Somewhere

Prologue

Somewhere, in the deepest wood, there is a spring. Such a spring as many have sought, but none have found. Now things that are never found grow up in a very different way than things that have been. They become more like themselves, and less like other things. Anyone who has found something undiscovered knows the delight is not from the newness of it, but the oldness: the idea that such a thing has always been right under our noses, and no one noticed. Stories are like this too. There are new stories of course, but the really good ones are not new at all, they have always been there, waiting for someone to tell them. So is the story of that spring.

Long ago, when the world was still young, no trees had grown up yet. The few bushes that had, seemed towering leafy giants to the mere grass and mossy stones through which they sprang up. Voices they had too. Yes, the whole lot of them, though the wood one might gather from all the bushes that stood there would not keep a hearth warm for more than a fortnight. They spent their days chattering to the wind, blowing with it this way and that. The wind had a voice of its own, though its was rarely heard, and quickly faded when it was. The sun had not yet learned to cross the sky. He rose like the dawn, but before he could climb to mid-day, grew tired, and fell back down the way he came laughing like a toddler learning to walk, only to try again before resting back in the rosy nursery where he was born, the light of sunrise still dazzling the sky. So was the world kept in an evergreen morning.

There was peace between the winds, perhaps merely faces of the same were they. It is said time began when they first did stir, but how it was marked in the elder days, is a mystery unknown. They were not called by the names of our time, so it is not certain which of them began it, the first night. This second secret is sung in hushed tones, but I once heard it in a rustling branch of the tree that sheds the first leaf of fall. It is said if any can find this tree, they will hear a different story, for it will be another wind that sings to them. It began with the West wind, or so was I told. It grew jealous, that each sunrise favored the east, and leaving it’s siblings, flew far into the dome of heaven, till it nearly touched the home of the rising sun. Blowing with all its youthful might, it carried the giggling orb aloft as was his habit, but with this renewed force, he climbed higher than ever before, and gave a new light into the west, such as never before had been. Flowers that had only known dim shadows now danced with joy to see the sun’s face. Noon came, the first, but when the sun grew tired again, he looked down, searching for the nursery he’d never strayed so far from. But as he tired and tired, growing nearly asleep, he lost the familiar track of day, and fell instead into the west! The sun had never set before, and scared of this foreign ground, he cried great tears, that flew about the heavens, leaving speckles of light behind him that still fall in blazing lights on nights of great significance, when love flowers or fades, or when a new fate is decided for the course of things.  So on this first night of fate, when at last he had sunk below the horizon, all the winds cried out, and found that West was not in his usual place. They grew cold, and howled in fear, unaccustomed to the blackness of the sky above. But while they searched for their missing playmate, a new thing came, from the ground in the East. Missing it’s child, or so that whistling tree says, the moon came out, and saw the green meadows for the first time. It had never seen the world on this side, accustomed as it was to the starry black of eternal night. The winds called out to her, and together they laid a plan that has been in motion since. Each day, the East wind guides the sun on his journey, and the tussle of the North and South winds give us the seasons. I also heard the echo of a prophecy, that one day, the West wind will return, and all winds will fight, plunging the world into an unending night, only to be broken if a daring soul crosses the secret barrier, to lead the sun back from the abyss beneath the world. And that spring, is the barrier. But before I learned where it was hidden, another leaf fell, from a tree nearby, and the secret remained safe within the great forest that has grown from the mere bushes that sprang up at the dawn of the world. Much time has passed since I heard these things, and much more still has the world changed, but there are some things, old as they are, that never change, and that secret spring, is one of them.