Tell Your Story

Of Heather & Hares

You've heard her name. How could you not, when it is whispered so sweetly?

She is a warning, a ghost, spoken of in hushed tones. The story is different, always - a new face, a new name, the hundred thousand changes that any story must bear as it grows from rumour to tale to legend.

The story is the same, always.

The bride, picking heather for her wedding. The fog, coming from nowhere to envelop her. The hours, or days, or months spent roaming the moors. The solitude that comes, only and always, from the cold silence of the mists.

Everyone knows how it ends. The screaming, broken wail, torn from her throat as she finds her never-husband's grave. The terror of the village, her village, as the people laid eyes on a woman a hundred years dead.

Whether she truly wanted to marry the man, no two stories agree. But she ran, all the same. Abandoning his grave, the last piece of her old life.

Returning to the iron-grey of the moorland sky, the biting cold of the winter wind, the loneliness of the fog.

The prick of white heather.

Some say she grew hooves, with which to tread the deer-trails, and a snout to smell out food, and lived the rest of her days happily. Others, that she gouged out her eyes, too proud to watch as she became nothing more than an animal. Others still, that she wandered the hills as a ghost, human-shaped but mindless as the grass beneath her.

She was a wild thing now, a lonesome thing, hair tangled with the heather that had marked her doom, what remained of her gown hanging tattered and torn round her hips.

And you have run to her.

Storm winds whip around you, tearing the veil off your head at last. Freed, your hair streams with the gale, tangling beyond what any comb could fix.

Your eyes stream too, tears mixing with the pounding rain. Your foot finds a rabbit-hole and your ankle twists, your delicate white slipper pulled down by the mud. Moments later, the other joins it.

And yet, you continue. Feet bruised and bleeding, hair wet and matted, white dress muddied. You continue.

You have no place other to go.

How long have you been walking for?

The hills seem endless, stretching as far as the eye can see, broom and gorse tearing at your skin as you trudge ever onwards.

You walk, and walk, and walk, until it seems as if there has never been anything else. As if you have never done anything but walk.

You fall. You crawl. You find a way to keep going, no matter how much pain sears through you.

And finally, you find it. The storm clears - slowly at first - then all at once, there is nothing.

You pull yourself up, pain like lightning shooting up from your feet and hands. But you know the sting of cuts and nettles, and they do not concern you.

Far worse is the bone-deep exhaustion, the feeling that you could sleep for the next hundred years if you only had someplace to rest your head.

But you are at last where you mean to be, and so you drag your tired body onward, the only thing burning brighter than the pain the dogged determination not to die like this.

The heather is harsh on your bruised feet, and so, when you come to a stream, you gratefully sink your feet into its freezing water. Everything around you is cold, but the wind has stilled, providing you some small respite.

For a second, you almost feel at peace.

There is another woman at the stream.

You do not know when she arrived. If she arrived. Maybe she has always been here.

She is young, too young for the white hair that spills over her shoulders and down to the ground. Everything about her is bone-white - her eyes, her skin, the antlers that reach for the sky like the branches of a lightning-struck tree.

Her dress is long since gone, scraps of silk and taffeta torn away and wrapped around her horns as decoration, and she wears nothing but her crown, a twisted wreath of white heather and thorns.

She watches you, calm and unashamed, as she lounges by the bank of the river.

You explain to her why you have come - stuttering and starting, unprepared for the blank, serene, expectant gaze of the Queen of the Moor.

You finish, and her deer-like ear twitches, once, twice. She rises, and she towers above you, tall as an oak tree yet delicate as a reed.

You stand, trance-like, all thoughts of pain forgotten. She lifts your chin with a claw-like finger, the white flesh as chilled as the mist that surrounds you both.

She places a kiss on your forehead, lips even colder than her hands.

She steps away, and you begin to shrink.

Your body contorts, bones twisting and flesh melting, fur sprouting from what once was skin. You open your mouth - to scream? To cry? You don't know - but no sound emerges.

And throughout it all, the Moon watches, the same serene gaze watching over you.

You wanted an escape, no?

Your ears elongate, your teeth twist, your eyes pushed sideways as your nose moves forward.

The fog drifts away, the clouds parting, the silver starlight cool on your fur.

No man may keep a hare trapped.

You twitch your tail, nose pricking up as you balance on your hind legs.

You bound into the undergrowth, as the last memories of your life fade away.

And above it all, the Moon watches, and smiles.

You're welcome.