Tintagel… there were still those who believed the castle had been raised, on the crags at the far end of the long causeway into the sea, by the magic of the ancient folk of the Ys. Duke Gorlois laughed at this and said that if he had any of their magic, he would have used it to keep the sea from encroaching, year by year, upon the shoreline. In the four years since she had come here as Gorlois’s bride, Igraine had seen land, good land crumble into the Cornish sea. Long arms of black rock, sharp and craggy, extended into the ocean from the coast. And when the sun shone, it could be a fair and brilliant, the sky and water as brilliant as the jewels Gorlois had heaped on her on the day when she told him she bore his first child. But Igraine had never liked wearing them. The jewel which hung now at her throat had been given to her in Avalon: a moonstone which sometimes reflected the blue brilliance of the sky and the sea: but in the fog the jewel looked shadowed.

In the fog, sounds carried a long way. It seemed to Igraine, as she stood looking from the causeway back toward the mainland that she could hear footfalls of horses and mules, and the sound of voices, here in isolated Tintagel, where nothing lived but goats and sheep, and the herdsmen and their dogs, and the ladies of the castle with the few serving women and a few old men to guard them.

Slowly, Igraine turned and went back toward the castle. As always, standing in its shadow, she felt dwarfed by the loom these ancient stones at the end of the long causeway which stretched into the sea. The herdsmen believed that the castle had been built by the Ancient Ones from the lost lands of the Lyonnesse and the Ys; on a clear day, so the fishermen said, their old castles could be seen far out under the water. But to Igraine they looked like towers of rock, ancient mountains and hills drowned by the ever encroaching sea nibbled away, even now, at the very crags below the castle. Here at the end of the world, where the sea ate endlessly at the land, it was easy to believe in the drowned lands to the west; there were tales of a great fire mountain which had exploded, far to the south, and engulfed a great land there. Igraine never knew whether she believed the tales or not.

Yes; surely she could hear voices in the fog. It could not be savage raiders from over the sea, or from the wild shores of Erin. The time was long past when she needed to startle at a strange sound or a shadow. It was not her husband, the Duke; he was far away to the North, fighting Saxons at the side of Ambrosius Aurelianus, High King of Britain; he would have sent word if he intended to return.

And she need not fear. If the riders were hostile, the guards and soldiers in the fort at the landward end of the causeway, stationed there by the Duke Gorlois to guard his wife and child, would have stopped them. It would take an army to cut through them. And who would take an army to cut through them. And who would send any army against Tintagel?

There was a time- Igraine remembered without bitterness, moving slowly in to the castle yard-when she would have known who rode toward her castle. The thought held little sadness, now. Since Morgaine’s birth she no longer even wept for her home. And Gorlois was kind to her. He had soothed her through her early fear and hatred, had given her jewels and beautiful things, trophies of war, had surrounded her with ladies to wait upon her, and treated her always as his equal, excepts in councils of war. She could have asked no more, unless she had married a man of the Tribes. And in this she had given no choice. A daughter of the Holy Isle must do as was best for her people, whether it meant going to death in sacrifice, or laying down her maidenhood in the Sacred Marriage, or marrying where it was thought meet to cement alliances; this Igraine had done, marrying a Romanized Duke of Cornwall, a citizen who lived, even though Rome was gone from all of Britain, in Roman fashion.

She shrugged the cloak from her shoulders; inside the court it was warmer, out of the biting wind. And there, as the fog swirled and cleared, for a moment a figure stood before her materialized out of the fog and mist: her half-sister, Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, the Lady of the Holy Isle.

‘Sister!’ The words wavered, and Igraine knew she had not cried them aloud, but only whispered, her hands flying to her breast. ‘Do I truly see you here?’

The face was reproachful, and the words seemed to blow away in the sound of the wind beyond the walls.

Have you given up the Sight, Igraine? Of your free will?

Stung by the injustice of that, Igraine retorted, ‘It was you who decreed that I must marry Gorlois…’ but the form of her sister had wavered into the shadows, was not there, had never been there, Igraine blinked; the brief apparition was gone. She pulled the cloak around her body, for she was cold, ice cold; she knew the vision had drawn its force from the warmth and life of her body. She thought, I didn’t know I could still see that way, I was sure I could not… and then she shivered, knowing that Father Columba would consider this the work of the Devil, she should confess it to him. True, here at the end of the world the priest were lax, but an unconfessed vision would surely be treated as a thing unholy.

She frowned; why should she treat a visit from her own sister as the work of the Devil? Father Columba could say what he wished; perhaps his God was wiser than he was. Which Igraine thought, suppressing a giggle, would not be very difficult. Perhaps Father Columba had become a priest of Christ because no college of the Druids would have had a man so stupid among their ranks. The Christ God seemed not to care whether a priest was stupid or not, so long as he could mumble their mass, and read and write a little. She, Igraine herself, had more clerkly skills than Father Columba, and spoke better Latin when she wished. Igraine did not think of herself as well educated; she had not had the hardihood to study the deeper wisdom of the Old Religion, or to go into the Mysteries any further than was absolutely necessary for a daughter of the Temple of Mysteries, she could pass among the Romanized barbarians as a well-educated lady.

- from 'Mists of Avalon'

this is mother earth calling...calling for are help...

Outside in the garden she found lavender flowers and manage to find a few wild-rose hips. Boughs of juniper, too, she cut with her own small knife, only a few symbolic branches, and a small piece of hazel. Once in her room again she drew the bolt and stripped off her garments, standing naked and shivering before the fire. She had never done this, and knew Viviane would not approve, for those who were unskilled in the arts of sorcery could cause trouble for themselves by meddling with it. But these things, she knew, she could conjure the Sight even if she had it not.

She cast the juniper on the fire, and as the smoke rose, bound the branch of hazel to her forehead. She laid fruit and flowers before the fire, then touched salt and oil to her breast, took a bite of bread and a sip of the wine, then, trembling, laid the silver mirror where the firelight shone on it and, from the barrel which was kept for washing the women’s hair, poured clear rainwater across the silver surface of the mirror.

She whispered, ‘By common things and by uncommon, by water and fire, salt and oil and wine, by fruit and flowers together, I beg you, Goddess, let me see my sister Viviane.’

Slowly, the surface of the water stirred. Igraine, in a sudden icy wind, shivered, wondering for a moment if the spell would fail, if her sorcery were blasphemy as well. The blurred face forming in the mirror was first her own, then slowly it shifted, changed, was the awesome face of the Goddess, with the rowanberries bound about her brow. And then, as it cleared and steadied, Igraine saw; but not, as she had hoped and foreseen, into a living, speaking face. She looked into a room which she knew. It had once been the chamber of her mother at Avalon, and there were women there, in the dark robes of priestesses, and at first she looked in vain for her sister, for the women were coming and going, moving back and forth, and there was a confusion in the chamber. And then she saw her sister, Viviane; she looked weary and ill and drawn, and she was walking, walking back and forth, leaning on the arm of the one of the other priestesses, and Igraine knew in horror, what she saw. For Viviane, in her pale robe of undyed wool, was heavy with child, her belly swollen, her face dragged down with suffering, and ever she walked and walked, as, Igraine remembered, the midwives had made her do when she was in labor with Morgaine…

No, no! Oh, Mother Ceridwen, blessed Goddess, no…our mother so died, but Viviane was so sure she was past childbearing. And now she will die, she cannot bear a child at her age and live… why, when she knew she had conceived, did she not take some potion, to rid her of the child? This is the wreck of all their plans, then, it is the end…

you magickal element is water. you love the rain. people probably find you swimming all the time in the summer...