Ida

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, White Raccoon.”

“No problem. I enjoy meeting with people.”

“First, if it’s not an impertinent question… What are you, exactly? All of you, I mean?”

“We just are. We’ve always been here. Like reality’s bedrock, maybe, the frame over which everything more specific is laid. Each of us is bound up with a concept that shapes our nature.”

“What do you mean by a ‘concept’?”

“It’s hard to say. In Granny Moth-Spider’s case, it was deals and exchange. In Wistwind’s, it is escape and freedom. In Winter’s, the cold. It That Hungers devours concepts, as is Its nature, but I was never sure whether It ate every individual manifestation of that concept, or every creature’s understanding of the concept. Or whether concepts are something more fundamental than that, lying abstract beyond reality. Perhaps the place beyond and our understandings meet round the back… Perhaps I’m rambling. In short: I’m afraid I can only speculate.”

“Which is your concept?”

“Connections. Community. Bringing people together to escape the loneliness and the cold.”

“And is that why you made us?”

“Yes. I sculpted dreams into you so that you might dream of higher forms of togetherness. Build structures of fantasy together. Mythologies. Societies and support networks. Worldviews and cultures. I tried earlier, with the Spirits, but our natures were too disparate, then… But not now. The ingenuity and kindness of you and your kind have bridged that gap. You’ve spun a network, stretching out from the city, tying all things that think and feel together. Spirits and animals, as one.”

“You really don’t have to do this, you know,’ Lincoln says. ‘We won’t be disappointed.”

“I know,” you say. “I want to see what it’s like. Telling stories the way you do, not just analysing them. The exchange with the crowd, in the moment. But I could do with some help. I want it to be a true recounting of what’s happened recently… But I’d like to tell it in a way that people will remember. And… perhaps a way of doing that is abstracting things… shearing them down to their essence. But I’m not sure how to do that in a way that makes things more meaningful… that doesn’t just lose important details.”

“You’ve got to keep the right details, I think,” Lincoln says. “Polish away at them until they shine, like a jewel. They’ll be the skeleton of story that people remember; the connecting details may shift, but they’ll remain. Instances of strangeness so clear and absurd that they strike the audience as clearly real.”

“Because… after all,” Upton says, “they are.”

For a second, you’re sure you can hear a voice in the wind through the trees outside.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps… the order could be disrupted, too,” you say. “Keeping details and instants as the focus, but structuring it more like an investigation: digging backwards from the end, unravelling the causes.”

And now the two worlds are coming together. The City-folk and the Forest-folk and more besides, all making their ways through the cooling wood, to the Place where the Carnival is held. Pebbles has organised it in Stillmirror’s clearing, and Granny’s lanterns light the way.

You step across the threshold, and you catch your breath, feeling the coolness in the air and remembering how cold it was last Winter, when you stood here last.

You freeze in place. Can you do it? Fit all of these details together into a coherent whole? It’s all so bewilderingly big… not like the world you used to know.

Upton lays a gentle wing-tip on your shoulder; Lincoln a gentle paw. “You’ll be wonderful,” Upton says.

You smile, feeling lantern-warmth in your chest. You step forward, greet friends. Pebbles and Bushy-Tail are smiling together, at the centre of things. You link up with Lorah for a while; you’ve been seeing a lot of each other, this past year.

And then, the time for the stories comes. The time for yours.

“Almost a wheel’s turn ago now, in this very clearing, a story came to an end. The wind was bitter cold, blowing so every bit of every beast was set a-chattering. But the tapestry the heroes had woven held firm, and kept them warm, and snug, and close. The heroes came from every clime. From monarchies, and anarchies, and all the archies between. Most of them were animals. Some of them were Spirits. Long separated, by nature or nurture or both, they came together, at the final hour of need, put differences aside, and told the Winter: ‘no’.”

“That is how one strand of our story ends, and how come you’re standing here. But other threads there are to tug. At a Carnival a bit like this, at this very time but not this place, a fire burned beneath the open sky. A king, come to anarchy’s heart, to bring a pledge of warmth and hope. To bring a blizzard, snuffing out that hand-held dawn.”

“Peeling back further layers to approach their truthful source, we find the fear of the flame beneath the ground eating at the heart of the coldness in the air. And the coldness creeping beneath the sea, to awaken a slumbering thing, all tentacles and teeth. A hungering thing, who was willing yet to begin the road to change.”

“Each creature, on its questing path, found friends to aid them, who needed aid. From a round table gathering of these friends, messengers went near and far, seeking out lonely Spirits, offering them company, and asking aid.”

“Surrounded by a web of faith, ensnared by cold iron of disdain, the creator of our dreams sat, longing to escape their pain. Investigation brought forth cracks. The truth, believed in every heart, finally shattered prison walls, so that pale light twinkled across the snow.”

“I do not begin my tale at the beginning, nor end it at the end, because that is not how we lived it. We were thrown glittering embers of the truth, trails down subtle paths that, journalists all, we followed. Until we found that we had been holding thread, weaving together a network of friends and tales. Connections, truth, stories, bound as one: a Raccoon’s strange dream, flickering in every heart.”