She walks through the vaulted forest with a willow basket of clean cotton cloths and herbs and flowers. Sage. Lavender. Tobacco. It is in the eve of spring but still she enjoys the lush grass. She wonders if she will see anyone, or if she will perform the mundane ritual alone.
There is not much to the ritual. A hot spring runs beneath a clearing in the northern peaks above her village and it is in this clearing that there is a fountain. Many refuse to enter this natural cathedral because it is eerie. Because it seems from another people. Perhaps a people hostile to their own. If they were human and it is not certain that they were. Someone - mortal or immortal - had installed a beautiful marble fountain of a woman. A marvel. A puzzle.
Another peculiarity is that there is a lifelike sculpture of an otherworldly beautiful woman. A Goddess. It appears as if she had real blood, real bones. Stories say she was punished and cast in a mask of marble for eternity. There is so much unknown about this fountain, this goddess, this civilization, and she, this dutiful woman, wishes someday she would learn.
All she knows is to do what her grandmother taught her to do, just as it was passed down from her mother and so on and so forth. The sculpture has her hands extended, cupped as if she were to collect the ethereal blue water beneath her to wash her face.
The woman must place the herbs and flowers into the sculpture’s hands and then she sets them alight, and once they are turned to ash, she pours the fountain water over them. With this ash and water, she washes the sculpture. All the while she is speaking in a tongue relatively unknown to the modern world. She herself does not understand the spoken word, she could not translate, and yet all the same, she knows. She knows the significance of this ritual.
It is a cleansing of the sins. An atonement. And this atonement leads to prosperity. A bountiful harvest. There are those who say the harvest is dependent on the weather, and corrective measures can be taken by human hands. A forest fairy can’t be responsible for the food, but she knows they are wrong.