Each month we share excerpts from the illustrated novel Dreams of Ýdalir with our followers. Each excerpt is accompanied by an exclusive “sneak peek”/”work in progress” of the concept art work, created by Roberto especially for the main theme and mood of the chapter it comes from.
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Now for the excerpt and art:
The Wild Woman
7 August, 1794
I had the most strange dream this night. It was of a woman.
She beckons to me from the trees deep in the forest and I am compelled to go to her. Her hair is bright as flames and tendrils of it rise up in the wind, caressing her face and sticking to and winding around the tree branches above her. Her face and hands are pure white like moonlight and her eyes are dark and wild.
As I come closer, I notice that the tree branches framing her head and face are not in fact from the trees surrounding her, but are actually a part of her, like some great rack of antlers. In fact, they may be antlers, disguised as branches, but I can’t quite make it out.
I feel her urgency in my coming to her, but feel no malice or harm, just a deep, deep longing for companionship and love, and a protectiveness towards me.
She is a wild woman to be sure, someone who has cultivated a synergy with the forests and the trees. Someone who has spent much of her life there, away from humans, lying down with the deer at night and following the flight of birds.
“I am Elen,” she says, “Some call me the mother of these forests and the creatures who live here. I am mother to some yet this forest was not always my home. I was sent here by my own grief to heal and I have long since aligned myself with the Good Folk who live here and are in fact true mothers and fathers to this place. And you are one of mine, my child many generations removed, yet I claim you still”.
That is all I can remember from this very vivid dream. I awoke with a start and I am still feeling shaky. Right as I awoke, in a flash of understanding, I realized who this woman was and my place in her story, her place in mine. But in this moment it is gone, all fading away as the dawn starts creeping through the windows. Yet her image is etched into my mind, her flaming hair, and her dark and wild eyes.
