Stonehenge, at the Death Feast of the Wolf Year
The High Priestess stood at the very centre of the circle. The bright lights of the feasting hearths dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see, even as the sky darkened in the east. Tribes from all over had come together for this greatest of all feasts, bringing their fattest livestock to contribute to the communal feast, their most august dead to be interred at their holy sites nearby, their children newly of age to have the chance to meet one another.
Closer by, the light came from the torches held by the acolytes as they marched their circular paths around her — seven rings, one each for sun, moon and the five wandering stars — and the four fixed in place at the four corners of the altar stone, illuminating the sacrificial calf lying in its central hollow. She stroked it with one hand, trying to reassure it, even as the other held the stone knife, only a hair’s breadth from slicing into her fingers. She had spent much of her time over the last moon in sharpening it to an edge so fine it was barely there at all.
The High Priestess had as many names as there were tribes: Child of the Outcast, Mistress of the Cold North Wind, the Frozen Firebrand, the Bearcub, the Axis of the Turning Wheel of Years … Some considered her to have transcended all ties of clan and kinship, others still held that the skies at her birth portended a dark fate and her mother’s banishment for failing to dash her brains out moments after her birth was fully justified. But all respected her authority; even those who thought that if only they whispered low enough, she wouldn’t hear them call her a creature of the great darkness, were glad to have such a powerful demon on their side.
This year, above all, she had proved her worth to them all. She had predicted the wolf moon eating the sun, but assured them that it was not the end of the world, only an omen of what could be. The sun would shine on, triumphant. She had predicted it to the day, and all those who had heard her warnings — either directly from her, here at one of the great feast days; or from those who had travelled back from this place, taking her insights with them — had taken heart when the appointed time had come from the knowledge that this too would pass.
More than ever, she had been hailed as a seer. But, as with all her previous achievements, from her point of view it was just a question of decoding the intentions of the builders of this place, who had gone many generations before. The things which she could see clearly were, even to the greatest chiefs and most devout clerics of the disparate clans, something miraculous. That had given her influence, enough not only to have the damage of the years here repaired but amendments and additions made to the great circles, allowing more detailed predictions than ever to be made. She had taught the techniques to as many as would listen, though whether they would be passed on accurately to future generations she could not be confident. The knowledge she had gleaned from the previous custodians of this place in her long period of training had been both incomplete in the important details, and encrusted with extraneous details, legends of immortal beings and ferocious monsters. At first she had challenged these, to the point that she had nearly become doubly outcast, but she had learned — slow, difficult learning, the opposite of how the heavens spoke to her so sweetly as they unfolded their secrets — that the stories were important too, to the tribes, to the place of the holy orders amongst them, to the peace between them which had held, more or less, ever since the stones were first erected.
The High Priestess had two secret names known to no one else alive: the one her mother had given her, Bran, and the one she had chosen for herself, Clan-Mother of the Star Children. She didn’t know where the Star Children were; perhaps none other than her was alive at this moment. Certainly none of those she had taught had displayed the gift. But some at least of the original builders must have been of that kin, and if there was anything in her reading of the cycles of the heavens that came from pure faith rather than empirical knowledge, it was that there were many more yet to be born.
And she would be joining them all soon. She had calculated it all very precisely. At the moment the setting sun was concealed by the Hiding Stone, the one which the ancients must have long known aligned with the longest and shortest days, and around which this whole complex had been built, the arrangement of the chanting circles around her would mirror the supposedly ill-omened skies of her birth.
The calf whimpered under her caress, unable to comprehend that it would be spared. The acolytes would understand just as little, she suspected. She had instructed that the rites of the altar were not to be shared with the wider tribes, but would they follow her instructions once she was gone? The feasting should go on all through this longest night, but would it once the news of her disappearance began to spread? She was not even sure whether she would leave a body for them to bury.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, its last rays casting long shadows over the scene, she gripped the knife firmly and drew it in one fast stroke across her own throat.
The knife clattered to the floor, but the chanting meant that even those in the innermost circle did not notice immediately. She looked down at her hand, expecting to see blood, but there was only light, light that was pouring into her through the wound and quickly suffusing her whole substance, transforming it.
And then she was gone.