Witchmother

The landscape is barren. Perhaps it has always been so? A wind-ravaged space where sun-bleached rocks lay strewn like bones across the grass-hair back of a sleeping giant.

Mists come often here, pulling across the sky like curtains. Strangely heavy yet weightless, like the tickle of cobwebs across the face.

It will smother you if you don’t remember to breathe. A person could go mad here.

There was a time when her bones lay as the rocks on the moor. Picked clean by carrion - her memory and shade almost lost.

Her killer had come looking for a “wonder”, and had slaughtered her with as much thought as he gave to a swine before a feast. She’d been a thing to him, a mere container for that wonder, and he’d taken everything that had not soaked into the earth when he sliced her in twain.

But the joke was on him in the end - what kind of fool mistakes a trophy for a wonder?

In any case, his name rose and fell and passed into legend. He went from “once and future king”, to loose inspiration for near-farcical family-friendly dramas aired on Saturday evenings. His was an empire built on stories, and stories can always change.

But you don’t need blood to be heard from the mouth of Annwn. And in a world of story, dead isn’t always dead - especially not in Annwn.

All you need is a poet or three - someone to write the words of resurrection.

Her shade had returned first, angry and filled with a sense of loss, and her cries beyond intensified. Standing in the mouth of her cave and grieving in Pennant Govid - the Valley of Grief - the Very Black Witch mourned the injustice done to her. 

Then one evening, some witches came. Maybe they weren’t the first or only witches to do this? Maybe many more came but she had just forgotten (twisted with grief as she was)? But they, like their sisters(?) came, gathering her bones and pouring out healing herbs, blood-like wine, meat for sustenance, and water sweetened with honey. 

Little by little her flesh returned and her limbs knitted themselves back together. Little by little she regained her hue and filled her lungs. Little by little she regained her strength and slaked her thirst.

And little by little she was reborn. 

Orddu the very black witch, daughter to Orwen the very white witch, resident of Pennant Govid is returned.

She still resides in her cave of ancestral bones at the mouth of Annwn. A witchmother of sorts to those who would seek her, work to heal her, learn from her. 

She still hurts from those crimes of old. Had he not seen she was a person too? Had he not cared that he took her life to steal naught but a trophy? 

She had been nothing more than a living container for the thing he’d wanted all along (and he hadn’t even gotten that). Even that blood is escaping now, its vessels popping with the primal scream of universes being born anew.

But *he* is dead, and his empire is failing. The “once and future king” is losing his future. (Good riddance.)

Orddu the witchmother lives on.