Lightfoot the Fabulist

Sometimes I write cultural commentary, sometimes rants, sometimes horror, sometimes poetry, sometimes fantasy: here’s one of the latter.

Lightfoot The Fabulist, storykeeper and weaver of magic, dances through dust motes, drifting delicately between universes. Systems carousel around him as he wavers, reluctant to place his footfall on the world that summons.

He hesitates upon the devastated and ruined terrene; blackened by war, fury and famine to the brink of pestilence and starvation. Faltering at the weight of the suffering, he feels them, the people there. Still struggling, still trying. There is also love in this world.

With a sigh, Lightfoot enters sideways, softly. The anger and rage of the planet’s inhabitants boils up around him instantly, an inferno engulfing his senses in its agonising flame. He moans deep and low and swiftly tinkers a boundary enchantment, forcing the violence to a bearable hum. The children of this world he can barely hear, a subdued murmur of whispering fears and hopeless weeping.

What has happened to these people?

Lightfoot turns his strange eyes backward along this planet’s timeline, which writhes and strains to evade his snare. A protection has been placed upon it, but he perseveres, increasing the pressure of his peculiar focus. He is rewarded by a parting of the miasma revealing the dark hues strewn over the first cities, where the hateful, the lost and the damaged swiftly took hold and began to manipulate, govern and guide. He sees men falling under the pall of contaminated individuals and, only a few generations later, never knowing there had been a better way, he watches them wreak their bloody havoc on one another and their gentler fellow humans. Sees the agony, slaughter and cruelty, the raping of bodies and earth becoming normal, accepted, even admired.

Trembling, his eyes tear-brimmed, Lightfoot keeps digging, down through the history line. Resistance becomes stronger as he pulls at the timeweave, threads shredding wildly in an effort to evade observation. He bears down harder and pulls at thrashing timethreads, uncovering, eventually, what he knows he must.

One of his own. It’s always a heartbreak to find this, he has never immured himself to the betrayal. He watches his dark counterpoint, his corrupted brother, arrive in the peaceful fiefdom. Sees him whispering and sneaking, casting The Darkness and The Shadow, and trudging the now tainted planet, ruining and sneering, nudging and encouraging the worst and most brutal to their horrible excesses, casting The Silencing and The Terror on the weaker, angrier minds. Three generations was all it had taken for most of the men and many of the women to fall under his virulent pall.

This is the worst contamination he has encountered in all his long years. This world is tainted to its core now, there is nothing that can be done for most of them.

Lightfoot The Fabulist takes a slice of starlight and an echo of sunshine and, calling on every ounce of strength, he forces the potion down the throat of a magnificent, slumbering volcano, encouraging it to burst its mantel and unleash its forces on this world.

Launched into the air by the violence of the volcano, the potency reaches every living creature, as the very breath in their lungs fills with iridescent shadows. Buried in each droplet a glamour commanding all humans who still have the heart to hear to come to his haven. One by one, by air, land and sea, they come questing; he sends helpful castings to hurry and protect their journeys where he may. One by one he portals the grateful humans through an opalescent shadow to a better world, a place his venomous brother has not yet found, a terrene protected by others of his own kind, where the humans who wish to live in peace for their brief span, who do not harbour venom, contempt and rage in their hearts and minds for one another, can rest and soothe their stricken companions and themselves.

Many more women than men come, and millions of children, but even with that the numbers he is forced to leave behind to rot in their insanity and virulence hunches his shoulders and tightens his heart with the grief of loss.

Finally, his work is complete. All who can be saved have been saved. The rest, poor stricken souls, must be left to thrash and shriek and reach their sure destruction soon enough.

His shadow flickering with exhaustion, Lightfoot the Fabulist takes a pebble, some string, and a shatter of green glass clarified by moonlight from his odd and countless pockets.

He tinkers an enchantment, creating new magics for the joy of it, and steps through a chink with a tiny, melodic note. Leaving the world the humans destroyed behind him, Lightfoot steps sideways, delicate as gossamer, between the worlds.