October 31, 1976

[theravenboy]

In John Rowlands' warm cottage, on John Rowlands' harp, Bran tries to pick out the melody that carries him to that other place. The music sounds wrong, wrong instrument, wrong sound. Even so, there is enough power in the music to earn Bran a sharp look from the shepherd. When the lesson is over, Bran pulls on his dark glasses and climbs on his bicycle. He doesn't think about his path or his destination; he just rides away from the small rooms and the ordinary harps, the mortal father and the human restraints. Cadfan's Way flows beneath his tyres.

When the pressure in his mind, go, go, go, decreases, Bran dismounts. He is standing by the banks of Tal y Llyn. The Sleepers awoke here, four years ago. Sleepers...dreams...a piece of a dream... Bran pulls the stone he gave Jane out of his jeans pocket and stares at it. A piece of a dream from the Lost Land,, Gwion said. What lies under the wave isn't lost, really, just caught in time, somewhere. They drink Atlantean wine at Milliways. Not lost...not lost... Bran grips the stone tightly. From some long-unused corner of his brain, instructions are beginning to rise.

Comments

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

[OOC: Pre-arrival]

*A high rippling snatch of melody drifts on the wind, achingly beautiful, and the air wavers like the wind-ruffled surface of a stream. Then the strange unearthly music is gone, sliding into the misty gap between memory and imagination, and Will is there, sitting cross-legged on the old faint track along the sloping hillside. In his hands is cupped loosely a small rounded pebble, plucked idly from the shores of Tal y Llyn years ago.*

[theravenboy]

Good. You're here. *Bran shoots Will the old smile, the one between two allies joined in a great cause.* How did you know? *It is a human boy's question, with an undertone of surprised laughter.*

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*stands, pocketing the stone*

I didn't, exactly. Don't. I knew that I had to come here now, and how. But not why.

*he looks around the lake, and a grin breaks out on his face*

But something's going to happen. I don't know what. But something.

[theravenboy]

*Bran grins broadly, caught by Will's joy. After a moment, his wide smile fades into the still, listening attitude of a king holding audience with a great advisor. Then Bran removes his sunglasses and looks straight at Will, and the expression on his face is not human in the slightest.* Will.

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*His head snaps round, attention caught by the regal command. He stares at Bran for a bare second, and then his face is the Old One's, expressionless and poised, waiting.*

*quietly* Bran?

*The air is heavy with magic, prickling across his skin and looming over his head like the moment before a thundercloud opens with rain. It is the Wild Magic, swirling and strong and inhuman, pressing against his senses, anticipation and wariness all at once.*

[theravenboy]

*Bran stands erect, hair blown by the wind and the tangles of magic growing in the air. His tenor voice has undertones of faraway thunder.* Take out the stone Gwion gave you.

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*Silently, Will reaches into his pocket and pulls out the stone. It sits in his palm, blue-green, irregular, sleek and smoothly rounded, gleaming in the pale October sunlight.*

*It is, Will remembers suddenly, the last day of October, and the last day of the year by the old reckoning. Calan Gaeaf, the day of the dead.*

[theravenboy]

*Bran's posture softens very slightly. He holds his stone open in his hand.* They're like the harp, Will, aren't they? The stones. They smell like it. *The stones don't smell like anything, really.*

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*Will can sense nothing there, only the gathering pressure of the waiting Wild Magic. But Bran's words wake memories in his mind, of bright smiling eyes in a grove of seven trees, and a bag full of smooth tumbling stones, and rippling music on a burning mountain.*

*softly* From the hand of Taliesin.

[theravenboy]

*straightens again* Yes. Taliesin. Remember him. Remember him now. *Bran extends the hand with the stone before him. The tension in the air stretches, and stretches, and stretches.*

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*Will does the same, standing tall and straight with the stone outstretched before him towards the dark water. His face is pale, now, with the strange tension singing through him, and there is sweat beaded faintly on his forehead.*

[theravenboy]

*Bran, too, is sweating. The muscles of his neck stand out, tensed, and his breath comes in short gasps.* It's not enough, is it? Too heavy, it is, and too far down.

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*Will does not know what would be enough, or even what Bran is trying to do. He has a faint nagging idea, but he cannot pay enough attention even to figure out what that is; the strange magic and the effort of listening to it and not crumpling beneath it are clouding his brain, making his thoughts move slow and sluggish.*

*His arm drops a little without his meaning to, and he jerks it back up. His other arm bumps against his side, loose sweater and the horn beneath it.*

*The horn.*

*Left-handed he fumbles it loose from his belt.*

[theravenboy]

*Without moving his right hand, Bran reaches his left hand out to the horn and slips his fingers through its loop. Slowly, as if pulling against some kind of resistance, he brings the horn before his face.

Bran inhales deeply, lifts the horn to his lips, and blows. The call is not any sound a human would make while hunting foxes, nor even the melodic avaunt Will once sent from a hill over Aberdyfi. Loud, long, clear, it echoes into the mountains.

The lake begins to ripple. At first only the vibrations from the horn call shake the water. After a few moments, though, as Bran's face becomes redder and redder in the effort to hold the note, something rises out of Tal y Llyn. Vaguely triangular, draped with seaweed, the object floats across the surface of the water. At last it touches the near bank.

Bran lowers the horn and the stone, takes a few panting breaths, and runs to the object.

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*Will follows, slowly. The gathered power has crescendoed and broken, and only ripples of it remain. They flicker at the edges of his senses like waves lapping on a shore, or pale ghostly hounds of mist leaping through the corners of his vision. He feels pale and drained.*

[theravenboy]

*Bran kneels before the thing, reverently brushing seaweed off of it. As he cleans it, its color begins to appear golden, and its shape becomes recognizably that of a stringed instrument ornamented with flowering vines.

In a voice high with exhaustion and ordinary joy, Bran says,* It's the harp, Will. Taliesin's harp.

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*Will drops to the ground next to him, staring at the harp. He remembers King Gwyddno Garanhir speaking of a boy "with all his father's strength in him and more besides." He remembers Bran in the Lost Land, his white hair streaked dark with shade and water, staring at him with Herne's tawny owl-eyes. And he knows, now, that though Bran gave up his place in the High Magic for all time, yet that was not his only heritage from his father Arthur.*

Do you remember what Gwion said to us, under the seven trees? "Any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion..."

*He laughs, brief and exhausted but joyful for all of that.*

[theravenboy]

I remember. He said, "Nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time."

*Bran cradles the harp in the crook of his arm, and touches its strings softly. It sings of births, deaths and long journeys, of lost riddles, buried labyrinths, and above all, the wild, wide music of the Welsh hills.*

[sign-seeker.livejournal.com]

*Will listens, a teenaged boy crouched on the cold damp ground, face still and enraptured. The confusion and tiredness are still there, underneath, but wiped away for this long enchanted moment by the liquid golden magic of the harp's song.*

*And, echoing around the quiet lake valley, the mountains sing.*

[theravenboy]

*At last, the music slows. With one last slow arpeggio, Bran presses his palms gently on the strings, stilling them.*

*Will stands, reluctantly, still caught by the hush of the harp's spell, and steps backwards away from the lake. Bran turns his head, watching him go, but does not move his hands from the golden harpstrings. Will's foot falls on the thin faint track of Cadfan's Way, and as the last echoes die, he flickers and is gone.*

[theravenboy]

*Bran rises, then, hooking the old battered horn to his own belt, and slings the harp onto his shoulder. He climbs back onto his bicycle and pedals away without looking back.*

*An hour later, he is drinking oversteeped tea at his adopted father's table, just a fifteen-year-old boy with some maths homework to finish and the harp and horn of the Wild Magic tucked safely under his bed.*