The others had retreated into the trees, taking their torches with them. Leaving her unclothed with the bowl in hand.

She stared at the bowl for a moment. Its contents had taken on a deep red color, the result of the weirwood seeds in the mix. When she touched her fingers to it, she found the mix was a watery paste. Drink she thought, taking a deep breath. As she put the bowl to her lips, the smell of sickness and mushrooms filled her nostrils and sent her stomach tumbling.

Serena drank in two swallows.

For about thirty minutes, standing in the grove, Serena felt nothing beyond the cutting cold. She had numbed completely almost an hour ago. A gentle pain radiated throughout her extremities.

It started with a low tingling. Numbness replaced by a steady outgrowth of sensation. Joints great and small shook with pulsing waves of something like pleasure. The sense grew, coating Serena in a blanket of warmth. She began to shake as her muscles and joints weakened and her vision blurred. The night swirled into a mass of dancing color as moonlight twisted into fluttering dust. What is and was and will be blurred. Memories flared up and dissolved.

Then the plunge.

The Hornwoods were as they had always been and were always to be. The springs, summers, falls, and winters of all the world were as one and ever shifting in a canopy of impossible sight. In their brush and under their shade rumbled the men, the animals, the deeper beasts, that had called these woods their home for millennia and would call them home for millennia more. Serena closed her eyes and found the darkness was full of twisting branches and leaves.

She had wandered. There was water up to her ankles and it was full of life. Minnows and tadpoles gnawed at her bare feet. The forest continued across the river, dark and dense and breathing. From their depths stepped out a form. One like a man, though warped: towering and build broad, coated in a layer of mangled, mangey fur from which pierced spires of cracked bone. In Its chest beat a burning red mass that may have once been a heart, and from Its lips spewed floating masses of embers and ash. Its eyes glowed the color of burning wax and shone bright across the waters, sending their color along the clear, flowing surface of the Broken Branch. Atop its head was a trio of twisting moose antlers, tangled together, forming something like a crown. The smell of fire grew in the air, though the woods remained still and the creature across the waters did nothing more than stand and wait.

And then Serena woke naked as she had been when the night was full, covered in vomit and snow, laid out in the grove. Cynedunne Hornwood stood before her daughter and nodded when their eyes met.

"Your dreams are your own," Lady Hornwood said, tossing furs onto her daughter, "You will not speak of them."