the forest primeval

    Brigid did not open her eyes, but she did awaken. Strange sounds greeted her first, like music played on instruments not of this world. Then the odor of sweet grass, the pungent dark humored stench of a mushroom lit directly beneath her nostrils, and lastly clover, gentle and drifting. She had a vague memory of being gentle and drifting herself, but she could not think from where this would have come.
    A soft breeze blew over her and through the field making the grass stalks tremble and bend down to tickle the backs of her knees. Her laughter was light, almost musical in reaction. When she opened her eyes it felt as if she were floating. The weariness that should have resulted from the fall she took was not there. She pushed herself upright, and though no longer fully reclined she remained seated where she was.
    Brigid studied her dress. It was dry now, though still and torn in several places where the branches of the oak had reached out to cut her in mid-flight. She shifted the garment about on her body as much as she could, and searched for wounds through the holes left in the fabric as a child might, trying to match the wrong which had been done to her dress to the wrong that most certainly had been done to her body. As she looked herself over her eyes fell finally to the burns on her hands. They were gone.
    She raised her hands to her eyes to examine them. Blisters that at the time had seemed to scar her palms irredeemably were gone, leaving behind only the soft pliability the rest of her young skin displayed. A warm white light poured down through the tree tops with an intensity that seemed to make her hands glow. She could feel the blood arcing through her fingertips as sensations returned which she had not known since she was a little girl. Her whole perception seemed to sharpen. Beyond her fingertips the whole field now, she noticed, appeared as if under a radiant flame.
    It was like gold before her; the grass stalks twisted and traced every movement of the breeze out along their lengths. She looked skyward and saw the black shapes of the tallest trees in the wood racing towards the clouds to blot them out, but in this ring, this forest glen, they could not. The sky beyond was, for now, as blue as a lake and cloudless. It shed a dappled broken light through branches hundreds perhaps thousands of feet in the air, and shifted it to and fro as the canopy of the uppermost branches shifted back and forth along their tracks in an unseen wind.
    Brigid placed her newly healed hands at her sides and then continued their journey with a downwards press into the soil. With a single smooth motion she lifted her hips from the ground and rested her legs beneath her frame. She rocked forward and stood slowly with some semblance of grace, readying herself if her new legs should give out on her suddenly.
    She reached her full height and sighed, felt a youthful energy return to her body that at once called to her to play and bound through this grassy place. Though she could still feel the mass of her pregnancy upon her mid section, Brigid had lost the edginess and exhaustion she had felt through the previous months of her cycle. Though she was certain she had not eaten or drunk in many hours she did not feel hunger or thirst steal over her. Though she had slept on naked earth long enough that the grass was still pressed into the soil where she had lain she did not have the usual cramps or pains from such a slumber.
    It was if she herself had been birthed, newly anointed by this strange place and relieved of the thousand natural aches to which flesh of any age, except its most youthful, is ere. In this new found strength she heard the call to wander and explore.
    Brigid strode to the very edges of this new found place, and stared with sharpened eyes into the under dark beyond the forest glen. The shadows stole all details from her sight. Faintly, as if it were luring her along, she heard a music she thought she had heard before. A song like the one that had awakened her, charmed its way through the branches and underbrush surrounding the thicket and for a moment she felt light headed even intoxicated. But a hoarse rush of wind down into the hollow whipped the leaves on branches around her into a fury and in the resulting din obscured the tune for a short while.
    She strained to hear it when the rustling had departed, but it was no more. Around her only silence seemed to prevail for in this wood beyond the glade nothing could be heard. Not the cry of bird, buzz of insect, or snap of twig. Though the forest seemed alive it might as well have been a dead thing for all the noise it made while she stood listening for its cries.
    To her youthful half she now found within, this silence was like a call in itself. It spoke of mystery and strangeness. Hers was a half courage that she found in the early morning light and so she moved closer still to the edge of the glen and at last beyond the hillock of underbrush at its rim into the cool of the old growth pine and beyond.
    The shadows grew deep and drew her in farther than she perhaps thought, so that when she turned at last to see where the glen lay behind her it had blended away into the intermittent breaks through the canopy; lost forever in the ancient wood. Brigid stopped and trembled for a moment realizing she was herself lost. All that strength she seemed to have had in reserve was vanished along with her patch of sun. Her eyes began at once to seek a place like it, but fell only on dim splotches of light like aqueous humors cast about the detritus of the forest floor.
    As she moved onwards going ever deeper into the woods there were periods of almost sheltering shadow play over her head. At her feet the ground grew damp, the leaves slick and muddy as she persisted along her path. She looked up at this point aware only at first that the trees had blotted the sun out of the sky once more. Around her here the dead lower branches and trunks of weary looking white birch stood out in the gloom.
    They looked like skeletal soldiers organized in loose formations. Here a loose knit tribe of warriors atop a low hill. There a company of them readied to ford an imaginary stream. The trees leaned this way and that, seeming to careen about in the near dark of the forest, granting the illusion of movement.
    The cool quagmire of dead leaves swallowed her feet and briefly her knees making Brigid shiver in the gloom. A hundred yards of trudging through this and she found herself tired enough to lean against one of the trunks of birch. She exhaled and her ears perked to a sound she had not heard for several hours now.
    The music was calling her, deeper into the woods beyond this shadowed place, deeper into the swamp.