[These are a few of the notes from several visits to Avalon in preparation for my current work-in-progress, After Camelot: Gestes of Love, the Wyrd, and the Dark Hunt on Avalon. Though disjointed, these are more real than true observations from the Isle of Apples. Best to remember, they were taken down in a place we have forgotten but that still remembers us, so the words are lost and only the music remains.]
Invocation:
Intelligence of a deeper unknowing that bears the dreaming and the very days of our dreaming, sing! O Dark Dweller, fathom of every abyss, reap the silence.
[Before we look at the reaping, I should at least mention theoretical physicist Itzhak Bars’ Two Time Theory. which is how I got to Avalon in the first place. The four dimensions we are familiar with are a “shadow” of the six we actually encounter. Heisenberg’s principle states that you can measure a particle for momentum or position but not both simultaneously. Why has been a mystery. Perhaps they’re in different times. Here’s where I found “sideways time,” borrowed from physicists James Hartle-and-Stephen-Hawking’s “perpendicular time” where time behaves like space. Then, it’s isekai all the way, portal magic, straight on into the twilight and a sharp turn to the right at the first star of the night.]
First observations on arriving:
Emerald butterflies jostle among the season’s leavings — ruffled cabbage flowers poking through windfall apples with orange and violet frilled leaves. White deer graze upon the tall bracken between bare frames of renegade elms.
Vacant spaces among trees, boulders, or dunes strike chords as the wind strums the compass needle.
[Illegible] … from starry flowers. Asters royal purple and gold spangled the rolling hills and, much closer, orchard lawns among crooked lanes of gnarled apple trees.
Stepping through the dark trees into streaked rays of sunlight, I pause. The smell of windfall mulch turning colors steps forward so sudden it hushes time. Summer hovers.
The moon in a day sky kites above orchard lawns and rolling hills.
Story Notes:
Arthur paused, stood motionless at the brink of hesitation, sensing a hum, a vibration, a distant bee swarm. It was time incandescing. His reality as a timebound creature was finding a new frequency, because the wizard had removed the king from the linear dimension of history, where he was a ghost, and installed him in sideways time as legend.
Thirteen more centuries would pass before people discovered that time had two dimensions. In the time we know, there is just now. One ever-present now. More immutable than diamond, it is etching a line across space in one direction only, In truth, it is not now that moves. Space turns. And every direction leads to a different future.
Ghosts were magic revealed by memory, humans magic revealed by myth.
The Kenning Stone, once cleaved to and by Excalibur, is the most challenging object for Merlin to cross into sideways time, because it originates in the far, far future: the Iron Star and the Xoloth, the Elder Gods, who evolved in the thermal ocean of dying black holes, adapting to Information flowing out of the ruptured event horizons. The Xoloth exist at the very end of thermal existence. They alone of all the sentient swarms of atoms that self-organized in the universe penetrated the scrim of phenomenal experience to know the noumenal and write the code that will become the phenomena of the next big bang universe, where Light inscribed with the coded laws of physics cools to all the possible configurations of atoms and bosons in that new cosmos. As cosmic architects they are Elder Gods.
Merlin, having aged backward to a boy has been removing objects heraldic of Arthur, sliding into sideways time (into an Earth without humans): some were easier to remove: Excalibur, the Round Table, but Camelot takes a lot of time and magic, and the castle is strobing in and out of this world.
Most difficult heraldic object to slide into sideways time was the kenning stone, because it had been entangled with the boy since before he was a human being, or any kind of being, when he was a dark dweller.
[Illegible] … had plunged Britain into a thousand years of darkness. To return the world to the mystery it was before Merlin tried to hone the edge of humanity’s chances in the dark of existence, the wizard had dedicated himself to removing magical objects.
Uncertainty needs valor to make sense of the world.
Pondering that – he became slippery in time.
Merlin’s powers are much diminished since moving Camelot, which is budging slowly into sideways time. The wizard returns to Avalon to draw power from the differential between the two dimensions of time. He meets his paramour the Swan Queen, and they talk about their fates as noumenal beings departing the phenomenal, losing touch with the historical.
The wizard visits the abode of King Arthur at the far end of a remote valley on Avalon congested with massive trees and mazes of wild shrubs. The king is gone! Where?
The wizard consults with undines, aeyrs, hobs, and calcifers. The king is still on Avalon. But Avalon is itself drifting out of historical time. The terrain is indeterminate: Arthur could hide anywhere – and to track him requires a Dark Hunt.
Days blurred by. A form inside the formless, the ancient wizard with the appearance of a boy slid along the hyperbolic curve of the planet’s orbit to arrive softly where the Earth would be in a fortnight – and where he would be.
The boy sat on a log at forest’s edge, above colossal sea cliffs on Avalon, staring into an upheaval of fiery clouds. The future, tomorrow’s sun, had crashed in the west and lay burning over the ocean.
Offshore islands identified where he had arrived and fixed him in the moment. Memories of returning to Britain, to the battle slope of Camlann, dimmed.
Young hobs sitting next to the boy on either side ignored the stupendous sunset. Dark and compact as truffles, they stared openly at the youth. Their bright pea eyes took in every detail.
He wore a fine-yarn tunic, woad green, secured at his waist by an elegant braid of antelope-hide strung with seven pouches of tawed leather in varying sizes from thumbling to cabbage sack. The cabbage sack hung from behind. It contained the mummified head of a hobgoblin, though the young hobs didn’t know that.
Avalon’s sunset hinged together worlds. For the boy, the enchanted isle also jumbled time. One moment, he stared into the setting sun illuminating prodigies of myth among high cirrus: griffins, wyverns, dragons’ teeth.
He looked down at the young hobs perched beside him on the rotting log, small and wrinkled as gills of fungus, and – in an eyeblink – he fell forward in time and hunkered in darkness. He pressed his back against the rough bark of a monumental oak, and he peered into nocturnal shadows for Avalon’s slavering hobgoblins.
The abrupt shift didn’t startle him. Many years ago, he had begun sliding Avalon into sideways time, and occasionally the temporal currents sloshed him back and forth in the temporal flow. Never more than a few days forward or back. And less often if he stayed off the Isle of Apples.
He didn’t belong there. In truth, he didn’t belong anywhere. He originated in a reality before time or space. No words could name it. He had settled for calling it Undoing.
He remembered Undoing as passionate, vibrant, endless nothing. Foolish thoughts for him, hunched in a night forest on Avalon. Memories of Undoing might make him a meal for the gruesome beasts set on him by the hobs. No memories after that. Only oblivion if he died while still in this flesh.
The moonless sky set darkness on the surrounding hills absolute as the abyss of space. Hobgoblins crawled through those night fields, tracking his scent.
Overhead, unseen boughs rattled the stairs of the wind as the cold night came down.
Night peeled back to glaring day. On a rugged shore, a goddess born of sea foam leaned back against a barnacled rock, eyes closed, listening to miles of sky. She wore a green pastel chemise, slick with seawater.
The boy, cresting a scalloped dune, stopped short, and the languishing sensuality of the goddess quickly lit his pale eyes with inflamed attention. Though more than three centuries old, Merlin had the body and libido of a 14-year-old.
“Come closer.” The salt wind wove her breath to his deepest listening. He heard her in the meat of his thinking and feeling, in this human body pieced together of atoms that dream. He heard her the way a shy boy feels desire, and he quickly slid back behind the dune.
She reclined there beside the scarp of sand on a mat of damp kelp, easeful, regarding him lazily, eyes duck-green, iridescent. The air around her wrinkled with the sullen power of a goddess.
The boy plopped to his haunches and dug his feet in the sand to keep from sliding down the slope into her open arms. He had been avoiding the gods for years. His future sense had helped him escape their notice. But there was no evading this goddess. She owned his 14-year-old watchfulness.
“Come.” She beckoned with a slack insistence her naked beauty sharpened. “I have questions for you.”
He slid downslope and rolled into her embrace. She smelled of sun-warm stone. The nape of her neck tasted of sea tang.
“The Radiant Ones – the angels – the Firelords. They want to know.” She held him firmly against her spicy flesh. “What has become of the Round Table? Where is Camelot?”
“I’ve moved them.” Her hug coursed life force harder through him, powerfully drawing his truth out into the world. “I’ve moved them into sideways time.”
“Why?”
“I’ve meddled enough here.” He peered into her iridescence. “I’m removing all the rats of my soul, every magical object I inflicted on this world.”
For an instant, the boy felt the clarity of another in himself, the tithe of alertness from an earlier version, before he had grown younger than the wizard. That elder self, a whole self, insisted: he had to get off Avalon or else he would slip through time endlessly.
A whipcrack of will from strong memories of wisdom and its mystery of intuition, spun him out of Avalon and into a sparkling British morning under cathedral naves of a giant beech. The kenning stone abided there, slashed with sunlight.
A black, flat-topped boulder of ferric slag stood massively among hackberry shrubs atop a scalloped knoll. It perched above the steep gorge of an ancient brook. Peeving sunrays through the branches made the boy squint.
Then, he saw the small cleft where a dragon’s tooth had nicked the stone. A shard had disappeared. He searched all around the knoll. Exhausted, he sat with his back to the stone.
[Illegible] … on a prominent knoll that local farmers and herders called Arthur’s Rise.
Illuminated by angular morning sun, the pale boy in his red cap seemed to glow. He pressed his ear against the rock, body leaning into a strenuous push. An onlooking drover in the distance began to shout a laugh at the feeble boy muscling a boulder before space creased around both the boy and boulder, folded them into a tiny wad, and vanished.
The drover grabbed his knees. All breath rushed out of him in a gasp. He had just witnessed the Daoine Sidhe, the People of the Faerie Hills, reclaiming their sacred stone. Local legend recalled Excalibur standing in that very rock two centuries earlier. The drover had seen for himself now – the legend was true.
Meanwhile, a dimension away, an origami of spacetime unfolded into the boy and the kenning stone atop a high bluff in a Britain where neither boy nor stone had ever existed.
With the last of his strength, he shoved the legendary rock off its perch. It fell crashing through hackberry shrubs, tearing up furls of ivy, and bouncing off storm ravines to plummet headlong into the brook.
The momentum of entering sideways time propelled the boulder into another age, and it looked like it simply disappeared into the shallow water without noise, splash or ripple. Where it came to rest, blue ice stood a mile high.
Spent, the boy plopped to his haunches and dug his feet in the torn earth to keep from sliding down the steep bank – and falling backward in time.
□
Deep in Avalon, upland where apple garths and woodlands fell away, ringing silence filled vast horizons. The wizard boy waded through ferns upon the shore of a narrow pond. The quiet here allowed him to deepen his attention. He tried to visualize his ricocheting through time and orient himself.
Relief saturated him to remember a near future, where he will return to Britain and move the kenning stone out of this world. He could still see the drover’s astonished face.
The eternal continuity of becoming had fractured, because Avalon had begun to drift into sideways time. The elder hobs, realizing this, knew he had something to do with their holy island departing the familiar world.
While they conferred, he awaited their judgment on a log facing the setting sun. And he rolled in the arms of a goddess. And he shivered in the night forest. And he had already returned to Britain and removed the kenning stone. And he stood here in ferny highlands, in the transparent radiance of his watchfulness, gazing upon a goddess, peeking about for hobgoblins in the dark, squinting into a flamboyant twilight, spying a swan emerging from the reed brakes of this narrow pond, his lover in her animal guise.
He had met her on the black-pavilioned barge conveying the wounded king to Avalon. In each other’s arms, from the first, they had felt their hearts speaking to the universe.
The jigsaw pieces of time he had collected on Avalon all had their place in his vision. He recognized his purpose. And yet, he refused to let himself remember his own name. This was his way of punishing himself for the king’s death.
□
Time is not a flat circle. It does not repeat. It simply is. Like space. Precisely like space.
[Illegible] … peer about for ravenous hobgoblins, squatting in the night woods, hearing the brittle fluency of crickets and ...
[Illegible} … songs of many a secret thing the undines had learned from the drowned.
Higher atmospheres veiled the coming night in vaporous blues and dusty indigo. Faint stars and celestial bodies leaked through the fading light. The boy’s poetry became wordless but not silent. Twilight breathed, a fire sermon that sent broad rays fanning across high cirrus. illuminating prodigies of myth: griffins and wyverns, dragons’ teeth.
To the north, auguries of a future eon gleamed. Small with distance, white orbs flitted and silver disks tilted far down the starry sky.
[Illegible] … listening to the brittle fluency of crickets and boughs rattling on the stairs of the wind, he peered about anxiously for voracious hobgoblins.
[Illegible] … orchards surrounded knolls and crowded into dells. Surf booming on the rocky coast rode vesper winds, and the famous apple trees listened. Their fruit were bright hearts hung in the oblique light.
Above a deer trail, perched on a knuckled bough, two owls show only silent backs hunched against the fiery twilight.
The famous apple trees listen. Their fruit are bright hearts hung in the slant light. Hobs sit in knotholes and along root ledges.
… unseen boughs rattling the stairs of the wind and the cold night coming down.
At a far distance, under cinnabar streaks of sunset, lordly towers glow with last light. Camelot’s pennants and banners barter with the wind.
The famous apple trees listen. Their fruit are bright hearts.