Excerpt: The Fallow Year

Night had fallen in the forest. It was a clear night, the two moons, white Sela and blue Azriel, chasing each other across the cosmos. The stars glittered above the trees, only the occasional cloud obscuring them with whispy tendrils. There was little wind, the leaves mostly silent. A quiet night, broken only by the rustle of squirrels through the leaves, seemingly thunderous as bears for the brief sprint to the next tree.

A woodland deer raised his head, his antlers casting shadows across the ferns that he ate. Chewing thoughtfully, he watched as two small lights, one purple, one green, flittered through the underbrush, inspecting a fallen tree, moving in and out of the rotted trunk. The deer watched warily, his body tensing as they skirted close, relaxing as the two lights flickered in a different direction.

The lights, small bundles of seithyr, were barely self-aware. They had begun life – or this aspect of existence – as bubbles softly coalescing from the spring of seithyr that bubbled to the surface in a pond that fed a small waterfall from an underground geyser. Seithyr – what some poets long ago had hailed as the spirit of life – flowed slowly through rocks, caroused down streams and undulated across the oceans. It was taken up by the roots of trees, flowing through their sap to the branches and leaves and back down again into the earth. Seithyr was dissipate in the soft breezes that whispered across fields of grain, golden in the sun. It was concentrated in the clash of two air masses thundering in the sky, rushing down into the earth with the forks of lightening as they burnt the ground. It was in the small bits of pollen carried by Nitara's bees back to their hives. Some academics, before the Cataclysm had rendered the study of seithyr anathema, had pondered whether the life force was responsible for bees being able to fly, a conundrum not explained by natural science.

The two small flickers of light, one now red, the other yellow, bumbled together in their frolics, becoming for an instant a larger orange orb before exploding into millions of fiery sparks showering to the ground, sinking into the soil where they would be taken up by the roots of trees or would slowly return to the main saithyr streams that flowed through the earth. In the bubbling pond where the two lights had begun their existence as small sparks of light, two small bubbles hit at exactly the right speed and angle and merged, pulsing more strongly. When enough bubbles had merged, the resulting orb began to take on a life of its own, becoming, as the two lights had become, aware of itself and the world around it, finding it fun to move through the world, investigating a mushroom here, a tree stump there. Mostly, these orbs would burst upon hitting a stone or tree branch or another orb, being absorbed in smaller pieces back into the earth or scattered in the air. Sometimes, in a very long while, the orbs would continue to merge, becoming increasingly awake to their surroundings, developing emergent personalities, becoming what the humans referred to as kami or spiorad, small creatures of seithyr that inhabited a stone or a tree stump, that enjoyed the smell of roses and the taste of milk and honey. Only once in long while, over many centuries, would these small beings become something more, something godlike.