Once upon a blue moon,
In the creeping, dawning light,
Listen through the washing ocean,
The breeze and birds in flight.
Hide behind the steady grass,
The growth along the strand,
And peer out through the early mist,
And whipping of the sand.
If your heart is steady,
And intentions pure and free,
You may just yet spot her,
Gliding by the sea.
But should you be so lucky,
Brace both breath and shield,
For never will her haunting eyes
Once grip your soul then yield.
And never will her mysteries
To any be revealed.
The shore was lost in a cloud of mist. Dunes were vague shapes against the bleak, pink sky, and gannets stirring from their floating rest to preen and squabble were little more than bleak shapes in the murk. Only the light of the fading moon reflected in the endless, grey water gave any measure of their presence. The stillness was unbreakable; the waves themselves, stroking the shore, were insignificant against the vastness of the dawn. No crab, no tern, no glitter in the water could disturb it. Nor even the figure that ghosted through amongst them.
She paused in the wash. Storm-coloured eyes narrowed, fixated on a single pebble between her feet. Slowly, she crouched and gazed at it, head cocked critically; from above, from the side, shielding away the diffused light with a painted hand. Then, her lips twisted.
Too blue.
Her interest passed.
Pebble forgotten, the phantom rose again, brushing back a mane of sunbleached gold, and resumed her careful stride through the waves, attention fixed to the sand. Stone after shell after pebble she studied - too yellow, too green, too pink - and not once did the world react to her. Birds didn't stir, didn't squawk, didn't dive; hermit crabs didn't scuttle, fish didn't scatter. The fog didn't lift. The sea didn't cease its waves. She was barely there, yet completely present.
Eerie, people called her, forever wandering the coasts and forests like a ghost. She belonged everywhere some said, others, nowhere, but any brave attempt to understand her, almost always beginning with a comment on her soft steps, never left their tongue once her gaze drifted onto them. Steel, silver, grey, storm; they had become as much folklore as she had herself. There was a sadness in them, some said, a 'kindness laced with hurt', with or by hard-earned wisdom, and tightly vaulted. Her thoughts, always, were deep and veiled. That mystery left many uncomfortable - though far less so than her silent power.
But she never wasted any thought on those opinions. Peaceful solitude and motion were her greatest companions, and her mind ran far deeper than the trivial questions and rumours of strangers.
A meagre gust of breeze parted the mist only briefly, and again, she stopped and stooped. And, again, the moment of consideration she granted the pearlescent shell resulted in the same dissatisfied twist of her lips.
Too purple.
And on she waded.
The shore was soon broken and lost among spears of rock, and though she climbed and leapt between them, ignored by the birds surveying from their peaks, they quickly became impassable. Water swirled treacherously in eddies between them, and the colours of sand and shell vanished beneath the foam.
A hint of defeat touched her heart, but she paid it no heed. She would simply have to turn.
Her path diverted inland, and her ceaseless attention turned now to the tussocks of tall, pale grass that gripped the sand in the young dunes ahead. But their blades, she could see already, were each too yellow.
The defeat returned, and a sudden weariness crashed over her like a tidal wave, forcing her to a stop once sand lay beneath her feet again. Heavily, she loosened her pack from her shoulders, jingling with strings of carved pebbles, crystalline stones and wooden rings as it dropped, and retrieved a waterskin from its folds. The water was cool and welcome on her lips, but only now she paused did she feel the ache in her legs. Her tired eyes turned across to the rising sun. How long had she been walking? Three hours? Five? Any normal day she'd have sat and enjoyed the waves, calmed herself and attuned to their sounds. But this time, her pursuit was dire.
'Dire,' she thought bitterly, 'or frustrating?'
Her eyes passed back over the vast coast as she drank, its distant end lost though the mist was fading, then back towards the land sprawling ahead of her. Even in the low dawn light, the forest sank her heart. Beautiful, green, lush in spite of the salt spray, and even less likely to gift what she sought. Colours grew more vibrant inland, more varied, more beautiful. A rich palette, endless and wonderful. Too rich.
A deep sigh passed her lips as she lowered the waterskin with a heavy hand. But on she would go.
The skin returned to her pack, the pack to her painted shoulders, and her feet trudged on, keeping close to the grasses where the roots trapped the sand. Dunes soon gave way to compact ground, compact ground softened with grass, and grass thinned out as trees rose around her. The light dropped, the sound of the sea faded, and birdsong changed from coastal chirps to treetop warbles until she found herself ghosting through a new world. Her heart steadily lifted again as the muffled forest's beauty seeped into her bones, and the absence of a horizon leant new adventure.
Mist still hung, trapped by the shadows, and wouldn't burn off until the day grew older and the sun peaked higher through the leaves. It was a different kind of cool, one rich with new scents and texture, and the morning seemed to regain its youth. So too did her enthusiasm. There were colours everywhere: shades of green overhead, some rich with yellow, others blue, some even with tones of red; barks of grey, silver and brown, speckled with spots both lighter and darker; lost feathers of grey or iridescent black, flower buds of pink and light blue. Had the year been later, snowdrops would have littered the wider openings, but instead there were only the last purple signs of helleborine and neottia.
Not for the first time, she kicked herself. But there was nothing she could do about the season, nor her previous winter's sickness, no matter how avidly she assured herself now that there had been. Instead, her pursuit reimposed itself and her attention fixated now onto patches of lichen covering the trees, both standing and fallen, live and rotting, and she began her battle with the light. Every patch that peaked her hopes revealed itself after far too long a moment of consideration to be too green, or too red, or, in one especially frustrating case, too purple.
Curses fell from her lips. A trick of the light. Natural contrast. Forest-induced colour-blindness. And, again, she kicked herself.
An hour had passed before she shrugged her pack from her shoulders again, and she sat heavily against a tree. Exhaustion and hunger settled over her like a mudslide, and it took a long while before she actually found the thought to eat. She devoured the apple so quickly she barely tasted it, nor the raisin bread that followed, and watched time pass by itself before her eyelids slid heavily closed.
It was perhaps hours more or merely minutes before she roused again, awakened by a sense rather than completion. But, despite the grumble of a bear far to the east, a howl of a wolf ahead to the west, and a larger bird squawking nearby with no distinct direction, it was not alarm that flashed her eyes open, but curiosity.
A curiosity, she felt, that was returned.
She leaned forwards slowly, eyes roving the shadows. The air was warmer, but though the mist had evaporated, it was no clearer to see. A haze, she realised, of sleep, for when she finally located a set of eyes peering back at her from behind a knot of roots, she blinked it into focus.
Golden eyes below pointed, golden ears. Silently, it stepped out of the shadow, watching her cautiously, and a smile tugged at her lips. A cat, sleek and shin-high, small for the forest; wild or feral, she couldn't tell. But it approached, carefully at first, then trotted, and brushed its small face against her knee. She startled only briefly when a light thud sounded close by, and a second golden cat, smaller and bluer in tone, approached and circled around her with tail held high.
She reached out and cupped the first's head in her hand, which it gladly pushed itself into, and ruffled its ears while the second sniffed at the stones on her pack. A moment later, the first climbed up into her lap, stood with slender paws on her shoulders, and sniffed at the paint on her face. She chuckled, surprised, but didn't push him away. There was no danger from them. She knew that. And they knew no danger from her. They were kindred, in some way, both belonging and not belonging in the wild, and all three carried that comfortable understanding without need to complicate it.
She reached out again and stroked the first's whiskers, but when the second gave a small chirp from the pack, they both turned sharply back to the trees and fled.
Disappointment warred with warmth at the encounter, over far too soon, but as she rose to her feet, deciding it was also best to move on, she found them both still watching her over their backs from the shaded tree roots.
They took a few steps, then stopped and looked back again.
A shallow frown marred her pale face, but she stepped towards them, sensing a beckon, and watched them repeat the action.
She soon found herself following the cats through the forest by harder routes: low-hanging branches, knotted bushes, the run of narrow streams, all the while surrounded by the vibrant sounds and smells of the ever-deepening wilds. She searched the colours by habit as she went, but the cats never ventured too far without her, and when she stopped here and there to analyse a particular pale petal or a nub of grey fungus, they returned, brushed against her leg as if to remind her that she was getting sidetracked, and led her deeper into the woods.
Then, prompted by nothing at all, they stopped.
She frowned and stopped beside them.
"What is it?" She asked, peering around through the mosaic of light and shadow, and though only part of her expected an answer, she received one.
The larger of the two cats moved purposefully towards another knot of beech roots, the second following more lazily, and after a sniff and bat at something in the ground, it meowed at her. She approached, half expecting to find a den of some sort, and hopeful behind that for a glimpse of kittens. But instead, all she found was grass, a rotting log, and more misleading mushrooms.
And yet, she stopped. Frozen. Her wondering ceased.
The cats circled as she found the mind to move again, crouching in the damp grass and peering closer at the moss-riddled log.
Her eyes turned sharply to the sky. It was bright. The canopy was open. There was light. Clear light.
Her gaze snapped back to the mushrooms.
But...they weren't mushrooms. Or, barely. They didn't have a bulbous umbrella or a net or a fuzz; they were long, white and slender, but where they should have had a cap, they bowed over instead, and where the stalk should have been ridged, it had short, white leaves.
Carefully, she nudged the non-mushroom with the back of her fingers, gently lifting its drooping, trumpet-shaped head. It was dense. Sturdy. A plant masquerading as a flower with stalk and leaves, all completely bleached of colour but for a few tiny black spots.
Her gaze pulled back to the cats. The smaller had wandered off and began cleaning itself carelessly, but the larger remained close, watching her. When she failed to move quickly enough to satisfy him, he lowered its head, plucked at the plant, tore it and its single neighbour free, jumped onto her shoulder and dropped them pointedly onto her pack.
She could feel how high her eyebrows had risen and forced them back down. Reaching behind her, she looked again at the plant, turning it over in her hand while the cat retrieved the second as it fell and returned it to where he had put it.
Pure white. Pure white. Purer than snowdrop petals, than chalk, than treated iron...
Quickly, she glanced around again, not at the cats but at another fallen log a short distance away, and after a quick, graceless crawl, found three more stalks growing from the rot.
A laugh, delirious with fatigue, tumbled from her lips. The cats watched and yawned as she gathered these, slung down her pack, withdrew her stone and pestle, and began her heart's greatest work as the cats curled up satisfied on the log beside her. White released, combined with fats and water, she created there the purest, smoothest, most brilliant white paint any had ever seen.
From then onwards, the legend changed, and the phantom of the wilds, with her ghostly footsteps, was accompanied by cats of gold, spirits of fortune or curse woven of her own golden hair, and woe befell any who tried to part them.
