caracco

this chapter will be kind of unusual, with no dialog, and some strange oniric mumbo-jumbo.

I hope no one will be offended by some of the religious references I've used.

May 1, ???, ???

I woke up expecting the pounding of a hangover, but strangely I wasn't able to feel anything I'll expect as an aftereffect of a drinking night; so I decided to open my eyes and find where I was.

I was in a clearing circled by countless trees, illuminated only by the moon, lying down on the grass, able to hear only the noise of the nature around me.

Feeling lightheaded I tried to stand, realizing that while still being me I was a young buck, standing on four legs; the fog of being something that I'm not obfuscating my mind, eroding my conscious mind and leaving my subconscious instincts as the controllers of my body.

Then the sound of twigs breaking and barking reached me.

It's singular how much a single noise can change your thought process, or at least this is what I'll think if I was able to at that moment, but an animal mind is not one made for philosophical thinking; the fight or flight instinct reined my mind and for the first time of my life I run on four legs, with the agility of a fleeing stag, running in the night from hunters I know were following me.

The adrenaline of the flight giving me the energy to run in the dark forest, avoiding branches and roots, jumping over streams and holes, mixing with others fleeing deer, everything to escape the pursuit of the hunters.

But nothing of this diverged the attention of the ones tracking me, the barking sounds still behind me, always at the limit of my awareness, shepherding me on a precise path, in a way that stag-me will never notice.

And so I kept running, drifting for hours in the night, with the hunters’ presence following me, until the first ray of an unrisen sun starts to lighten the sky, and I arrive at the clearing again.

A majestic stag waiting for me inside it, with antlers crowning him in a way that no other words than regal will describe it; only at the moment I reached the open ground I noticed the changes my body went through the night, I wasn't a buck anymore, I was a stag as majestic as the one in front of me, ready to fight for the crown.

Already prepared for my challenge the king-stag charge at me, starting the fight for dominance, pain flaring as our antlers collide and our necks strains, our legs bending to minimize the recoil and use it to gain the space to charge, to cross our antlers times and times again. Adrenaline pumps into my vein as small injuries start appearing on my fur and my primordial mind take even more control, turning me in a passenger of my own body, a spectator of the fight that will decide if I'm going to live after this battle or not.

Time flows while our battle, the ancestral fight of the young against the old, goes on, a tie that's finally broken when the king-stag, fatigued, falters in one of our antler-wrestling moment and falls to the ground, giving me the chance to attack his unprotected side, an opportunity to end the fight, one that I take.

Before he can regain his footing, I charge at him with lowered antlers, piercing his unprotected side, scoring a mortal wound, and winning this fight.

Now watching as life leave the old king that I have bested, I feel my body changing again, returning to a human one, knowledge of the ritual I am part of flows into my mind as a knife made of stone comes to be in my hands.

At the same time I return to my human self, the hunters that followed me for the entire night start appearing in the clearing, this time not to hunt me but to welcome me into their ranks, because now that I killed the great stag I have become one of them.

Following the instructions in my mind, I slit open the king's throat, a hunter using a stone bowl to collect the last of its living blood, then I cut open the king's abdomen and take out its heart, putting it in the already filled bowl.

When blood starts overflowing the bowl, the hands of multiple hunters collect and use it to paint me with the Consort symbols, preparing me to meet the Goddess of this Beltane, and while the rest of the hunters carries my prey, the trek to where the great bonfire lies starts.

The long trek in the forest is soon over, the sun still as unrisen as it was when I reached the clearing, because time has no meaning in this night, and moments later I am in front of the priestess of this ritual, as the king and the Consort, ready to move on with the ritual.

I give her the bowl, breaking the heart in two halves and offering her one, then as we eat the bloody heart we pass the bowl to the other participants, each one taking a sip, till it came back to us, still as full as when they start drinking, so we can water the soil whit the blood of a king, needed to make the land fruitful again, as life can only flourish where life was spilled.

As the sacrifice, ends, the fertility part of the Beltane ritual starts.

The blood of the mighty stag affecting the people with his powers, filling them with vitality and releasing all of their inhibitions, turning the gathering in an orgiastic agglomeration of bodies where men and women will mate as animals in a lust induced trance.

As I watch the scene, my body moves under the will of the Consort, and together with the girl controlled by the Goddess, we leave the bonfire to enter the nearby cave, where generations of our predecessor completed the same ritual we were going to finish.

And so we became one, in a swirl of magic, blood and bodies we mated, both as humans and as gods, as we were not only ourselves in that cave, we were the hunter and the prey, the plow and the field, the Goddess and the great stag, her Consort.

Only when the ritual ended I regained control of myself, finally fully conscious of what happened in the last hours, remembering what I had done and who I had been, a stag, a man, a hunter, and a god, everything in a single night that spanned more than the time of a single day, because the old magic willed it, and here, where the Mists of Avalon lie, the magic of old dictate everything.

Slowly clearing the fog inside my mind I realize that more than one world superimposes in this place as two levels of existence start to split up, the outside world and Avalon, united only for a night, when the veil between worlds is thinner, and when I started trying to understand the strangeness of what happened in this night a bell toll reverberates in the world outside, ringing in my ears, signaling the start of the new day and the end of the magical phenomenon that has given me the first taste of power I have ever had.

As the sound starts increasing in volume my eyes settle on the sleeping form of my companion of this night, the first I ever had, someone I know will remain on this side, and so, as the real world separate itself from this one I close my eyes, tears streaming down my cheeks, as I leave my first partner and my soon-to-be first child behind, knowing that I will never see them again.