A Little Twinkle in a Starless and Bible-Black Sky…

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/twinkle/

Dark has been my mood, dark as a poetic sky – though lacking the lilting loveliness of the original.

Missing him, I am, the other half of my self whom I had to release (for his destiny and mine no longer marched forward hand-in-warm-hand) when our boat cracked upon the craggy surface of this Cymraeg beach.

The blessed brightness of the Moon Goddess sails close by – and, for all that my cowled head is down, negotiating the rain-slick rocks and ankle-cracking crevices of the towering cliffs, the calling-out of my True-Name comes as a jolting shock.

Since the waters crunched up, and spat out, my old homeland, I – and those others who sailed with me, upon the sad ship of necessary lore and law, to far distant lands – have survived, though it has been a hard and bitter journey. And I? I have adopted a name more in keeping with the savage tribes amongst whom I now live and teach and try to love.

The cowl protects me from the lustful gazes, and superstitious gestures, of men who would bed and then kill me, or women who see in my silver-milk locks the hand of witch-evil and not, as we Atlanteans do, the caress, and special favour, of the Lunar Lady herself.

And so, to hear, ‘Amgel? Lady Amgel?’ whispered in accents so familiar, and yet so odd, causes me to miss my footing in a tiny dip, and tumble, down, down, down, into the valley below.

Is it dizziness which creates the hazing and buzzing and kaleidoscopic spectrum which, so suddenly, paints rainbows against the darkness? Or has the jolt unleashed a tremulous ghost of my old powers?

For above me, lit as if by twinkling stars, is a face so dear to me that tears spring and spill and warm and then chill, the way these things do in life.

‘Granny’ I would call her in the new language, though the syllables in our old tongue are quite different.

What does her appearance signify? A falling star of bright simplicity!  For she will lead me back to the Women’s Cave, with its Moon Phases depicted so beautifully around the walls, and its priestesses, blue-robed and serene, gliding noiselessly about – and, beyond that, the life which I was sent here to continue.

Ah! But through the prisms of twinkling Moonlight, and the tender pain in my foot, I see a radiant vision of myself and the man now lost to me, naked under a proud Full Moon, making love in a wild stretch of sea – with cliffs and coves all too reminiscent of the forbidding landscape I now inhabit.

Does this twinkle, this strange fall and wondrous meeting mean that, one day, I shall find my twin in all but birth, my companion through the trials and delights of childhood, my secret love, once more?

Or have I, all unknowing, caught my head upon a rocky protuberance and been sent a Moon Delusion to tempt me off the path?

Granny takes my hand in hers, and I feel the old wound, cut deep into her palm. It comforts me and brings me back to Amgel, the Priestess I was and, one day, will be once again.

I push back my cowl, let my waist-length hair flow, living lunar fibres, the way it should – and, holding on to my long-ago mentor, hobble on…

The Man-Vision can wait! I have work to do…