Adding another stout ash log to the hearth the man poked at the dying embers, bringing the lapping tongues of flame back to life. Then, taking a half-step back he replaced the wrought-iron poker on its stand beside the fireplace, the dark pupils of his amber eyes reflecting the resurgent flames as they flickered up the sides of the log. Stroking his salt-and-pepper beard he watched contemplatively as the flames began to blacken the smooth bark-rind of the wood.

Sighing, he turned away from the flames — a simple exhalation somehow spoke of the weight of eternity pressing down on his shoulders. Hinting at the dihenydd, the fate, imposed upon him by the Once and Future King. Dismissively shaking his mop of curly raven hair, as if to dispel the ghost of a distant memory, he slowly eased himself backwards and into the wooden embrace of his favourite armchair. Almost unconsciously his left hand slipped from the chair's arm to fondle the thick pelt of the dog that lay quiescent, head lolling atop crossed paws, by the side of the chair. Content with the familiar contact, though not exactly at peace with itself, the man’s mind began to wander and he hardly noticed when the log shifted in the hearth with a sharp crack and a shower of sparks.

As always, the metronomic ticking of the old grandfather clock ensconced within a darkened corner of the adjacent kitchen did draw his attention. For each oscillation of its exquisitely-balanced pendulum was a constant reminder of time’s passage. Especially now, as each shuddering progression of the clock’s inset second hand brought incrementally closer to recovering his beloved. Not that the passage of time truly mattered in any real sense, of course, for it was simply a confabulation engendered by base mortals to lend a semblance of meaning to their brief existences. For the actuality of time implied a future and allowed for the myth of rebirth. Though his own ceaseless existence raised him far above and beyond such simplistic considerations. Almost six millennia of mythological un-life and abeyance to his fate had taught him that.

Which was not to say that things did not change. Even as the sun and moon traced-out the seasons of this current human year the canid, whose fur he was now fingering, traced-out its own changes. Indeed, within the confines of his own private hell this strange sub-breed of wolf might actually be his key. His means of finally ending the dihenydd — the inexorable, unalterable, fate bestowed upon him by Arthur all those centuries before. Trapped by inevitable fate he lived and lived and lived again. He had become the ouroboros, an Addanc devouring its own tail and from this being re-birthed.

Perhaps sensing his darkening mood his rather he strange dog rolled beneath his fingers so that those long digits could tickle its vulnerable flank. As he peered over the rim of his chair to ruffle the thick fur he noted that the animal’s steel-grey pelt was now quite rapidly running to white. Some might think the canid was running to old age. Rather, it was under the influence of a strange seasonal change; denoting the mystical transition from summer to autumn. A harbinger for the modern final (and the ancient first) quarter of the year. When the Celtic New Year began and the worlds of myth and the world of man melded one into another.

Reluctantly he dragged his fingers from his contact with the hound's comforting fur. Easing himself up from his chair he reached for his boots, which were warming on the grate beside the hearth. Supple despite his bulk and height he bent almost double as he inserted first one foot and then the next feet into the boots’ warm embrace. Tightening the laces, he tied them securely and made to stand. Whistling to the dog he grabbed a red-check fleece from its peg by the door before it open to step out into the autumn evening. Mist was curling her tendril fingers up from the marshes and there was a hint of dankness in the air — the first intimation of decay. The landscape itself become uncertain, rendered mystical, as the thickening mist filled it with spectres; rendering the landscape numinous.

But for the modern clothes he wore this evening the mist-wreathed landscape through which he ambled could have been from anywhen during the previous six thousand years. These long millennia of his own torment. All those centuries lived alone, until now. Whistling impatiently, he brought the faithful canid, Bleið, scampering to his heels.

Pausing momentarily to peer through the obscuring reed beds he felt the chill autumn air wrap itself around him like a cloak. An invisible weightlessness that even so was somehow comforting across his shoulders. Promising in its own way that this time the end might be near. Of course, this was no longer his era — nowhere near it in fact — neither within the various cycles of human belief and development nor within the annual cycles of the earth's orbit about it’s local star. And yet, after all these long aeons, the personal and seasonal dissolution that autumn promised seemed almost comforting to him. No matter that autumn was a time both of bounty and decay, leading inevitably leading to winter’s slumber. Ah sleep... now wouldn't that be a blessing — to achieve the eternal slumber after never-ending life. Instead, he had to suffer an eternity of recurrent life; being within the world but never having the opportunity of truly being a part of it. Perhaps, despite the promise this year had wrought, he was descending into melancholy, for the brief time of his own ascendance within the year was almost over. Not that he truly wished for death. Rather, he simply wanted a chance to die. To become mortal and to live-out the remainder of his life within the embrace of his beloved, Penarddun. She who had been the cause of his curse and his eventual madness.

Shivering, as an icy finger of autumnal chill pierced to his very core, forcing his attention back to the present, he turned and once more commanded Bleið to heel. Obediently the canid bounded over to him, tail wagging and tongue lolling, excitedly within its jaws for the animal was enjoying the momentary cold. In tune as it was with the change in the seasons. Distracted by the exciting new smells in this twilit autumnal world the dog came briefly to heel but quickly raced ahead of him as soon as its attention became distracted. Though they might be different in many ways they were linked, that canid and he. Equally opposite and similar; flip-sides of an iso-value coin.

Both were ancient, eternal, beings with the threads of their mythos irrevocably and indelibly intertwined. Island-motes cast adrift upon the seas of time. Strange attractors bound to describe strange courses about each other's orbit. About them civilizations had risen and collapsed to ashes, wars had been won and lost and won again. Yet, somehow, and despite all that had befallen them the peoples who had engendered their mythos, the dog and he, still survived. A rump population clinging to life and a distinct but endangered culture at the fringe of the continent of Europa. A continent which had once almost been theirs alone. The story of these ‘compatriots’ might almost have made him hopeful for the flawed ape who was the current dominant species on the mudball they termed ‘Earth’, were it not for the full myopic horrors of human action. A consequence of that inevitable biologic selfishness which infested the human psyche. Mankind had become diminished by its actions.

He, for his part, recalled a time of giants where true heroes were all that they could be. Though there had been war, even then — the eternal conflicts between the Plant Dôn and Plant Llŷr — gods and giants. There had even been the petty, almost ritualistic, conflicts between tribal chieftains. Somehow, though, those battles had seemed more honourable than their later counterparts; conducted as they were between heroes on behalf of their peoples. These were certainly not the tawdry scraps of all-out war that exemplified more recent conflicts. All those battles, those wars, some even instantiated and fought by him during the shadowy times of the Dark Age. Still, it seemed strange to him that the giants and the ancient gods had vanished from reality, though their battle still remained. This was his own fight, his eternal, annual, struggle with his foe. The final survivors of those two ancient lineages.

The ancient race of giants, his own kin, had been defeated by that half-blood turncoat, Arthur, whilst the gods had, in their own turn, been extinguished by the spread of that doctrine of pain, the Canaanite madness. The remainder had simply melted away to the lands beneath the sídh. Diminished in stature and substance to become the Fair Folk of popular legend.

His own existence with its intertwining threads of hanes and stori — the merging of fact and fantasy to make an eternal truth. That selfsame truth that blind Homer had recounted within the verse and metre of his Iliad. Ancient tales once told around a companionable hearth, the stock-in-trade of the cyfarwydd become half-understood stories committed to parchment and copied by monks only to lie, languishing, within the dusty libraries of great houses. Throughout all these events he was, he saw. A phantom trapped within the warmth of history's shadow. Condemned to perceive but not participate, driven by millennial obsession. Not that there was any point in sinking into despondency, especially as the best chance he had ever had at breaking the curse lay so near to hand.

Whistling once more he brought the errant canid back from its questing around the marsh’s verges. As the dog’s greying pelt resolved itself from the mist’s obscuring embrace he felt a strange twinge of envy. For, unlike him, or any other human the dog existed within its own ever-present now. The fortunate beast had no sense of its own history, no concept of a future nor of failure. It simply was. The distant descendant of a Canis lupus captured by man, which over maybe 30 000 years of selective breeding had had been domesticated and altered until it empathically recognized the moods and behaviour of its human pack-leader. It had been transformed into the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dog, and during this process it had been humanized. Subjected to that almost miraculous process of selective breeding that had transformed this particular vulpine variant into a legend in its own right.

Overhead a flock of geese hooted as their composite delta formation cleaved the air. He shivered involuntarily at their passing, reminded of the sound that his enemy’s Wild Hunt made as it passed overhead. Then again, at this time of year, almost everything he encountered made him recall his foe. Even the ripe or ripening fruit upon their withering vines. And part of him envied these geese their northwards escape.

Oddly heartened by the birds’ flight he stooped by a tangle of briars he plucked a ripened blackberry and after a cursory examination of its knobbly surface he popped the dark fruit into his mouth. Individual packets of sweet juice burst, coating his tongue with the encapsulated sum of late summer. That which the sun had wrought and which he now enjoyed.

Fruit were, undeniably, the bounty at summer’s end. Just as fungi, those harbingers of decay, were the fruiting bodies that marked the autumn’s start. The last of life before the scarcity of winter’s lease. Not that his particular concerns regarding the passing of the seasons truly mattered to those short-lived inhabitants of the ‘real’ world surrounding him; cosseted as they were by phantastikal achievements of the modern world. With all its misery and its technical marvels. Truly, none of them realized how transient their lives, their cultures, actually were. Mortals scarcely saw beyond the limited spans of their own tiny lives — thinking this to be the limit of all history. He'd seen enough over his incessant life to know that eventually the fall of their civilization would come and each person alive then would be shocked and terrified by their own helplessness in the face of events as their world spiralled into the inevitability of a new barbarism. Barbarian; not a term which he could easily accept nor employ. He was a descendant of the original Barbarians; those peoples the Greeks had met to the west of their own lands and termed ‘barbarian’. Those whose speech, to ‘civilized’ Greek ears at least, seemed an entirely incomprehensible gabbling string of ‘Ba ba ba ba ba...’ sounds.

The ancient Greeks themselves now were but a memory, immortalized by the words a long-dead poet. A man born long after his own legend was birthed in the Neolithic. Though, oddly enough there were correspondences between his own mythos and that which Homer had engendered. Both were tales of wars fought over and for another’s hand — a woman stolen by another.

Eyes momentarily turned inwards briefly gazed out across the reed-strewn marsh as daylight gave way to monochrome moonlight. Clear sight yielding to twilight myopia — the natural state of man. Not that such considerations affected Bleið, being a creature driven by scent rather than sight. But the traveller had been born in an age with almost no man-made illumination and undaunted he progressed for a few paces into the near-dark before turning sharply on his heel.

Tracing his way back towards the cabin that he currently called home he reached the shelter within a few minutes and pushing the wooden door open he stepped into cosiness of the firelit interior, all the while bidding a reluctant Bleið to follow him. The canid scooted through the door just as he was making to close it and seal them both within the warm.

Shucking his coat he settled himself into his armchair and allowed the world to settle into its allotted course; even as his own mind wandered back to the events of the far-distant past.