Myrddin and the Whispering Tweed

Myrddin and the Whispering Tweed

written for Wendy Cockcroft’s 30 Days of Fright

Day 13: Anthropomorphic Personification

“Develop a personality in the environment around your characters by attributing human emotions and characteristics to nature or inanimate objects.”

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Merlin, from an illustration by Alan Lee

The Tweed doesn’t flow; it breathes. Its waters, silver-flecked and restless, coil like a great serpent through what we now know as ‘Merlindale’, exhaling mist into the dawn. It knew Myrddin the Wild, Myrddin the Mad, long before he knew himself, for rivers have memories that are longer, much longer, than those of men.

When he stumbled to its banks, wild-eyed and thorn-scarred, that late afternoon in the 580^th year of Our Lord, the Tweed sighed. The alders on its bank leaned in, their leaves trembling with the gossip of a sudden breath of wind, while the reeds clutched at his rags with anxious fingers. "Stay," they whispered, "the storm in your mind is no match for us."

The rocks, old and moss-bearded, watched him patiently. They’d seen him (or men like him) here before, those who came to the water not to drink but to drown. Yet the Tweed curled around his ankles, cool and insistent, pushing him back toward the shore. "Not yet," it rippled. “The time has not yet come.”

Even the wind conspired, snatching his ragged cries and scattering them like fallen leaves. The hills, drowsy in the afternoon light, cradled his rage in their hollows until it softened to something mournful. The earth beneath him, thick with the scent of corruption, pressed close, like a mother steadying a fevered child.

By dusk, Myrddin Wyllt was no longer shouting. The river had taken his words, the trees his fear and trembling, and the sky his solitude. In their place, the Tweed had left its own voice: a low, ceaseless song, which hummed a slow healing.

And, eventually, he slept, beneath a sky stitched with stars, wrapped in the river’s lullaby.