Timeless {The Pale One}

Timeless

{The Pale One}

.:+:.

There have always been old things in this forest. Ancient things that still remain stubbornly existent even as time has weathered all else, and the world outside the bounds has changed countless, countless times. The land is old underneath seasons of detritus and decay, the mountains and stone cracked and crumbling underneath aged with each cycle above. And if the land and the rock is old, then the trees are just so as the most ancient of them loom over all the young and new that have taken root around their bases. All things that stand even in the passage of centuries, all things lacking the fragility and the fleeting span of life that most other things cannot escape….. but the land, stone and trees are not near as old, nor as timeless, as some that wander here. 

Nephele has known of this one for a long time, felt them for what seems like forever- as if they have always been there, maybe even before she herself had stepped into that existence of timelessness too. She could not remember a time without them, they are tethered to this place just as deeply as she, both of them with roots of their own digging deep into stone and earth, and reaching far overhead to cloud, sky, wind and rain, and even past the tallest trees and highest peaks. They are old, persistent, unweathered and ever there- rigid in the current of the river of time that races past and ravages near all else.

But not them

The wind has picked up, the rustle of the branches and the brush that had long since become a natural and muted humm on the back of her mind, now suddenly singing. It’s gained a voice of its own, there’s a force behind it now, weight in the weightless that’s pushing and pulling as it tugs at the wispy cloud around her feet and shreds it into tendrils, whisking it away and sucking inward toward its source and master. The forest bends faintly under the pull, whole trees with trunks larger around than most would ever dream suddenly leaning in, centers swaying and limbs pulled around toward that unseen source with such ease where even the fiercest of storms had never made them waver an inch. And there in the distance, hidden nearly in a section of the old-growth seldom touched by any at all, comes a flash of pale blue wisp that flickers in and out among surrounding shadow, beckoning. 

A single step forward seems to breach hundreds of yards in the matter of a moment, the wind a craft to sail upon and shrink the distance between them with nary a thought to it. They stand there amidst a clearing the single step and their wind has carried her to, silent as they have always been, a form so fractured but still whole, weathered but resistant, enigmatic and ephemeral in all ways, and timeless in more. Their blue wisps streak slightly as they rush by with the step, ghostly trails of sky blue distorted at the edges of her vision with shapes and things beyond comprehension- but still full of meaning, she knows. Their ethereal vapor winds and twists with the milky white of her mist that refuses the force of the wind, dancing and shaping new things with those muddied images built of the glow, creating in answer; 

Hello

The greeting is never voiced, the word never breaches the air or dances upon the wind. It does not exist, not outside that subtle twist of mist and pale blue light dancing on the ever swirling wind- but it need not be anything else. 

They have never spoken. In all that time where she cannot recall an absence of them, and they cannot recall an absence of her, there has never been a singular word spoken between them. Their name was never given, the title little but rumor and story that’s been whispered through the old-growth over centuries without end, mingled with a million other names and things- but all subservient to that singular moniker, which seems to have been carved into the very depths of their overlapping Haunt;

The Pale One

She has always known them as this, perhaps even before there was another to string the words together and form the name, and certainly long before she ever heard whispers of it from those lured into the trees by wind and wisp. She has known their name just as long as she has known them, a shared piece of this timeless soul that she’s always ever seemed to carry with her- and the same sort of piece the Pale One has carried of her since the start. Pieces of themselves buried deep within the old-growth and woven together in their very cores, connected through land and root just as intrinsically as the threads that connect each living thing in that massive, complex system of life the forest is made of. Both of them tethered to the land, and to themselves, no matter the distance between the roots, or the span of centuries that have passed between them. They are always here, always felt, even if they are not seen. There has always been a constant pressure, a whisper among the leaves even when it goes unheard, and a tug in both their centers that remains of the other, and always likely would be.  

After all, as timeless as The Pale One certainly is, she is just the same. The land is old, the earth and stone just so, and many of the trees seemingly without end- but they are not them. They are not those two souls who wander hare, and who seem to be truly that.

Timeless