the fall

    Tears welled up about Brigid's eyes, making it difficult to see what happened next. It was like standing atop a cliff face and leaping from it. All about her air seemed to rush up from her feet, icy blasts that tore at her clothing and beat her skin a deathly pale. She shivered and realized that the stone she had meant to hurl was no longer in her hands. Though her body was wracked with tremors from the now freezing air about her, her hands still burned. She could feel the flesh harden, blisters pushing to the surface as if the stone were there in her grasp.
    The air about her went grey as she opened her eyes and dampness pervaded like being caught in a mist or cloud bank. She could smell the ocean faintly though for the moment but all she could hear was the howling of the harsh wind as it ripped past her.
    Or am I falling? She thought.
    Her eyes turned downwards for the first time and in looking she found herself drawing in a hard breath. Her feet kicked endlessly out from beneath her. No longer was there the comfort of earth and flora at the ends of these limbs. The air about her was filled not with the buzzing of insects, but instead only a perpetual damp that by now had soaked her clothing and made it cling to her in a most uncomfortable way.
    Her dress whipped upwards pressing against the underside of her belly, its sleeves riding along her arms until the loosened folds of cloth brushed her neck. Then took suddenly to making wet slaps against her hips and back as the air pushed and pulled her through this foggy descent; the sound along with the sensation served only to add to her confusion.
    Faintly then there was the smell of ash, pine, alder and a swampy odor. Something broke the fog bank beneath her as she fell and then rose up past her. It was a tree. The branches of a mighty oak swept up out of the gray formless clouds beneath her and danced around her as she fell amongst them. Its leaves shrouded the smaller limbs, but as she whipped past gravity took its toll on the tree and it expanded beneath its own mass. Soon she passed by branches so large they would have dwarfed the trunks of the largest trees she had ever known in Eirinn.
    And then all at once she struck a branch, or else it leapt into her spiraling path to strike her. Either way the effect was instant. A crushing blow to her chest; leaves and smaller branches clawed at her hair tangling it. She felt her jaw slam shut and her teeth rattle in her skull as another branch came swinging out of nowhere to greet her body in the leg this time. She cried out and stretched her hands to the knee that had taken the blow only to find her shoulder struck next.
    In desperation she took to new tactics as she fell, reaching out with a free hand she made an attempt to catch a branch as it flew by. One quick ripping motion later and Brigid had instead torn the blackened flesh of her palms asunder. The blows came with some rapidity now as the branches below her became a tangled mass of leaves and pain.
    Reflexively she curled into a ball, seeking to protect her torso and with luck her unborn child as well, only to find herself struck in the spine and the back of her head. At this last injustice she lost consciousness for a second or so.
    The gray realm of fog and branches returned to her, but when it did so this time she found the branches gone. Instead a trunk as thick around as a large house passed beside her in the air. It was hewn of bark rough enough to tear flesh and so she did not foolishly reach out to touch it as they passed one another, only thought of her own tree far from here and burnt to its roots.
    Was this a dream? She wondered.
    For all the speed with which she passed the trunk of this enormous oak it might as well have been featureless. She twisted her body grimacing in agony and looked down beyond her feet as she continued to fall.
    Was there an end to this? Brigid pondered, and had just enough time to think, "Yes," when the ground came rushing up beneath her at last.
    It was a sallow field in the awful grey twilight of this realm. Had the sun been out for Brigid to view it with more clarity it might have seemed less sickly in nature. But for the moment the bank of fog through which she fell gave a lackluster review of what lay before her. The soil seemed hard packed and frozen the way overturned earth could get in harsh dry weather; unmoving, unforgiving. She winced in anticipation of this new pain. Mercifully, just as she was wondering if she had died, she blacked out.
    What happened next was not something she awakened to until moments later as before when she was falling. Her impact with the ground was softened considerably by the fact that as she blacked out of her conscious mind her descent was slowed immediately to a crawl. Instead of a lung crushing impact with the frozen ground, she instead began drifting like a leaf lazily back and forth in the air, until she came gently sliding to a stop in the tall grass and clover of the field. There she lay.
    A low mist wound its way through the tallest sheaves and over the top of her slumbering form, to obscure its repose amongst the unturned earth and flora. Brigid slept and dreamt of falling into darkness, beneath her the shadow became a span of stars and those stars became eyes. In this new realm beyond the shadowed borders of her grassy den those eyes became reality in the deepest spaces between elm, oak, and birch.
    Though in her dreams the shadow and starlight she could sense were a forgery she knew somehow that the eyes were not. Something was out there in this darkness beyond her; even in her sleep she could see it.
    A hundred thousand sets of eyes that had not seen the mortal realm for two thousand years nor laid those eyes upon a mortal being in near to a century opened one by one. This was their place, this ancient forest. Their music wound its way through the branches here and their magic ruled. To them it was a kingdom, a place of poisons, seductions, and strange fruits that tempt and lure. Love from which there is no escape. Where winter's rite has no foothold and the land is held to its most blissful repose. Tir Nan Og.
    Brigid would wake soon. The morning of her first day was coming.