"Threshold Prelude" by Ruth E. Morrison

          It began in Cannido, the land of spring. For the Aideane, the seasons are not times, but places that exist on an otherworldly plane, that pass across the land by means of hidden portals. While in the world of men, the seasons appear to move and change, in that other place it merely a matter of geography. In Cannido, the geography appeared to be a vast forest, full of flower blossoms and youth. There were animals too, of course, each tribe with their own customs and language, and their own territory clearly delineated by marks carved onto the trunks of trees, or intricate barriers of woven vines. In those days, and in that remote place, the animals were much like human beings, and lived in the kind of civilized harmony that relied on good strong fences.
          There was another animal in that place who did not belong to a tribe, and therefore felt he was free to cross through territories at will. The other creatures found him strange in other ways as well; his habit was to move about on two limbs, sometimes on his feet, and sometimes on his hands, but rarely, if ever, on both. Unlike the others, there were no more of his kind, and it was believed that his people had displeased the Yanne, who lived in the world above, and they had all been exterminated save him. He went where he pleased; he knew all of the ways of the different tribes, and he spoke all of their languages as if he had been born to it. He could climb into the trees to speak with the birds, and into holes in the ground to converse with the snakes. He could change his size to fit into the smallest burrow, and it was rumored that he could also fashion himself into the shape of whatever creature he chose. They could not but love him, for he could charm any living creature, and they called him Bara Cannidone, after the spring star, and in private they called him by a casual name, Barayen. However, it may have been true, what they said of the wrath of the Yanne, for among themselves the lords of the heavens called him Seolar, the trickster.
          It was Barayen's greatest joy to confuse things. He taught the cuckoos to hide their eggs in the wrong nests, and he caused the skunks, whose coats were more beautiful than the spring star itself, to smell worse than all of the creatures of Cannido combined. The animals underestimated him, for he had no claws to dig with, and no teeth to cut with, and no wings to fly with – but this never bothered him, for he made his own. Sometimes he played diplomat and caused the tribes to become friends, but when he was bored he started wars, and taught the animals to kill and eat each other.
          No children were born in these times, and no fruits sprung from the vines and the trees, for this was the land of spring, where everything was perpetually new and fresh. But one day it came to pass that Barayen discovered a tree whose blossoms were gone, transformed into something new. No animal would have investigated, and indeed, no animal would have come to this part of the forest, for it was far beyond the boundaries of their territories. Barayen tasted the fruit, and found it sour, but further on he could see more trees and vines full of fruits, and a kind of path that wove between them. Barayen saw at once that this was most certainly a trap set for him, maybe by victims of his latest mischief, or by the Yanne themselves, but it was in his nature to temp fate, and so he continued along the path.
          The fruit grew sweeter and riper as he went along, until it was falling from the trees and plopping wetly onto the forest floor before he could taste it. By this point, though, he was no longer paying attention to the fruit – he had spotted the bait at last, a silvery portal at the end of the path, through which brilliant sunlight shone in a solid ray of light. It could not have come from the forest beyond the arch, for it was ever shadowed by dense foliage. This door went somewhere else entirely. Barayen considered the entryway for a moment, and then cautiously stepped up to it. He could not see through it to the other side, so great was the light that shone through. His curiosity drew him like a moth, and he entered the arch.
          The great light dimmed, and Barayen found that the arch was fairly long, a kind of tunnel or shimmering air. The walls of the tunnel were opaque, though made of no earthly substance; he could not see the forest through them. Turning back, he could indeed see that green land, the barren trees and the overripe fruit, and turning the other way he could see what he had not been able to see in the forest – the land beyond the arch.
          This world seemed to have few animals in it, at least compared to Cannido, and most of them seemed to be akin to Barayen. They used tools like the ones Barayen had fashioned, and used them to sow seeds, and plow fields, and grow crops. Curiously, they worked with the other creatures to make the process faster. Besides the plants that the Barayen-creatures had grown, there seemed to be little in the way of greenery – the sun shone down, bared in all its terrible splendor, and the ground was dry and hard, except in the places where it had been watered. The animals that resembled Barayen had decided that parts of this bleak landscape belonged to them, but instead of simply disallowing access to it, they sold their possessions and rented out their homes. They fought more fiercely than Barayen's own creatures ever had, but with mysterious forces known only to them. But the strangest of all was that occasionally Barayen glimpsed children, running through the fields, or playing in the houses, and to him they were stranger than all the creatures of Cannido.
          He glanced back at the forest, which now seemed so very far away. It was no clear what the 'trap' had been; someone – the Yanne, probably – had decided that they no longer wanted him in Cannido, and was politely showing him the door. But where he was now, he seemed to be nowhere – he was not in Cannido, and he was not in that new place beyond the arch. He felt as if he were in the rift between two great mountain ranges, invisible from the peaks. He could sense the youthful world behind him, and the mature one before – and somewhere, off in the distance, a third world of ice and snow, though he could not see it with his eyes. There seemed to be a pivot here, around which unfathomable things revolved.
          He was not a part of Cannido. Much as he would have liked to dwell forever in that eternal paradise, it was not for him to do so. Neither was he a part of the world that beckoned through the archway, or of the one beyond it; if he was anything, he was a citizen of the place he stood now, of this threshold between the seasons. And it was just as well – there was only one Spring, and only one Summer, and only one of... that other place... but there were innumerable thresholds, and they all waited to be crossed. He stepped through the arch, into Frenido, the land of summer, and went to look for them.