Goodbye Oganach

She fell into the vision as if it were a dream, but she had the acute knowledge in the forefront of her mind that it was not. She found herself in the glade around the Great Oak. Her heart soared only for a moment, before the fact that she was home reminded her of why she had fled.

It was dark, evening, with black storm clouds rolling quickly in from the horizon. Too quickly for real clouds, to black and evil and wrong. What golden sunset was left was swallowed quickly by the clouds and she whimpered and turned away.

“No,” came the ethereal voice of the shaman, “You must watch.”

Despite every instinct not to, she looked back at the oncoming storm. The sky was completely black now, and she would hear the bleats and barks of unnerved Fawnlings, but could see none before her. The glade was empty, but she could hear echoes of voices that were familiar to her. Voices with no words.

The tension gathered up above, the clouds roiling and churning as if the ocean was in the sky. Dread filled her, and she cast her eyes at the Great Oak. She saw what happened before it did, while it did, and after. She could not stop seeing it, it filled her mind and made her scream to unsee it.

With a hissing crack and a deafening slam, the clouds spat lightning to the ground. The forks stabbed at the Great Oak, and seemed to cling to it. With a blast of light and searing flame, the Great Oak was suddenly ablaze. The lightning hit once more, in tandem and after, before and again. The Great Oak was split asunder, and the flaming halves bowed towards the ground under the fury of the Sky King.

Nuala shrieked and awoke, the pitch blackness of the cave sending her into a panic. “Hush, hush, it’s okay,” came the voice of Elf, the shaman’s daughter. She could hardly see a thing besides the marks of their paint. Her eyes had adjusted slightly since she had been down in the caves, but after the blinding light of the vision, she may as well have had her eyes closed. Nuala blinked and saw the visage of Elf’s painted golden wings bobbing in the darkness, and shivered even as the friendly young doe sat down with her.

The more ominous red stripes of the shaman were not far from her other flank, and she could only guess from the sounds and movement of his glowing paint meant that he was putting the vision-causing herbs away. When her pounding heart began to slow, her tears began to run.

“Tell me what you saw,” Berach’s gravelly voice asked.

Nuala shook her head, though in denial of the vision rather than him. “The Great Oak.”

“Your sacred tree?” He asked.

She nodded, “The Great Oak is where Óganach’s body rests, while his spirit rests in the Sky Kingdom. But...” She quivered, and she felt the comforting touch of Elf’s muzzle on her cheek and she stilled.

“It’s okay, it’s just a vision, only the message is real, not what you see,” the shaman’s daughter murmured.

Nuala took a deep breath, “But Óganach’s spirit was angry. He sent a storm to... to destroy the Great Oak! I don’t understand! Why is he angry? Is it because I left?”

The shaman spoke with no bias either way. “Perhaps, but perhaps not. Does your god have a reason to be angry at anyone else?”

Nuala thought for a moment, her tears slowly drying on her cheeks. “I... I don’t know.”

The bobbing of the shaman’s warpaint suggested he was nodding. “The message of the vision is not always clear to begin with. You should never jump to a conclusion, since the most obvious answer is not always the correct one. You must know the message in your heart, and the message will be known when your heart tells you.”