IV. PRELUDE: Eirik’s Dirth
Those unsettling voices… faded by degrees, fleeing perhaps
to shroud some terrible vile deed. The echo of their songs lay buried in the
distant surf. Nought remained but a lingering darkness—a silence spreading as
slowly as mist across the invisible line where sea meets sky.
A single moment of darkness was enough to change
everything. Dazed, I sought meaning in the shards of horror still searing my
memory, but the rest of my thoughts lay fallow. Every trace of my former life
had slipped away like sand through fingers. My soul, once serene, was now a
tempest of unrest and bewilderment.
Left behind, like shadows in the fog, were the memories of
home: that secret nook hidden among deep fjords and mountains that graze the
northern sky. He yearned for the crystalline seas he would sail as winter
exhaled its last breath, crossing waters where ice floes drift like white
sentinels heralding the spring.
In his travels, Eirik learned
more than the stars or the fickle waves. He became a weaver of lore. Beneath
his cloak, beyond any map, there beat within him the art of music and the
spoken word, but above all, a gift that defied reason: the absolute mastery of
the Runes and the secret of the Oghams. He held the hidden wisdom of the Vitkar
and the ancestral magic Druids once whispered to the wildwoods. Each voyage was
no mere route, but a rite of power.
Each year, as the thaw’s breath stirred the sleeping giants
of the forest and the first elderflowers braved the cold, Eirik listened to the
song of the currents. As the spring equinox restored the earth’s pulse, he
committed his soul to the horizon, tracing the brine-paths along the
continent’s edge while the days gained ground against the shadows.
Yet, as the autumn equinox began to stain the sky in gold
and blood, Eirik felt the call of return. Around the twentieth day of
September, just as light and shadow duel for the world’s balance, the chill
gale reminded him that dusk now came early. It was time to find his course for
home, before the world succumbed to the embrace of the ice.
It was on one such voyage, at a remote edge where maps fail
and the world ends, that destiny lay in wait. A vast flight of gannets fled
southwards, a white tide against the leaden sky.
Following their flight, my eyes met a colossal island
rising from the mist; it seemed to me the petrified head of a giant peering
from the abyss. I had no time to act. An invisible, mighty current wrenched the
helm from my grip, dragging the ship with supernatural force toward the stone
mass. The thunder of the hull against granite was the last I heard before the
dark reclaimed me.
Eirik awoke days later—or perhaps centuries—sheltered by
that sanctuary of rock. There he met a maiden of light and mystery, a creature
of the shore seemingly born of the foam itself. Without need for spells, as if
an invisible rune had kindled in his breast, his heart was bound to her beauty
and the uncanny sweetness of her voice.
From that first encounter, year after year, the lovers
turned their meeting into a rite of light upon that very seashore. During the
night of Mabon, while the world celebrated its perfect balance, they remained
entwined under the mantle of the stars, letting the murmur of the waves merge
with the chants of the Sea-fey—the sweet fairies of the sea—in a legendary
connection. Those hours were a gift of time that both lived with wonder.
Yet, with the arrival of dawn, the sun announced that the
cycle must continue. Although the separation brought with it a sweet
melancholy, they bid farewell with hearts full of promises, knowing their bond
was unbreakable. They said goodbye with a smile in their eyes, fully trusting
that they would once again entwine their bodies and press their lips together
as soon as the Great Wheel completed a new turn; that which, perhaps at last,
would grant them the longed-for destiny of an unfading encounter.
Lyrics of “Hacia el alba”:
They are dancing in whispers
By the sea,
His skin still tastes of pitch
When she wakes up.
And when leaving, at the break of dawn
The sun keeps shining above the sea.
The waves are singing, ‘In September
He will come back to your lips…’
As a seal of that promise, she had given him a small
treasure: an earring with the silhouette of Yeadhr. She was not merely giving
him a jewel, but an amulet charged with her own essence for him to keep in the
immensity of the high seas. Against his skin, he felt its touch as a constant
reminder of the shore to which he must return. The earring became his companion
on his voyages, an invisible beacon that beat to the rhythm of the sea waves,
while he awaited the arrival of the following autumn.
Yet during one of
those cold autumns, when winter hastens its arrival with biting winds, Eirik
did not keep his tryst. His beloved remained alone, waiting before a sea she no
longer recognised. The air froze the falling leaves of rowans, birches,
hawthorns, and poplars—still warm from September's breath—and rimed the foam
upon the shore. Plunged into deep sorrow, she still heard that song beneath the
waves, but now the melody had turned sinister. These were strange, dark voices,
fraught with an infernal vibration, foretelling a misfortune that devoured the
echoes of their nights of love.
In the distance,
through mist and brine, Eirik’s ship emerged. It advanced in a calm that held
no life, gliding shorewards with spectral slowness. It resembled a great
coffin, pierced at its heart by a long spear crowned with a tattered shroud,
drifting until it ran aground in absolute silence. Not a soul remained aboard.
The waves closed
their jaws, leaving the sea's surface as placid as a black lake, sheltered from
the North wind's lash. Nought persisted but a faint whistle, intoning the notes
of a half-composed requiem. The young mariner’s spirit was being dragged, perhaps
forever, toward another world; his soul hung now upon the threshold of other
realms, lost in the absolute and terrible darkness of the night.
The wind’s whistling in the silence
And the waves are sleeping under the sea,
And the cold of the north
Reigns in the September sky.
And when the night’s over, at the crack of dawn,
She’s waiting alone in front of the sea.
The waves are singing, ‘In September…,
Will he come back to your lips?’
The ship remained there, stranded and mute, an empty shell
in the small bay. The beloved contemplated the shipwreck of her own hope,
receiving no answer other than the whistling of that incomplete requiem. She
knew nothing; there was no trace, only the searing absence of the one who
should have come to meet her.
However, beyond the veil of reality, at that threshold
where Eirik’s spirit hung by a thread, a faint light resisted death. Submerged
in a new and confused dimension, where the light of his memory had been almost
entirely extinguished, he still managed to rescue tatters of his existence.
They were not clear images, but sensory echoes that emerged from oblivion
without rhyme or reason:
‘I hold only the scent of her
hair—white poplar resin—the sweetness of ripe apple-flesh upon her lips, and
that despairing cry of my name: "Eirik!". I have but one desire: to
reach her, though I must swim the firmament and turn the wheel of time at my
will. My prayer rises to the heavens in musical notes, traced in magical runes.
As on that first day, my love, you shall ever be my star, my winged vessel, and
the autumn wind that guides my journey.’
(Eirik’s Annotations. September, Mabon.)
All I could recall of the place where my beloved dwelt—that
nook I always reached guided by the tides and the command of the stars—was the
sense of an irresistible enchantment. Upon docking in the small inlet,
everything always appeared shrouded in thick fog. Through that
veil, I sometimes perceived flickering glints dancing in the distance and the
ceaseless murmur of flowing water, perhaps from some hidden stream feeding the
sea that I never chanced to discover.
I felt that meeting point, in the heart of autumn, was
endowed with supernatural power. The air vibrated with the echo of celestial
chords, as if an ancient, invisible lyre struck notes that were, at once,
strange and familiar. And above all, that constant thrum of distant drums, like
the heartbeat of a giant swelling with joy... It was then, from between the
white curtains of mist, that she appeared before me as if from nowhere, to find
me once again.
Beyond these memories, within Eirik’s head there floated
only an immense, grey cloud—an impenetrable shroud masking the divide between
the waking world and that of shadows. He felt he must not only contend with
forces without, in the tangible planes of the universe, but also wander
aimlessly within the microcosm of his own soul.
Eirik sets out on a relentless quest along paths forged by
others—often utterly unknown to him. He will cross diverse realms of legend,
guarded only by his experience and the knowledge garnered through his long
odyssey across the world; for he still treasures all these provisions intact
within his mind and heart…
- I. OVERTURE: My Name is Eirik
- II. EXORDIUM: "MYTHOS", Symphony of a Wandering Soul
- III. RESONANCE: My Story and the Secret of the Shadows
- IV. PRELUDE: Eirik's Dirth
- CHAPTER 1: Eirik and the Secret of Avalon
- CHAPTER 2: Discovery in Atlantis
- CHAPTER 3: In the Shadows of Hades
- CHAPTER 4: The Pull of Niflheim
- CHAPTER 5: The Icy Breath of Yule
- CHAPTER 6: Return to Mabon
- CHAPTER 7: Eirik and the Mystery of the Sirens
- CHAPTER 8: The Mirror of the Lake of Shadows
- CHAPTER 9: Finale
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