Black with Ash,
Red with Grinding

by Chip Houser

Our words call us, the same words the priests burned us for speaking. Our words call us, and we come.

We rise together, a shifting, grinding mass pushing upward through hardened ash and coal toward our sacred clearing. We rise until our bones strike something hard. Our clearing was soft soil with swaying grasses. We push against this new surface, but it does not yield. It is perfectly smooth. Unnatural. We trace it with our small bones and find narrow, straight seams. We push again, together. A section of the surface shifts. We push together, harder, our bones creaking and knocking. The section cracks loose, revealing a halo of red light.

We push it aside and rise into an impossibility. Our clearing, where we died in agony, where the priests unceremoniously shoveled our bones under with the smoldering coals, is gone. The priests have built a stone temple, and we stand in its center. The tall grasses, the wind that stirred them, the ancient ring of oaks, the forest sounds beyond, all that is sacred to us replaced by polished stone.

Free of the ground, our ash-crusted bones find their natural order, binding together with ethereal tendon and muscle and sheathed in luminous flesh. Next to us, a fire roars inside a worked iron brazier of interlaced silhouettes, a wicked mockery of us dancing, eyes glowing red, mouths belching fire. Around us, a thick ring of salt. Beyond it, the priests stand behind an oak lectern between fluted stone columns. Time-bent and hairless, shrouded in gold-trimmed vestments, powdered skin damp with effort, they chant from a great tome. They chant our words, which echo harshly off their polished stone.

We held no rites; we had no need summon our magic. We were a natural part of this clearing, like the grass, the trees. We raised no structures; we had no need to separate ourselves from the clearing. We had no need to codify our magic; we knew the words when they needed knowing.

The priests call us again, but their stolen words are not what has drawn us from the soil. Those words, though powerless from their lips, have reminded the clearing of what it once was, what we shared. The clearing has called us back, not the priests.

We circle the salt perimeter, watching. All that the priests touch they pervert: their architecture, stone wrested from the mountains, chiseled into conformity; their vestments, coats stolen from sheep, stained with berries meant for bird and bear; their tome, scraped pages the skin of hogs; their words—our words—written there with charcoal from our burning.

Secure in their costumes, their rituals, their imagined order, eyes alight with righteous certitude, the priests do not ask, they demand. The sound of our response is the scrape of bone as we clasp hands. Our toes scatter salt as we glide toward them.

The priests command us to stop, but we are not bound by those who steal our words. Their arrogance, their false claim of dominion, binds only them.

We surround the priests, our voices charnel whispers, stirring a wind which sweeps along the circle of salt. The priests thrust out their palms, chanting louder. Rivulets of weakly salted sweat streak their powdered cheeks.

The wind spins faster, hurling salt in thrashing waves. The crook their elbows, shouting. Their words or ours, it does not matter. Salt and wind scour our bones.

The vortex widens, lashing the priests, shredding their vestments, tearing apart their tome, splintering their lectern. The brazier groans as it is sucked into the maelstrom.

Paving stones lift free, columns bow and break, the temple come apart, spiraling upward. The crunch and crack of stone replaces the priests’ screams. The stones, red with grinding, rise with the whorling vortex into the sky.

With a last long sigh the wind is gone and suddenly all is quiet. Nothing of the priests remain, or their temple. The dark soil is freshly churned, the clearing ready to grow anew. She calls us back to her, and we come. We lie together on the soft ground. She embraces us and we rest, eager to rejoin her. For all of us to heal, together. We will rise again with the grass, with the great oaks, and the clearing will be sacred once again.