From the mountain....

From the mists, came magick…

Who could have known that dutifully following the instructions of the local nurseryman would bring such adventure! For that’s where it all started. I needn’t have watered that garden that morning. After all, it had rained a little the night before – enough really, not to bother. But I’d bought these new plants, hadn’t I? And with them, came very definite care instructions, in the form of an almost fatherly attachment and concern.

“Make sure you water them every day for a fortnight. If you do, they’ll survive anything, for the rest of their lives.”

He nearly didn’t hand them over, even after I’d paid. Perhaps it was the hastiness of my demeanour. To get them into the car. Be on my way. I'd made an impulse stop, and an impulse shop. I had somewhere else I was supposed to be.

That next morning, I’m sure it was guilt that was driving me. Driving me to haul out the hose and drown those plantlings in water they didn’t need. Guilt from having left them, poor things, the day before, sweltering inside the car for several hours, before I’d rescued them to some poorly prepared patch that could barely be called soil.

Nevertheless, I was there, not really focused at all on where or what the water was hitting, but more, on the rising of mists before my eyes. You see, from my front garden, the foothills of the D'Aguilar Ranges, in Queensland, fill the skyline in a protective hug from the east, sweeping to the north, and into the west. On a clear day, they surge close and green into the deep blue of the skies. But that day, the cold and damp was globbing in thick fog, covering them like snow.

“The mists rose like chilled steam,” came the writer’s voice inside my head, as if reading a story aloud.

It was through that veil of mists that I saw the first glimpses of a new world, which I came to know as Amora. I saw the Mountain of Mysteries and the movement of four young folk as they tramped their way up its thin track. A very bossy voice was berating the smaller one just behind her.

“An olde piece of cloth?” she sounded rather aghast. “For a spell?”

That’s when I dropped my hose and turned it off, running into the kitchen to find something, anything, to scribble on. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the day the Amora Trilogy was born.

(Sadly, too, it was the day those few fragile plantings began their demise. I tried. I really tried - to remember them. But I barely left my desk for weeks on end, and by the time I realised I’d forgotten them, they’d gone - ‘to the Ether’- as they say in Amora.)

I feel so much gratitude to the folk who live within the pages of ESOR, ELON and EVER, for allowing me to share their turmoils and triumphs for four wonderful years. I will miss such closeness. But also, I will ever cherish having shared the adventure! I hope you enjoy the ride, just as I did - enjoy a journey that’s supremely magickal!