Title: Time-Wrack
Fandom: Sapphire and Steel, Arthurian Mythos
Rating: G
Length: 300
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Morgynleri encouragement & sanity-checking, and to Lost_Spook for the inspiration in this post.
Summary: Ghosts of trees emerge from the sands



The petrification — vitrification — of the immeasurably Old trees was beginning to break down, the bonds holding the time-poisoned cells failing of their long and arduous duty, allowing leakage. Mostly it bled into the sea, dissipating with minimal harm into the vast and ever-present, ever-changing Now of the ocean. But that required the Water to be covering the Wood, the sand and salt insulating it from both Air and eyes.

The Elements looked in dismay at the ghosts of trees rooted in shallow sand, branches reaching toward the abandoned steelworks, drawing out exhalations of steam and smoke from long-cold smokestacks. Look too long and one would see the smelter-fire, the forge-fire, the burning bones of laborious days and sweltering lives.

The wind-farm, oddly, was proving a barrier to the worst of the distortion/dilation, the broad blades spinning steadily in the equally unseasonable strong breeze as the storms that had exposed the ancient trees, the far-retreated tides.

It had, to Silver’s eyes, all the hallmarks of an Elemental struggle of quite a different order than his - their - own. Air, Earth, Water, Fire, Wood and Steel and Stone. With unruly, capricious, unkind Time setting one against the other. At, of course, a balance-point, a crossing-point in the year-wheel.

Steel to the steelworks then, with Lead as backup; Copper and Quicksilver to the wind-farm, to aid that fierce, frail defense. Sapphire and himself to hold the shore, and cozzen, coax, captivate and herd the tree-ghosts, to once again drown the dreaming Forest under unspeaking glass and timeless wave. A job of work indeed, subduing Logres, Broceliand, Avalon, the Land that Was to lie once more as myth, memory and fancy, and not become a maw of Time-out-of-Time, to end the world. Not yet that day. Not Now. Not yet, and mayhap never.