Excalibur - Caledfwlch

Keowulf 10

Two nights ago, I dreamt.

I was a princess-prince-knight living during the Dark Ages.

For some reason, the ruling evil chief-king of the land had decided I was a traitor and put a price on my head, offering a generous reward for anyone who could kill me. It would be difficult for any bounty hunter to kill me as I was undefeated in battle.

I was a fugitive on the run. I escaped those pursuing me and made it to the border of the land where it would be harder for anyone to track me - for there it was a wild eerie untamed and enchanted forest full of danger, magical plant life and magical beings. It had a dense thick atmosphere. A river ran through it. No one had ever returned alive from the edges of the land before - few would dare pursue me into this place.

The place was beautiful in its raw wildness. Giant trees reached up into the sky - their tops high beyond sight. One giant half-fallen trunk of a tree lay at a diagonal across the river which ran through the place - the ends of the tree trunk I could not see. As I gazed at the tree trunk, it came acutely to my mind that no one had ever escaped the land before and that a party of pursuers had dared to pursue me to the edges of the land into the enchanted forest and had just entered it. I was at the very edge, the very end - there was nowhere else to flee except out of the land - and no one had ever escaped the land before. It was like an immutable law of physics - no one could escape. I stepped upon the trunk of the tree to ponder some way to do the impossible - to escape the land and the bounty hunters intent on killing me.

Suddenly, as I had stepped upon the trunk of the giant ancient tree, it flew up (as if catapulted by the touch of my feet) and out of the land like the land had been a world within a lake. I saw it from above the surface of the lake - the land lay beneath the still surface of that which appeared to be like a lake. I saw it from above the land which lay under the surface of a lake like world - I had escaped the land and my pursuers. I had done the impossible. I had transcended the law of reality which said it couldn't be done. I felt like Excalibur, held above the surface of the lake in the hand of the Lady of the Lake like in the movie The Mists of Avalon.

I woke up.