*removes shining white robe* *douses torch* Now, ze next bottle is an odd, smoky vintage with a hint of ripe citrus fruit, questionable purity, a certain richness in the mouth, and a lengthy finish. (Critics say it’s fairly priced for the quality) Hope you enjoy. Love you!
Red Velvet
How could Little Red Riding Hood have been so very good
And still keep the wolf from the door?
Why was she dressed up in her bright flaming red
Unless she intended to knock someone dead
Why did she ramble she knew it was a gamble
She was out in the woods for no good.
They say she was a maid most discreet
And there's no doubt about it she must have been sweet
But you know and I know that even sweet girls must eat
So how could Little Red Riding Hood have been so very good
And still keep the wolf from the door?
(AP Randolph)
He comes to me on the edge of waking—lithe muscles rippling beneath taut skin.
He closes his eyes and inhales. “Ah! At last.”
White teeth flash as his mouth tips up into a smile. He is the unknown that I somehow know to the marrow of my bones; his breath is warm, and his skin smells of iron, juniper, and an earthly musk. Nice sensory details
His rich, dark voice pours into me like hot buttered rum. I float upon its currents, unable to resist its pull. “Deep in the woods where bucks rut and does drop their fauns, there is a glade beside a brook. The moss is soft. The grass is tall and sweet. There, I will twine pink mayflowers and purple violets into your hair. Your red velvet cape is soft beneath our naked bodies. Your skin is soft, warm velvet. Your thighs warm and strong around me.” \
His yellow-gold eyes beckon. I want to touch him, but step back and shake my head.
“You’re forbidden,” I breathe.
He reaches out. I shudder but do not pull away as a long, warm fingertip brushes the soft flesh just above my triangle of dark curls.
His lip curls. “We always long for the forbidden things and desire what is denied us. Come to me in the glade where the sweetest blossoms bloom after your first Moon Blood.”
I whisper, “No!” but step toward him—iron to lodestone—as he vanishes into a veil of mist. His sinewy, powerful, body, raven hair, and hungry eyes are imprinted upon the backs of my eyelids. ###
A congregation of startled crows explodes out of the beech trees and tatters my dream. I stare at the whitewashed wall and listen to the sleep sounds of my Sisters, their backs to the growing light, deep in the other-life of their own dreams. Yesterday I thought that I knew each of them as I thought that I knew myself. But today their steady, even breathing cannot calm me. He has left his mark upon me. I am slicked with sweat and my heart beats as if I had run hidden trails between the Grandmother’s House and the Younger Sisters’ barracks.
I moan softly as new warmth and wetness slicks my core. Our Elder Sister, touches my shoulder. “I heard you stir. What troubles you, Younger Sister?”
I push off the thin white blanket, spread my thighs, and touch the symmetrical crimson petals that paint them.
Elder Sister’s nostrils flair. Her lips thin. “Your first Moon Blood! What is your age?”
“Sixteen years this Beltane.”
She clicks her tongue and gathers the sheets between my legs. “So young! I am almost nineteen summers and haven’t yet…” Her brow wrinkles. “How could this be? For seven generation no Daughter has started her courses so early! You are of your mother’s flesh in a direct line to the Foremothers—flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. May the Great Diana hold them safe in the Fields of The Faithful!”
I touch my forehead in respect. My mother, Red Andraste, was a Glorious Martyr—her life and her valiant death a powerful reminder of a Daughter’s perfect surrender to the Goddess’s dictates. When I was two, Wolves had raided our territory and come perilously close to The Grandmother’s hidden cottage. As a guardian, and handmaid to the Grandmother, it was her duty to defend. The battle was fierce. She and her Sisters had killed many Wolves, but in the end the enemy surrounded my mother and another. The other female, a traitorous Daughter whose name has been stricken from the records, whose soul is blackened and damned, chose surrender. But Red Andraste, namesake of the warrior goddess, remained invincible. “Great Lady,” she had cried, “Keep me pure! I choose your dark embrace.”
She fell upon her sword when I was two, rather than be taken by The Wolves. She is with the Goddess now—a sacred martyr. Every Samhain, when we honor the Ancestresses, we tell her story and pray for her guidance in the name of The Great Diana.
Looking down from her paradise, could she know my fear and shame? My cheeks flush and burn. I am grateful that the semi-darkness hides my humiliation. Why had the Goddess singled me out? I looked exactly like my mother who looked like her mother before her. Why could I not be as perfectly pleasing to the Goddess as each ancestress?
###
No Daughter has ever passed Moon Blood before her nineteenth year. The Grandmother’s magic prevents it.
Elder Sister purses her lips.
“Here! Hold these sheets about you. I must take you to the Gateway now. The Daughters will bathe and instruct you in what is necessary.”
She snatches up a shawl and drapes it about me as she trundles me out the door.
I whisper. “What will happen next, Elder Sister?”
“You’ll be purified and assigned your crucible, of course,” she snaps.
She is as unsure of my future as I am. I wonder whether she is afraid for me or of me. Perhaps she is jealous because a Younger Sister will pass through the Gateway and receive her red cloak before an Elder Sister.
The Younger Sisters are all awake now. Some whisper together and gape at me like trout yanked from their water world by a cleverly bated hook’s monstrous deceit. But luck is with them. When I leave, they will return to what they know. Today will be as any other day, and they will swim the shallows safely while I dangle, twist, and gasp. Caught. My stomach clenches. I will never return to the barracks. The Younger Sisters sense my change
Elder Sister speaks the truth. Since the foremothers founded our order, The Daughters of Diana have come to their first Moon Blood at the age of nineteen and are not permitted to have a child implanted until their twenty-fourth year. I smell the iron tang of Moon Blood and a heavy woman scent about me. My breasts ache with forbidden longing. I am perverse and disgusting. For seven heartbeats I face myself and admit, silently, that I want to touch him as he touched me.
It has been several years since The Wolves have raided our territory. Our martial arts training begins when were turn six. Buy our thirteenth year our combat instructors expect us to kill Wolves on sight.
###
When we were twelve, our combat instructor, Red Artemisia, carried a Wolf’s corpse into the training arena and threw it at our feet. We gasped and pinched our noses against the death stench, but dared not step back for fear of a whipping. Daughters are never weak.
Her voice shook with battle rage and triumph. “Look well upon this beast Younger Sisters. Is it not hideous?”
She gestured toward its hairy chest, facial hair and strange nether regions with disgust.
“This thing is neither Man nor Beast.” Her eyes raked us. “But it is a filthy predator. It craves us because we are pure.” Her eyes fixed upon me. “Explain Younger Sister!”
I squared my shoulders, fought back the urge to vomit, and began. “This Wolf is an impure mingling of human and beast. In the Burning Times after the Great Blast, the Evil Ones mingled the essence of human and beast in their warriors. The creatures that survived share wolf and human genes, but females are scarce and do not breed well. They are an unholy, impure race while we are pure—unsullied—mother to daughter. So mote it be.”
Red Artemisia nodded. “Well said. They seek us for we are pure and separate. Under the guidance of the Lady Diana, Huntress ever pure, the first Grandmothers, great magicians, hid us far from the Killing Fields. For centuries we have remained pure and separate as the Goddess desires.”
She flopped the creature onto its back. Death had stolen the coiled threat from its thickly muscled arms and powerful thighs.
“While we remain pure and unsullied, this male thing continues to degrade. It is no better than the animals with which its cells are mingled. Still, generation after generation they stalk us to use us as filthy breeders, filled with Wolf muck, breeding abominations.”
She scowled. “Look well upon this. Would you let suck filth rut upon you? Do any of you desire such a fate?”
We shuddered and shouted, “No!” with one voice.
“So mote it be,” she said. Then Red Artemisia’s lips twitched into an almost smile. “That is why we hunt and kill Wolves. That is why you must free yourselves, through death if necessary, if Wolves should capture you.”
Her eyes flashed. “For the Goddess will damn as traitor and heretic any Daughter of Diana who embraces impurity and violation!”
“So mote it be,” we replied, still one voice though now a much quieter one.
###
I stumble as Elder Sister halts before a strong iron gateway bordered by a high, thick hedge. She sounds a small gong. Red Clotilda appears moments later. We bow deeply. Red Clotilda is a great warrior, chosen by The Council of Mothers to attend the Grandmother. Sparrows chirp and dart in and out of the hedge building their nests. One swoops toward me, its beady black eyes intent. Red Clotilda grabs my arm as I move to swat it away. One small, sharp pain later is darts back into the hedge with several strands of my hair to add to its nest.
Red Clotilda follows it with sharp grey eyes and studies me intently. Her eyes brighten. “A good , if odd, omen for your crossing, Younger Sister. You will bear well when your time comes.”
I would like to ask her what she means, but am shy of questioning a revered Elder. We are Parthenos––Virgin Mothers––creators who have birthed a greater, purer civilization without need of a male consort. Yet male and female animals mate, build homes, bear young., Part of me has become part of that process and my skin crawls despite Red Clotilda’s assurance that the omen is good.
Elder Sister squeezes my hand, steps back, and walks away deserting upon this alien shore. No. That is unfair and untrue. She must go back. I do my duty and honor to continue into this newness. Still, I wanted to cry, “Come back! Take me back with you to the nest of our girlhood.” I press my lips together and blink back tears. I will not see her again until my training is completed. Then I will be a Daughter cloaked in red and she will be my Younger Sister. Red Clotilda selects a key from the ring suspended from her belt, unlocks the gate and offers me her calloused hand. We walk through an arching cloister of ancient apple trees, their blossoms just budding, delicate and pink.
The Cleansing Lodge is just ahead. I pause and swallow. Red Clotida’s eyes soften. She touches my cheek.
“This is a necessary step in your passage Younger Sister. Do not fear Moon Blood or your crossing into womanhood. After your Time of Purification is over, you will receive your Red Cloak and your crucible. You are held in the light of the Goddess. You will stand true.”
“I am afraid, my Mother.”
She smiles tenderly.
“Do not be afraid. Some passages cannot be helped, or changed. A child cannot grow back into her mortal mother’s womb. Nor can you become a Younger Sister again.”
She cups my face in her calloused hands. “After seven generations, the Goddess has chosen you—the youngest Daughter to cross since The Before Times. You must surrender what you were, for what you are now, and for what you will become.”
###
I have been instructed in proper etiquette. When I reach the Cleansing Lodge I must remain silent until my Moon Time is over and I have been purified. Then I will be initiated and receive my unique crucible. No Daughter could ever reveal her crucible as it was given by a Mother and assigned by The Grandmother. The ritual was a mystery to the uninitiated Younger Sisters. No small amount of speculation went on in the barracks regarding what the ritual and crucible might involve.The Cleansing Lodge is nothing like the stark whitewashed barracks of my former life. Nor is it like the fieldstone and ivy clad home of the Daughters, or the high-roofed wooden house with its brightly painted Ancestress totems where the Mothers, our elders, live amid the bee trees and kitchen gardens. The Cleansing Lodge was built into a green hill slope carpeted with violets. I bow to two red-cloaked Daughters, their faces obscured by deep hoods.
Red Clodilda murmurs, “Take off your tunic and sandals. You must enter the Mother’s Womb hiding nothing from Her—without or within.”
The hooded Daughters lead me down a narrow passage, the earth packed hard by generations of naked feet. They bath me in an ice cold spring until I burn with the cold and tell me that I am between the worlds, awaiting rebirth like a larvae in its chrysalis, or a child in its mother womb.
I nod and smile as they rub me down, and show me how to insert the tightly packed finely woven cloth into myself and instruct me in the making of herbal tea for cramps. I am a liar and a vile cheat. The Goddess will punish me for my silence and for coveting my dram like a miser covets gold. I long to slide into the hidden chambers of my dreams and feel his honey voice cover me with sweet words, feel his hands upon me, and touch his warm, forbidden flesh.
As always you've created the most unique of worlds, steeped in magic and mythos and beauty. Thank you.
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