Lord of the Green

The Lord of the Green felt the pine-needles crunch beneath his toes. The trees stirred from a slow slumber. The smell of decay hung heavy between them, the proud oaks and skeletal birch and withered snags all waking to feel his comforting presence. Mouthless, they sang their kyrie for him, the song only he could hear. A melody without end.

He sauntered with surefooted strides, passing one such hoary yew with a beard hanging with grandfather moss, conscious that it yearned to touch him. Indeed, it crooked a branch like a harridan's claws to reach, desperate to feel it’s god's embrace. The gnarled fingers scraped harmlessly off smooth skin the colour of a young sapling. He was primordial, an arborous being like his subjects, but he was not one of them. He dreamed like the rest of them, sang with them, basked in the glory of the sun, felt the warm caress of daylight on his green limbs, but he was not one of them. Upon his hairless head, a pair of great antlers twisted and bent like forks of black lightening, his crown, his magnificent crown. He had countless names, that god, for he had lived before there was anyone to give a name to him. When others were young, he was already long-lived and wise. For he was the Horned King, He-who-Watches-the-Wood, Greenjack, Hardroot, Oaken-Lord, master of bloom, melter of ice, bringer of succour.

A clearing lay before him, marked by a loose circle of upright stones. Between the few sparse tufts of brittle grass, the earth was moribund. He stopped in the centre, lifting a hand to feel the air. The tiniest of sensations made him lower his obsidian eyes, to something small crawling over his foot. The mouse pattered indolently over a verdant toe. Picking it up with all care, it scrabbled over his hand and malachite nails. For a moment, it appeared to consider the strange figure staring down without expression or passion or malice. Ignorant of the majesty that it beheld, it soon lost interest, and began to groom itself. The Lord studied the mouse, his patient, sure thoughts bringing the mouse closer for inspection. He closed his fist and bit down on the creature, crunching its bones and rending flesh and savouring the taste. The creature spasmed briefly, but soon lay limp in that hard palm. For those black eyes glittered then. A thin line of blood trickled down his chin. The trees sent their song into a crescendo, deafening for those with ears to hear it.

The air was still. For those with eyes, a false-night had come, clouds gathering to cover the sky in a slate carpet. The apotheon stood alone in that great barren meadow. He was naked but for a stone snake torc coiled tightly about his neck. The blood had run down his chest. He finished off the tiny creature, leaving nothing behind. His dark antlers looked bright, burning with a radiance of its own, shot through with pale strings of refracted light, those thrawn racks shining as though lacquered and polished to a burnished gleam.

He raised his right arm. The voices hushed, a muted silence settling over the clearing in a feverish fit of anticipation. From a mouth painted a sickening red, guttural, growling sounds roared, a mantra from some dead tongue.

For the longest time, the glade waited in a deaden quiet. The Lord let his chest rise and fall in a steady rhythm, his breathing a hypnotic metronome. Those unknowable thoughts of the god passing imperturbably. He held no fear, for fear was a hindrance for lesser beings. Not for the Lord of the Green. Raising his head, he glared up with the same dispassionate face. But his eyes hid little. They burned. A pair of pits roiling with black flame, inextinguishable and inexhaustible. A fire to light the world.

As if in answer, a silver-white flash tore itself from the empyrean, coiling and screaming like some insane creature of the sky. It fell, striking the Watcher. Soon came a splitting drum of thunder that barrelled through the glade. For a moment, the world had bathed in wondrous heliotropic light. The pall of cloud peeled away like old bark, and through them came the faintest hints of sunlight.

The rain steadily fell in that empty glade, to the exultation of countless voices.