Moss Child

“Dreams are the seeds of change. Nothing ever grows without a seed, and nothing ever changes without a dream.”

~ Debby Boone

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She’d left those seeds in the snow, forgetting that they were ever real. Seeds left to die, just like everything else she'd ever loved. All that she'd known was lost. Her home was scorched and the women whose nurturing hands had moulded her into being were no longer. No part of her could understand the reason why her people and their way of life had been destroyed. How could anyone make sense of it?

"It was the Queen's orders," she heard the tyranous horsemen say as she hid in the forest shadows cloaked in ancient moss.

Who was the queen?, she wondered.

Did this queen know that she was erasing generations of love and magic, ending the line of seed women who'd planted the forests of the earth across the eons, one seed at a time? They were a clan of warm-hearted women who brought life and hope to every patch of soil they touched. They'd listened to the dreams imbedded in each seed and sang each a special song to help them flourish. Their voices were the sound of kindness and their eyes were an ocean of peace. They knew that dreams were the lifeblood of all goodness in the world, and so they devoted themselves to keeping them alive, adding tinder to the fires of inspiration, whispering encouragement wherever they went.

No, the queen couldn't have known, she thought. The cruelty of it all was just unfathomable.

When the last horseman disappeared over the hills on the horizon and the last corner of her village had collapsed into cinders, it suddenly began to snow. It was as if the sky was mourning. Tiny flecks of cold, soft snowflakes drifted slowly through the air, one by one until they'd completely covered the land she'd once called home. It was all gone and her world plunged into darkness.

So, for a thousand years the seeds stayed there, lost to the world and frozen deep inside the death grip of snow as hard and mighty as glacial permafrost. And for a thousand years her heart felt empty, devoid of hope or dreams. She wondered aimlessly through the gloomy woods in search of something that she couldn’t quite remember. At night, she slept long dreamless sleeps under dark moonless skies with no stars to guide her back home. What home, after all? No hearth could warm her soul. No rain could wash away the sadness that permeated her life. For the longest time, emptiness became her name.

Until one day – and that one day always comes – when she heard a whisper in the icy winter wind. Something called her name. It called her to come North. With nothing to lose and nothing to keep her where she was, she gathered her old cloak, a treasure intricately woven from woodland moss and elderflower petals by the generations of women who came before her. She put on her sheep skin shoes and set about on her journey to the far off lands in the North.

She walked for 7 days and 7 nights across frozen meadows and snow covered hills, the whisper in the wind guiding her along the way. There was something familiar about this guiding voice. Was it the voice of purpose or the voice of her ancestors? Was it the voice of the earth? She wasn't sure. Yet, although she could not quite put her finger on why, she trusted it. This voice had found an opening, cast its line beyond the dark cloud of grief and somehow hooked into her heart, tugging her life forward once more.

She walked across the frozen lake and up narrow mountain paths, until she reached a black bear’s cave.

A deep, gruff voice echoed from inside the cave.