Involution…

*

“You forgot involution,” says Wen with the sort of grin which means things are going to get worse before they get better.

“Did I?”

“From your list of concepts which may help people fathom the shadowing.”

“Ah, so I did, but then ‘involution’ is a rather vague term.”

“What, and ‘correspondence’ isn’t?”

“Well, no, at any rate not in the context of that which shadows and that which is shadowed…”

“But you were also thinking magical correspondence weren’t you?”

“I may have been… Whereas involution, on the other hand, quite possibly needs a subject you might think?”

“Involution of structure and form.”

“And structure is?”

“Structure is stone because stones are the bones of the earth.”

“And form is?”

“Form is hills, particularly hollow hills.”

“How to make the hills hollow,” I murmur, more to myself than to anyone else, “but the stones are no longer structure when they are in the circle, they act more like form.”

“Well, they’re both, especially if after a certain period of time you then again cover them with earth to make a mound, which we know happened at a number of sites.”

“But not here.”

“Except, that the sanctuary may have once been a mound.”

“Oh yes, I can see that…”

“And mounds are always portals.”

“Why are mounds always portals?”

“Because the human belly becomes a mound in order to act as a portal for the body.”

“Hmmmm…”

I sit down on a stone, somewhat dazed.

In fact, I sit down on what we are now calling the ‘Throne Stone’ and immediately slide off the wet surface and land with a bump on the sodden earth.

Which is an effective enough way of being re-grounded…

*

 

Lands of Exile:

KITH ‘N’ KIN

Stuart France & Sue Vincent

The Beeley Stone, ‘liberated’ from the churchyard at Bakewell, stands proudly in the centre of its village green once more. While the locals enjoy the fruits of its restoration, Ben, who had led the daring raid against authority, still languishes in jail.

Don and Wen, arrested and released without explanation in Ireland, now plot an erratic course through the wild places of Wales, while Jaw-Dark and Kraas, seeking the legendary stone of Fergus Mac Roy, have been separated in the most uncanny of circumstances…

As the darkness closes around them, the Black Shade haunts the moors above Beeley and, in the shadowy rooms of the old tower, an ancient and even stranger story begins to unfold…