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You heard them as you walked in the woods. You heard them as you glided across frozen lakes on your skis under stark, spangled skies. You heard them in bonfires, in lakes and brooks, in axes and arrowheads, in all the tools and dwellings of your people. You saw the fairies in white dancing upon distant meadows and the lights of hidden treasures across swamps and knew you were home.
You were told after the fact that you did not truly exist back then. You were at best a child and at worst a mindless monster, little more than one of those whispering spirits. Perhaps there is a kernel of truth to those claims: so much of your memory of those distant times is opaque haze.
Still. You remember the sheer presence within the holy groves and the calls of the swan upon the river of death. You remember the scent of blood and lilies-of-the-valley in bloom. You remember looking at your fur-wrapped hand clutching the shaft of a spear. Perhaps you weren't you, exactly, but someone existed in your skin all the same.
Among the things you remember is that he came uninvited.
He tells the story differently, of course. Or rather, his people do: he himself holds his peace as he so often does, allowing his silence to speak for him. He came smelling of saltwater and promising rules, and law, and protection. Above all, he came bearing the great gift of the cross. You met him bearing an axe.
No, there was not merely an axe. Axes. Most of which fell upon no living skulls, but upon spruces, and birches, and rowans.
It stole upon you in secret, the notion that you belonged with him.
You never lost yourself, not entirely. You sang your spells and spoke to snakes even when told not to, but it wasn't as though either you or your people could keep the new faith from muddling the old. You couldn't help living with him changing you.
And so you forgot.
Your people clung onto their remaining scraps of knowledge of what had once been a shared truth, but even what was preserved melted into meaninglessness. You could see no spirits, heed no advice from the woods or the lakes. Worse, you didn't know to miss it. Nature wasn't silent, after all. You could hear the sparrows and the larks, the crows and the wild ducks, the chittering of squirrels and the rustling of leaves. There was so much sound that you couldn't even conceive that a part of you was forever lost.
Until, one day, you could.
What triggered it? You cannot say. All you know is that one day a lone memory trickled back into your conscious thoughts: the memory of a holy rowan. And an axe.
More have followed. The thoughts are infrequent and usually pass without troubling you overmuch. Yes, you will think, that was how things were once. But it's too late to regain what you've lost, far too late, and so you move on.
He is not your enemy. Even during the darkest hours, he never threatened your very existence. At worst, he whittled away pieces of you so softly neither of you truly noticed what was happening. At worst, he allowed his gaze to be turned away as you were threatening to bleed out. He is not your enemy. He is your friend. Now more than ever.
Still, sometimes you look at him, at your closest ally, at your trustworthy neighbour, at the person you once pledged yourself to, and the gaze crossing yours tells you nothing concrete and suggests nothing hopeful. You see no malice, but the contempt is even more galling.
Perhaps it's only in your mind. After all, hasn't he told you that he loves you? Are your fates not intertwined? Look. His hand reaches out towards yours.
And yet, as you take his hand and interlace your fingers with his, all you can hear is the absence of sound from within the holy groves.