Page 50 of Up from the Earth

“Who areyou?” That mirror reply came back at me again, but the inflection had changed.

I met the eyes staring back at me, one green and one blue. But she was older. She was pregnant. I was not these things.

“Aren’t you?”

She spoke alone, and I cocked my head, taken aback. What was I looking at? Who was this blurry, wavering image of a woman?

“You ask what you already know.” The reflection cocked her head in a similar fashion, and I still knew that there was nothing of me to reflect. “Do not resist or rationalize. Give in.”

Sucking in something that could not be air into my not-lungs, I focused in on her image. She was familiar, a mirror of myself. The hair and form, but she was someone else as well. A stronger nose, a prouder stance. I could feel the life-giving essence seep from her and into what would have been my bones. I could sense the proximity to death that she existed near.

“A goddess…of spring?”

“You are getting closer.” The grin that spread across her face was wicked and wise, her youthful glow beaming from her even as I noticed again her rounded shape. “But perhaps, it is because you need to see the rest of us.”

Near her, curved through the reflecting light almost as if looking into a concave mirror, appeared more shapes, diluted and shifting but there. In fact, more women stood next to her with their same features and like facets. Pale hair melted into dark, smooth faces melted into those with wrinkles. But they were all the same, this essence of the natural order tied to the three phases—maiden, mother, crone.

Iwasthem. I was a part of these beings who had come before and would be here long after.

My chest, still invisible in the dark, warmed. It was neither pleasant nor uncomfortable, but a place in the middle which I feared could dip in either direction.

“You were never just Cerridwen, don’t you see?” The woman in the center spoke along with the two at either end, their three faces versions of the same being. “This is your final moment of truth seeking. A point between two realms to which you both belong.”

“A crossroads?” A grin flickered over her face like torchlight licking across the darkness.

“And a well,” said that first woman, her swelling abdomen suggesting birth was imminent.

As if in response, I could feel the quickening begin, the surges small and low but with the promise to grow. I held her eyes, knowing so innately that life thrived within her, that she could gift that life through the natural order to everything within the mortal realm. A Queen of Birth and Death, a Wife to Beginnings and Endings.

“And aren’t you as well?”

Considering, I nodded. “I suppose. Though my kingdom is dying.Iam dead and have left it behind.”

One near the right side shimmered brighter, and then another near the left. They were the same yet different as they all had been—one with tanned skin and intelligent eyes, the other with wild yellow hair and a cunning smile.

“Death is one step on the journey. A part of the grand wheel that turns for all things. Beginnings and endings. Endings and beginnings.” They spoke in unison, and the warmth in my chest swelled. “One cannot be without the other,but…”

The word hung in the air, rippling through matter and space. A humming wormed through my mind, my essence.

“Cycles are not lines, Cerridwen.”

Before me in the air a gold thread materialized, astoundingly bright against the darkness. It stretched through me, far into the distance at my back and even farther into the expanse before me. The two women held up their hands, and then they all did—versions flickering on the edges so that I couldn’t tell how many there were.

In the space between us, the line of thread curved, bowing upward until a loop was formed.

“Cycles are circles. What came before will always come again. Death will be followed by life and life followed by death. For you know the words, Cerridwen. Life, death…”

The ringing in my bones—or what should have been my bones—rattled my entire being. Everything thrummed a droning wail reverberating as it grew louder and louder. Against the noise, my voice would be nothing, and still I spoke.

Rrrummmble.

Smiles and the golden thread shimmered, loops forming around each of the women before me down the line into infinity.

Because Iwasthem. Not by happenstance or similarity. I was each of them and more to come. We were the feminine line that would stretch on. We were the facets of this natural cycle incarnate, and custodian to it all. Fluid shapes, fluid bodies that could change however they needed to. Beings that could be whoever they wanted to be and would remain ever as important to the well.

The cauldron.

I saw my Queen lost among the row of endless faces, for she too—in all their forms—was part of it as well. And they needed me.

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