Deathless by Belinda Burke Page B

earth of spring.
    “Father… What…are you doing?”
    The words fell heavy as stones from Myrddin’s mouth and disturbed the silence, but not the frozen moment. He took a breath and held it as his father bent and lifted his mother in his arms.
    “ And now it is time for you to come with me .” His father’s voice did not disturb anything, nor his mother’s, as it came just after.
    “Is this what dying is?”
    Myrddin heard his father laughing.
    “ Yes. No .”
    The world snapped open and shut.
     
    * * * *
     
    The tribe was in a furor, shouting and crying, confused over what had happened to the vanished body they had been carrying. Listening carefully, Myrddin learned that the reunion he’d witnessed had been nothing more than a single moment of stillness for them, just a flicker in time. Once, he would have laughed at their confusion, but tonight it only accented his own difference.
    He retreated alone to the round, thatched silence of his mother’s empty hut. It was the last night of autumn, and as he’d done every year on this night for sixty years, Myrddin readied himself for his long sleep. This time, as he did so, he wondered. What was he meant to be, or do, remaining as he did, alone now, unchanged in a changing world?
    Sixty years more, and no one living would remember who he was or where he had come from. Another sixty after that and his name would gain less notice than a ghost.
    Even if I choose to stay with them and be with them, they’ll die too, all these mortals. Still. Where else could he go? He had never bothered with building his own place outside the tribe. He had always returned here , to his mother’s place. The world and its silences were friendly to him, and in spring he could never keep himself from the wild, the heart of the wood, but what of every other time? What about the winters? What about his hibernation?
    Sleep .
    If he closed his eyes, he thought he should be able to taste it already, coming for him with the moonrise, but he lay alone in the dark and remembered instead. Sleep wouldn’t come—as if it were spring instead of autumn’s last night, spring instead of awakening winter.
    “ Your mortal roots have left this world. Do you miss your winter sleep as well as your mother, my son? ”
    As if his thoughts had summoned it, the voice came through the window, the sound mossy, shaded, overgrown, as was the aura of power in Myrddin’s soul. Father. His father’s presence woke more of the spring inside him than was already moving untimely, but Myrddin remained motionless despite those summoning words.
    It wasn’t grief that restrained him but the instability of his being. He was the son of a mortal woman, now departed from this world, but he was also the son of this immortal and unearthly power, this wild God whose words echoed still inside him. Mortal roots? Sleep…my winter sleep.
    Once, twice, Myrddin blinked, then sat up and met his father’s eyes. He was outside the window, then by Myrddin’s bedside with no sign of motion, no transition, presenting not even the illusion of flesh.
    “Father…” He heard his own voice faintly, as if it too crossed some border of reality previously untouched. “Mother’s gone. You took her away, and now something’s happening to me. Or—not happening.”
    “ Consequences. ”
    Consequences. Again, there was an echo. Myrddin closed his eyes once more and thought his whole being was ripe with consequences, ripe as the end of the spring, the flowers falling into fruit. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, but there was no silence inside him. No winter hibernation, no slumber falling over him like the first flakes of snow.
    Since he’d been born, that was the way of it, the way the balance was kept within him. Sleep through the winter, wake with the first touch of spring, run wild in the joy of the growing earth. Explore his power as the green turned summer gold, explore a thousand shapes and shades of being while