OLD BELTANE

Story of Spring Fever

Unease settled deeper into Rhona's chest as she watched the wellness retreat ritual.

Rhona MacAulay stood at the edge of the prepared circle as the guests arranged themselves on their cushions. Artisan wool, hand-dyed in colours with names like Dusk Heather and Highland Mist. The hill behind her was called Càrn na Marbh. The Hill of the Dead. It was on no map Callum Forsyth ever consulted.

The evening wafted with peat smoke. The aroma beneath was older. A dark rich smell of soil that had been undisturbed for centuries.

The fire was lit with great ceremony. It didn't follow tradition.

Callum struck flint in a way he had watched on YouTube. It sent its smoke in the wrong direction. Against the wind. As though the far side of the hill was inhaling it.

Dunbeag Wellness and Retreat Centre had been open for eighteen months. The main house was a converted farmhouse. Stone-walled and low, with new skylights that caught the Perthshire light on good days. It wept condensation on the others.

Callum hung a Pictish symbol above the entrance. A double disc and Z-rod. Carved in a replica stone he ordered from a website. He called it a meaningful threshold marker. Fraser the groundskeeper, found the original stone during the landscaping works. He watched Callum place it on his office desk as a curiosity. It was now the retreat logo.

Thirty-two guests paid £1,800 each for the Beltane Fire Weekend. They came from London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and one from San Francisco who specifically requested a room 'facing the ancestral energies.' They were burnt-out, grief-carrying, souls tender with transitions. They were, in the oldest sense of the word, between states.

The hill, waited through seven hundred years of April nights. Their liminality awoke them the way a flame awakes to the approach of dry wood.

Rhona refilled cups of elderflower cordial and reminded herself she was being superstitious. She grew up four miles from here. She knew that hill. Her grandmother lit a candle for the dead every first of November without explaining why. Once when Rhona asked she had said, 'Because someone has to.'

She'd only taken the job at Dunbeag because it paid well. She was beginning to reconsider.

The temperature dropped as the fire took hold. Fire usually pushed cold back & carved a circle of warmth into the dark. The guests pulled their blankets tighter and someone made a joke about Scottish weather. The laughter rang thin against the hill's silence. Rhona noticed that silence on her first day at Dunbeag. She filed it under atmosphere and superstition.

Now, with the fire burning and thirty-two people arranged in a careful intention circle, the smoke moved against all natural logic toward the crown of the hill.

That silent hill. It was the silence of something paying attention.

The visiting facilitators moved through their programme. The sound healer from Bristol set her singing bowls on the damp grass and sent long bronze tones out into the night. The shamanic practitioner from Amsterdam, who trained in Peru and knew nothing specific of Scottish tradition, led a guided visualisation of roots going down into the earth. The breathwork coach from London asked the group to set their intentions for the season ahead. Hands were pressed to hearts. Eyes closed.

Thirty-two people opened themselves, deliberately and trustingly, to whatever the land wanted to offer.

The land accepted the invitation.

Fraser witnessed the stone move.

The large stone at the hill's crown, the one that had always been there. The one he had been told by his uncle's uncle was not to be interfered with. It was there, and then it wasn't. No sound. No crack of earth. One moment it sat against the April sky. The next moment the sky was unbroken. The grass where it HAD stood was white. Frost-white. Perfect and circular. Spreading outward like a held breath just released.

Rhona watched the frost move across the hillside. It traced through the dark grass in patterns too deliberate for weather. Purposeful. Angular. Shapes her grandmother had drawn on napkins when she thought no one was looking. Shapes on the stone in Callum's office. Symbols no living scholar fully decoded because they were not intended for the living to decode.

The Picts were carved to hold something down.

The frost reached the edge of the fire circle.

Rhona watched the fire.

All fires burn orange and gold, the colours of living warmth. The colour of the new sun. The edges of this flame had gone blue. Ice blue. The guests nearest the fire did not move back. They leaned in. Faces tilted up. Expressions of extraordinary peace.

The breathwork coach was still speaking. 'Allow whatever arises,' he was saying. 'This is a safe space for transformation.'

From the west ~ always from the west, her grandmother said, always from the direction of the setting sun, from the direction of the dead ~ came the sound of wings.

Not a murmuration, though it moved like one. Vast, liquid, and turning in the dark with the specific intelligence of a single mind distributed across thousands of bodies. The Sluagh. The unforgiven dead. Her grandmother's voice said this in her head. Clear as though the old woman were standing at her shoulder. They fly in from the west. They take the living. They have been circling that hill since the plague year. Rhona was eight years old when she heard this tale. She looked up the plague year and found that an entire village had been buried in the hill above the valley. Sealed under a large stone. Unconfessed and unblessed. There had been no one left healthy enough to offer the rites.

Seven hundred years. The stone held them. The stone evaporated.

She found Callum at the edge of the group, phone in hand, filming the blue fire for his Instagram stories. He was smiling.

“Something's wrong,” Rhona said.

He lowered the phone. The smile became careful. “The guests are having a profound…”

“Callum.” She kept her voice very level. “Do you know what this hill is?”

He told her about the energy mapping he'd done. The ley lines. The feminine power of the site. Ancestral energies.

“It's a mass grave,” Rhona said. “The Hill of the Dead. They buried a whole village here in the plague year. The stone at the crown held them. Where is the stone?”

He stared at her. His face struggled to put this puzzle together. A man who built an identity on openness to the mystical. He was encountering something actually mystical and finding it was nothing like the brochure. “We should call…” he started.

“Who would you call,” she said. It was not a question.

The wings grew louder. Several guests opened their eyes. They turned their faces upward with expressions that hadn't yet decided between wonder and fear. The frost entered the fire circle. Threading through the grass between cushions. Where it touched the artisan wool it left a white bloom, like breath on glass.

She came first as cold.

The cold of age. The deep strata of time. Patience of stone. A drop of temperature so sudden Rhona's eyes filled with tears from the shock of it. Her breath coming in great visible clouds. The elderflower cordial in the nearest cup froze solid.

At the tree line, Scots pine and ancient oak, the remnant of the Old Wood. Something moved within its anceint shadow. It was tall. It was the specific grey-blue of frost on stone. It moved the way glaciers move. Imperceptibly, then all at once.

The Cailleach Bheur.

The Blue Hag.

The Winter Hag who shaped the mountains by dropping stones from her apron. Herded deer across the high ground in the dark of the year. She who carried a staff of blackthorn that froze whatever it touched. She retreated every Beltane for longer than this valley had been farmed. Longer than the Picts had been carved. Longer than any human calendar.

Every year the need-fire had been lit — the true need-fire, kindled from friction, every other flame extinguished first, the old fire killed so the new could be born clean — and every year she had laid her staff under the holly and turned to stone and waited.

This year the fire was lit without extinguishing anything. Thirty-two people brought all their old fires with them. Their grief, their cortisol, their unprocessed damage, their desperate willingness to be transformed without paying the cost of transformation. They fed it all to a hill that was sealed for seven hundred years and called it ceremony.

The Cailleach was patient. The need-fire must to be lit from nothing, every old flame dead. The dead had to be named. Spoken for, acknowledged. Not performed, not workshopped, not held in a 'sacred container,' but genuinely reckoned with. You could not borrow the language of the old ways and leave out the weight.

There were hundreds of dead in that hill and not one of their names had survived.

She looked at Callum, who was backing away from the tree line with his phone still raised. Still filming. She looked at the guests, some of whom were now standing. She looked at the fire, burning blue to its core now.

The Sluagh came down.

No one was prepared for the gentleness of it. They came down from the west like a dark tide. They moved through the circle of guests with the efficiency. They took but not blood or breath. It was subtler. Total. Faces changed. Lines of a life in progress erased.

The breathwork coach stopped speaking mid-sentence. The sound healer sat with her hands in her lap looking at the bowls with an expression of empty serenity. The guest from San Francisco, who had wanted to face the ancestral energies, was facing them now. Facing something vast and cold and old in a way she would not be able to look away from for the rest of her life.

Callum ran.

The Cailleach moved through the circle without haste. Where her staff touched, the frost bloomed up in the Pictish patterns. The shapes carved into stone as warning and which had been ordered from a craft website and hung above a door as décor.

The hill opened where the stone had resided. The dead moved upward through the earth with the slowness of roots. The patience of centuries. Seven hundred years of cold soil teased Rhona's nose.

By dawn, the valley was white.

Rhona sat in her car at the bottom of the access road and watched the sun come up. The frost held.

The guests were still there. Breathing. Unharmed in any way a physician could measure. Their expressions of empty peace was the most frightening visual in Rhona's life.

Spring did not come to the valley that year. The lambing puzzling. The ewes confused. April never warmed past four degrees. The farmers noted it. Moved their flocks. The growing things, the blackthorn blossom, the first bluebells in the old wood, the hawthorn that always came into flower by the first week of May, remained sealed in their buds.

Dunbeag's main house had been surrendered to its mortgage. Callum had not returned. The guests had, eventually, gone home. Driven home by family members who came in worried and left in a different kind of worry. They were healthy. And empty.

In October a walker from Perth reported an unusual formation near the crown of Càrn na Marbh. A frost circle thst persisted through the summer. In the centre, a stone she did not recognise, covered in symbols she photographed and sent to the university at St Andrews.

The specialist who received them sat with the photographs for a long time. She was sixty-three years old. Devoted her life to Pictish symbols. Her professional assessment, she had not seen these before. They were not in any catalogue. They had not been there in April.

She wrote back to the walker: 'Do not move the stone. Do not return to the site. I will be in touch.'

She was not in touch. She drove to the valley in November and stood at the bottom of the access road for a long time looking up at the hill's white crown. The frost circle had grown. Something had been tending it. The boundary neat. The symbols at its edge more numerous than in the photographs. The valley was very quiet. Silent as a grave.

She got back in her car. She drove home. She lit every light in her house and sat at her kitchen table until morning and on the first of November, without entirely knowing why, she took a candle from the drawer and lit it for the dead.

On the hill, the frost circle held.

Spring would come when The Cailleach permitted it.

She was in no hurry.

Written for….

Tif Spring event,

Hosted by Garen Marie

Spring Fever! Horror in Bloom Substack Event