Work Text:
In the old age, before bullets and coal, Arwyn had been in love.
It had been easy. In those early days, when life was vast and untamed, feeling with all of your entire being was what a person did in order to survive. And Arwyn was no different. He felt all of it, with all of him; his fingers spoke poetry to the branches of the trees, his voice echoed the songs of his heart up through their branches. His pulse pounded in time with the beating of raven’s wings, his spirit light and airy, even on days when the fields bled and the sky pitched like the sea.
Nothing was taken for granted, back when the world was neither friend nor foe. “Back when things were different.” That’s how Alistair always put it. “Back when the world was alive.”
In that old age, when Arwyn had been in love, there were no myths. Only facts and certainties, legacies and histories imbued with passion and retold by those who embellished the truth with their own wonderment. In those days, magic had been vibrant, eagerly flowing throughout the wild lands, alighting on rosebuds and branches like dew, rolling through the murky woods like mist. And even on the darkest mornings there was birdsong, trill and beguiling, singing lullabies to the dead, calling for the living to rise from their restless slumber.
“There was no such thing as ‘faith.’” Alistair spat the word like a curse. “Things either were or were not. No one pretended to understand any cosmic reasoning. Gods, saints, none of that mattered. People knew that there were things that were unknown, and that was enough.”
In the middle age, when the people began to disperse, Arwyn’s love burned in him like a flaming sword. Commoners and kings clawed their way from caves and tumbled from the mountains, eager to ascend to godhood as they descended into mayhem. At midday, when battle cries livened the rolling hills, and the forests rang with the echoes of sharp steel and sworn oaths, Arwyn breathed shallow, passionate breaths, emboldened by the constant clash of men and their unforgiving gods. At nightfall, the howls of wolves and wyverns echoed across the moors, ushering the deep and indescribable forces that lived within the ground below to take shelter, to either hide or come alive. It was a dark epoch, a fiery era, a bloody, soulless age.
Throughout all this, Arwyn loved. The sweetness of morning, the anguish of nightfall, the serenity of the full moon; he loved all of it. He was captivated by the world, deeply devoted to its shifting form and its untameable, unstoppable forward turning. His love blossomed and raged alongside the world’s adolescence; he fought and cried and burned his own lands alongside his comrades and his enemies because the world demanded it. He shed his dignity and drew his sword and tasted the sweet poison of a lie on his tongue, all in the name of love, love for passion, love for life, love for now.
It was during that age that Arwyn first learned of fear. It was love’s natural enemy; where love bestowed, fear consumed. Where love burned, fear froze, cold and colourless and sharper than steel. Arwyn watched the forests burn and the oceans scream, and fear clawed its way up his spine in ways love never had. But fear would never kill his love, so long as the world turned and the stars in the heavens glinted far-off promises. Even when the stars fell, even when the night lights became fluorescent, and the hum of the new electric age silenced the stillness of the ancient night; somehow, Arwyn continued to love.
Perhaps it was because he still believed in magic. They all did. Even Arthur, who’d done his utmost best to squash it into the ground, who’d laughed as he’d broken sacred circles, who’d punished them all for their pagan pageantry. Not long after the Great War, Arwyn had caught him whispering to unseen faces in the woods. Whispering apologies, begging for any wisp of a response.
But as the century turned, the unseen things remained quiet and disbursed. Arwyn’s love went with them, skittering off into tangled thickets, tucking itself into gnarled roots and broken branches. The world would never die, but like a scorned lover, it had learned to hide. So too did Arwyn’s heart, bleeding into ink stained pages, written down and hummed to oneself and folded inward like a secret note.
It wasn’t as though he was afraid to love. His love had just grown tired, burdened with the endless ghosts of the past, content to breathe shallowly in the ditch where it had been left to die. Not dead, not yet. Just...tired.
“We’ve killed what was left of the magic,” Alistair said, even though he believed otherwise. “Back then, people weren’t so greedy. But then they began to change and take and destroy. Now, after all this, there’s nothing left.”
Arwyn didn’t see it that way. He had a fondness for circles and cycles, an understanding that there were phases and patterns to everything. There had been a time before, when things were different, and that time had come and gone. In that old age, everything was loud and vibrant and awake. It was impossible to be unaware, unimaginable to be able to go through life without it.
And now, cloaked by the manufactured din of progress, the magic was just a little harder to hear. But not impossible, Arwyn knew. He felt his own heartbeat, after all.