Pages from the Personal Journal of Nuada
So many books. You could spend an eternity in here reading and sipping honey mead... if only the books were written in English. A few are, so you pull one down titled Nuada's Journal and sit on one of the stools.
You flip the book open to the first couple of pages and begin reading the flowery, hand-written script.
It is set down in the annals of the stars that we have come to the Isle of Destiny, and by that measure we must meet our sacred purpose given to us by our Mother Danu. We come to Inisfail, this Isle of Destiny to prepare the way for a race unborn and eventually to teach and guide them.
Manannán Mac Lir, Keeper of the Changing Seas, bore us across the boundless oceans in tall ships. Guided by his hand, we left behind the Undying Lands those fair islands of Gorias, Murias, Finias, and Falias, where thought is deed and being is light, to cross into the mortal green.
Today, we set our feet upon a land unlike the brightness of our gleaming home. It is a wild place, murmuring in its own strange tongue, not the clear chorus of spirit, but a rugged cacophony of stone and river, root and sky.
To cross the gulf between the fluid immensity of spirit and earth, we summoned the Mist, not wholly water, not wholly breath, but a weaving of the two. It clung to us as a second skin, heavy with change. It cloaked us and it cloaked the land, softening the sharpness of reality, allowing us to become less potential, more substance.
The Mist folded us into flesh, hid our arrival from watchful eyes, and seeded the island with new music tuned to our notes of the Oran Mór, the Great Song of creation. In that fog, the edges of ourselves blurred, and where before we gleamed pure as the aether, now our light finds shelter inside these clay-bound forms. My hand, once weightless in its power, now bears the grain of form, and the effort of it makes my spirit ache.
The Mist served as midwife to our becoming: birthing us into a world of blood and branch and time. It softened the land for our arrival, bending the fierce stones and the wild woodlands to remember echoes of our light. Yet it demands a price. Already I feel the slowing of thought, the sinking of my feet into the coil of mortality. Already we are becoming other than we were.
Mother Danu has charged us to ready this land for the coming of humanity: to teach them the Great Song, to awaken their souls to the music of the earth, the stones, the rivers, the sky, and even the cosmos. Through us, they shall learn how to sing in harmony with life itself, and coax the world into the fullness of its glory.
Yet I am troubled. I know not whether this change is ascension or a fall.
I behold wonders. The trembling of leaf in wind. The scatter of stars not fixed in endless noon, but hidden, returning, hiding again, a rhythm of lives that end only to be reborn anew. But my wonder is shadowed by terror. I worry we shall lose ourselves in this heavy, beautiful world. I fear our light will dim beyond recall, and that we shall become as beasts, forgetting our origin and our purpose.
I fear we shall fail Mother Danu.
I set these words down, so that if the day comes when memory falters and our path is lost to shadow, we may look back and know:
We came not to rule. We came to seed a symphony.
May Mother Danu and the Oran Mór guide us still, though our forms are newly heavy and our hearts uncertain. - Nuada, High King of the Tuatha de Danaan
Tucked into the next page is a small hand-painted portrait of whom you can only guess to be Nuada, himself.
