Puc Discovers Ying Yang

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In the deep country beyond Caerleon, where the green gloom of ancient woods still remembers the rites of unnumbered centuries, there wandered a creature whom the shepherds named Puc. Some claimed he was older than the Roman roads, others that he was merely a vagrant spirit, a trickster of leaf-shadow and dew. Yet all agreed on this: he sought strange things.

One autumn evening, when the last radiance of the sun filtered through the beech canopies like the remnants of a forgotten incantation, Puc halted. His keen, inhuman eyes had caught a glimmer beneath a fallen oak root—something smooth, something neither stone nor seed. With a curious gravity, he lifted it.

It was a tiny disk, part pale as moon-milk, part dark as a cavern’s breath, the two halves curling into each other like serpents asleep. And within each half, a single dot of its contrary color, as though night hid a seed of day, and day a secret chamber of night.

Puc felt a tremor run through his horned skull. For though his kind trafficked in mischief and sudden laughter, this object exhaled an air of solemnity, like the very pulse of the world laid bare.

As he held the disk, the forest dimmed. Not with the dimness of evening, but with an older shadow—the presence of the hidden. The trees loomed as if they recognized an artifact not meant for mortal touch. And then Puc heard it: a low murmuring hum, like wind that had learned to speak.

In that sound he understood—though “understanding” is too small a word—that all his pranks and wanderings, the joy of spring apples stolen, the winter songs whispered into sleeping ears, the ancient sorrow of the soil, were part of a vast weaving. Light was never unaccompanied by darkness; delight was always shadowed by dread; life coiled eternally with its phantom twin.

The disk warmed in his hand, and for one heartbeat Puc saw the world as it truly was—terrible, exquisite, indivisible. The great secret that humankind had forgotten and the spirits of the earth guarded jealously: that every blessing is born with a curse, every curse cradles a blessing, and no creature walks alone in its nature.

Overwhelmed, he placed the object back beneath the oak root. For some truths, even for the Old Folk, are too potent to bear.

As he stepped away, the forest lightened; birds resumed their evening hymns. But in Puc’s gaze there lingered a new solemnity, a silent reverence. And though he soon returned to his capering ways, he carried forever the memory of that perfect symbol—the little disk where day and night held each other in an eternal, trembling embrace.