You are standing at the start of a storytelling journey. Your responses will contribute to a story that will tell itself. The story will be made by many minds...woven into a pattern that no-one can foresee...the unthought tale…
There will be questions and challenges.
Let them echo in your memory. Use that memory as your starting point.
Challenge Number One
Please answer the following questions:
Cautious or risk-taking? < Hazel chose Cautious
Nature or gadgets? < Hazel chose Nature
Birds or fish? < Hazel chose Fish
Arriving at a small hotel in the middle of the night, you take a room looking out over a river. In the morning you wake to the sound of rushing water. You open your window to look out.Someone is fishing by a river. They ask you for a story. What do you tell them and why?
Hazel wrote
My breath catches as the gravelled tones and rushed vowels grate against my ear drums. My teeth clench as the fisherman's question carries on the wind and swamps my dry earthside senses.
He is speaking English. He is asking for a story. The man's face is consumed by bewilderment. He emits a sigh. Was that impatience? Or was there disappointment in that gesture? I flinch.
The fisherman returns his attention to his fishing line. With his back turned, I remove my shaking hands from their desperate clench on the bedroom drapes. Sequins cake the heavily embroidered curtains and they scratch and scrape against the receding webbing between my fingertips. I have been out of the water for 14 hours now.
The fisherman does not see me spread my mouth wide, stretching and exploring it's flexibility. My tongue licks my lips...it seems that no amount of complimentary Hotel shower gel will rid me of taste of clay and putrid moss. A forefinger presses against the raised ridge of my now sealed gills on my neck.
I try to speak but a hoarse whisper only emits. Saliva catches and a desperate spluttering and gasping ensues. I grapple to breath in the polluted air of the city and instead envisage the forest's riverway. Swirling currents....glittering streams....deliriously soothing and intoxicating - my wildest ride.
Between my gasps, a bouncing beam below catches my sharp attention. Scales teasingly trace the lapping surface, a fin propels them forward...and unblinking eyes fix on mine. They found me.
Hazel Wrote
Matted knots and defiant curls - my scalp aches as I frustratingly claw at them. Hurriedly dressing my weakened frame, loose clothes hang like a true alien cotton skin.
In the dark, the ticking of the clock despairs me and leaves me all at once jittery. Where is my bag?! Time is unforgiving.
I'm again unfamiliar with the bold forms and rigid furniture of humans. I clumsily stub my toe and bang my knee - incessant hopping and a yowl of pain diminish my chance of a subtle slip into the night.
I force and push the hotel room's key card back underneath the aged frame and put the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the handle. This should buy me some time - if they slither down the hallway in the light of dawn, they will be more surprised by the breaking down of the door than I.
Amber and the others observe me closely - their fins swish in time with my hurried footsteps. Moonlight guides me as I jump down from the concrete bank. The tide has retreated and the riverbank's sludge and grime now cake my calves. I barely notice as I desperately unzip my backpack.
Amber lifts her head out of the water. My breath catches. With each tired pull onto the shore, her scales retreat further and further. Iridescent red jasper - that is what her skin reminds me of. Her head drops but I gently cup it before it hits the pebble dash. She gasps as I place the green jade stone against her lips. Amber sucks in its essence and quakes with relief.
A menacing roar stills my heart. The others balance precariously high out of the water on their tails. We all face my abandoned hotel in a state of shock. How could they know? How could they sense that I would leave at such an early hour?
Amber's webbed hand grasps mine tight. Our school of fish hurriedly raise a swirling riptide and I welcome the release of responsibility, and allow myself to transform - to return to my scaled and agile carp self. I scoop the jade stone up from the riverbed and carry it protectively in my soft mouth. Amber's fins press against mine and a rush of heat reaches my scales - was that a blush?
Their menacing red eyes watch our blazing current escape from the open bedroom window.
The water rushes around you, a feeling of freedom and wildness grows in you as you surge forward. Amber has flitted on ahead, and you flick your tail and drive faster through the river after her. The jade is a heavy burden to carry, but you cannot drop it now, it is needed and you have risked everything to get it.
But the rushing of the waters contains a roar...you know that roar...you know what it means.
They are coming.
You clamp the jade and see that Amber has turned around to gaze at you, you know in her eyes how much depends on this journey. There is fear in those eyes, a fear you also feel.
They are coming.
The jade gives life, but time is still ticking.
You recall the first time you heard about the jade. The story moves through your mind and the touch of Amber’s fins that brush your own bring back such memories.
What is the story of the Jade? Who told it to you?
Hazel replied
The jade stone's tale has been carried on raindrops, through swerving streams, and engulfed in the mightiest river currents.
It causes both gentle bubbles and raging swirls.
The storyteller's lips may soothe or splutter, depending on their truth.
The tale may be as old as a worn pebble or as new as a fresh teardrop. There is no measurement of time in the water's deepest depths.
I recall my Mother's word as I desperately swim on - ever aware of the closing distance between our fleeing fish school and their blood curdling roars.
The jade stone would not have been...except for...her.
Ragged and desperate sobs. Sharp spilling tears. Rough rubbing of her eyes and unsteady steps forward.
The woman stumbled in fear. Her broken heart was momentarily numbed by the fear of fleeing through the midnight wood.
She paused - was that the sound of running water? She willed her rushed breathing to settle.
Her ears were her eyes. They always had been. Her fingertips were her eyelashes - warning her of approaching blunt and sharp objects. Her ears welcomed the sounds of the rippling water. Her heart ached for the comfort of one "known"...too many tree barks and brazen risen roots had caught her off-guard already.
The woman hurried out of the wood's thicket. Her trips and falls were rewarded with the harmony of an enticing river.
Her rich red curls were now caked in black - there was no moonlight. Only the clouds were at play.
Fresh cuts and scratches haunted her freckled skin. A flimsy nightgown barely covered her modestly as it was shredded and torn - a mark of the woman's frantic escape.
She splashed forward and sighed with relief. Only when her aching feet and cut shins were soothed by the water, did she allow herself to give way to a hopeless sigh.
She was a 'burden'. That was what her Mother had fearfully whispered in her ear at breakfast. An overheard statement. They had held each other's hands tightly underneath the kitchen table. Although her eyes had never seen, she imagined silent tears running down her Mother's face.
"Your Father intends to make you disappear. Tonight. When he returns. You are thirty six and he has not been able to marry you off. He is counting the mouths to feed. You need to live my child - to escape. He blames you for everything....as you know. He will not listen to my pleas. He wants your blind eyes to feed the crows. He mutters that they will feed the foxes, and that they will then feed us. He has lost his mind Amber. He will bring you into the woods. He has a wooden mallet. Run my child - run! Do not forget me. I love you. But you must not come back!"
Amber's Mother had desperately kissed her Daughter's cheeks for the last time. Her urgent whispers sparked the woman's sudden and frightful flee into a dreaded woodland. Unprepared and barely fed, Amber had blindly run for her life.
Her mutters and tearful wails had an audience. An abundance of fish paid close attention to the woman's whispered and lonely monologue. A mother Carp swum protectively close to her released eggs. Spawning had been tiresome. The reeds had welcomed her to glide in for a rest.
Amber delicately tiptoed deeper into the water. The grazed soles of her feet plunged into sludge and upturned mud. A hole welcomed her imbalance and a surprise current dragged her quite suddenly underwater.
Up in the skies, an age old battle ensued between the moon and clouds. Moon beams hurried to light up Amber's way. Her desperate kicks to resurface were futile. She tumbled and swirled. Reeds entwined her. Air had not entered Amber's lungs for four minutes. Bubbles stopped escaping from her lips.
The jagged rocks delighted in the promise of fresh meat, torn flesh and possible broken bones. The moon was barraged with their delirious cackles and roars. Amber's lungs began to fill with water. Tonight the rocks would feast. The wind ripped up a spine tingling chill.
Fourteen minutes passed. Moonlight hurriedly shone into the raging river waters. The beams attacked the sunken muds, beat the devil-ish rocks and thrashed at the twisting reeds. Suddenly water began to swirl, pulp and mould. The mother Carp forgot to breathe with shock. Before her eyes, a whirlpool raged...and then quite suddenly...stopped. Out shot a green stone, landing brazenly close to the Carp's eggs.
Without pause, the Carp scooped up the jade stone into her mouth. Moonlight lit her way. She urgently swam towards the unmoving human and pressed the stone against her lips.
Amber's skin switched between flesh and scales - a tornado of changing forms. Which form would she settle in?
The rocks looked on enraged, unable to move closer to the moon's powerful creation.
At last...amongst the ripples...a new heartbeat...unblinking seeing eyes...a glittering swaying fin....a flickering of gills...a grateful release of bubbles. It was Amber.
The mother Carp was keen to sooth the transformed Koi Carp before her. With a swishing tail flick, the jade stone rolled in amongst the mountain of eggs.
But I quivered in my egg. No amount of moonlight could drown out the rocks' jealous and defiant roar.
I wish that I had been bigger - a fully formed fish. Maybe then I could have stopped....the jade stone being carried downstream by the current?
My mother Carp had been too busy nursing to notice, whilst the rocks had been too busy growing and grating into a stone human form...the jade stone held tightly in a new menacing hand as it grasped the riverbank.
There can be no going back now. You have fulfilled the promise that you made to Amber. You could not help her at the moment of her rebirth, but you will help her now. You have found the Jade stone and as your mother predicted, it has brought down on you the anger of the one whose greedy hand first snatched it from the waters.
It was not just Amber who was transformed that night, but her father also. As she became a carp, so he became - in his cold hearted fury and pursuit of her through the forest - a werewolf, the moon’s other creation. Just as Amber needs the stone to live, so her father needs the stone to turn back from wolf to man with the coming of each dark moon. Now you have it, he will be trapped in his wolf form for ever and the urgency of his pursuit is the urgency of his need.
Behind the shoal of carp, you hear the surging of the wolf's clumsy progress through the waters.
But this is your last desperate gamble. The stone that once represented all that divided daughter from father, now contains the seed of their reconciliation.
The same moon that caused the waters to surge, the same rocks that grated Amber into new life, are now waiting once more. The stone must be returned and then what will happen will happen.
You have almost reached the spot now, the rocks are appearing in their vicious sharpness. The water is surging white around them in the moonlight.
You brush Amber’s fins, and alert her. She turns and in her eyes, those great staring fish eyes you see a yearning, a fear, a hope.
You let the Jade stone fall to the sand at the bottom of the river.
You listen for the pounding of a wolf's paws through the shallows.
You stand on your fins as all the carp stand around you. Amber is next to you, she is already gasping for breath.
The moon’s light illuminates everything.
How is the stone returned and what happens next?
It is lost for ever in the river.
It is taken by the hand of a werewolf and a man stands on the bank.
It enables transformations of Amber and you into something else...
Hazel chose : It enables transformations of Amber and you into something else...what?
A deep guttural roar erupts. Bubbles burn as they spill through my fast closing gills. I hear my war cry and still cannot believe it is me...until I take a desperate gasp for air. My newly returned human legs are shaking. Webbed hands spread wide and I note for the first time how sharp my nails are. I arch forward. Heels stamp and soles defiantly push the green jade stone deeper into the riverbed. My foot lifts up - I lose contact with the stone - I am on 'countdown mode' again until my inevitable transformation back. But this is one carp that will not succumb to death's fishing line yet.
Vincent is being careless. He crashes through the churning riverway, slices himself against gravel and boulders into mud mounds. I can smell fresh blood oozing from the gauges in his torso. Amber's father....a devilish creature takes pause. All blood drenched and matted fur...this horrifying sight engulfs my vision. Even a few metres away, the demonic red eyes of this werewolf burn into my skin. Foam flies from his sneering jaw as he emits a menacing howl to the moon.
Amber's tail urgently swishes against my ankles but I cannot be swayed. She bumps into my heels and gnaws at my toes....urging me on and to run.
"Go! Go now!" I desperately whisper.
I pray a silent thanks to the moon as its white light casts a blinding reflection on the water's surface. Amber and the shoal remain hidden in the river and from the hungry glare of the monster before me. But...I cannot conceal their smell.
I charge! I shoot downstream! I fearlessly barrel into the beast, smacking its nose and punching it's muzzle with a blinding fury.
"Swim! You must go!"
The chilling wind drowns out my instructions. Rocks slice at my entirety as I grapple with Vincent. Fangs pierce my skin all whilst granite stones graze against my neck. His tail thrashes against my spine. Pebbles painfully embed themselves in my knees. A piercing cold breeze seeks to blind me. I am earthside and below the water in heated thrashes and in confusing seconds. I hungrily gasp for oxygen. My sharp nails pierce the werewolf's eyes and my wrist is then quite suddenly held in Vincent's mouth. I cry out in agony and proceed to wrap my free arm around the demon's neck.
Suddenly an alarm rings out - a clinking metal warning. I dare to look up and the pit of my stomach caves in on itself in fright. Vincent looks as endearing as a Poodle in comparison to the terrifying entity before me. Rocks, pebbles and granite make up the cackling monstrous man on the riverbank. No features define his face - he is a raw satanic nightmare. A haunting essence rises and hangs in the air around him. An alarming watch dangles from a chain, playfully swinging and swaying. The wind is unforgiving.
"Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock."
My heart flutters in fear at his teasing tone.
"Tell me this CARP! Was the countdown too much? Is that why you left me a delightful trail leading me straight to you? I thought that a smart FIN like you would have been more discreet!"
My mind sways and swirls. Pain, fear and exhaustion leave me on the precipice of collapse.
"That pet is mine by the way. Such a stupid mutt. Did you really think that he had the brains to control the jade stone? Amber's father - he was a delight to manipulate. All blood thirsty beast and no brain. Funny how he was the same as a man - oh the irony!"
My eyes dart to the resting place of the jade stone. Did Amber absorb some before fleeing?
"And yes I know the koi is close to don't even try to pretend otherwise."
Vincent forces me under - his thick padded paws hungrily press down on my windpipe. I dare not even worry about swallowing water and I accept that death is close.
"Your own ticking heart is nearing its end Hazel - be a good fishy and die quietly for me won't you? Oh - and one more thing. Did you really think that you could outsmart me and steal the green jade stone? Thanks for leaving it so safely in the riverbed for me. You are a smart-y carp-y. Bye bye now."
The rock man clicks his grated fingers. Boulders rise like the undead from the river's darkest depths. Suddenly balls of rock crash against my skull. He jumps into the river. With each advancing step he orchestrates the hailstorm of granite blows. Vincent too begins to sink under the weight of the rockfall attack. I do nothing to try to save him. My mind swirls and I become delirious. I think I see the rocks feasting on the fresh flesh of the drowned werewolf.
I cannot fight the torpedo of pebble bullets. And in a flash, the crazed rock man is on me. His weight is crushing and excruciating. He slams sharp fists into my eye sockets. I hear the crack of my skull - the water cannot muffle the sound. My failing eyes lock on the blurred underwater view of the moon...so it wasn't a full moon tonight?
I slip deeper into the darkness - riding the current to eternity...to the promise of infinite rest. I feel peaceful. The weight has gone from my chest and I feel as light as the egg from which I was born. I see a blinding white light and smile. How beautiful. Wait - what is that floating in the waterway? Is it....ash? Splinters of ash cake my skin. Where are my fins? I thought that I would have had my scales here - been a carp again? I cannot rub the ash off. All calmness dissipates and I frantically scrub at my skin. I scream!
A human hand grasps mine and pulls. River water hurriedly slides off my body. Amber rushes to carry me out of the water, lowering my crumpled form onto the bank. The putrid smell of moss and algae....damp earth and moist mud....I smile because the smell has never been so enticing. Red curls smother my face. Amber spits the jade stone out of her mouth and it lands on my chest. A heat engulfs me and numbs. She rubs the stone across my broken bones, sores and wounds. I surrender to sleep.
Amber's seeing eyes rise up to the crescent moon. It's beams continue to burn and break down the rocks - splitting the rock man's body in two. Slates and boulder's crumble in the rising tide and are carried away. The remaining ash disappears in swirls of foam. A defiant thrashing in the water fails to distract Amber from her healing task. The carp school beat the watch until every ticking mechanism is flooded. The ticking stops.
The crescent moon has returned, and with it the darkness is dispelled. The flailing tumult of rock and snarl of werewolf have all merged now into the river’s ebb and flow. The moon with its eternal cycles has triumphed over the tick tock of the rocks. The time of human lives and the vicious ends with which they are terminated is replaced with the movement of the river as it pours endlessly into the sea far away.
You are part of this time now. You have reached an end and discovered that there is something beyond the end - an eternal cycle of transformation will now be yours.
You stand up and take the Jade stone, holding it and staring into its depths. The moon illuminates it and whispers to you, with the sound of the sea, with the sound of the woods, with the sound of the carp surging in the waters.
Amber stands next to you. You have passed through the same trials and can never be separated. You smile at each other, with encouragement and shared understanding.
You both turn. You take the jade stone and toss it ahead of you into the waters. It will nestle there safely and you will know, always, where it is. The river will offer it when it is needed, not just to you, but to all those others who take the wild ride into the rushing waters.
Now you both run towards the river, there is joy filling you, shared laughter. You feel with Amber the freedom of movement, the easy breaths coming in and out, you reach the river and dive….and now….you return to the shoal. But you are no longer of the shoal, or of the river. The whole world is yours, land and ocean, river and wood, earth and water.
You swim with joy, heading towards the sea.