Once, O best beloved, when this part of Hesse was still known as a Landgraviate, one spring before May Day, when fires still climbed up the slopes of the Knüll mountains on this day and the goats would not settle, a shepherd boy saw something no simple shepherd should.
He was fifteen.
Sent too far up the slope too late in the day.
And too late in the month.
The mist was thick, and the sheep uneasy.
He followed the flicker of what he, rightly, thought was firelight. Until he came to the top of the hill.
Schwarzer Stock.
That’s what they called it.
There, between the blackthorn and the pine, fires burned low and circular.
Figures walked widdershins, silent as smoke.
One bore antlers. One wore wings like ash. One bent backwards as she danced, like her spine was no longer hers but a reptile’s
They did not shriek.
They did not chant.
They simply moved, around the stone at the centre, around the fire blazing bright, around the goat who did not blink.
The boy hid beneath the gnarled roots of an old beech.
He did not breathe.
When it ended, it ended all at once.
The dancers scattered like leaves, and the goat turned its head and looked straight at him.
And smiled.
He returned at dawn.
Said nothing.
Ate little.
Did not sleep.
But after that night, lambs never took sick when he tended them. And he knew how to took the beasts to spots in the old Hutewald no one had used in centuries. Wild dogs would not cross his path. But dogs would howl when his shadow passed.
He did not age quite like the others.
And once a year, on the last night of April, he climbed Schwarzer Stock again, barefoot, without a lantern.
Sometimes, he sang.
They say the last time he went, he did not return.
But that spring, the flocks were easier, the births smoother, and a single stone near the treeline was warm to the touch, though no sun had reached it in weeks.
And once, a child said she saw a man in the mist, with a crooked smile and one eye like a goat’s.
She never saw him again.
But the sheep followed her after that.
🎨 Esao Andrews
