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Under the evergreens, the soughing pines, the sighing firs, it is always as dark as the restless bed of the river.
The path underfoot is all red-brown needles and with every step a smell like incense rises from the ground, just as ghosts rise from the ground to walk alongside the living. The old people (who are also sometimes wise) will tell you that only when the moon is full, only then can you see the castle away up at the top of the Loreley Rock. Only then will you see the Lorelei herself looking down from her tower window onto the tops of the shining pines and firs, the moonlit murmuring curve of the Rhine, her long hair spilling out over the sill like white water.
She sings down to the river, and the river drowns her voice.
The first traveller saw a stream cross his path, and when he bent to taste the water, found it salty as tears. Overcome with curiosity, he strayed far off the road to follow it to its source, not caring that the trees closed in thick around him, or that the birds on their branches were calling dire warnings. In the heart of the wood he found the Lorelei, her hair cascading around her feet, trickling and winding away through the woods back the way he had come. She was weeping, and the tears mingled with her long, watery hair.
"Go away," she said in a voice like singing, but the murmur of the Rhine was louder in his ears, and he did not heed her words.
She sang, and he lost himself in the sound of her voice, and the river drowned her voice. Thus the Lorelei made an end of him.
The second traveller wouldn't listen to the prophet bird. It told him and it told him that he would never return, but he wouldn't listen. The track of the doe was fresh, and the grass was bent and dry where she'd settled to rest in the night. So of course he must go charging off after her on his big black horse, leaving the poor little bird with tired wings to follow behind, chirruping the same warning over and over as the hunting horns sounded farther away and fainter. He never listened, nor the horse neither.
The prophet bird caught up with him by and by, but already it was too late. He had found not the doe, but the lady of the wood, her face turned away from him, heavy hair hiding her eyes.
"Don't look at me," said the Lorelei, so of course he looked. And once he recognized her, it was all over.
She sang, and he lost himself in the sound of her voice, and the river drowned her voice, just as it always does. And he never returned, so the bird was right after all.
The third traveller, he wouldn't leave a lonely lady lost in the woods for all the world. Sad lady, too shy to even glance at him sidelong. Sweet lady, riding a black horse far too big and mettlesome for her. The least a chivalrous man could do would be to take the reins and guide her back home safely, but when he offered, she merely shook her head.
"Nonsense," he said, laughing, and rode close alongside anyway. She said nothing at all.
It was dark when they finally left the wood, and the white moon shone full over the curve of the river and the high cliffs of the Loreley Rock overlooking it.
"My castle is at the top of the rock," spoke the Lorelei at last, and the knight blanched to hear the bitter cold in her voice. "You must go with me now, whether you will or no."
And so she sang, and he lost himself in the sound of her voice, and the river drowned her voice. Cold lady, alone again, save for the moon and the murmuring Rhine.
The fourth and fifth travellers dashed themselves to pieces on the Loreley Rock in a broken boat, and the body of the sixth traveller who was with them was never found. The old people (who are sometimes frightened and foolish) will tell you that neither rock nor river is to blame for this.
They say that the Lorelei is the accursed shade of a woman spurned by her lover, a vindictive creature whose only desire is the death of all men. As she drowned herself in despair at losing her beloved, so she drowns the lives of others, and turns the love of their families and friends to despair to feed her ghost and keep it awake down through the centuries. A fire will blaze forever if there is fuel enough, or die in the space of a heartbeat if it lacks something to burn.
"If they would only stop coming!" the old people say to each other as they prepare what remains of the bodies for a decent burial. "If they would only leave her alone, all these foolish young men!"
The seventh traveller wasn't a man at all.
She was a grieving girl who had lost all her brothers to the voice that drowned. The castle where they had grown up together had grown too full of long and silent shadows for her to stay in it any longer, so she took the smallest suit of armor left behind instead of a gown to wear, and the smallest of the chargers still left in the stable instead of a palfrey to ride, and went in search of the source of the voice.
The Lorelei, when she found her, did not waste time with warnings. She sang, and the girl began to drown in the sound of her voice. Almost too late the girl remembered to take off her helm, and the Lorelei stopped singing at once and tilted her head in surprise, the river of her hair breaking white around her shoulders, her eyes wide and washed colorless from weeping.
"Why do you come here?" she asked in a voice with too many echoes.
"For my brothers," said the girl, trying to keep her own voice from trembling. "I will do anything to save them."
"They are lost as I am lost," said the Lorelei without expression. "There is nothing of them left to save."
The girl clenched her hands inside their gauntlets and closed her eyes for a long moment, silent. "Then what must I do to save you instead?"
The Lorelei smiled a very small smile. "Leave behind your horse and armor, my gallant knight, and follow me."
First the Lorelei asked for the return of her heart, lodged tight inside a cleft pine. The girl bloodied her fingers prying it loose, but at last it came free untorn, warm and wet from the amber tears of the pine's own heart.
"I planted the children of this tree all around its foot, long ago," the Lorelei had told her as she worked. "I watered and tended them, until they grew up into a garden of trees tall enough to hide me." All the while she watched with her colorless eyes her own beating heart, trapped inside the split and splintered wood. "It was good to have something to tend to."
Next the Lorelei asked for her breath from the bottom of the river, hidden under a stone, one stone among hundreds of thousands. The girl would have waded out into the cold current, and no doubt been swept under for her trouble, but the Lorelei reached out with a hand and turned the water as flat and smooth as a summer mill pond. Into the water the girl dove and surfaced and dove again, until finally she turned what seemed like the hundred-thousandth stone and the Lorelei's breath bubbled up from under it, rising fast to break on the surface.
"The birds once brought me a story of this river," the Lorelei told the girl as she sat on the bank and warmed herself by a makeshift fire. "The birds know many beginnings of stories. They can say where to find a goddess asleep behind a ring of fire, or a princess behind a wall of thorns. They know where the Erlking rides, and where he hides away the souls of little children. They told me the river could give me the ending I wanted." She picked up a stone round as a skull between her two hands and cast it into the water, watching it fall out of sight with barely a splash. "They will say anything, the birds of the forest."
Last the Lorelei asked for her soul out of the Loreley Rock itself, far down in a cavern where the only sound was the distant chiming of the dwarves' hammers, and the only light was the Lorelei herself, growing steadily brighter as the tunnels closed in around them, shining like the full moon as she walked ahead of the girl into the deepest dark. They found her soul shut inside a clouded crystal box, a glass coffin cast aside and covered in rock dust. The girl touched the rusty lock, which crumbled and fell away to pieces at her feet as the lid flew open, the soul inside leaping up like a blue flame.
"You are saved," she told the Lorelei. "And their lives are saved whom you would have killed in the days and years to come, had I not come here on errand. I should be content." But her voice was troubled.
"There is still one task more," said the Lorelei, bright among the shadows. "Find for me a home and a hearth and an end to all the stories I've ever heard, and I will be Lorelei no longer."
The girl stood in the darkness under the Loreley Rock, thinking of her lost brothers, and thinking of the long road back to her empty castle with the silent shadows. Finally she smiled a very small smile. "Leave yourself behind, then, and follow me home."
As they walked up out of the hollow places to retrieve her horse and armor, the spirit of the river and the wood and the stone gathered like a mist over the Loreley Rock, smelling of bitter pine and incense. And as they turned away to leave, it reached out a ghostly hand after them, calling after the Lorelei in many voices, many echoes. But it was only a mist, after all, and when she turned and looked at it, the pines and firs stopped their soughing and sighing and the water stopped its murmuring and even the rock held its breath.
The woman who had once been the Lorelei sang out with joy, and the dawning sun rose up like a long-lost friend to greet her, turning her white hair and the girl's armor and the wide road before them to an ever-brightening gold.