THIS IS IMPORTANT

The water is blessed, said the priests; it is holy. Any evil it touches, it will burn away.

But what if it is diluted? asked the acolytes.

The priests smiled.

It can’t be, they said.

***

The first of the holy water splashed across the brow of the baby, wailing and shivering in her mother’s arms, and the droplets ran over newborn skin to fall upon the soil.

They drained into the earth, mingling with the dew; and the dew became holy too.

***

The grass that grew on the soil drank some of the water in, drawing it into cells that were instantly blessed, filled with purity. Later, the sheep grazed upon the grass. The blades were sweet and lush, fat with rain, and as the sheep ate, the blessing in the grass flourished within it, coursing through now-sacred blood.

***

The rest of the water sank lower through the soil, washed down with the rains. Groundwater flowed, consecrated, sweeping below the earth beneath the reach of roots or the eyes of humanity.

There was more water there, and the holiness grew.

***

It can’t be? the acolytes asked. How can it not be diluted?

It converts, said the priests. A drop of holy water in a flask from the lake turns the whole flask holy.

What if a drop reaches the lake? asked the acolytes.

Why would that happen? asked the priests.

***

The butcher slew the sheep, taking the meat for cawl. It bubbled in its pot over the fire, the water from the cells of the mutton leaching out into the rest of the stew until all the family groaned at the sweet scent.

It tastes better today, they said, as they ate heartily. We wonder why?

***

The groundwater reached the river, and the whole vein became holy.

***

The butcher’s son was caught by the vampire the following night, wandering home just a little too late, a little too drunk, a little too alone. I wonder if you could help me? the vampire asked, and the butcher’s son followed where he should not have gone.

The vampire sank hungry fangs into unwilling flesh, and the butcher’s son accepted the end.

But it did not come for him.

***

What can have happened? the vampires asked afterwards. What strange power is held by the butcher’s boy? What did he do?

It was a mystery, baffling and wrong. The vampire had been strong and savvy, a hunter of renown. Now, her veins burned, her body aflame from the inside out.

Sickness, maybe? they said uneasily; but there was no sickness that could take a vampire.

***

The river gave drinking water to all the people of the region, in towns and villages and farmsteads alike. The holiness grew, spreading from land to bodies, young and old, rich and poor, believer and unbeliever, coursing through veins and hearts.

And the river flowed on.

***

Something is wrong, the vampires said. 

It was clear now; every vampire in the land was sickening, burning from the inside out as they fed.

No sickness, said the elders, shivering and broken. A corruption. A taint, spreading unchecked like rot. We must leave this land, move elsewhere.

There is something in the water.

***

The river reached the ocean, and the holiness spread from shore to distant shore.

***

We are safe here, the vampires said, collapsing on foreign soil. We cannot touch the ocean; but why should we need to? The humans cannot drink it either. We are safe here.

We are safe.

***

The sun shone over the waves.

Water rose on the warmth, evaporating to the sky. It greeted the clouds, and the holiness blossomed through them.

***

When the rains fell, the vampires screamed; for they knew the end was coming. Every raindrop burned, every splash agony, and they wept and watched in horror as the rains filled the wells, filled the soils, filled the lakes and rivers and valleys and moors, the corruption seizing the new land in its iron grip.

This is the end, they whispered, crumbling to dust. This is the end.

This is the end.

***

The water is blessed, said the priests; it is holy. Any evil it touches, it will burn away.

But what if it is diluted? asked the acolytes.

The priests smiled.

It can’t be, they said.

you have invited strangers into your home, helen pevensie, mother of four.

without the blurred sight of joy and relief, it has become impossible to ignore. all the love inside you cannot keep you from seeing the truth. your children are strangers to you. the country has seen them grow taller, your youngest daughter’s hair much longer than you would have it all years past. their hands have more strength in them, their voices ring with an odd lilt and their eyes—it has become hard to look at them straight on, hasn’t it? your children have changed, helen, and as much as you knew they would grow a little in the time away from you, your children have become strangers.

your youngest sings songs you do not know in a language that makes your chest twist in odd ways. you watch her dance in floating steps, bare feet barely touching the dewy grass. when you try and make her wear her sister’s old shoes—growing out of her own faster than you think she ought to—, she looks at you as though you are the child instead of her. her fingers brush leaves with tenderness, and you swear your daughter’s gentle hum makes the drooping plant stand taller than before. you follow her eager leaps to her siblings, her enthusiasm the only thing you still recognise from before the country. yet, she laughs strangely, no longer the giggling girl she used to be but free in a way you have never seen. her smile can drop so fast now, her now-old eyes can turn distant and glassy, and her tears, now rarer, are always silent. it scares you to wonder what robbed her of the heaving sobs a child ought to make use of in the face of upset.

your other daughter—older than your youngest yet still at an age that she cannot be anything but a child—smiles with all the knowledge in the world sitting in the corner of her mouth. her voice is even, without all traces of the desperate importance her peers carry still, that she used to fill her siblings’ ears with at all hours of the day. she folds her hands in her lap with patience and soothes the ache of war in your mind before you even realise she has started speaking. you watch her curl her hair with careful, steady fingers and a straight back, her words a melody as she tells your eldest which move to make without so much a glance at the board off to her right. she reads still, and what a relief you find this sliver of normalcy, even if she’s started taking notes in a shorthand you couldn’t even think to decipher. even if you feel her slipping away, now more like one of the young, confident women in town than a child desperately wishing for a mother’s approval.

your younger son reads plenty as well these days, and it fills you with pride. he is quiet now, sitting still when you find him bent over a book in the armchair of his father. he looks at you with eyes too knowing for a petulant child on the cusp of puberty, and no longer beats his fists against the furniture when one of his siblings dares approach him. he has settled, you realise one evening when you walk into the living room and find him writing in a looping script you don’t recognise, so different from the scratched signature he carved into the doors of your pantry barely a year ago. he speaks sense to your youngest and eldest, respects their contributions without jest. you watch your two middle children pass a book back and forth, each a pen in hand and sheets of paper bridging the gap between them, his face opening up with a smile rather than a scowl. it freezes you mid-step to find such simple joy in him. remember when you sent them away, helen, and how long it had been since he allowed you to see a smile then?

your eldest doesn’t sleep anymore. none of your children care much for bedtimes these days, but at least sleep still finds them. it’s not restful, you know it from the startled yelps that fill the house each night, but they sleep. your eldest makes sure of it. you have not slept through a night since the war began, so it’s easy to discover the way he wanders the halls like a ghost, silent and persistent in a duty he carries with pride. each door is opened, your children soothed before you can even think to make your own way to their beds. his voice sounds deeper than it used to, deeper still than you think possible for a child his age and size. then again, you are never sure if the notches on his door frame are an accurate way to measure whatever it is that makes you feel like your eldest has grown beyond your reach. you watch him open doors, soothe your children, spend his nights in the kitchen, his hands wrapped around a cup of tea with a weariness not even the war should bring to him, not after all the effort you put into keeping him safe.

your children mostly talk to each other now, in a whispered privacy you cannot hope to be a part of. their arms no longer fit around your waist. your daughters are wilder—even your older one, as she carries herself like royalty, has grown teeth too sharp for polite society— and they no longer lean into your hands. your sons are broad-shouldered even before their shirts start being too small again, filling up space you never thought was up for taking. your eldest doesn’t sleep, your middle children take notes when politicians speak on the wireless and shake their heads as though they know better, and your youngest sings for hours in your garden.

who are your children now, helen pevensie, and who pried their childhood out of your shaking hands?

Photographic highlights of the year

Photographed by Freddie Ardley 

𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐨𝐧

𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐬

𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥, 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧

𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞

𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥, 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐧𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞

𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐬

𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥, 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝

𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐱𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝟐𝟑 𝐝𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐬

— cosmo sheldrake, “the moss”

I love these neat little mushrooms...

not to repeat myself again but imagine you’re helen pevensie and you send your children away to keep them safe from the war. you send them to the country to keep them alive, keep them children for as long as possible in a war like this.

and then you get them back, and suddenly it feels like you’ve invited war itself into your house. not in the literal sense, arguments now happen quietly and with composure no children should know how to wield. but somehow, whenever you look at them, you think about blood, about death, about enemies felled with weapons too fast for them to notice. it feels like you hugged a man in a trench when you welcomed your children back home.

you feel terrible, but it’s hard for you to be in a room with them all for long. you don’t want to shake war’s hand. war has torn your country apart, war keeps your husband away and in the middle of deadly danger. war should not be sitting in your living room, drinking your tea and eating your food. you’re afraid of war. you don’t want war in your home.

your children should not be the war you wished to keep them safe from.

Dogor is the 18,000 year old pup that was found within the Siberian Permafrost, yet is not quite a dog nor a wolf, but a puzzling connection to both. 

Dogor has been miraculously preserved within the permafrost, with its fur, teeth and even whiskers incredibly intact. Radiocarbon dating has placed the animal at 18,000 years old and researchers have suggested that the animal passed away at just 2 months old. The name Dogor means “Friend” in Yakut, a language spoken within Eastern Siberia. 

Generally, genetic analysis can quite easily discern whether a discovered canine is a wolf or dog, but in this instance, the genetics suggest that it could be an ancestral link to both. Interestingly, Dogor lived at a time in canine evolutionary history when dogs and wolves began to branch off from each other.The general scientific consensus is that dogs and wolves split from a common ancestor, however, the process of how “dogs became dogs” is certainly contested, and Dogor could be a crucial piece in that puzzle.

If Dogor is determined to be a dog, it will be the oldest ever discovered. The next oldest, the Bonn-Oberkassel puppy, was discovered in Germany and was clearly determined to be a dog of around 14,000 years old, buried with a man and a woman. 

The progression of climate change is melting the permafrost more rapidly, and discoveries like these are becoming more and more commonplace.

Images via Sergey Fedorov/The Siberian Times

foggy morning // Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse

My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.

I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”