Eyes of crescent moon

References to violence, injury and dark magic.

The reflection in the mirror wasn’t my own.

There were similarities: the slant of green eyes, the high cheekbones and the bow of the lips. She could have been my twin. She was, once.

She screamed her silent scream, throat black, eyes wide in despair, her face distorted by agonised torture.

I smashed the old looking glass and fled the dark attic. I sought the bright fluorescent light of the bathroom and the solace of my own familiar face reflected in the mirror above the basin. But her eyes had followed me, haunted, terrified and terrifying! Was I caught in her grasp, in her world of horror?

But the expression was my own, the terror too. Our eyes have always been so similar, the fluid green of jade, but the silver crescent moon that shines in the right iris, is mine alone. It was given to me by our mother.

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First, she was my sister.

Melanie and I were born under an auspicious moon in the shortest night between the longest days, at a time when people still knew the importance of such things.

Our birth was a violent affair, which tore life from our mother. Melanie was born red-faced, fat and furious. I was a tiny, blue, still thing. They put me on my Mother’s breast that we could find comfort together in our dying. As my mother’s heart beat for the final time, life left her body and filled mine and I grew strong immediately.

Aunt raised us, a woman who never reckoned on having children and did not think to change her ways on our account. We lived in the forest, with tree and wolf and bird. Our home was in the glade, where the turn of the brook meets Big Belly Oak, half a day’s walk from town. There, Aunt taught us the language of the trees, the magic of the earth, stones and mud and the gifts of the plants. We rarely ventured to town and did not yearn for social relations. Occasionally, the townsfolk would seek us out, ashamed of their humanity and their illnesses, afraid of our medicine, but desperate for its help. I was complete with Aunt and Melanie, and the forest, and the lives therein. Save for the odd frightened townsperson, we lived in peace and isolation. Each night, Melanie and I fell asleep holding hands, with our noses touching and our eyes rapt. Her eyes were the same slanted green as mine, but without the crescent of silver moonlight.

On the day of our sixteenth year, the Big Belly Oak shook her leaves in a way that raised the hair on Aunt’s neck. She hurried us away from our home, away from the brook, and deep into the forest. She told us how the men in the town feared us and that fear makes weak men dangerous. The forest was our friend and able to conceal us from dangerous men, but not so from dogs that had been starved for the purpose.

We heard the dogs first and they caught us quickly. Aunt tried to save us. She fed herself to the hounds as she screamed for us to climb high into the trees. We watched from above as the fangs snarled over her bone and sinew before they tore the expression from her face. The men soon followed the dogs. Without Aunt, the forest, the incantations and the magical stones could not save us. Even as they flung us from the branches, and throughout the agony that followed, Melanie held my hand and held steel enough in her eyes and ice enough in her heart for both of us.

When the men had done with us, broken our flesh and bones with their thrusting fear and violent desire, they delivered us to the town, with tales of sorcery and curses and hexes. They were rewarded for their cruelty and we were condemned as witches, to die in the dry well outside town.

They tumbled our bloodied bodies into the dank darkness of the disused well. Melanie’s pain enraged her. I whimpered, and waited for death, among the falling excrement, phlegm and stones. As night arrived and people left, the faraway circle of violet sky brought little comfort. With the last of our strength, we summoned the power of the night, the nurturing of the rotten earth around us and the magic of the precious stone I had grasped tightly since we left our home in the glade. Our noses touched, and she kissed me gently. When my voice had faltered for the final time, Melanie squeezed my hand tighter and cursed the village with devastation. I did not have the strength to reverse what she had done.

Soon after dawn, the townspeople returned, fresh with murderous fear for the disease that had stolen into their homes in the night. Amid shouts of “Witches!”, barrows and shovels of mud rained upon us and death finally carried us away.

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Then she was my daughter, Amelia.

In my fortieth year, under the waning crescent moon, her birth brought my old soul back to me, with some of it’s memories and learnings. Her hand grasped my finger, and in the perfect scent of her crown, the universe and I remembered each other as old friends.

Melanie was a dream at first, vague and fleeting. As Amelia’s voice found depth and vibration, the visions and rememberings became clearer.

We lived then in a sandy cove , with a fisherman, a good man, named Franz, who didn’t return one day. Then it was the two of us again. As Amelia grew and learned to swim and fish and hunt, the dreams became nightmares. The nights were dark with visions of a once beloved face, bloodied and broken, a soul torn by anguish and screams filled with black mud.

As my daughter shed childhood, and her natural rhythms began to align, the old memories hurried to return to me. As the language of the seabirds, and the messages of the waves blossomed in my knowing, I taught them to her. The night sky reminded me of it’s secrets and I offered them to Amelia so that she too could hear the pulsing of the stars amplified in the night-cool sand. Our lives were lived by the rhythm of the moon and her tides. The dolphins were our playmates and taught us how to swim strong and without breath. We made necklaces with magical shells and danced on the sand with the moon. The sea cherished us and brought abundance and companionship.

As the seasons passed, Amelia became a woman. Desire bore down on her, as it had on me when I sought Franz. One moonless night, she relieved her natural yearning and in the howl of her first ecstasy, the cruelty of men returned to shock my memories, and I feared her youth and beauty.

When a fishing boat anchored on the bay, instinct called her to swim to it, to seek relief from one on board. She found a man on deck, and through her beauty and magic, he thought her a mermaid. She took her fill of him, and as her body soared in bliss, her soul remembered the measure of her power. She remembered Melanie and the cruelty with which we died.

I should have swam her to the boats sooner, before her desire grew so fierce! She swam further the following night, to another boat, and the following night again, enslaved by her passion. Tales of an insatiable mermaid drew men to our cove. I sent those men away with magical shields and threats of curses. But Amelia turned on me. She held me angrily in her jade green eyes, so like my own, but without the silver crescent. Then she followed the men.

She returned several days later, finally sated. She wept in remorse at her anger, and we held hands and rubbed noses and lived quietly for some time. Then more men came. To please me, she denied her need for them. But they were fevered with lust and vicious with the want of relief. They did not heed her refusals and sought to take her by violence. Her rage vibrated with a power of it’s own and brought thunder from the sky. The men fell back. The old words fell from her lips to raise a mighty wind and the men ran for the water. She laughed as she swept her arm, raising the sea to claim and swallow them.

When the clouds parted to reveal dazzling sun, the gulls warned me of what was to come. Amelia wept, spent, as I collected our precious stones and medicines in waterproof pouches. We fled our home and swam to the furthest island, a basalt outcrop peppered with caves. We lived meagrely but peacefully in the rocks, and the dolphins came to visit us with stories of our cove. One night a storm set in and a boat lost it’s anchor. As we watched it drift in the morning calm, I sensed the thirst rise in her. She slithered along the moss and into the water, her instinct driving her forward.

When they saw her, the men drew back in fear, recognising her as the Mermaid Witch who ravished men and then drowned them. Clutching their protective amulets and firing their weapons, they drove her back.

They came the following day, and found us soon after. Amid jeers of “Witch”, we were stripped of our power and condemned to the water to drown as innocents, or survive as heretics.

As the water rose above our heads, we touched noses. As we sank, we held hands. Without our words, we could not ask the sea to save us. As our bodies settled on the sand beneath, we held each other’s gaze. I poured my love into her eyes with every dying heartbeat, but her eyes were defiant. She garnered every bit of magic available to her and found her voice down there, in the water. She summoned all of her fear, fury and loathing and used it to curse the men. The bubbles of my last breath were not enough to reverse what she had done. My heart pleaded with her heart to find peace, but she did not hear me, and we left that life on her hate-filled words.

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Then she was Mama.

She bore me during a moonless, lightning forged night, on the soft moss of our mountain. She raised me as a child of the air, the water and the earth, safe in the knowledge of my power and my infallibility. She loved and protected me fiercely and she taught me the magic of the bog plants and showed me the sacred places where the strongest of energies could be invoked. She helped me understand the prophecies that could be tasted in the moisture of the clouds that visited our mountain. I learned to sing with the birds before I could speak. Our home was a grand stone cabin, built by a man who had fathered me. In summers I learned the magic of the plants and autumn brought the messages of the mushrooms. During the dark winters we sat before the large fire as she brushed my hair and helped me know the ways to obtain all that I desired. One Spring, as we laid down seeds for medicine plants, my first bleed came. She held me and wept for my blessing. Together, that night, we howled with the moon and the she-wolves came to us and they howled with us, in shared celebration of my womanhood.

As the next moon waxed ever more full, Mama became angry, as was her way, and took off to seek her cure. I followed her this time, tracking from a distance behind. She reached the foot of the mountain that night and was not surprised when I joined her by the glow of her fire. She did not look at me, but chewed the leaf of a tree, and spat the leaf into the fire amid a cascade of flames and sparks. She sang to the mountain, asking for food. A rabbit, enthralled by the firelight, approached and we had a fine meal before we lay down to sleep on the warm moss. We held hands and Mama spoke so soft that we had to touch noses so that I could hear her. She revealed the mystery of her rhythmical ailments and bad temper.

My nature was that of the blackbird, who painfully mourns the sun’s desertion each night and enthusiastically forgives it’s abandonment each morning. Mama’s nature was that of the rabbit, who longs for physical connectedness and is possessed of the need for energetic release. I understood the ways of animals and still, I chose to accompany her to her hideaway on the outskirts of town. While I was slept, her favoured magical stone snug in my hand, she stole away. I awoke long before dawn and found her in the heather. Under the complete embrace of the moon, Mama sang her song to the sky, her body glistening and effervescent, the ground thrumming with the vibration of her magic. I watched as men approached from the town. The stood before her, senseless, unaware except for her nakedness and the pulsating of her. Having made her choice, the other men returned home to their beds, with a strange dream in their heads. Freed from her spell, the chosen man was yet helpless in her radiance and she rode him in wild abandonment. As she arched in ecstatic release, she howled with the moon and the she-wolves. He saw me then, and I came forward into her light, drawn by their dance. The man’s eyes locked onto mine and he hollered his own relief. Mama sensed his thoughts and as her energy peaked, her fury descended. She summoned the clouds and dawn ended. She took his body from him and continued her taking as he lost the power to protest. When she was sated, she dismounted him and freed his body from her control. As his senses returned, she forced a kiss upon him and inhaled the life from his mouth. I went back home and Mama went back to the town, her fury and desire greater than before.

We had returned to our cabin at the top of the mountain when the moss stirred in a particular way that caused Mama to take hold of my shoulders. She reminded me that our powers can frighten all but the strongest of men, and that frightened men are violent men. We left the mountain, taking what talismans and magical protection we could. We hid among heather and bog for a time. But in the fullness of the next moon, her instinct returned and she had to seek her cure. Her howls betrayed our safety. The men had learned of her howling ways and her habits and they followed her sounds and discovered us. She tried to hold my hand as they inflicted their fear and anger on her and she tried to hold my eyes when they tossed me upon the pyre of dry wood.

But as the flames danced blisters upon on my feet, the she-wolf came to me. In her warm eyes, the strength of the mountain found me and held me. Necklaces of magical sea shells tinkled in my ears. The sight of a big bellied oak by a brook in a dappled glen filled my heart. And I knew that fear and hatred cannot defeat fear and hatred. I sought Mama’s eyes again, to tell her this, but she had turned away from me.

That was a long time ago and many lives have passed since our souls separated that night. She still tries to find me in my dreams, or in my reflection.