Ghost People

The forest favors my kind.

This has always been so, for we were born here—we are its children. The Tahtanah (Redwoods) have watched over us since before we were a people, when there was only our Lady. Long before the elders had names or the moons sang our song, when our Great Light had yet to find her dawn, it was then that the might of these great woods called to us. It nestled us away in its forgotten places among the mountains’ father and its great stones, the ones that stand even to this day. There we stayed. We were safe and forgotten as the world was swallowed in fire and storm in the Time Before. It was then that the Great Water brought Our Lady to this land. From those shores she sojourned with the wind, trotting the wilds’ expanse until her feet led her here. The Sun had set on her people. There was not left but sorrow and shadow in what came to follow. She was their last, but she would not be their end. She is to us Mëshuni (Mother), for once the last of her people, but now she has borne a people—my people, the people of Elhuuntah (that is, the People of Wolfskin).

It is said that her kind were the fair ones of old. The elder ones spoken of in tales and tomes. They were a fair light among the land and such a thing is no truer than when it is spoken of her, for she is fair beyond all the golden glory of a rising sun. Tales of the Elder Ones are still whispered among my own, even to this day, for they were wiser than all races of men. They were older too. It was the Elder Ones that gave the stars their names. Their people spoke to the wind and calmed the seas and among all who dwelled upon the face of the earth there were none more true to the wood then they. It was their home, their sanctuary, and it was there that Mëshuni was born. She became a young woman under the silent eyes of the Uuntah (Pine) before she was taken by the Mähgdi (Great Water). Then the gods played their games and smote the world with ruin and fire. Their merciless war was the end to king and kingdom and when the gods had fallen and were no more it was their children, the Fell Ones, that sucked the world dry.

The whole world burned. The Kingdoms of Men were no more. Their heritage a tale of demise. The god's children became a plague and all that remained was bled dry by their hands. It was in this very dark hour that our Lady dawned a light. She left the Wood for the Ruined Places and stole from the hands of god, snatching children from the bowels of flame. Fate’s cruel hand left many crippled by fire or famine, diseased and broken. Those that lived became her children and our elders and this is how the remnants of men became something else. As we grew her own ways became ours’. She taught us the way of the second birth and gave us our coats. Mëshuni taught us how walk among the great ones as friends, we took their silence as our own, and now in the quietest place we hear their wisdom. In the years that followed the Wood took us as its children and so we learned to walk among it as its shadows, as ghosts to the land, always haunting it but never seen.

Tonight was no different.