Celyn’s Story of Leaving Home

This is Celyn’s story of how he left home; please don’t read it unless it has been revealed in game

After he had learned what Eirian had to teach him, Celyn returned home.  He had no particular impulses, no particular guidance otherwise; he had gotten what he needed, and the burning fury at everything feeling wrong, of curves and cycles and all of that, finally quelled in the acceptance that he was out of season, and the discomforts could be managed.

Things were all right for a while.  He settled back into his routines: cleaning the standing stones.  Playing the drum and wondering if anyone heard, if he was assisting at some invisible revel that mortal eyes were not permitted to see and mortal eyes were not permitted to hear.  Pouring out the wine, when it was time for wine, and sometimes being accosted by some fey who wanted a drink of it rather than the traditional libations.  He wove flower crowns again, when it was the season for flowers, enough for every child who asked and the adults who were willing.  He added to this gathering the herbs that would ease the unease of his body, or the others that would make for the sorts of cosmetic that, when dried, would let him reshade his jawline, to look not older but just that little bit blockier, that meant when he saw his face he saw himself.  He took time for small prayers of gratitude, of celebration, when the impulse struck, and he looked for the holy place with the tree out of season in it, but he never found it.

Clawyn was not large enough for it to be likely there was another trans man there. It meant he occasionally went on a hike down the slopes to Nefyn, the nearest village that wasn’t home, down where the land was flatter and better for grain.  Grandfather Trefor there worked as the administrator for the little temple to the Father.  He was a big round man, broad-shouldered, and had managed to grow the sort of amazing beard that eluded Celyn entirely, surely as glorious as what he’d heard dwarves could do.

Grandfather Trefor liked things neat and tidy and orderly and Celyn did not think they had all that much in common at all, but he tried to find things, to learn things, about growing into a man the hard and twisty way.

But when he asked, “Was it hard for you, growing into a man?” Grandfather Trefor said, “Oh, no.  Of course I had to talk to the apothecary to make everything come out right in the end, but that’s hardly any trouble, now, is it?  Do you need help with the apothecary part?”

“I learned the herbs I need in the Wyrdling temple in Ruthin, Grandfather.  But I would like directions to your apothecary, if you would.”

“Are you thinking of apprenticing to the apothecary?  Do you have a good herbalist in Clawyn?”  It was painfully obvious that Grandfather Trefor approved of the idea.

“No, Grandfather, I just wish to learn if they know things that I don’t know, about the herbs for our kind of people.  Or maybe I learned things they don’t know, and that would be good to share.”  Celyn was, if nothing else, painfully earnest about it.

“Our kind of people?”  He was briefly confused, and Celyn didn’t know why.  “Oh, yes, of course.”  And he had taken Celyn around to compare notes with the apothecary, and Celyn had added some things to his book and shared the recipe he had that the apothecary didn’t know.  That conversation, at least, made sense.

The next time Celyn tried visiting Grandfather Trefor he was invited to dinner with some of his extended family.  Trefor had had one child of his body and his wife had carried two.  Their husband had died several years before, and he remembered that; while he was pretty sure he wouldn’t actually manage to achieve it, he did think that “lived a life such that everyone in the villages in walking distance attended the funeral for actually good reasons” was a pretty good ambition overall.  Not that he would say so; it seemed impolite.

The family dinner involved the children, a few grandchildren, and Grandfather Trefor holding forth on how being trans did not prevent one from settling down and forming a family.  This had not been on Celyn’s top list of concerns, but he actually suspected that it was a reasonably common thing for people to worry about, so he appreciated it for the supportive gesture that it was.  He was not at all sure what to do about the granddaughter who leaned in and asked him if he had his eye on anyone, and he stammered something about being very busy with the fey shrines and managed, after only a little fumbling, to divert the conversation into a discussion of tradition and ritual.  Trefor had opinions about that, of course, and could be provoked into holding forth on them at sufficient length that several of the more energetic people in the family eventually groaned and politely took their leave.

Before he made it back for a third visit, cousin Ifan was a fool.  Well, cousin Ifan was often a fool, though in a different way than Celyn was often a fool; Celyn had contemplated that more than once.  Ifan was the sort of fool who would irritate an ox when trying to hitch him up to a cart, though, and that sort of foolishness was the sort of thing that did not at all end well.

Ifan was dying when the scream went up.  One side of his chest had been caved in when the ox kicked him - Celyn would have thought it would have been worse if the beast hadn’t been polled.  The ribs were in all the wrong places, poking through all the wrong things.  Ribs, Celyn thought, in the moment that seemed to last forever, should not poke through anything at all.  Ifan was dying, Aunt Dilys was screaming, and Celyn walked.

He walked like a ghost, they said afterwards, like an apparition, like something eerie and otherworldly, but he walked; he knelt in the dirt by Ifan and picked up a pebble.  Someone was yelling at him, maybe asking him what he was doing, but he twisted his wrist, so, and set the pebble to glowing, and laid it on Ifan’s chest, just above the injury.

Celyn was not sure if the screaming stopped or if he just stopped paying any attention at all to it, as he spread his hands over Ifan’s chest, watching the way the flickreing rainbows of the light spun across his knuckles.  Ifan’s life was caught in a torrent, whirling, getting sucked away, he could feel it, he wondered if the Night Queen was there, to pay him heed.  Someone probably ought to give Ifan a good lecture, and he might listen to the goddess. Humans he wasn’t that great at.

The light played across his hands, and he touched, his fingers coming away with blood.  That wasn’t right.  Ifan shouldn’t be bent like that.  No, Ifan should be whole.  His fingers flexed, and he pulled at— he pulled at something, he wasn’t sure what he was pulling, but the ribs straightened as he pulled, as the power passed through and on and Ifan suddenly gasped and reached up to try to grab Celyn’s wrist.  Celyn dodged it easily, picked up the pebble, and put it in his cousin’s hand.  “You need to not antagonize Guto, he’s both bigger and smarter than you.  Rest.”

When Celyn stood back up, someone was yelling about miracles and he could not, for the longest moment, figure out what they meant.  His hands were tingling and lightly covered in Ifan’s blood; his head was tingling more, with the rush and exhaustion of power.  “Someone should take Ifan home,” he said, to whoever it was— Aunt Dilys?— “and explain what he did wrong so he doesn’t do it again.”

“Praise the Mother!” someone else said, and Celyn was not able to pull back to somewhere quieter, to work through how he felt about what was happened, someone was dragging him off to the temple despite his protests.

It was, he realized in retrospect, an easy mistake to make, with the Mother as the protector of the village, and the miracle being one of healing, but at the time he mostly found it infinitely frustrating.  Nobody was listening; there was too much excitement, too much celebration, for listening.  He had made a miracle.  The gods had blessed Clawyn with a miracle.  Praise the Mother.

Eventually he gave up on trying to explain anything and practiced his drumming on the wooden floor of the temple, working up to the most complicated rhythms, the ones he’d learned from the fey themselves, that took all his concentration.  It let the chaos of everyone’s excitement and assumptions wash around him, though he smiled, just a little, at it; he had brought chaos to the sleeepy little town.  Chaos and hope, for Ifan’s recovery.  That felt good.

Feeling good did not last forever.  People wanted to know, to understand.  The disruption to Celyn’s life was complete.  People followed him when he was trying to tend the fey spaces, which was fine when it was the children - he was happy to talk to the children about the work he did - but other people tended to get in the way, wanted to talk to him about miracles, whether he could do more.  His protests that he needed to rest, to recover, got him a brief reprieve, but eventually the general consensus was that he had obviously rested enough and someone should see if he was one of those who was blessed with the power of miracles, or if it had just been one moment, for Ifan.

He let himself get nudged into clearing some rot off a harvest of grapes with a prayer, but the miracle felt hollow inside him.  Yes, he could do it; it did not leave him as exhausted as healing Ifan had done.  But it felt strange, incorrect, it reminded him of being angry the way he had been angry when they thought he was a girl.  He slipped away in the night, into the woods, to get a chance to think, drumming quietly to help settle his thoughts.

He was still young.  He let them buffet him this way and that, because they were older, full adults, because they were family.  Because, he admitted, they thought him fey and strange, all in a completely known and knowable way, but perhaps that meant they thought he was a little bit dim, too.  A different Celyn, a Celyn before he had found peace with the Wyrdling, would have taken petty vengeance over that, would have stolen something or broken something to make his displeasure known.  He didn’t need that anymore.

He took his private thoughts back to the village and let them steep for a bit, like his tea to fix his voice steeped.  He could be patient, and test, and make sure that this was the right disruption, the right change.  When he made clear he had no interest in being brought into the Mother’s temple organization, he was asked to go down to Nefyn and talk to Grandfather Trefor again, which he did.

Grandfather Trefor did what nobody in Clawyn had done, and sat down with Celyn and some wine and asked, “How do you feel about your miracle?”

“I feel,” Celyn began, and had to think about it.  “I feel like nobody sees me anymore.  I’m the one who made the miracle.  Miracles.  They don’t even remember that I was terrible a year ago, when I was angry because I didn’t know how to become a man.  That I made trouble and broke things.  They don’t remember that the fey gave me magic before this.  That I was supposed to be minding the standing stones.”

Trefor just nodded, and drank his wine, and eventually Celyn spoke more into the quiet he created.

“I’m not for this.  It’s not what I’m made for.  For being just a channel, just a way for miracles to happen.”

“I don’t think anyone’s made for that,” Grandfather Trefor said thoughtfully.  “It puts the universe out of order.  It’s not justice, is it?”

“It’s not.”  Celyn knew he sounded sulky and didn’t bother correcting it.

“It has been a long time since we’ve had a miracle-worker in these villages.  People are excited.  I cannot blame them for that.”

Celyn sighed.  “I guess.”

“But that does not mean they are treating you well, young man.  And I imagine it is hard for you to say no to your mother when she says she needs a light for her mending.”

That made him laugh.  “I don’t want to, to not help.  But....”

“But you are, you say, not made for that.  Tell me, Celyn— which god has blessed you?”

Celyn looked up, and actually met his eyes for a moment before both of them looked away.  “The Wyrdling.”  He paused.  “People did ask, but I don’t think they actually paid attention.  Because the first miracle was healing.  Praise the Mother, they said.  As if she’d done it, when it was them, and my hands.”

“But Clawyn looks to the Mother first.”

“Yeah.”  He sighed again.  “Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I just— it’s something that makes me feel like they don’t see me.  I’m not made for peace!”

“But not war, either,” Trefor pointed out.

“Not war either.  I’m made for,” Celyn had never articulated it.  “I’m made for hope.  I’m made for transformation.  I’m made for ferocity and madness and drumming for the fey.  I’m made for taking care of our people, people like us, like Eirian who taught me the herbs she needed, that I needed.”

“In the Wyrdling temple in Ruthin, you said.”  He was putting the thoughts into a tidy sort of order, like he always did.  “Would you be happier in Ruthin?”

“I don’t think I’m for temples either.  Even Wyrdling temples.  Though it was nice there.  With people who understood.”

It was Trefor’s turn to chuckle.  “I have not done a good job of understanding you.  But I am a creature of order, and you are not.”

Celyn smiled.  “But you tried, Grandfather Trefor.  And this— this has been good.”

“I think,” said Trefor, “that our villages are too small for your fate.  You will have to find it elsewhere in the world.”

“Further than Ruthin.”

“Likely,” he said with a laugh.  “But do you trust to chance?”

“I trust to chance, and fate, and my dreams.  That, that I’m made for.”

He nodded.  “I recommend you do not take my word for it.  But see if your dreams guide you.”

Celyn nodded.  “Thank you,” he said, very quietly, with the full import of the words rolling in his tone.  “I can… I can see what I have to do now.”

“Good lad.  Now come help me with a few things in the temple before you go home, I need someone agile.”

Celyn laughed, and helped, and climbed back up out of the fields and into the low hills of Clawyn, feeling thoughtful.  And there were dreams, it was true, dreams that had birdflight, the world laid out like a map, one of the sorts of expensive ones that traders might have rather than the rough ones that the village made for things.  He found a flask of wine and went out to tell the fey that he was called elsewhere, and he hoped that someone would keep up the rites properly.

Then he went to tell his mother.

It was, perhaps, six months later, while he was playing dice— a delightful thing that thrilled him in ways that were difficult to explain— with some of the players in the travelling theater that he had joined, that he wondered how much of the disruption of Ifan’s injury had been part of the necessary chaos to force him to leave the nest.  He considered it for a while, until one of the players elbowed him to take his turn with the dice; he considered it and then decided that if fate had found him that way, he would figure it out when it became relevant.  It was not a problem for now.