She Came From A Fire

Lives of the Wild Saints #8

St Teodora of Sihla
Romania. Seventeenth century

She stepped out of the crack in the rock and raised her arms to the sky. We saw that she was on fire.

When a human passes through forest they are always alight. The light comes in different colours. We all know this. Mostly they are grey, the colour of the rocks. Heavy, weighed down. Sometimes brown, like the soil. Muddy, low. A few have the green of the spring leaf about them, they hum with it, especially the young ones. Always what is in them comes out in colours. The colours tell us what to watch for. Some are unsafe. Few even see us.

But there are some whose light is white, because something in them is burning. It is not the rage of those who burn red. There are plenty of them. We keep well away then, we hide in the fingers of the trees. This is not that. This is a white fire. It is rare. It does not come from the people. It comes through them.

Now the woman lifted her head and gazed directly into me. Her arms were still raised. She was muttering. We never understand the sounds they make with their mouths, but the light speaks to us sometimes, and then we may listen.

The white light said, come.

She was thin and she wore nothing. I knew her. Most days we saw her. She had wandered these forests since before I was born. She was here before all of us, they say. There are stories. Did you know that we tell stories? We tell them well; better than most humans, who roll like rocks or cling like mud to the forest floor. Our stories erupt from the trees. Sometimes you may hear them at dusk. They pass from the sentinel on the high branch to the parliament below. They swirl in the air like smoke, as we swirl when we leave the parliament and funnel up into a sky that is yellow now, orange, blue.

There are stories about the naked woman who lives in the crack in the rock. She came from a fire, says the sentinel. She fled from swords, she hides from armies. Once she was married, now she is alone. And, the strangest story of all, but the one I came to believe, told in one breath by one of our old ones, on a night when snow came:

There are more like her, but she is their queen.