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He comes to me as a raven, bill bloodied with tattered shreds of flesh, eyes yellow and haunted from what he has seen. I see his broad-winged, silent approach, an indigo blur against the great sea-clouds that have descended from the northlands, marshaling woe on their winds.
There was a great battle on the moors today. Had I stopped my ears, I would have felt it still in the roots I plunged deep, deep into the waters of the earth, soaked with the moon's blood, for they shuddered and trembled while man impaled horse, man impaled man, and all the while, the ravens spun lazy circles above the heath, cackling.
I don't know why they fought. I never do. Nor do I care. I have one purpose, and comprehension is not it. A sad irony. And, a tragic fate, but it is the only one I have. Each of us, one fate alone, and no more.
Except for those who are beloved of Bran. They will live again, if he chooses them, and before battle, they flock to him, that corvid man, simpering, pawing, playing the fool, thinking this is what he desires. If they were believing men, men who lived the old ways still, they would come and whisper to me, ask me what I knew, for I've danced the path to Bran's heart. But they fear the will o' the wisps that cluster around my bark. Fools. They ought to know, if they saw with their soul-eyes, that the wisps are my escorts, my entourage. They guard me when I slip from my alder skin and walk the earth on moon-less nights. Instead, the men come and carve my bark until my flesh turns as red as their blood. A tree. That is all I am to them.
So why it is that I lament their fate when they throw themselves to the hordes on the fields of battle?
Because I know that Bran will find his chosen, the few who look on the face of death, weeping, and yet, who will still stand their ground. These are the men he wants, and these are the ones he bears to me in his razor-bright bill, tendrils of sinew and muscle leaving a trail of blood.
Their fate becomes my own. My sole purpose.
As the wind sighs in my branches and my leaves quake, he lands and shifts from bird to man, with hair as glossy as obsidian, skin white as the moon herself when she walks the skies. Now, there is no moon, but only the crimson flush of the sun behind the sea-clouds, turning the world sanguine. Behind the clouds is the Morrígan, waiting to see who Bran has passed over, what she can claim for her own.
He sets the fragments of men at my roots. Three. Three of the hundreds who perished have been deemed worthy.
There is little ceremony in what he does. His hands fall on my trunk where long ago his mother pierced my side with her blasted sword, giving me a wound that will not heal. With a grimace, he splays my sides, and, bloody piece of flesh in hand, thrusts it into the cavity left by his mother: my womb, my most sacred self. One at a time, and with a sorrow that only the ancient secrets of the earth can know, I absorb them to bestow life again.
A turtledove alights on my lowest branch and croons. The sun bows his head and slips below the mantle of night. From the depths of the moor, a stag bellows. Rutting season is at hand and even while the groans of the dying fill the air, life must continue. It is a stag's fate to rut. It is a man's fate to die. It is my fate to serve as a womb for Bran's chosen.
Bran waits with me through the night, weeping as my bark unfurls to close around the gaping wound in my gut. His fingers press against it, imploring for it to open. If he could, he would slip inside to know me, his most treasured possession, his blessed cauldron of knowledge, for the one thing he will never know is what it is to be birthed.
"Speak to me," he sighs, head on my bark as I reach down and caress his cheek, kissed with dew, stained with fatigue. This is how we love: leather-leaf to paper-skin, neither whole nor healthy, both born of some aberration in the natural order of things.
Dawn comes with a subtle light, dusting the horizon with its pollen. Bran breaks a limb from my halo of branches and stabs at the soil, digging into my roots, uncovering the faces of the men he brought to me by day; fragments of men made whole by my womb, the cauldron of a hero; where my sinews sings flesh to bone and all things can be undone; where fate becomes obsolete for Bran's chosen few.
They gasp, claw at the earth, writhe and moan as death releases its last fingers from their eyes. They weep at Bran's feet and with their hearts, promise fealty, a fealty that bears new meaning when it wells up from the dayspring of my roots.
Later, they discover that a mother's love never leaves and that there is one part of those men that will stay with me forever and will never be Bran's.
I alone will hear the first word they attempt to scream from their tongueless mouths, and that word has been, and always will be, Mother.
A fair price, don't you think?
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