Photo story: In the mountains

This is a fictional photo-story starring Tamzyn and Sioul, from my game Caverns and Dryads. It’s set in the real world, which they entered after Sioul gained mastery over time and space.

Our home is in the heart of the forest. A blue-painted cottage — the color she chose — with white windows. A piece of civilization for a wild creature.

Sometimes, she asks to go wandering beyond the forest. She walks to the edge where the trees grow thick. Curious like a cat, her deep green eyes search for what is new — and somehow forbidden.

When she steps outside the fantasy realm, she automatically becomes more human in appearance. You would never guess the beast beneath that cute shape—the brutal force of nature wrapped in a feminine, sweet, yet dangerous body.

That is how she is meant to be. In the paintings of Delacroix and Rubens, in Baudelaire’s cat, in Bécquer’s green-eyed guardian... all of them are nymphs—or more precisely, dryads. In each, the delicate and beautiful guardian of the forest and its animals, the Great Mother, exists to seduce, trap, and kill the evil humans who harm and threaten the creatures under her protection.

But now, in this sunset, she is just a pretty girl, because we are her friends. Like a leap in time, you want to be her friend at school, her boyfriend in high school, her husband, her lover… her anything. You want to belong to her. The first phase of her powers is already present: the allure of the nymph.

You are already trapped. But if you are a good friend, the killing moment will not come. You know what you must do: respect nature, respect women, respect this woman—and, by association, all the others.

The eternal feminine, born of the Great Mother, the one shamans spoke to in the caves, in the dark, inside the womb of the earth. The Great Mother who devours her children and returns them to the soil. Too ominous to be prayed to, too caring to be ignored.

As a creature of twilight and dusk, she avoids the noon. The harsh light of the sun is usually too defined, too aggressive for her. We need her in the dreamlike, soft atmosphere—so you can doubt whether she is real or not, whether she belongs to this world or to the world of your desires.

I said, “Go on, run! Let’s catch the sunset!” And she ran, laughing. She began to look like one of those nymphs you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, whose laughter echoes somewhere deep in the forest.

And that's how the day ended. Maybe we've had enough of this valley—or maybe not. I think we'll return. 

As the sun sets, her smile—her body framed by nature and light—is suspended between space and time, etched into our memory forever.