He'd seen the same evening light in its pools of standing water that recalled a hero's footprints or fragments of firmament fallen to earth. He had crossed it countless times, treading carefully among glittering blue and green damselflies while tracking a hare or a slow-moving grouse. It was a mysterious, holy place, home to spirits and strange mists, a place of transformation and danger. The slight hollows in his clean-shaven countenance bespoke hard labor and scant harvests.

His muscular shoulders were those of a man who had herded cattle milked at daybreak and evening, who each spring broke the virgin soil with his plow, who sowed corn and reaped it with sharpened blade - a man ruled by circular, circadian rhythms of light and darkness. But the primary sensation was cold, a deep, numbing chill combined with an utterly astonishing softness, whose deceitful purpose, he knew, was to draw him into its familiar, bosomy grasp and keep him here forever.Ībove his head the midsummer evening remained fair and mild, and his eyes reflected the waning twilight still visible at the top of the bog hole, scarcely more than an arm's length above his head. He gasped for air, feeling the leather cord encircling his throat, all at once aware of a strange, spreading warmth upon his chest - blood, his own blood, sticky and metallic. Was all this real, or only a vision of what was to come? He remembered running, a glancing blow, and before that -įor a moment he remained very still then he struggled to right himself in the bog hole's narrow fissure, pressing against the walls with his hands and elbows, treading slowly against the dark, pulpy liquid into which he'd already sunk to his hips. He shook his head, groggy, as though awakened from sleep. His body, however, seemed to require further persuasion. He knew it was the reason he had been brought to this place, the reason he had been born. The moment he plunged into the frigid water at the bottom of the bog hole, his eyes fluttered open, and his mind grasped the fact that he would certainly die here.

Lake of Sorrows by Erin Hart