The Vigil
By Alan

The fires burn through the length of night entire. Weeks are spent gathering the wood that will fuel them as we count the days that lead to this cold place in the year. We set the wood, carefully, in stacks and tented frames, kindling to branch to stick to heartwood for the fire to chew in its teeth.

The work is an art of ritual geometry; small wooden stepped pyramids stand at precise points around the circumference of a great circle. At the center, marked by radii of intersecting lines, the largest of the stacked offerings is placed, surrounded by the great stones worn nearly black With time, and the passing of long, old nights. At the moment before sunset, we shove our burning brands into the bundled wood, and set the great fires to their burning.

It has been this way for as long as I can remember.

I have walked those stones and circles, checking preparations for the fires, white robes drawn close against the cold, breath freezing in the damp of late evening's air. It is ritual for me, performed since the days of my youth, when I was called to become one of the astronomer-priests. It was so many years ago, so much a time when age seemed a mythical thing to
me. Now I wonder if those summers of my past were the myth, instead.

Last night I stood before the great arch of the standing stones and saw the Star of Evening rise, as though it were passing through a gate carved halfway between the heavens and the earth. Passage in this season giving clear sign and meaning of celestial moments ahead. Tonight, hidden by the rising tides of fire, it will ascend unseen. Though its path marks the course through which the sun will rise tomorrow. A fabulous bird awakened from the ashes of the fires lit tonight. It will mark the time when night's hold is broken, and day begins the slow return and reclamation of the season.

It has always been so, since we learned to count the stars and chart their paths across the years of night.

Yet lately, I have seen a thing. Each year, the Star of Evening drifts a little closer to the edge of the Stone gateway. In time, it will drift to a point outside this frame, and the day will dawn to greet an empty arch. What will happen then, I wonder? The sun will rise, I know; and the cold will still give way to longer days. These things are truth, and measurable.

But what will come of us? Will our rites be lost, with nothing but stories and scorched marks upon the ground to tell of us? Or will we melt away completely, as insubstantial as the memory of snow?

Lost in these wonderings, I walk the stone perimeter, let my fingers trace the contours of the weathered rock.

And I hear a thing.

Three thousand years from now, it tells me, the stars will run old courses, and the Star of Evening will rise again, to be framed in this gateway of rock. The sun will rise in its appointed place, and mark again the time when night gives way to day's approach.

Those who see the thing will remember us, and will remember this place.

They will call it Stonehenge.