Orion

Orion is what remains when an elf is asked to carry a god. He towers above his Wild Riders, antler-crowned and terrible, trailing the heat of high summer through the cool of the glades, and even his stillness has the coiled quality of a hound before the slip. In his hand he bears the Spear of Kurnous, across his back the bow called the Hawk's Talon, and at his hip the Horn of the Wild Hunt, whose single note empties the forest of everything except pursuit. When it sounds, the kindreds leave their halls mid-song, the wild riders come with hoofbeats like falling timber, and the Hunt runs — over river, ridge, and ruin — until nothing that trespassed is left alive to be pursued. The Wild Hunt does not defeat its quarry. It uses its quarry up.

He is one king and countless elves. Each midwinter Orion dies, the god's fire consuming the body it borrowed, and the forest goes dark and quiet through the mourning months while the Eternal Guard stand watch over its sleep. Each spring a chosen lord of the asrai enters the Oak of Ages, and what steps out is not that lord but Orion — again, always — the same king in new flesh, crowned anew before Ariel his queen and attended by the Wild Riders who will serve him until his next death. The rite has repeated since the pact was young, and the asrai have never found another way; the forest must have its summer, and summer must have its king.

To be chosen is Athel Loren's highest honour and its purest sacrifice, for almost nothing of the vessel survives the god. Almost: the kindreds whisper that each year's Orion has a slightly different temper, the way each year's summer does — this one patient, that one pitiless — as though some flicker of the borrowed life persists in the god the way a taste persists in the wine. What never changes is the ending. The asrai crown their king each spring knowing midwinter will take him, and grief is built into their calendar as surely as harvest is built into the calendars of men. Perhaps that is why they follow him so absolutely, into any dark and against any foe. It costs little courage to die for a king who has already agreed to die for you.