RIDE
Ride is a tiny village about eight miles south of the only other sizeable Dethry town, Berrydearth. Ride is almost completely swallowed by woodland, and what there is of brickwork appears like mythic ruin, and what there is of flesh and blood appears as if snake-swallowed and slowly digesting. In other words, they're tacit folk, and their houses are enshrouded by trees to such an extent that the interiors are wholly damp and dark. Spider webs cross pathways and if you pass along the Ride Road at anything greater than a canter or its equivalent you are apt to miss it altogether, such is the potency of its camouflage.
This was the birthplace of the aforementioned modern Druid Randolph Stuart, and of the celebrated writer, Charles Winterglass.
Winterglass, when interviewed, peered down his snout's great arête advancing green eyes waxing bright as harvest moons. "Ride! Yes, yes, I can remember those days well! What fun! The television in those days was so good!"
Winterglass, born in 1969, would have known the initial 1980s incarnation of "Channel Dethry" very well, being an adolescent, and being a denizen of a dark and dripping habitat. "Everything was either filmed underwater, or underground you see. The extensive Karin Mine and associated caves were perfect for studios. They ran cables from buildings through holes from above. Utterly precarious and death defying, but so satisfying to see when it went out!"
Later in life, Winterglass turned to writing to soothe a voracious blood cancer. His polemical final novel: ,"Slimebright", was lauded at the time as a masterpiece, but is all but forgotten nowadays. Most found its final chapter: "Galadriel's Needle" 'hard to take', but the cancer had really taken hold by then, and his psyche' was freewheeling impaled and suspended over some awful abyss, so one cannot entirely blame his judgement becoming a little "Skew-whiff". A brief excerpt of the novel is included below.
"Galadriel's Needle lies sunken in sand, with only the very nib protruding. A sand combined of pink seashell, quicklime, bone meal, and blossom. Of cigarette ashes and pulses of dried blood. The fallen grey hair of grandmother werewolves, and white plastic packing beads that smothered every pore.
Galadriel's needle pulses with spurts of lovely blood. Alluring arterial flow crisscrossing the cosmos's. The flexing organ alternatively pales and flushes. The night behind the black of the dead cathode.
The children from the town buried me here, carefully, wound by wound. Strawberry vines too, have bound my bones, and I wish nothing more than to feel that sand again, tickling the intimate flesh between my toes. The sand beneath Galadriel's rose. Or perhaps I do wish for more.
So I have come to you in this fly black dark, while you dream in the divide. I must become drunk of you to make yours mine. Blood begins its lazy trickle down your chin, but soon I will pluck your pink handkerchief from behind your wife's ear, and make her believe it came from thin air. Just as I did.
I am so sorry lad, to consume you in your sunniest days, but I have hallucinations to cultivate in some blank God's eye, and I cannot walk again as bones outwith blood's warm seal.
I will know everything while you are gone."
Charles Winterglass, circa 1991.