Rhiannon - Child of Twilight
Chapter 5 - Page 1
Glamour and Deception

Having disappeared from the Bardic Council like some spirit borne on the winds into the hazy tones of night, Megan hid in the long shadows of the forests seeming without scent or sound. For days, weeks, she stayed in the wooded wild places, avoiding any contact with human thought or vision, hunting and gathering as she needed. She knew her way in the woods, in the caves; she had been taught well, but her own nature served her even better. And she had managed to get her scroll, a knife and sword, another pair of clothes; evading the Council more from their lack of understanding that what they sought might be more than they could account for than anything. She was good at movement in the night, in the dark; when others sought refuge by some heated light, looking for the warmth of other human presence. Yet, after some time, the woods, the caves, began to bore her and she began to consider what move she ought seek out next. She would not give up on her prize; what had been so deftly taken from her, she knew she must acquire. But this time it would take more cunning, better plans, bolder moves, and in the end perhaps shake the very core of Cymru itself.

She had managed to wander fairly wide of the Council's reach into the Northern wilds of Gwynedd, yet realized she would go East away from the Council, perhaps away from Bardic influence, out of Cymru and into its uncertain neighbor, Briton. A neighbor whose King and nobility evinced no love for the Bards or their religion, having embraced the new religion of Christianity and its ways. It was a place where this new religion was truly catching hold with all its people and the Bards had become very unwelcome, even being deemed evil by its priesthood. A place where the Bards would not easily follow her even if they knew she was there; so that Megan thought on this and began to set her mind in that direction.

Being deep in a mountainous terrain in a large, splendid cave and sensing no human life for miles about her, Megan decided it time to truly consider her next moves and begin to act on them. And therefore she stabilized herself first and built a small but bright fire in the cave, where the ceiling was so high it looked as if it made another sky of scintillating rocks above her as the flames danced and cast their shadows like living things upon the walls. Satisfied with the fire's steadiness, Megan sat and studied the scroll a moment, nodding once or twice, seeming to try to make certain of what the writing told her. Finally deciding how she would approach things, she stood up, her voluminous dark hair wafted about her, her clothes loose upon her straight, slender form making a strangely sexless image before the flame. Slowly, walking in a circle around the fire, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, she chanted a low and eerily musical mantra holding the scroll in front of her as she moved, glancing at it and chanting from it. After she had circled the fire three times in both directions, she stopped and faced the fire, watching it, waiting.

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