Saturday 19.11.22 //
Encounter someone new in the forest last night—or rather, see someone who shows herself for the first time, but who has been there a long time. I am where I usually am when I go to meet my guides, in the middle of a clearing. She is standing a ways off from the clearing, partly hidden between tall pines; she peers out at us with curiosity.
She is a small figure, neither slight nor short, but smallish; most significant is her long jet-black hair, wavy, matted, fine and untended. She wears sandy off-white robes, simple, like a novitiate; the sleeves and skirts are long, and hide her hands and feet the way her overlong hair hides her face.
Goggle unthinkingly at first—what is that doing here? Who is she? Do I know her?—and then actually mistake her for Rowana, what with the raw dress and wild hair— or perhaps she is Rowana’s sickly and forgotten little sister?—but no, Rowana is standing beside me in the circle, and although she registers the new one’s presence, does not affirm any responsibility for her.
I look around at the others for clues. Athena does not appear to see the girl between the pines at all; she’s absorbed in her own thoughts. Odin is looking on the newcomer with a sweet expression. He cares for her for the same reason he cares for me: he’s touched by her powerlessness; it activates his correct protectiveness.
Reviewing her, sensing how much she wants to be invisible (and the extent to which she can, apparently, be this), it occurs to me that she will not enter the clearing because she is ashamed. Or she is shame… oh. She is my shame; and my fear. For whatever reason, tonight she felt safe and brave enough to allow herself to be seen; maybe her curiosity got the better of her. I can’t recall what we were discussing in the clearing, but the subject may have called her out to us. Maybe she had an insight or opinion she wished to share. This is her family, after all; these are her woods.
This moment feels kind of like The Sorcerer's Stone, when we see the dead unicorn in the Forbidden Forest. You remember: for a detention, Hagrid takes Harry and Malfoy in to search for whatever has been hunting the unicorn, leaving its bright silver blood on the leaves; Harry, alone with Fang, finds the creature, over which a dark hooded figure is kneeling, drinking its miraculous blood (this will turn out to be Quirrell, nourishing Voldemort).
In this case, the girl is both beings: the wounded symbol of pure innocence, possessed of unique healing powers; and the personification of dark forces, sapping away that innocent, shimmering life.
The girl knows that some of us in the clearing are looking at her; she does not disappear, but she also does not come any closer. Maybe she lifts one oaty sleeve to push hair out of the way of her right eye, the better to see us with. I don’t feel any fear, looking on her. I can only feel pity, and a very subtle wonder that she emerged.
