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For Plaxica
There is a chill within the night air that has nothing to do with things so mundane as temperature or weather. It is the chill of absence for there is that which moves about this night from which all trace of life is absent, as if the grave has found legs upon which it might wander with its cold and heavy touch out among the lands of the living. To say, however, that life is absent is to understate matters, for that which moves about so freely this night is no mere object nor is it that blasphemous mockery of life referred to as ‘undeath’ in popular idiom. Life is absent from that which moves this night for that which moves about does so in hunger, a terrible appetite which consumes, feasts upon, and destroys that which lives. It calls out and its voices are many, but its tone is ever the same, unchanging, flat and monotonous with the never varying chill and stillness of the grave. Life, that life which could move of its own accord, has fled this forest at the touch of this chill and the sound of this call. That life which could not flee has fallen numb, unable to feel and unable to move, into a stillness that betokens the finality of death.
The owl, while for some reason not so strongly affected as those other living things of this place, still feels, all the same, a certain sluggishness in its movement and a dulling of senses that are normally much more keen than they are at present. According to the directions given by the woman the place is not far and a certain heaviness of death in the air, a heaviness oppressive with the stink of blood spilled in great amounts, would seem to indicate that this assumption is indeed correct.
The howls, and the movement of the banewolves and their terrible hunger after the living as moved elsewhere – in the direction of the stone circle and the woman. But the calls are many and so is the movement, and one cannot be completely sure that all have moved on when his senses are numb and death lies heavy about the air within which he moves.......
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