Initiation

She hadn't known, when she'd given herself henna tattoos of animal prints and let her hair loose and dressed in green, what would happen.
She'd walked calmly down the beach to the edge of the woods, where earth was bordered by sea and sky. She smelled moss, ferns, salt, and the algae on wet rocks. With each gust of wind the hem of her pants was stained with salt, her hair more tangled until it hung in a matted curtain before her eyes.
She'd thrown out her arms, eyes bright, and spun slowly as she spoke:
I call on you, spirits of the earth, spirits of the water, spirits of the wind, will you come to me?
It was a wish, a dim hope, a silly impulse. She hadn't known what would appear, that the elemnts had heard her were curious of this girl who spoke to them.
Creatures of wind gathered first, for the breeze had carried her voice to them quite quickly. Sylphs, graceful, lithe, so thin they could spin disappear if she wasn't watching. They were insubstantial, barely there, almost transparent where the sun shone through. They were more like an interruption in the air. They reached for her and before her shock subsided, she felt their touches on her skin.
She stumbled away from the water, when something rose up from the waves. A shadow in white seafoam crests. Black eyes, bottomless, arms lock with black clawed hands. Its bottom half disappeare into a mass of waterweed, it's skin pale, covered with blue ripples like the pattern of light on the waves. Its hair glistened, clinging to its lovely face like seaweed to a rock. It watched her almost hungrily, seemingly unwilling to venture beyond the rising tide.
She backed into the woods, into a copse of trees where the spirits flitted back and forth, becoming a part of the forest. There was a rampant stag, horns twice as long and reared back like a goat's, spirals branching off like twigs on a branch. There was a faun, and some unrecognizable creature, eyes like a forest canopy; green speckled with brown and gold, iridescent as leaves in late sunlight. It was deep brown, blending into the trees, it smelled of earth, young and old. Hooves of a goat, paws of a walf, tuft of a deer's tail.
She didn't call to them again, but it didn't matter. She'd invoked them, they had come, they had been called.
And when she was called on, years later, by a boy with feathers stuff in his hair, a ring of teeth around his ankle, she came.

Art by Abby Diamond

Text by Lucie MacAulay