Long roads stretch out from home laced in shadows marked by the dying embers of the sun. Swift into dusk the tongues of flame are replaced with silver limmed shadows that flicker under light of the waking moon. Night calls to me and I set my feet to the journey. I feel the call of the trees and the wind that carries the scent of the sea. With starlight on my brow I walk into the night with only an Earthsong to guide me. Its words come from ancient memory and sung gently it take me through Beech halls with their grey columns upraised on a carpet of copper autumn leaves supporting a roof gilded in a silver wooden lattice till at last I come to an avenue of sandstone that was hewed by men. It opens up at the end into a wooded arena and I understand already that I am not alone. I sense them watching, listening to my song and in the pale moonlight they sing reply to it and step from the shadows between the trees into the waking world. Beings older than I, greater than I and yet more humble than I. As children they seem and yet are as ancient as the bones of rock that shape the world. Forms made manifest to my eyes by a deeper belief and time and see they come to greet me and awed by their song I become stardust and melt with them into the shadows as I am reborn.
Reborn within their song of majesty, that takes each note and displays the story of creation. As the music swells I see the threads of time weaving into the weft of the present and the warp of the future. The older cloth shimmers while the newest is dull and dowdy. The fabric of the world made in song shows these beings have nurtured us from the beginning of time. We are the wards of a titanic history and as unruly upstarts we have nearly laid waste to all we have been given.
They have no technology only an organic insight that co-exists with all other living things. They do not die; they simply take on a different form to explore the world anew. How so? Within the earth is a now waning power that is the dynamo of destiny. It is a declining force now and with each passing day a little more is lost forever. Each lost tree, each acre of woodland is a doom to the force that sustains them and so they retreat further from man and transform into something lesser than before. Yet think how mighty must they have been at the beginning to make this glorious world and maintain it as a paradise for so long.