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Submitted section of the Librarian:

      In the Garden, Edmund Panopolis gathered the children sitting smartly and wearing their yellows and greens and multi-coloreds and jeans and skirts and slacks.  He had provided each of them with doodle paper and pens and pencils and crayons and markers, telling them that if they got bored or if they wanted to they could draw or color or write or whatever their minds and hearts and hands would tell them to do.
        Then, sitting crossleggedy ontop of the table in the very center of the garden, Edmund Panopolis closed his eyes and took a deep breath that made his jacket seem suddenly two sizes too small.  When his eyes opened, they seemed to be looking out from a place where he was, but nobody around him was, and a smile on his face gave a wave and a friendly comealong with me sort of grin.  He began to speak.
        "Long, long ago, and far, far away, in a valley nestled between two mountains and snuggled in the fork of a river was a small village.  Now, this was not just any old village, with it's stoplights, and stop signs, and traffic, and policemen and criminals and sewers and ... well, it was like no village you have ever seen before.  It was quiet, and it was also peaceful, which, by the way are two different things all together.  It was also a Village of Magic, and it was also a Village of Shopkeepers, with a Capital V and a Capital S.
        "There were Shopkeepers that sold shoes, and shirts, and skirts, and buttons, and button hooks.  There were Shopkeepers that sold towels and bowls and tools and spools.  There were Shopkeepers that sold cakes and cookies and breads and beads and toys and just about anything you might even begin to imagine in the whole of every thing you CAN imagine."
        "Even children?" asked one little blue eyed, blonde headed boy, about eleven.
        "No.  That was one thing they did not sell, because children come from a different sort of magic all together."
        "Did they sell doo doo?" asked a redheaded boy, about eight years old.
        "Yes! yes they did!"
        "EEeeeeewwwwwww" went all the children, as pure as any choir in any tabernacle.
        "Oh, but you see, this doo doo had a special name.  It was called fertilizer, and it was used to help grow plants, and when the plants were old enough and strong enough, the farmers that lived outside of the Village would gather up the crops of alfalfa, hay, cornstalks and other greens and feed them back to the animals, who, in their own sincere way, repaid the farmers by making... well, what do you think they made when they ate all that food?"
        All the children sang as one body "More Doo Doo!"
        "Yes, it's true.  And so things in the Universe move in a circle, round and round and round it goes.  Now, who wants to hear more of this magical story?
        The response was a unanimous "I do, I do", and the answer was "Oh?  You doo doo too?", which caused all the children to laugh and laugh.
        "Very well, then.  This was a Village of special folk, Shopkeepers that could make your wildest dreams come true, and some that could make even your worst nightmares come true as well.
        "It wasn't always that way, though.  There was a time, in this magical place, this hidden valley where dreams became real, when there were just a very few shopkeepers, and these did not have a capital s at all, the valley was very sad.  Not just the people, but the valley, with all its trees and grass and houses and horses and people. Every thing was sad. 
        "It was sad because no matter how hard they tried, all the things they tried, and the dreams they dreamed, well, none of it seemed to work out.  The crops they planted in their fields did all right, they did just fine, but they did just enough.  The things that the shopkeepers made to sell were all right, they did just fine, but the things were ordinary and nothing special.  Trees looked just like ordinary trees, grass looked like ordinary trees.  There was something missing, and not one person knew what was wrong, because they had lived that way for so long, it just seemed that ordinary life was just this way.  Ordinary.  Bleak.  Dreary.
        "What's bleak?" asked a pretty brown haired girl in glasses.  "What's dreary?" asked another one, a boy this time, wearing coveralls with pictures of race cars on it.
        "Bleak is... well.. you know when a day is all grey, and it has been gray because the sun did not shine forever and ever and ever, and it was too cold to go outside and there was nothing at all to do inside and you thought you were going to just die because you were soooo bored?
        Heads nodded, and a few of them said "yeah.."
        "That's bleak and that's dreary and that’s what they are like.  You can almost not find bleak without dreary, but if you ever do you will know that bleak is very lonely, because it is empty without dreary, and dreary will be very lonely because it will be very depressed without bleak.
        "And that is what this village was like.  Grey and ordinary and very very empty.  Empty of dreams, empty of magic, empty of color. No rainbow ever appeared after it rained, and in the fall, when the leaves from the trees fell, they were all one color.  It never snowed white snow, it just snowed slush, and there were no hills to sled down and no winds enough to even fly a kite in.
        "It was just a very sad village, and the saddest thing of all is that nobody in the village even knew they were sad.
       
        "One day, a man came floating down the river on his back.  He was singing a song that made no sense at all. He sang it loudly, as if he wanted the entire world to hear him, and he song he was singing went like this:
       
        "One bright day in the middle of the night,
        Two dead boys got up to fight.
        Back to back they faced each other,
        Drew their swords and shot each other.
        A deaf policeman heard the noise,
        and rushed to stop the two dead boys.
        If you don't believe this story is true,
        Ask the blind man.... He saw it tooooooo!"
       
        The children all clapped, few because of the words, most simply because when the Panopolis sang it, he sang it with all the gusto it deserved, from the top of his voice.  A few of the library goers pushed a shhhhhh towards the garden, which cause the StoryTeller to put a finger to his lips, not even barely hiding a wide smile.  Some of the children giggled, as did Panopolis, and even Emily found it hard to not smile at it all.
        "What made it even more interesting", Panopolis continued in an ever so civilized voice, "was that the man was completely naked! Not a stitch, not a shirt, not even a sock.  He seemed to not really care that he was naked, he seemed to not really care about anything at all.  He was just floating down the river as if he had nowhere to be, and nothing to do when he got there.
        "So here was this naked man, floating down the river, singing.  This was something that the village had never seen, and not only had the village never seen it, but the people in the village had never seen it either.  And more amazing, when the man floated to where the little village dock was, he turned onto his side and swam, in broad strokes right to the dock, and hauled himself and a large red bag right out of the river and onto the dock of the village, and there he lie, laughing, until he chuckled himself to sleep.
        "At first, nobody in the village knew what to do.  Nobody wanted to walk onto the dock where a naked man was sleeping.  It just wasn't done.  It just wasn't proper."
        "So... what did they do?" asked the redheaded boy.
        "Ah!  What they did was this.  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  They left him there because they were afraid.  What if he was a robber?, they asked.  What if he was crazy?, they wondered.  What if he was a Crazy Naked Robber?, they all muttered, fearfully, to each other as the day went on from daylight to night, Why! they could all be murdered in their sleep!
        "At night, though, it all changed.  The man woke up, and pulled from his bag bright red pants, a bright red shirt, a green hat with a loooooong feather in it, and green boots with pointed toes.  He put all these on, started a small fire on the dock, pulled some fishing tackle and a long pole from his bag and sat there, fishing, until he caught two shiny fish, which he than sat about cooking.
        "Some of the villagers began to wonder that maybe the man was a vagabond." Seeing the question on some of the children's faces, it was explained, "A vagabond is like a hobo, but not exactly like a hobo, because a vagabond goes from place to place, makes a lot of noise, tells some stories, maybe juggles some balls, steals your wallet and heart and the sneaks away into the night."  Ahhhh, nodded the children.  That made it all perfectly clear.
        "They considered this man, this red dressed man with the green hat and boots that had set up camp on their village dock.  Some thought the blacksmith should go talk to him.  He was the biggest man in the village, because he was very large and very, very strong.  He was so strong he could lift a full grown horse and hold it as if it were a baby.  Some thought they should ask the founder of the village, which meant that he was the first person there, and had been there before the village was even a village.  He was a farmer, and very old, and very wise.  The debate went on long into the night, when most of them should have been in bed, and asleep, and dreaming.  Except in this town, nobody ever, ever dreamed.
        "Nobody?", he was asked.
        "Nobody ever, ever.  Not the parents, not the children, not the dogs and cats, not the horses, not the corn or the wheat.  Not even the bugs.  Nobody, ever dreamed in this village.
        "This discussion went long and long, and it was held in a village pub.  A pub, in any other place is a place where adults go and talk and laugh and have a good time telling stories that nobody believes, but everyone pretends to, because it makes them all friends.  Here, though, a pub was a place where adults went to be ordinary.  Laughter was a gray thing, weak as a kittens first meow, and quiet as cotton falling onto snow.  Stories weren't told, because there were no dreams to bring stories from.
        "The pub was a big place, nonetheless.  It had long tables with long benches and a waitress who served the people at the tables without a smile, a nod, or even a good evening how are you this night.  The waitress would have been a pretty woman anywhere else, with long brown hair, and brown eyes, but here, her hair hang loose, and she dressed like a man, so nobody could see what a very pretty woman she was.
        "On this night, with most of the village people talking in hushed and sad tones about the man on the dock, the front door of the pub opened.  It didn't just open, children, no indeedy!  It flew open!  It burst open!  It tore open as if an elephant had grabbed it and puuuuled it open with it trunk. And who do you think it was that walked in?
        "It was the Bagabond!"  "No, stupid.. it was the Vagabond, with a V".  "Don't call me stupid."
        "Now children," Panopolis calmed.  "This spot where we are at, this garden, is a magical spot, for at least a little bit, don't you agree." Nods from the children, even the stupidcaller.  "All right.  And since we all agree that this is a magical spot for just a little bit, can we agree that right here, right now, no answer is wrong, no answer is stupid, and that all answers are right and true and good."
        "How can all answers be true and right and good?"  This came from the stupidcaller, an older boy, with a sullen expression.  He had shown up late and obviously because his parents had made him.  He may have been twelve or thirteen.  He may have just been grumpy.
        "An excellent question!  How can all answers be true and right and good?", Panolpolis repeated. "The answer to this is very simply because everyone has the answer to their own questions, and everyone's question is just the right question for that person at that time.  If I ask a question, I already know the answer, so what answer you give me, has to be the correct answer to you.  If you ask me a question, I know you already know the answer, so any answer I give you has to be the correct answer for me.  And this is true because right here, right now, in this spot, just for a little bit, all the rules you learned anywhere else don't mean anything, because right here, right now, in this spot, magic is the rule, and all answers and questions are right and true and good.  Agreed?"
        The children all nodded, slowly, though you could see a bit of confusion in their eyebrowed and ice creamed faces.  The older boy nodded too, but you could see the doubt on his sullen and distrustful of anyone over the age of 15 years old face.
        "I'll make you a deal, young man.  If you let the story continue to the end, you will see that all answers are correct, and that there are not bad or stupid quesitons. All I ask is that I tell the tale and you give it a chance.  Deal?"  And the StoryTeller held out his hand.
        The older boy hesitated.  Nobody had called him young man before, nobody had offered to shake his hand, and no one had ever offered him a deal.  "What do I get if I don't see it?" he asked.
        "If you don't agree with me, then I will pull three silver dollars out of my ears and give them to you."
        "Then it's a deal." and the older boy and the Storyteller shook hands on it.
        "Excellent!  And you were both right, it was the Bagabond, who is a Vagabond with a Bag!  It was he that entered the pub, all blustery and and windswept and red cheeked and he went right up to the long counter of the pub, sat down on a stool that was obviously not only waiting on him, but was his and his alone."
        "Barkeep!" He called out. "I would like some of your finest ale!  I would like some of your finest ale for everyone here in the building!"
        "The waitress, who was also the barkeeps daughter, went up to the man and said, "I'm sorry, sir," because back then everybody believed you had to be extremely polite to crazy people, otherwise they might do something even crazier than whatever crazy thing they were doing.  "I'm sorry, sir," she said, "but we don't have ale here.  All we have is tea and bitters and some rather ordinary stale beer."
        "Tea!" the man laughed. "Bitters!" the man cried out.  "Stale Beer!", the man bellowed.  "Stale beer it is then.  But rather than just one glass, I'd like to buy an entire barrel, and I'd like you to bring it here!"  Truely and really, he did talk like that, exclamation points and all.  He was and excitable gent, it seemed, always with the smile and that twinkle in his blueish eyes and slightly twirled mustache.
        The world of the library faded from view to both children and to Emily, listening to the gentle rythmic tones of the Storyteller’s voice.  The world that replaced it was the story being told.  A pub in a village, in a valley, long, long ago, and far, far away.
        The waitress looked at him hard, as she was not the sort to put up with any foolishness from anyone.  He certainly didn't look crazy.  She examined him from the tip of his three foot peacock feather to the tips of his green, green boots. 
        There was a hint of a tint of red in his hair, and a bit of graying there as well, so he was not a terribly young man.  His forehead was smooth and his eyes, bluish she could see, but on closer inspection, she saw specks of gold and green in there too, his eyes were clear and not clouded at all, so he was not a terribly old man.  He was not a tall man, nor was he a short man, or a fat man or a thin man.  He was, besides his incredible eyes and his constant grin and his overly excited crying out every word he said, rather average.  Perhaps a bit shorter than average.  Maybe sort of a small average.  "Yes," she though.  "He is smaverage"."
        Emily started at this, as it was exactly what she had though of as being the size of the Panopolis.  "Was he reading my mind," she thought, "besides all the other odd things he did?"
        "Smaverage he may be, but average he certainly wasn't.  She felt, looking at him, her heart beat a little bit faster than was ordinary, and in a town that was very, very, quite ordinary, that was something that she caught right away, as she was a very, very, bright girl.  She hid that fact from everyone, and she certainly hoped she had hidden it from this odd stranger who was looking at her, waiting on his barrel of stale beer.
        "A barrel, did you say?  A WHOLE barrel?" She raised one eyebrow. "By yourself?"  She balled up her tiny hands with her long fingers into fists and placed them on her hips. The towel she used to clean the water rings off of tables when people were done was held in her left fist and it flew like a flag of defiance.  "And," she asked, "do you have the coin to pay for this barrel by yourself?"
        The man hopped off his stool, bowed deeply from the waist and said "My lady fair, and fair you are, indeed it be true and I dare any man to say otherwise. Man?  I dare anyone in this entire village to say otherwise, man, beast, woman or child.  My lady fair, I have coin enough for this barrel, for this pub, for this village, if only I ask for it."
        "Sir," she said, "you are either an incredibly lost, extremely wealthy person, or else you are as crazy as a June bug on a hot summers day thinking it is snowing and the mud pies you are eating are apple."
        "My lady fair", came her reply, "I am neither lost, nor crazy. Let me demonstrate myself to you, if I may."  He reached down to his side, and pulled up his red bag.  It was tied at the top with a golden cord, which he untied and reached in.  "Hmmmm..," he hummed.  "There seems to be nothing here." and to prove that fact, he turned the bag inside out, and indeed, it was as empty as the hearts of the villagers, who had by now, at least the ones that were in the pub, gathered around the crazy man to see what was going to happen.
        "Wait half a second," said the man, "I think I know where the money has gone." He went to scratch his head, then went to scratch his beard, then twirled his mustache, but only the left side, then reached up and pulled his left ear.  And magics of magics, coins started to rain out of his ear and into the bag. All the villagers that were watching, stepped back, not knowing if this was a man, a devil, or what. When the bag was almost half full, the coins stopped coming, and the crazy man put the bag on the countertop.
        "Here, m'lady.  Reach in and count out the coin you wish.  When you have taken enough to purchase a barrel, then that will be enough for me.  And when that is done, I would most assuredly be appreciative if you would bring me one barrel of your finest stale beer!"
        "Oh no, sir.", said the waitress, "It's not for me to be reaching into that bag.  For all I know, it might have a devil or a demon or some horrible nasty creature inside just waiting for me to do that so that it could grab my hand and pull me in and then where would I be?"
        "I would imagine, fair lady, that you would then be inside of my bag, with my horrible creature, which is what I would imagine."  He winked at her.  She felt something inside of her melt and snap and crackle like burning ice.  "Very well then," and he turned to the rest of the villagers, "since my lady fair will not reach into the bag for coinage enough to purchase my barrel, is there anyone else here that would be willing to do it for her?"
        "There was a lot of murmuring, let me tell you, yes there was.  Just about everyone dared everyone else to reach into the bag and see what was waiting in side.  The discussion went on for quite a while, when the man in green held up his hand and said "Stop!  I can see that you all want to, but being the polite sort of folks that you are, you are waiting for the other one to go first.  I will solve this for you." He reached inside of the bag and brought out one single gold coin. 
        "This I give to you, sir" He gave it to the oldest man in the village, who was the founder, who was the first person to ever have lived in the village even before it was a village.
        He reached into the bag a second time and brought out another, single gold coin.  "and this I give to you, sir"  He passed it to the Blacksmith, who scowled but took the coin.
        The man in green reached into that bag not once, not twice, not thrice, but as many times as it took to give every man, woman, dog, cat, mouse, rat and bird in the pub one single gold coin.  That is, everyone except the waitress, who stood, arms crossed, skeptically looking with her best skeptical look.
        "Now then," he said, "please examine your coin.  If it seems to be the work of the devil, I will leave and never return.  If it appears to be the work of a demon, I will leave and never return.  If it appears that it is some horrible creature, then I will leave and never return.  Otherwise, if you deem it to be good and solid and worthy, then please would you, could you, place it on the counter for m'lady fair to count, so that I might get my barrel of beer."
        After a few moments of discussion, a few minutes of coins being twisted, turned, stepped on, bitten, tossed, flipped and scratched, the general agreement was that the coin was indeed good and solid and worthy, and one by one, each person in the pub put their coin on the table.
        I would like to say that every person put their coin on the table, but in truth, some people held onto theirs.  It was, indeed a poor and bleak and dreary village, and being very poor and dreary and bleak will make criminals out of the very best of us.  It's a sad truth, but then it was a sad village, so nobody was actually to blame, though some were to fault.
        The man in green than sat back down on his stool, with the entire pub's populace behind him and watched as the waitress counted the coins, still wearing her skeptical look, one by one.  When she had reached, what was in her mind, a fair estimation of the worth of one barrel of stale beer, she said, "Please take the rest back, what I have here will do."
        In truth, but not necessarily known, she could have taken the entire amount.  Was it magical money?  Was it real coin?  Did it have worth and value?  The answer to those questions is yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  All coin is worth exactly what it is deemed to be worth, not one bit more, not one bit less, and all coin is very much magical, as worth is an imaginary concept, created by folks to say 'this is worth such and such' when it very well might be worth nothing at all.  And this is true of so many, many things.
        She scooped up the coins she had counted, placed them in the money box under the counter and went into the back for the barrel, which she loaded on a little two wheeled hand truck, and rolled out to where the man was sitting.
        "Here you are, sir. Our very finest stale beer.  One barrel, as you asked for, ordered, and paid."
        Again, the man hopped off his stool and bowed very deeply from the waist.  He then took up a mug, bent down to the spigot on the barrel and poured him a full draught of the pale golden liquid from inside. 
        This he then lifted to his lips, and in one fell swallow, which is not to say that a swallow fell when he was drinking, but that he emptied the mug in one single long unbreathing gulp.  the villagers standing behind him looked at each other, nodding and murmuring in appreciation of this feat.
        "Oh my! That was incredibly tasty." he said.  "But I think you might have been wrong, m'lady. And if not wrong, then perhaps simply mistaken.  And if not mistaken, then it could simply be that one barrel of very fine, very, very fine ale had slipped your attention."
        "Sir, if you please, and even if you don't, we have never, ever had ale in this pub.  This is a poor village, and our crops barely provide the barley for the beer. There exists no means to make ale here."
        "That is too bad," said the man, with such a sigh that he might have imploded if it had not been for the smile his face wore.  "For I do believe," he explained "that this is ale, though I might be mistaken."
        The man in green turned toward the blacksmith.  "You there, young man. Would you be so kind as to come here and sample just a bit of this to ensure my insanity?  Would loan your talented palette to this golden draught?  Might I benefit from your experience and taste buds?"
        The blacksmith was no fool.  He had seen enough of the world before coming to the village to know flattery when he heard it.  He suspected the man in green was an idiot, and not just any idiot, but a dangerous idiot.  The type that cause folks to start to think things that might just get them in trouble.  Regardless, or perhaps, in spite of his misgivings, he stepped up to the barrel, drew himself a moderate portion of the potion and had a small sip.
        Then a larger sip.
        Then he refilled his mug till it was full overflowing, but not quite overtipping, raised it to his mouth and matched the feat of the man in green, gulp for gulp. 
        "Well tie me down, paint me pink, and call me Sally." he said.  "This is ale, and not just ordinary ale, this has got to be the finest ale I've had in all my years, and I've seen enough of this world to tell you that I've had a lot of ale in all my years."
        And that was that.  Every villager stepped forward with their mug outstretched and every villager had, on that night, at least one, and at most as much as they could take, mug full from the barrel, which mysteriously never seemed to become empty, no matter how hard they tried to empty it.
        "My friends." said the man in green.  For a moment, no one heard him, so he stepped up onto his stool and cried out a bit louder, "My Friends!  Tonight is a special night for me.  I have been floating down the river for many a day, only to turn up on the shores of your glorious land and to find your beautiful village.  This is what I toast to.  To Dreams!" he raised his mug to his lips. "To Truth!", he raised it once again. "And to m'lady fair, who is, to my eyes, the loveliest of women", and he drank the third and final time. 
        The rest of the pub was talking and laughing and joking and some were singing songs they remembered from long ago. Some had been sailors, some had been in the military, and some had simply learned songs from days gone by.
        The man in green hopped down off his stool, crossed over to the waitress and said to her in a quiet voice, "M'lady, I thank you for your hospitality, your beauty and your suspicion.  If any of the three had not existed, then this night would not have contained the magic and majesty that it had. But now, I must take my leave.  I am sorely tired, and am in need of rest.  Till tomorrow, dearest lady."  He turned to go.
        The waitress, blushing as blushingly as any first rose could have dared to blush, called him back. "Sir, wait." she whispered, and she was afraid he did not hear her, but back he came.
        "M'lady, your faintest whispered wish is my command.  What is it that I may do for you?  Move the moon, raise the mountains, rechannel the rivers?"
        "No," she said with eyes down turned.  "I... I .. wish to know your name."
        "Something as simple and as useless as a name?  Something as powerful and as powerless as a name, m'lady?  Hmmm.  I have gone by many names, m'lady, but for you, I will give my true name, but you must not use it unless you truly mean to."  He came very close to her, so close she could feel his warm breath on the side of her neck, right below her ear.  "My name is Gwion, m'lady."  then in a slightly louder voice, he said "You may call me Taliesin, for all to hear, and will bear that name proudly, as proudly as any standard bearer may bear their standard.  And please then, may I have the pleasure of knowing yours?"
        So quietly that one might have sworn she said nothing at all, especially from the noise of talk, laughter and joy in the room behind her, she said "Rebecca"
        Again, he bowed, and with one of his hands, hands that looked strong, soft and rough at the same time, he took one of her tiny, long fingered hands, long roughened by too long a-washing dishes and wiping down tables and drawing stale beer, and kissed the very air above it.  Her blushes grew to the point where the very sun would pale in comparison.  From where he was bowed, his bluish, greenish, goldenish eyes raised to meet her brown, and it was there that so much was said that words could not contain it and books could not contain it and no library would ever, never ever, even hope to grow large enough to hold the story of what was not said by the things that were said.
        After an eternity’s second, after a frozen millennia of moment, he smiled his wide, wide smile and bounced away. He turned to that joyful throng behind him, many of whom were still pouring from the barrel and said, "And I'm away, good people.  I shall return tomorrow, but tonight I need meet my dreams, as it is in dreams that I refresh myself.  Farewell till we meet again!"  With that he danced through the crowd of noisy, happy folk, and out the door, which blew back in as proudly as it had blown out when he first made his entrance.  And just when it seemed that he had finally gone for the night, his head poked back in for one final comment. "Good People!" And his voice boomed around the room.  "Good people, I thank you for you assistance on this evening. For those of you who put their coins on the counter, you will find two coins in your pockets when you leave tonight.  For those of you that kept  your coins as mementos of our first meeting... well.. at least you have a coin to remember me by.  And again, Farewell!"  And with that, he was truly, really gone, in best Cheshire fashion.  For those folks that checked their pockets on the way home that night... some had two golden coins, and some had only the one.  And so it was.
        The waitress, Rebecca, had no idea what to make of it at all
*
        Later that night, as Gwion's campfire crackled merrily out on the dock, and he lie with his feet toward it and looked out over the river with it's shiny spots of ripply ripples, he thought about the waitress; he thought about Rebecca.  Fire there was in her, he reckoned, damped down by the damp imaginings of this place.  He admired the way she had talked to him, straight out and upfront about what was what, challenging his belief and asking him to prove it.  He liked the way her brown eyes flashed, and her brown hair flowed, the lines of her face and the furrow of her brow.  There was something about the curve of her lips that made his heart go thump, thump, just a little faster than usual.  He was a man that had seen many things that made his heart go thump, thump, just a little faster, and it had been a very long time since that had happened, a very long time indeed.  Until tonight.
        He had originally gone to the pub to see what was what, who was who, and where was where.  Perhaps a bit of the wet o' my whistle, tell a few stories, gather a few tales, and back on the road again tomorrow.
        It was her, it was Rebecca that had made him want to show off, which was something he swore was something he would never do again since the last time.  It was how he ended up in the river and... well, that's a story for another time.
        He sat looking at the stars and thinking about his place.  He did not know if he had ever seen such a lifeless place, all gray of thinking and lacking in the colors of dream and imagination.  Every tale he had heard in passing in the pub had been from long ago and far away, much before the teller had come to this place.  It made him wonder if the Grims had come here too.  A small shudder passed through him, remembering the last time he had come across those killers of joy, those stealers of dreams. 
        The Grims.  His name for them, as they didn't have any other name he knew of.  Possibly the SomethingBads, but that name just wasn't lyrical enough.  The Grims were nothing he had ever seen, only nothings that he had seen the effect of.  Sad memories came and went in the quieter, more somber parts of his memory.  The burning in his nose and the small ache behind his eyes and the few tears that ran down his cheeks might have come from the campfire smoke, but he knew better, and even if he had said so to anyone else, he would and could not lie to himself.  A great sigh ran through him.  "Ah well... so much is lost dust.", he said to nobody, and was surprised when nobody answered him.
        "What is so much lost dust?", came a musical voice from behind him, from the direction of the Village.
        So strongly was he startled that his leap took him completely off his feet and he twirled round and round in the air before landing and facing his questioner.
        "Um, um..", was all he could say.  It was of course, Rebecca, dressed as she had been but also in night cloak to keep the damp evening air away.
        "I didn't really want to disturb you, really I didn't, sir."
        "Gwion, please, miss", he said with incredible gentleness.
        "Gwion, then.  And I'm Rebecca, though most here call me Beck."
        "Beck it is, though I do like Rebecca so much more. No, then, Beck won't do, for you are far, far to large a soul to be confined to just four little letters. I shall have to call you Rebecca, as Rebecca is a name to be reckoned with, a name that carries a shield and a sword hidden among the seas."
        She laughed, a merry sound coming from deep in her throat. It wasn't one of those high tinkly laughs, it was one of those that reminded of rivers flowing over mountains, strong, mystical, and possibly very deep.
        "So you do have a sense of humor", Gwion said.
        "Oh, we all do, Sir Gwion.", she replied. "And though Gwion is a lovely name, it truly is, it reminds me too much of 'Mamma, the babies cryin'."
        "That is why I go by Taliesin in many of the lands I've been in.  Most people find it easier to say, and as you point out, it is much harder to mispronounce"
        "I like Gwion well enough though," she said, "so I will call you by it, as it is short and reminds me of that magical ale you made.  It simply rolls off the tongue, you see."  There was the sort of not unpleasant pause that occurs just as the planets decide which direction they are going to rotate, and then "May I share your fire?", she asked, a bit shyly.
        "Of course you may!  I would be honored.  But... wouldn't the rest of the villagers wonder what a single young woman, especially one as pretty as you, would be doing out here all alone with a stranger as strange as myself?"
        Rebecca moved to the other side of the small fire and sat carefully, tucking her legs under her and arranging her night cloak so that she would be kept warm where the firelight didn't touch.  She was framed by the forking river sparkling like diamonds and gave her an extra layer of beauty, seeming to dress her in finest sparklies, and the stars seemed to settle around her hair, as if she were wearing a Universal tiara.  The firelight danced off her eyes, giving them depth, and it played against her lips and cheeks, adding more rose than was already there.
        "Oh", she laughed again, "they fair shoved me out the door to come after you once you had left.  Just about everyone saw how you looked at me, everyone except ol' blind Jack, of course.  Even he though said there was something different in how you talked to me than when you talked to everyone else.  He said there was something softer.  I told him he was full of it and to shove off"
        Gwion laughed at this and smiled broadly.  "And who am I to argue with such a crowd?  But still... out here?  All alone?  With me?  Aren't you afraid?"
        "Oh no!", she answered.  "I'm perfectly comfortable, though perhaps just a bit nervous.  You are an attractive man, after all.  But afraid?  No, sir, that I am not.  You see, if there was any... er... untoward activities from your part, you would find yourself sprouting more quills than a porcupine.  I am not, really and truly, alone."
        "Ah", Gwion said, with eyebrows raised and smile frozen on his face.  Slowly as the movement of the heavens he turned his head to look back over his shoulder.  They were there, hidden in the shadows, her guardians.  He couldn't be sure of how many there were, but there were there, sure enough.
        "We were wondering, Gwion," and she struggled to not smile or laugh when she said his real name, "why it is that you are here, and what it is that you came looking for.  Which is really the same question, I suppose.  Maybe the first question would be how is it that you came to be floating on the river, naked and singing."  She thought a second.  "Yes, that would be the question to ask first."
        "Ah. That would be a story in and of itself", he replied.  "You see... I'm a storyteller by trade.  Not a terribly good trade, but a very good storyteller.  I tell stories and get by doing a little bit of magics here and again, some juggling, entertainment sort of things."
        "And you came to be floating on the river naked because..." and she let the answer drift off for him to fill in the blanks.
        "I came to be floating on the river naked because... because it was such a nice day I decided to take a swim, and you can't very well go swimming in your only clothes, so I put them in my bag."
        "You decided to take a swim."
        "Yes"
        "I see"
        "Good"
        "That, of course, begs the question, dear Gwion, from where did you swim?  There is no village nor town within leagues of here."
        "Did you just call me 'dear'? Oh my.", he mused.
        "Don't detract from the tale, dear.  From where did you swim?"
        "Ah, well, that.  Well, you see, I was on a ship, headed somewhere far down the river, headed to cross the stormy sea.  When I decided to take a swim, well.. the ship decided that they would just let me go.  And that was that.
        "That was that."
        "Yes"
        "I see"
        "Good"
        "We've done this before"
        "Yes, and we'll probably do it many times before we're done"
        She had propped her elbows on her knees, and had laced her fingers together, and she was looking intently at him.  Her gaze seemed to burn in him, and he could feel that thump, thump start up again.
        "How many days ago was that, when you decided to take your swim?", she asked.
        "Oh, let's see.  Today is, erm.. umm.. what day is today?", he asked back.
        "Thursday.", she said.
        "Oh, well then, I went swimming on Tuesday." he answered her.
        "Tuesday?", she exclaimed, jerking her head as if she were a puppet on a string and raising her eyebrows and furrowing them at the very same time, which can be quite a trick.  "You've been swimming for two days?"
        "Two days?  Oh no, my dear Rebecca.  I went swimming on Tuesday three weeks ago."
        "Three we...." she nearly yelled this out, stopped, but she let the incredulity show on her face, and her body.  She said next in more hushed tones, "Three weeks?  You've been floating for three weeks?"
        "Well... not constantly.  The skin develops quite a pucker after a while and when that happens, and I don't mind telling you one bit, when that happens I just feel downright silly."
        "How did you survive?" Three weeks simply sounded impossible. "Why didn't you stop at some other village or town?"
        "It's easy to survive on the river.  It is water after all, and there were plenty of fish,  you know.  I mean, it IS a river.  As to why I didn't stop at some other village, I just didn't see any reason.  I was quite content to go floating, and I very well may have just continued on my merry way, if I had not seen your little valley here."
        "And you just decided that you simply had to stop here."
        "Yes."
        "I see."
        "Good."
        "Not again!  Why did you decide that you had to stop here?  Here, of all places?  We have nothing here to offer anyone, and many of us have even talked about moving on to somewhere else.  Of course, nobody ever does, but they talk about it."
        "And that, my darling Rebecca, she of the shining eyes and captivating lips and delicate hands is exactly why I had to stop here!" At that he rose, taking the stage, as any ham will recognize. "This town was perfect for what I have to offer.  I mean, it was so grey, so drab, so colorless!  Even the trees droop from depression here, even the grass seemed lazy, and I must tell you that it is very, very hard for grass to appear lazy as it does nothing but lie around all day and night and day again."
        Rebecca stood, and he could see that he had touched something just a bit dangerous in her eyes. Perhaps he had spoken a bit too far.  It is one thing to talk poorly about your own village, but it is quite another thing to have someone else talk about your village altogether.
        In a tight voice, tight as barbed wire, tight as a high wire, she asked, "And you came here why?"
        In an incredibly calm voice, as if talking to a large animal with even larger teeth, he gently said, "Because I want to fix it.", which was not the right thing to say.  He could tell from the flare in her eyes, which quite obviously were, indeed, the windows to her soul and emotions.  He added quickly, "I want to bring more color here than is already here.  I came to trade dreams, to tell tales, to hear tales.  Then, when my time here is done, I would have left, and hopefully I would have left your village a bit better than when I first came."
        "I see", she said and waited and dared him to say 'Good' or anything at all.  Instead, he simply faced her across the fire, his hands open to say 'I am quite harmless and please do not eat me with your very large teeth and your eyes the size of dinner plates', and didn't say anything at all.  He waited on her to make up her mind to eat him or not.
        It can be debated at this point if Gwion would have minded if she had swallowed him whole.  He was already in so deep that he was afraid he would never swim out on his own, and it was only by sheer force of will that he was ignoring it and all the changes to the story that was about to enfold.
        Instead of swallowing him whole, Rebecca sat back down, night cloak tucked under her legs, put her elbows under her knees and her perfect hands arranged on either side of her chin to hold her head up, and she said the words that he had heard, oh, so many times before, but never, ever, from a face that he would re-write the whole of history for.
        "Tell me a story, please"
        And so he did.  He told a grim tale, full of fear and bravery, full of happiness and sorry.  He told a story of life, of love, of fear and of failure.  He told the story of the Grims, those horrible things and thoughts that stole dreams from the young and hopes from the aged.  He told the story of a man who had watched his entire family murdered, and felt he had lost all hope.  He threw himself into the river, the very river that was at Rebecca's back, and he floated in a daze till he came to a valley.  The river threw him out, and the man lived, though he may not have wanted to, in that valley until the coming of a odd fellow,  bearing laughter, and companionship, and news.  It was the news that his family had survived after all. The lost family and the man were reunited, and they all came to live in the valley that the man had come to call home.
        Gwion told this tale to Rebecca, who had, during the telling not said a word, but had, at appropriate moments, laughed till her sides ached and cried till she felt she could cry no more.
        "That was ... incredible." she said in reverent tones.  "That story is known to me, though.  It is the story of the founder of this valley, a man that you met tonight.  The odd fellow you described was the very first shopkeeper here.  His old shop can be seen from the pub.  How did you come to hear the story?"
        "It's one of the talents I have", he said cryptically.  "I hear things, from all over.  I learned the art of talking and listening at the same time.  Not everyone can do it, or so I've been told.  And there are some stories that I just know, they just come to me while I tell them.  I do believe they tell themselves to me, and I just repeat them."
        "Have you ever thought about writing them down?", she asked in all seriousness.  "The way you told it was ... well... it was simply wonderful, simply magical.  Though I had heard the story many times before, when you told it, I could feel the river on my face, feel the dirt under my fingers.  I felt the incredible sense of loss and the incredible sense of joy.  It was..." she ran out of words.
        "Write?  Me?  Oh, my dear.  I'm a story teller, not a story writer!  I don't think it would translate as well onto paper. No, no, no.", he adamantly noed, "I just don't think I could be a story writer."  He thought about it a few seconds more.  "No.  I just don't think I could."
        "Ah. Well.  That is a shame, then.  I would not like to think that when you died, your stories, told as only you could tell them, would waste away and wither and die with you."
        "And what makes you think I will die? Perhaps, like my stories, I'll just go on and on and on."
        "Hmph", she hmphed, even though she had a gentle smile.  "It was my understanding that everything that lives, dies.  However, if you believe that you have found away around that understanding, the best of luck to you, Sir Gwion."  She yawned, wide mouthed and not even ashamed of it.  No covering this one, once it was started, she decided.  "Oh my!  I must be very tired.  So, how long do you think you will be staying here?"
        "As long as there are stories to be told, and tales to hear, and I'm allowed." came the answer.
        She yawned again, this time catching it behind one delicate hand, and patted it away.  "Goodness!  Gwion, I must be going before I fall asleep and then fall into the river."
        Quietly, gently, with rose petal tenderness, he said "I would never let you fall, Rebecca." The soft intensity of the words caught her by surprise.  For a moment, she was speechless, and for a moment, so was he.
        "Good." was all she could think to say in the moment, poor mask over her flustery blushing.
        "Yes." was all he could think to say to attempt to close up the open heart he had shown her.
        "All right then."  In a flurry of motion and emotion, she stood, and he stood, and the flames rose as well, just because they didn't want to be left out.
        She passed by him and when she did, very briefly, their hands, as if they had a life and mind of their own, as if they knew that the long life lines in their palms had already overlapped, touched.  Maybe the universe saw and held that moment motionless.  Perhaps the man who winds the clocks at the center of the world held the pendulum stopped for that intense flare of digital greeting of each other. Perhaps it was just that, at the moment the fingers brushed, the eyes locked, the hearts beat as one, the minds joined and agreed, and the souls all voted and came up unanimous.
        "Um." he blushed.
        "Er." she agreed and blushed back.
        "Say.", he sayed to her, in a shy little boy type of shy voice.
        "Yes?", she yessed to him, quiet as a little girl breathing on a golden dust mote.
        "Would you, could you, perhaps, if it's quite all right," he started.
        "Of course I would and could, with you, and it's quite all right", she finished.
        "Tomorrow?"
        "Yes."
        "Good."
        "Morning?"
        "Yes, please"
        "Good."
        Now, it doesn't matter who said what, because they weren't really speaking.  Well, they were, but they may not have been using their mouths to say the words.  All that is important is that they heard each other, and they answered each other and the answer that they heard and the answer that they said all amounted to one single word -  Yes.
        The universe decided to let the moment go, and the man who winds the clock at the center of the world let the pendulum go and went madly whooping through his halls and corridors.  Time started up again, and the hands, having done their job, congratulated each other and returned to the arms to which they, respectfully, belonged.
        And you know what?  Neither one of them slept the entire night long, but the night was still filled with dreams. 
*
        When the sun rose that morning, it was brighter than it had been for years, and there were even birds in the trees, and more amazing was that the birds even chirped once or twice.  All of the villagers noticed it, commented on it in one way or another, and went about their early morning with smiles and grins and even a shiny "how are YOU today?" on their lips here and there.  It was a marked and remarked upon oddity in that village that color had returned to grass and tree and bird and sky.
        The Storyteller and the Waitress met that morning in front of the pub.  She had packed a basket lunch, and had informed Gwion that she was going to show him some of the more ancient parts of the village.  That way, when he told the story about the founder, he could see more clearly the things he spoke about.
        She led him back to the dock and said, "This is where it all started.  He washed up there," and she pointed to a spot of stony ground just downriver of the dock.  "He built the first house down there, towards where all the farms are.  The land was much richer then, and the crops grew almost by magic, he said"
        Turning around, she pointed upriver.  "When the first shopkeeper, Hephestus, came, he came from one of the towns up river.  Of course you know this, and you know he was something of a scoundrel. His shop was the one I showed you, across the road from the pub.  What you may not know is that he disappeared on day, and nobody could find a trace of him.  He simply vanished.  He may have headed towards the mountains, but why?  It's a very hard route, and Hephestus was, according to all who knew him, a rather lazy man.  Very colorful, in the same way you are, but lazy." She stopped and blushed as she thought of what she had said.  "I didn't mean to say that you are ... I hope you didn't take that the wrong way..."
        Gwion shushed her with a pshaw and said, "If colorful is ever the worst I've been called, then I shall be most fortunate, indeed." He took her hand in one of his. "Coming from you, being called colorful is almost the same as being called godlike."
        "Not really godlike," she explained, "more enthusiastically joyful.  Yes, I think that is exactly what I meant."  And she did not, it should be noted, remove her hand from his for a very long time.
        They walked upriver for a bit, talking about nothing at all.. the weather, the birds, the river, and sometimes they didn't talk about everything, and just let their hearts and hands talk for them, saying a lot of the words they didn't dare say with their mouths.
        They strolled till they reached a grassy knoll that had one sad little leafless tree on it.  There Rebecca sat and spread a broad checkered blue cloth.  Upon the cloth she lay bread and cheese and a bottle of the ale "that didn't exist until last night", she said with a snirk, which as any child knows is the sneaky smirk you give when you are telling a secret you know isn't a secret at all because everyone knows it, but nobody talks about it.
        He popped the cork from the ale, and steam poured from the bottle.  He looked at Rebecca and asked with a smile, "How did you get it cold?"
        "That's odd," she said.  "It shouldn't be cold.  I mean, it should be, it's better that way, but we have no way of cooling it or keeping it cool."  She pushed a stray hair away from her face with a puff of her mouth and the fingers of her hand.  She gave him a look that definitely held the 'did you do that?' sort of eyebrow lift.
        "And that reminds me, mister," she exclaimed, pouring the cold ale into mugs, who then politely frosted over as any polite mugs do, "I forgot to ask you last night.  How, exactly did you do all that in the pub?"
        "All what?", he asked, innocent as a spring lamb lying in a field of wildflowers.
        "The ale, the coins..."  She poked his arm.  "How did you do all that?"
        He took a bit of orangey yellow cheese, strong and sharp.  "Oh, that."  He just went on, bite by chewy bite and said nothing else.
        "Yes! That!  How did you do THAT!", she demanded, hands on hips.
        "Exactly?", he asked, around a chew of bread and cheese and ale.
        "Yes, yes, exactly! Stop being difficult, Gwion... how did you make the coins, and the ale?  And, I strongly suspect the chilling of the bottle as well.  How did you do it?"
        "Really and truly?"  He asked, then he stopped playing with her because she had adopted the 'That is just about enough of THAT', stance, hands on hips, brows furrowed and knitted with socks, mouth a tight rope between cheeks.
        "It was magic, Rebecca." he said with the seriousness of a child with a bad report card.
        She snuffed a humph, and did not unfurrow her brow, and the socks were still knitted there.
        "It was the magic of belief and stories and tales and all the things I have seen and experienced.  No, that's not quite right.  It was the magic of Knowing.  Knowing with a capital K of how things could be, should be, would be, and are."  He pleaded with hands upraised and spread. "Really and truly.  That is exactly how it was done."
        "I'm not sure I believe you," she said skeptically. "It's not that I don't believe in magic, it's just that magic doesn't seem to work here. Magic was something that was here a long time ago, I know, but it stopped. It gradually faded and then just stopped. Why we aren't sure."
        "Take this knoll here." She waved her hand at the surrounding hill. "This knoll was where Hephestus set up his first shop... a tent, really.  He said that this knoll is the wellspring of the magic of this place.
        "The first shopkeepers, that came after Hephestus, sold wondrous things, toys and gifts and household goods that did exactly what they were designed for, and all by magic.  Yes, there were some ordinary shops here, like the blacksmiths, but even his shop had a bit of magic.  A forge that never went out, tools that never needed sharpened, that sort of thing.
        "Then the magic faded, the forge went out, the tools dulled, toys quit working or popped out of existence.  It was a sad day when the last magical swimming toy duck drowned, let me tell you."  Gwion could have smiled at that, but he didn't, realizing that it was not told to be funny.  When magic dies for a child, that is a sad day indeed.
        "It's like the village lost it's color, it's hope., it's dreams.  Just like Hephestus said about the wellspring, but the wellspring went dry or something."
        She sat next to Gwion and got lost in the corridors of memories, of thought.  He, being raised to be polite, waited until she opened the door and came out again.  "Nobody in this village ever dreams, you know.  It's like the dreams went with the magic.  It's like the imagination and the hope and the color all went and got sucked down some tremendous whirlpool and was lost." She paused, then looked into his eyes and took both of his hands warmly in both of hers.  She shone a smile on him that illuminated his soul and he knew that in that light, he could fly to the moon. "Or, it seemed lost until last night.
        "This morning was the first time in years I had seen my father and mother greet each other with a kiss and a smile. No grumbles, no mumbles.  A very simple good morning and a kiss, and I could see in them for just that moment what they had seen in each other when they first met.  I think it was something like what I see in your eyes right now."  she smiled from ear to ear and met his eyes long enough that he had to turn away with a cough, lest she read his secret heart.
        "It's the magic of the heart, Rebecca.", he said quietly.  "I had a choice, long ago. I was...", he paused. "Things have happened in my life that were not fun, and were not good.  I lost things and people in my life that were, and are, very, very dear to me, and not a day goes by that I don't miss them as I would miss my eyes or my nose or my heart.  Especially my heart, and I'm not referring to the one that is in my chest beating."
        Rebecca was amazed at the amount of sadness in his eyes.  It touched her heart in so strong a way that she wanted to build a fire, roast marshmallows and cradle him, telling him that it would really and truly be all right, and fight tooth and nail against anyone that would disagree with her or make it less than true.
        Gwion saw the effect it was having on her, and he quickly changed his tone.  "Every day, you see, I have a choice.  I could stay in that sad place, wallow in my own pain, or I could put that pain where it belongs.  In the past. Box it up.  Store it in the attic in that secret chest that everyone has, and lock it with good solid locks forged in the now and today of the eyes that I'm looking into across from me and I find that I made the right choice." and he smiled a triumphant smile across to his partner.
        Now, this was the right thing to say, because Rebecca put on a goofy grin, blushed from head to toe and had to look somewhere else to avoid having Gwion look into HER secret heart.
        "The choice, you see, is one we all make ever day.  It's to either greet the day with a smile, and accept the wonders and the natural magics that happen to us with the recognition that they are blessings and they are magic, or, " and here he took a big breath, " we can choose to be miserable and lead bleak and dreary lives without any color and magic and curse every day as another day we have to be alive and live through a horrible existence because we remember when it used to be different and we want to know why it changed and it's just not fair that it can no longer be fun like it was when we were children."  And he put on such a mock sad, angry face, all puffed cheeks and crossed eyes that Rebecca simply had to laugh at the silliness of it all.
        "Take this tree standing here, all sad and alone and by itself not entirely happy." He reached out and patted the bark of the poor little thing.  "You see, this tree, sad as it is, has a choice.  It can be just as it is, small, leafless, threadbare as only a tree can be threadbare.  Or.. " Gwion gently placed both hands on it and in a wordless whisper started speaking to the tree.  Rebecca watched, expectantly waiting for some magic to appear.  And waited. 
        "Um, isn't something supposed to happen?  I mean, I hate to be overly expectant, but..." and the words trailed off as she observed Gwion speaking a bit more seriously to the tree.  As she watched, she could see the veins on his forehead grow a bit darker, and she could see that he had his eyes closed, tight, almost as if in fervored prayer.  Amazingly, incredibly, the tree began to tremble, from root to twig, and she could see just the beginnings of tiny buds shoot out from the end of each twig tip.
        "Yay!" she applauded, and clapped her hands a joyfully as any child.
        "No." said Gwion, sounding quite exhausted.
        "No?" asked Rebecca, immediately alarmed by how pale and drawn Gwion looked.
        "No.  This was too hard.  There is something not quite right here.", Gwion answered.
        And he was right, for, as she watched, each bud turned brown, then black, then fell from it's twig tip down, down, down to lay on the grown, dead as doornails.
        Gwion sat, exhausted.  "What is it?" he wondered aloud. Rebecca could do nothing, and she could tell Gwion was deep in concentration.  "What is wrong here?"
        He looked over at Rebecca, and asked, "You did say that Hephestus said this was the wellspring, didn't you?"
        Rebecca nodded, very serious. "Yes.  That is what the old stories say, anyway."
        As silently as any thief in the night, and not your average thief, but a master thief, the thief that all other thieves look to for example, clouds started to form, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped just a bit. 
        The two sat there and shivered just a bit, just a tad, just a jot, and Gwion suggested "Let's go back to the pub.  I need to think, and I just can't right now"  He was all seriousness, showing none of the clownish storyteller he had shown earlier.  "I need to think because I believe the answer to this lay in a story I told long, long ago, but can't quite remember right now.  I'm drained.  I need to rest."
        Rebecca packed up the ale, cheese and bread back into the basked.  Gwion most assuredly appeared to as bone tired as any hard working skeleton, and she helped him to his feet.  The attempt with the little tree, who had gone back to looking skinny and sad, had driven him to his knees.
        With her arm around his waist, and his arm looped around her neck, they trudged the long way back down the knoll, through the village and into the pub. She helped him into the back and lay him down on her own bed, so that he was next to Mr. Poogles, her stuffed dog.  She made him a hot soup, beefy and tomato-y, and some strong tea, and sat there while he ate it, hoping that it would return some of his jovial strength to him.
        When he seemed a bit better, a little rosier in the cheeks, a bit more goldish than bluish or greenish in the eye, she felt he was on the mend, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Rebecca did not want the magic to go away, and more importantly, she did not want the man to go away.  She decided that if there was a choice between magic and man, she would choose Gwion.
        Gwion propped himself up on her pillows and smiled at her.  "Rebecca, my love, and you are my love, as you know you are, even though I have never said it, but I suspect both of our hearts know it by now. This thing that has happened; this is not an easy thing.  Your description of having the magic sucked out as if by some whirlpool is exactly what it feels like to me.  I have been drained dry of my joy, my magic, my Knowing, and feel as if I could fall into a horrible pit of despair at any moment.
        "I suspect that I know what happened, and I suspect I know how it can be mended.  It is not an easy thing to mend, if I am correct, and I won't discuss it right now, because to even think about it makes me afraid.  I need to sleep, and in my dreams I'll find the answer I need, and see if it confirms my suspicion.  If it does, then I will need my bag, which should be, I believe, still on the dock.  While I'm sleeping, would you get it for me, please?"
        Rebecca nodded and looked down at her love, which he had become, exactly as he had said.  The pale, saddened man who lay before her, bare very little resemblance to the boastful clown who had turned stale beer into ale last night.  A tear fell from the corner of his eye, and he turned his face away from her.
        "Whatever you need, my love, and you are my love, as you were from the moment you asked my name, whatever you need, I will fetch for you.  We will fight this together, and it will be mended, because I know that you, my brave, brave, very magical and imaginative, storyteller can mend anything, anything in the world."
        As she bend down to kiss his brow, pulled taught and fraught with worry and exhaustion, he said miserably, "I can't mend death, Rebecca."  Rebecca paused, kissed his brow, smiled and said, "not even death will defeat us, if we are together, my love."
        As she hurried out of the room, Gwion tearfully watched and murmured to himself, "Oh, I do hope you are right, love.  I do, I do, I truly do"  Soon, he was asleep, perchance to dream.
        Quick as a sparrow flying from the hail, quick as a snake slithering from the onset of autumn, Rebecca flew out of the pub, past her mother and father, past the villagers, and as she ran, she saw that the people were not as cheery as they had been the night before.  She noticed the grayness of the sky had returned, and the dreariness in the weight of the air.
        "Oh, Gwion, please be all right", she prayed as she ran down to the dock, where she looked and found his red bag.  The golden cord was tightly tied around it, but somehow, it had all seemed to lose it's sheen and glow.  It no longer had the flash that it did the night before, and had acquired a rather ordinary, rather dingy look to it. Almost, but not quite threadbare, as if it were trying to become threadbare, but gave up because it was too much effort.
        Hoisting the bag on to her back, she noticed that it was really quite heavy. "Full of sorrow", she thought to herself, imagining that the bag contained all the woes that Gwion had hinted at.  And oddly, the bag had a squirmy feel to it, akin to a bag full of very large, very mobile earthworms. 
        Rebecca shuddered at the thought, not because earthworms bothered her in particular, but because the idea of carrying a bag full of very large mobile earthworms did.  Tossing back her revulsion as just being part of her imagination, she ran off the dock, up the road to the village and just as she reached the entrance, it started to rain.
        It was not a clean rain, either.  It was not an energetic rain.  It was not full of thunder, lightning, majesty.  It was not full of hail, sleet, or wind.  It was the sort of rain that would rain from the sky because the sky was completely, absolutely bored with sunlight and had nothing better to do, so why not just rain.  It was a warmish, almost slimy sort of rain.  Not the sort of rain you would want in your house, mucking up the carpets, let me tell you.  This was the sort of rain that would stand outside subway stations, never bathe or shave and ask you for any spare change you might have on you right before it shot a large booger out of it's nose.  This was not a pleasant rain.
        She got to the pub, soaked to the skin from the miserable drench.  Her parents tried to ask her what was wrong, but she just growled at them, "Not right now, please!", which, by the way, is not the response to give your parents if you want to remain on happy terms with them.  They both turned away from her as she passed, and from each other out of embarrassment for not having the courage to think of any other thing to do, and replied to her saying "Be that way then... see if we ever offer again."
        She crashed through her open door and saw Gwion asleep, gently snoring.  Dropping the bag next to the bed, and being greatly relieved it was not full of earthworms, she sank down on her knees to watch him as he slept.
        And Gwion dreamt.
        His dream was one of bleak emptiness and despair.  He was falling, falling, down and far, accelerating as he fell.  There was nothing to hold to, no safety to grab, no rope, no net.  He felt the wind on his face, harsh, tearing, and the air was sickly sweet as he descended.
        He watched his past in flickers, still frames appearing and shooting off into the dark, receding like sparks off a dying fire.  He saw all that he had loved come into view, and he watched, had to watch, had no choice as he had no eyelids to close.  He watched them die. 
        Again.
        The dream faded and was replaced with emptiness and dark.  Not your ordinary dark, it was void of dark, it was void.  Dark had been pulled in and sucked away with all light, all sound, all life, all color.  He was still falling.
        Down, and down, despair settled around his bones like a damp and cold blanket.  No fear, he had nothing to fear. Fear, had it ever been, had flown away, drained away by the whirlpool of despair.
        There was a flash off to his side.  Not much, but a small flicker, a tiny flicker, a minute flicker of sudden color.  A pinprick, a dot, an atomic particle.  But it was something he could hang his hat on. 
        His motion shifted, and he drifted toward the flick in the nothing.  Round it became, but still small, still undefined.  Closer he drifted, slow, slow, but it began to resolve into a ball.  Blue, and white, brown and green it was. 
        He could feel, through some sense he could not identify, that the ever hungry void was seeking this place out. 
        Closer and closer till it became a spinning globe, a planet with oceans and continents.  Down and down till he could make out mountain ranges, rivers, forests.  Falling and falling till he could see a tiny village, small and individual, with a twin mountain range on one side, and a forked river on the other.
        This village, he could see, was a dimmer color than the mountains and the lands past the river.  It appeared faded, as if exposed to too much light.  The very air shimmered with little spots of fading color and light.  Pop, pop, pop, like balloons that have been pinned for the big dance the tiny spots went out. At the dance, they swirled and they twirled and they tangoed with a manic motion, and they were being drawn... drawn somewhere.
        His motion slowed, slowed, slowed till he stopped mid air above the little village.  He was a mote in the air.  Swirling and floating in the air.  He felt faded, he felt drained, and he too joined in the dance, being drawn, drawn, will less.
        He flowed with the other motes, heading toward a destination that revealed itself on the far side of the village.  A small knoll, with a small withered tree, was the gathering place for the faded spots of color and light.  They created a tornado of faded, fading hope and life, being drawn down to a spot at the base of the tree.
        He fell in a constant spin till he too, was pulled to the base of the tree.  There was, he saw, just before total and complete sweet oblivion, a hole in the fabric of the knoll.  Not the knoll, itself, but something just beyond the reality of the knoll, just before it as well.  It was a leak, and all of life, all of hope, all of love and magic in this little valley was being sucked away through the leak.
        "It's a Hole!", he cried out, startling Rebecca from where she dozed.  "It's a Hole!  Rebecca, it's a Hole, with a capital H and we have got to stop it up, somehow."
        Rebecca groggily replied "A hole?"  She was overjoyed to see Gwion recovered a bit from his ordeal, but he seemed to be speaking nonsense.  "A hole?" she repeated.
        "Not just a hole, my dear, darling, Rebecca.  A Hole.  Capital H o l e.  A Hole of such magnitude that it is draining this place of it's hope, it's dreams, it's very life.  I do not know how long it has been there, and I do not know how it got there, but I saw it, big as life, big as you, big as love.  It's there, for sure and true!"
        He struggled upright, and it was evident that no matter how far he had come in recovery, he still had a way to go.  Rebecca rose from her kneeling position, groaning as her knees let her know that age moves on and carries flexibility with it.  She sat on the bed next to Gwion and held one of his hands in hers.  It was cold and she gently rubbed it between hers.
        "Gwion, my love, I don't understand.  A Hole?  A Hole where?"  She shook her head, not understanding, but seeing the light in her loves eyes.  It was not the light of madness, and she recognized it as such, having seen the light of madness in the severely ill.  This light the light of extreme clarity, of having seen something that might not be seen with ordinary eyes.
        Excitedly, Gwion told her of his dream, of the misery and despair, though he did leave out parts of it that reminded him of things he could do nothing about.  He told her about the falling and the planet, and the village and the motes in the air, and the whirlpool at the base of the tree. He described it all in excited words, painting the picture until she nodded her understanding of it.
        "I see." she said.
        "Good." he replied.
        "But Gwion, how do you patch a hole, or rather a Hole, that you can't see with normal eyes?"
        "Did you bring my bag?"  And she pulled it up from the side of the bed.  It no longer had the feel of being a crawly live thing, and though it didn't have the same sheen and glow that it had, it was also not quite as headed for threadbarreness as it had been earlier.  She marveled briefly at the change, suspected it was related to Gwion's partial recovery, and suspected it would not be the first wonder she would wonder at.
        He buried his head into the bag rummaged deep into it, muttering. "Where is it, where did it go?" He pulled his head out and looked at Rebecca briefly. "There's something I had a long time ago, almost when I started ... when I started on the path I'm on now.  I'll be back, I may have to go down to the cellar."  And having said that, he crawled into the bag and completely disappeared.  She could have sworn she heard receding footsteps, and receding mutterings, things being tossed about, clattering, clanging, bouncing and every so often an exclaiming "Hello! I had wondered where you had go to!".
        Not as patiently as she would have liked, Rebecca waited.  She was glad that Gwion had recovered as well as he had, and she was equally as glad that he believed he had an answer, but she did wish that he would get a move on!  Sitting on the bed as she was, her foot began to tap, tap, tap.
        Shortly, but not quite short enough to suit Rebecca, the sounds of feet on a staircase came from inside the red bag on the bed.  She looked right, looked left, and feeling a bit guilty about it, she peeked into the bag.  She wasn't sure if she should, she was fairly sure that it would upset Gwion, but peek she did.  She saw only more bag.  No Gwion, no staircase, no nothing at all, just the red insides of a bag with red outsides.
        She heard a door close and she quickly dropped the lip of the bag into it's place.  Folding her hands in her lap, and entwining her fingers, she sat there, like a petulant child, swinging her legs.
        Gwion poked his head out, said "Oh! Hello, love.  I hope I wasn't to very, very long." to which she replied sweetly, "Oh no, not at all.  There's just this great hole sucking in the very life of my village, you see, and I could have waited centuries for you to return, I was so entertained here by nothing at all."
        "I sense a bit of tension here", he said. "I'm sorry, Rebecca, but you see, I left these far back in my memories, and sometimes when searching our memories, it does take a bit of time."
        "Memories?  How can you search your memories... Never mind.  I know that your answer to the question would be some cryptic answer, such as 'This bag holds my memories, which is why if anyone else looks into it, they will see nothing because they are after all, MY memories'".
        "Exactly!", he exclaimed, pleased with her deduction. Only... "Rebecca, did you go looking into the bag?"
        "Um." she said.  "Maybe just a peek... but you were gone an awfully long time, and there was a lot of noise from the bag and the sound of steps, so yes... I won't tell you a lie, Gwion, and I never will.  I did look into your bag, and I saw nothing but the inside of the bag."
        Gwion gave his love an intense look.  "Rebecca."  he paused, thinking what to say.  "No is not the time, but there will come a time when I allow you to see all of my memories.  Not now, though.  After we fix this Hole. Would that be all right?"  He took her hand in his and looked into her brown eyes, reminding her that she had caught his heart from the very beginning.  "You will know all about me there is to know. I promise this, because we shall be together for a very long time."
        "All right, my dear Gwion.  I will wait, and I too, feel that we shall be together for a very, very long time.  Now, what was it that you brought from the cellar of your memories?"
        "Ah!", he said, and produced a small, thin, black case, about the size of a flat loaf of bread.  He opened the case, and produced a pair of lenses, encased in dark wire, bridged in the middle, with hinges on their outside edges.  The lenses were tinted a reddish color.
        "These are my rose colored glasses.  They were first worn by me to pull me out of a dark depression.  They were given to me by the one who taught me my craft.  And that is a story in itself, but no time, no time.  They will allow me to see the stream of light and hope and love that is being sucked away and into the Hole on the Knoll." 
        He struggled with pulling himself erect, and then he struggled with putting on his boots, now a faded green, as faded as a lawn in the autumn knowing that winter is nibbling at it's edges.  Belying his words, his physical strength was not ever half back, not by half.  Rebecca was alarmed and said as much, and Gwion tried to sooth her worries with assurances that once they had blocked the Hole, stopped the drain, then his strength would return as quickly as it had left.  He emphasized that they should hurry, for as quickly as his strength had left him, he was as afraid that his courage would too, and then it would be far and away too late.
        She supported him leaving as she had when arriving, arm around his waist. This time she did stop, give her parents a very large hug, kissed her father's cheek, and explained that she and Gwion were going out to save the world, please don't worry, and don't wait up.  As her parents were parents, they looked at each other after she had gone, shrugged and went on with their game of whist
        Stumbling and halting when Gwion had to catch his breath, the pair moved through the misty streets of the village.  As they moved, Gwion explained what he was having to do. 
        "When we get to the knoll, I will don my glasses." He tapped the black case against his temple.  "These should allow me to locate the exact place where the Hole is.  Then, still wearing them, I should be able to find a stone large enough to plug the hole.  And that is where the danger lies."
        "And why is that?  Surely there is a stone in the village large enough to block any hole you find, unless that hole is so large it would take a house to fill it."
        "No, Rebecca, even that would not be large enough."  Seeing her confusion, he went on.  "Look, the Hole is not something of this earth.  It was created or dug or made or fashioned somewhere else and placed here.  Why it was placed here to drain all the magic from this place, we don't know.  By whom, I can only barely fathom, and I won't even guess because to speak a name is to give that thing power, and I'd rather not do that yet.  In short, this is not a hole that we can dam with common village stones.  It is not a common hole... this is a Hole in the spirit of the earth, in the soul of this place.  It can only be stoppered by a stone of the same caliber, a stone of the heart."
        "Stone of the heart.  And that would be?" she asked.
        "A stone of the heart is something so sad, so terrible, that it sits in the heart, exactly as a stone.  It gets in the way of you giving that heart to anyone, fully without reservation.  It gets in the way of you even giving it to yourself, in the form of forgiveness or love.  I have such a stone.  I know where it dwells.  So, it lies with me to grasp that stone and use it to close off the Hole."
        When the implications of what he had just revealed sank into her mind, Rebecca regarded her love with new eyes, and those eyes were shining with glimmers of tears.  How difficult it must have been to have put on such a merry face when in truth, his whole world was shattered?  How brave a soul must he be?
        "Oh, not so brave", he said with a smiling frown, knowing what she was thinking. "It was cowardice that left the stone there, for I never faced that pain, never let the tears wash it out of my heart.  Now, perhaps I see the reason. Perhaps in the depth of my own story, this has been written exactly as it should."
        "Then what would be the danger of using that stone, that pain, for something good and proper?  How could that be anything but a lifting of your soul, a brightening of your heart?"
        "Because it is a part of me.  It is what has created me, made me the merry jester, the incredible storyteller, whose stories can paint a world so real.  It is the pain inside of me that allows me to be able to do that, because, you see, everything that the characters go through, for good and ill, I have already been there.  It is the Empathy of the Storyteller that brings it all to life.  If I remove that, then there is a very good chance the stories will be removed with it.  That I could not bear, and yet, I must.  For to leave it as it is will allow the Hole to grow till it drains us all.  When that happens, all the stones in all the hearts will become so large that this very land will sink into the earth to become not a valley, but a lake of tears."
        "OH! Well, then." said Rebecca, with new understanding.  "But still and all, you would have your memories, and from those you could re-create the stories, yes?"
        With a sad smile, Gwion looked over to Rebecca's hopeful face.  "Yes. They may not have the same color, the same depth, the same... life.  But they would still be there.  That is for sure and true, my love."
        "And you would always have me!" she said with a smile, hoping to bring a bit of light back into his eyes.  She didn't, and she could see that, but he smiled back and answered, "And you will always have me, my love."
        They finished the journey in silence, leaning on each other.  No more words, no more bravado.  Just the job to do.  The knoll was still as it was, and the skinny little tree, leafless, greeted them without a word.
        He nodded to Rebecca, and said "Best let me do this alone, love.  This is greater magic than I have ever attempted before."  She nodded back to him, but oddly, her hand would not leave his.  Her hand believed, and made a very strong case to her heart, that if it let go of his hand, she may very well lose him altogether.
        "You must let go, love.  It won't be long, I promise."
        What exactly he was promising, she could not be sure of, but she let go.  She couldn't say a word to him, could not tell him to be careful, could not tell him she loved him.  Her voice was to close to cracking, her eyes to close to overfilling, her heart to close to breaking.  She very simply had a feeling that she was about to lose something rare and valuable, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
        Gwion stepped away from her, and placed the rose colored lenses before his eyes.  Suddenly the world changed.  The muted greens and blues and yellows became a miasma of greys and shades of grey and red tinted greys.  He could see the motes, the same spots of light he had seen in the dream, had even become, whirling and sucking through the air to be drawn down, down, down.
        "I can see them Rebecca.  They flow into a spot directly at the base of the three."  On his knees, he pointed to a spot where three roots emerged from the ground.  Though Rebecca could not see a thing, it was evident to her eyes that Gwion did.  His face followed a line from far above her head, down to where the roots entered the ground.  "These are not the roots of the tree.  These are the Taps where the Hole has been draining the entire village.  Poor tree. Unsuspecting dupe for whomever is behind this."  He reached down and pulled with what strength he had, and the fake roots pulled out quite easily.
        To Gwion's eyes, it was as if he had unleashed the light of the sun.  With the pulling of the fake roots, he had undammed the hole and now the motes were flowing into it even faster!  "Oh, that was stupid." he said.  Rebecca alarmed, cried out "What? What was stupid?"
        "Um. Never mind, dear.  I just may have to work a bit harder than I expected.  Faster too.  Now, I will be very quiet here for a few moments while I go searching for the stone.  Do not be alarmed, all right?  I will be back as quickly as I can!" and saying no more he dropped to the ground and sat, quiet as midnight.
        Rebecca, a bit alarmed regardless of what Gwion had said, looked at him and shook her head.  "Silly man, love you though I may, I certainly hope our lives are not filled with me constantly waiting on you, because so far, that's exactly what it seems to be."
        Gwion did not hear her.  He was quite busy.  Not having his bag nearby, he had to go down, deep into his own self, dropping through memories that had long lain buried, and that he had hoped would always remain buried.
        Sadness mingled with anger, tainted with joy and painted with pain, down through years and years and lifetimes and more years of memories, looking for just the one that he knew was there.  It didn't take long, for he had placed the memories there, and he knew exactly where to look.
        Death there was here. Fear too.  Pain of loss.  Loss of life, loss of love.  The largest stone in the human heart is not for those that have left us, but for those that have left us not of their own free will.  Memories of laying his head on an empty chest, hearing the labored wheeze of breath, feeling the tired heartbeat in a living chest slow, slow, slow until it beat no more, and the living was not.  Memories of solitary kiss against lips that could not feel, on forehead that did not think.  Memories of warmth, fading, fading, fading... gone.
        Tears came from his eyes and heartbreaking sobs broke from his throat as Rebecca watched him.  She did not know what he had found, but she most ferverently wished it was what he was searching for, because just watching him and the pain he was going through was tearing her apart, knowing there was nothing she could do to help him.
        Gwion grasped the pain of the memory.  He pulled it close to his chest and cradled it as gently as one would a newborn.  Up, and up he swam through the other memories, all paled now from the experience of this one he held.  Up and up he went till he reached the cage of his own mind.  He opened tear clouded eyes, calmed the sobs in his chest and saw Rebecca standing there, her hand, a fist clenched and bitten to hold back her own cry. 
        Gwion looked down at his hands, and examined the stone he had wrought.  It was red, but not from the tint of the lenses.  It was the blood red of pain, of sorrow, of madness.  It would be enough, he hoped.  It would have to be.
        On his knees, he crawled. He carried the stone to the Hole.  How empty he felt.  Weak as a kitten, worn as an old sock.  Limp as a noodle, too long boiled.  He made it to the Hole and swayed over it, feeling the pull of the misery, feeling the lure of despair.  How easy it would be to just give in, give out, give up.  His pain reached out and tugged at his memory, promising bliss if he just let go.  He started to fall into the Hole, and his pain slipped out of his grasp and went down before him.  His sight failed.  His world faded to the black of oblivion.
        Rebecca watched him crawl to the little tree, carrying nothing, nothing at all.  She watched as a river of tears and heard a volley of sobs claw out of his chest.  She saw him teeter, she saw him topple, she saw him fall.
        "Gwion! Gwion, Gwion!" she fair screamed his name as she stood and ran to his side.  He lay as one sleeping, tear stained face still soaked from his ordeal.  His chest did not rise and fall. "Gwion!" she cried again, laying her head on his chest, listening, listening.  Not a sound echoed inside his ribcage.
        "No! Gwion! No!"  She snatched the rose lenses from his eyes and looked deep into them, seeking for some spark, some sign.  Deep, deep within, she saw them.  Tiny, not hardly noticeable at all, almost gone... golden motes swam, but grew dimmer, dimmer, dimmer.
        "Oh, Gwion", she sobbed.  "You always leave me waiting."  Dimmer, dimmer...  "Now you get back here, right now!", she screamed at his unmoving face.  "Come back, come back, come back".  If this had been a fairytale, he would have come back.  He would have taken a great gulping breath, opened his eyes and kissed her.  She would have cried great tears of release and they would have lived happily ever after.  Dimmer... 
        She had an inspiration, a bit of a grasp of a glimpse of a shred of hope.  She took the lenses and placed them on her face.  The world spun, the universe shook, and she saw the world through rose colored glasses for the first time in her life, and what she saw terrified her. 
        She saw the motes swimming out of Gwion, tornadoing down into the Hole.  She could see it now, large and gaping and hungry seeming, pulling at her, wanting her to join with it, to merge and just let the world go.  Gwion was dying, possibly dead.  Of what worth was her life without him?  Where would the color be?  Where would the joy be?
        She teetered on the brink of the Hole, watching mote after mote fly into it, sparks into a vacuum.  If Gwion had been successful, shouldn't this have all stopped?  She looked down into the Hole and saw what had happened and was wrong.
        She could see the stone that Gwion dropped.  It was large, and it would have been large enough, but it had stuck on an outcropping.  She could not reach it, for every time she tried, her hand, very real in her outside would, would not go through the solid ground.  The Hole, she remembered was not in her world.
        She stood up in a panic, and looked around.  Nothing.  There was nothing here that would help her.  "Think, Rebecca, Think!", she yelled to herself.
        Memories, Gwion had said.  Stones made of memories.  Well, if there were stones made of memories, why not sticks?  Why not a stick large enough to move a stuck stone made of memories?  Sticks and stones.  She almost giggled, but was afraid she would not be able to stop.
        How to do it?  How had Gwion done it?  It looked like he had just... gone inside himself, as if he was just remembering.  Well, that certainly looked easy enough.  Holding tight to Gwion's cold and lifeless hand, she dropped to the ground, quieted her breathing and took a mental step back and high dived into herself.
        Funny thing about memories.  People tend to run on just the surface memories, such as 'What do I have to do today?' and 'Did I turn the kettle off?'.  Occasionally they think about things in their past, but generally it doesn't run very deep.  Most people rarely want to get that close to themselves, and leave it alone.
        Rebecca didn't have that choice.  She was spurred on by desperation.  "Where is it, where is it?, she questioned herself, searching through countless memories of breakfasts, long days without end, nothing out of the ordinary at all, just bleak and dreary existence.  The only break she would fathom were recent memories, since Gwion entered her life.  Lovely though they may be, they were of no help, as they were cotton candy stuff of romance and love, but nothing substantial enough to move an imaginary stone stuck on an imaginary ledge in an imaginary Hole that was sucking the life out of the one she loved.
        Further and further she waded through the muck of ordinary nothing special days.  Here and there were sparkles of things rather special.  Birthdays, her parents anniversary, the first time she had been kissed by a boy behind the pub, but nothing that would serve. Her heart was starting to sink that what she needed might not be here.
        Off in the distance in her virtual world, she saw something that gave her hope. Something that restored her resolve, pulled her through the mud till she could grasp with un-natural strength the memory that she had come looking for.  She had hoped... no, she had known it was here, even if she had not remembered it was here.
        When she was very, very small, no more than 3 or 4, her father called her to his side to show her one of the last remaining magics in their world.  As she stood, tiny hand grasped in his giant one, he pointed in the direction of the twin mountains, and there, perched like a bridge between them, was a rainbow.  She asked her father then, if she could catch the rainbow.  He laughed and reached out to try to grasp it for her, but failed.  "Darlin' babygirl, if I could, I would bring that rainbow for you to carry in your pocket."  That was the memory that Rebecca found.
        She reached out for that memory, and using power from whence she knew not where, she pulled the rainbow from between the mountains.  It did not want to come, it did not want to go, but grudgingly, it tore free, sprinkling memory mountain fragments in it's path.
        Rebecca held onto that bow with both hand, with dear life, and leapt straight up, up and back into her own head.  Looking down into her hands, she could see the bow, large, solid and very, very strong, all shiny and all colors radiating outward. 
        Hurry, hurry, she thought to herself, before the Hole sucked away the joy and color of this, too.  A quick glance at Gwion showed no change, but a slow movement of motes crawled from his heart to the Hole.
        With the strength of a pile driver, she drove the rainbow into the Hole, and lodged it against the spot where the stone was lodged against the Hole wall.  When she felt it was secure, she pushed against it with all her might.  It didn't budge. 
        She shifted her feet to get her shoulder under it, and lifted the rainbow, straining hard.  Nothing happened, but she thought she could see the stone rock, just a little bit. 
        She stepped around to the far side of the Hole, not letting go of the rainbow.  She then, with a better angle of leverage, shoved the rainbow as hard as she could, throwing herself off balance and at the point of falling in. 
        The stone shifted. The stone ground angrily from having been woken, rocked, tilted and started to slide off the ledge and into the Hole.  Encouraged, Rebecca doubled her efforts, grunting as a young lady most assuredly should not, straining as a young woman would never admit to.  The rainbow moved, the stone slipped off the ledge, and Rebecca, giving one elated hurrah of triumph, toppled into the Hole, following the stone closely.  The Hole was stopped.
        On that day, on a grassy knoll, near a village that lay in a valley that was nestled between twin mountains and snuggled at the fork of a river, there were two bodies that lay head to head, with their hands touching.  A man, dressed in flashy green, and a lovely woman with brown hair.  For a very long time nothing happened at all.  There was no breeze.  No birds sang.   Not a thing at all.
        Then, with a startled and gaspy intake of breath, the man in green, Gwion, opened his eyes.  He didn't move for a while.  In fact, he was surprised he was even able to open his eyes and gasp in a startled breath.  He lay there quite a while, just feeling, just being, just being alive, gathering his thoughts and realizing where he was.  He felt that he had just climbed from a deep hole of a long sadness.  He felt... clean.  And there was a curious emptiness, as if something had been misplaced, but he couldn't imagine what that could have been.
        Slowly, as slowly as elephants crossing the alps, memory returned.  Slowly, he remembered who he was.  Slowly, he remembered what had happened.
        "Rebecca?"  Painfully, he lifted himself onto one elbow and realized that one of his hands were clutching something.  He looked down the length of his arm and saw that he was holding another hand, and that hand was not his own.
        "Rebecca?", he called out, hauling himself to his knees and crawling to where his love lay, unmoving.  He saw the rosy lenses on her eyes and he said in anguish, "Oh, Rebecca! What did you do?  What have you done?"  He took the rose colored glasses gently, gently, oh so gently from her face and placed them over his own eyes.
        No Hole.  He had done it... or ... had she?  Regardless it had been done, but the realization of success was dimmed and muted and saddened by his loss.  He removed the glasses from his eyes and examined the still form of his love.
        She still breathed, thank the gods, and he sighed a happy sigh of relief.  She was not dead.  He listened to her mind, and heard nothing, no dreams, no murmurs of the silent droning of ordinary thoughts of the silent furious buzz of the creative.  He did hear her heart beat, though.  Not only did he hear it, but he heard it ... twice.  Doubled.  Two times over.
        "What the hell?", he thought.
        He looked around to see if what he thought he thought was what he thought was correct. The knoll gave it's agreement by not saying anything at all.  The ground near Rebecca's feet was disturbed, as if she had been standing and her feet had sunk in deep.  Supporting something?  Pushing something?  Regardless, she had shown a lot of strength and her feet had dug in with determination.
        Gwion knew exactly what had happened and he laughed with delight. "Oh, you clever, clever girl!", he said, rubbing his hands together.  The light in his eyes and the glee on his face was even stronger when he first arrived in the pub and he fairly glowed when he stood up.
        He walked over to the little tree, still rather skinny and sad looking and quietly spoke to it for a bit.  Then, with a slap of his hands, and a hoop of laughter, he placed his hands on either side of the trunk, and pushed with all his heart, all of his mind, all of his imagination and wishes. He pushed so hard that sweat broke out on his brow.  What was he pushing?  The tree didn't tip, didn't bend, didn't twiggle a twig.  He was pushing through the tree, looking, looking into the ground beneath his feet.  He whispered hushed urgent words, speaking feelings and hopes and dreams in a voice quiet with concentration.
        When he had found what he was looking for, he reversed his stance, took a deep breath and puuuuuled with all his might.  This time, the little tree trembled with the exertion.  Tiny beads of sap began a flow up out of the twig ends and it appeared that the tree itself was crying out.  Buds appeared like popcorn over every branch.  One bud in particular, was very, very large and continued to grow long after the other buds had flowered.  It eventually grew so large the branch it was on could not support it any more and the bud dropped off, falling down. Gwion deftly let go of the tree in time to catch the falling superbud.
        He carried the oversized package to where Rebecca, still and pale, lie.  There, gently, he unwrapped the bud, one leaf at a time until what lay there was what he wanted to find, what he knew he would find.
        A bright mote of light, clean and bright and shining and surrounded by the green of life and love and nature.
        He lifted the light up and out of it's green nest, carried it over to the waiting form of his love.  With the care of a surgeon, he placed it on her chest, sat back and waited.  He watched as the mote sank into Rebecca's body.  A few moments more, and her eyelids fluttered.  A few ticks of that world clock and they opened.  Rebecca took a deep breath into her lungs, and coughed, as a swimmer will when they have accidentally breathed water before learning how to do it for real.
        A few minutes passed with Gwion sitting on his heels grinning and with Rebecca filling out her body once again.  She sat up and looked around, saw Gwion sitting there smiling at her.
        "Darling", she said, smiling back at him.  "I love you more than life itself, and you know it to be true.  But there is one question I do, indeed, have to ask of you."
        "Anything, my love.  Anything at all."
        "Will you always leave me waiting for you to show up?"
        Gwion just smiled, and Rebecca just smiled and the village recovered it's magic and grew to be the Village of Shopkeepers once again, and eventually Rebecca got the answer to her question.
        And the answer was Yes.