There wasn’t always a castle on the hill. The seed was planted many years ago. A warc carried a stone, a vision of what might have been, and buried it six inches below the surface of the earth.
The warc covered it with loose soil, its gritted, gnarled hands clawing desperately at the ground.
A vision of what might have been.
The castle grew over time, stones assembling themselves piece by piece, year on year. The locals in the village below watched with curiosity, waking every morning to see it risen slightly higher. None ever saw the workman. They went to bed and woke each morning feeling just a little safer.
It was just what the warc had wanted. A gift for the village, unsolicited, but earned.
The warc stepped backwards through time. The journey is linear, and to a creature that appears more branch and moss than flesh and bone, it is the correct and only direction.
So to see what might have been is, for a warc, to see and anticipate the future.
And the walk backwards, step by step, is, for those whose feet go against that flow, to see the future with utmost clarity.
The villagers did not survive the strangers, who arrived one night carrying torches and flame, and put to waste thatch roofs and wooden walls. They took with them wheat and mutton and stores of fresh water. And carried on their quest.
It was an important quest, of that they were certain, but the details matter not. To the villagers, the quest meant nothing; and yet they perished at its hand, and valiantly. They fought against the tide, with pitchforks and sharpened poles, but to no avail. They were swept out to a starless sea.
The warc watched, and was moved by what it saw. And so it vowed to reward the villagers for their bravery. A stone was fashioned such that it would bless the village with strength and fortitude. A place for them to retreat.
And so it was that the stone was planted.
And, so it was, that a hundred years hence, in the deep past of the warc’s journey, as time flowed back against the grain of its footprints, the villagers retreated to the walls of this castle at the first sign of flame.
And the thatch roofs burned, and the wheat and mutton was taken, but the villagers, brave as they were in that vision of what might have been, lived long enough to rebuild their homes and replenish their stocks.
And they cursed the strangers who rode through their lands. But they knew not the vision of what might have been, for to them the castle had always been there, a steadfast relic of generations gone.
Peter R. S. Thomas 