There are nights in the old forests when the wind does not blow from anywhere. It simply begins, all at once, and the tall trees bow to it like servants. The people of the villages know what that means. They bar their doors, cover the windows, and tell their children not to look outside, whatever they hear. The Wild Hunt is riding.
At its head rides the Forest Lord. He sits on a boar so huge and so old that for years no hunter in the land could take it. His face is not a face but bark and splinters of cherry wood, grown together the way a tree closes over a wound. A crown of crystals stands on his head among pheasant feathers and small horns. In one hand he carries a staff of antlers crowned with a skull. The other hand is no hand at all.
Behind him come the rest of the Hunt: riders in dark armour, hounds that have no masters, things from the far side of the woods that have no names. They do not hunt deer. They hunt whatever is still out on the road after the wind has begun.
The old rule is simple. If you hear them, lie down in the grass. Bow your head. Whatever happens, do not look into the leader's eyes.
But sooner or later someone always looks. And the strange part of the story is not what happens to him in that moment. It is what happens after. He wakes, sure it was a dream, and finds himself in a saddle, galloping through the dark, the wind at his back, the howl of the pack in his ears. And in his chest, where there used to be fear, there is a new hunger. Somewhere ahead a living soul is still walking home, and now he can smell it.
That is how the Hunt grows. Not by killing. By being seen.
The boar is real, the trophy of the same hunter who stands among the roses in Hunter, and the Lord's face is the face of the Druid, grown older. The gaze that turns prey into predator will return in the saga's final chapter, in the werewolf of the deep woods.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in June 2024.)
