To the best of her knowledge, Vera was twenty-two years old. And by the time she finished tying the laces of her running trainers on this early October morning, she had ten hours and fourteen minutes remaining of the life she knew in a little town called Glastonbury in the southwest of England.
Glastonbury’s highest buildings topped out at three stories. And still, when the air was just right, wind whipped down the High Street as if in a tunnel. You could almost smell that something there was not simply ancient but sacred. Many tourists have driven near to Glastonbury with the aim of passing by, but were drawn in. All it took was coming close enough to town to see the Tor, the mystical hill that rises above the landscape with its singular stone tower (just ruins, really) perched at the peak.
A passerby aims to pass by, sees the Tor, is drawn in, goes home, and says to the people they love the most, “You have to come and see it, too.” And so, pilgrimages to this place began some 10,000 years ago. To even the slightly attuned spirit, Glastonbury positively hums with sacred energy, a mystery never to be solved and always held like a breath of anticipation.
The only poor soul who would say in skeptical disbelief, “A hill? You want me to come see … a hill?” simply hasn’t seen it yet or, bless them, they have a disposition entirely the opposite of curious. Boring, even, one might say.
The Tor draws a soul in, the wind whips up some untapped and wildly alive place, and the whispers of pilgrims who’ve walked these grounds echo up through the feet with every step. You drink the waters of the well, and the work is done. Transformation—and something else, too, is ripe for the picking.
Pick a legend: pagan gods and goddesses, King Arthur, even Jesus himself. Their stories all have some home here, along with ordinary, everyday people. Some who live in Glastonbury sell supplies for the household witch, artifacts and gems said to contain deep magic. Others craft handmade goods or brew spectacular coffees. Some sell carpet or repair automobiles. Whether they deal in what might be called mundane goods or not, it can’t be helped. Wherever you live, whatever air you breathe, whatever oddball people might pass through, it all becomes ordinary.
And the extraordinary existence of living in Glastonbury amongst the Tor and the legends and the mystical air is all but forgotten in the business of living a life.
Alas, the price we pay for proximity to wonder: it gets cheap.
It was for precisely this reason that as often as she could manage it, Vera would set her alarm before sunrise and jog up the steep path leading to the top of the Tor. She craved the wonder and was willing to pay for it with her footfalls and sweat. She wasn’t particularly fast, and sometimes the steeper stretches were more of a trudge, but she loved the predictable race against the sun’s morning appearance. Vera woke with just enough time to dress and scurry downstairs from the innkeeper’s quarters at the George and Pilgrims Hotel before bolting out the front door.
She carried only a torch for guidance—no phone, no music, no distractions. Just the noise of her feet on the pavement until she turned off the road and onto the narrow gravel path that curved back and forth along the spine of the Tor.
Vera used to grin in the darkness when the wind pushed at her back, feeling like some greater force carried her onward. She didn’t believe that anymore. It was only wind, whining in her ears as it whipped by, no longer an omen of good to come. Indeed, its mere sound was a harbinger of remembering what she had lost.
She inhaled a ragged breath, powerless to stifle the rising memory. That sound. It was like the day two years ago when she’d rushed into the university library. Only then, the whistling wind came with flashing lightning in its wake.
It had stormed mightily. She’d scarcely heard thunder like it before or since. There hadn’t been many other people there, so Vera weaved through the halls and bookshelves, quietly singing to herself while she waited for the rain to slow.
She hadn’t even seen the young man sitting on the floor with his back against the wall (probably because she was so used to no one ever noticing her) until he called out as she passed by, “Do you take song requests?”
She’d stumbled to a stop and spun around to face him. It was the first time Vera met him, though she would come to know him so intimately: Vincent. He smiled without glancing up from the sketch pad on his knees. Over the next two years, Vera delighted in calling him Vincent-not-Van Gogh, the artist who had both ears. His hair even had a shine of red to it under the brightest sunlight.
As she urged her feet up the Tor’s steepest section, Vera saw that whole day play out in her mind, like the memory was in fast-forward or like time didn’t exist at all. How she’d stopped to talk to Vincent, then spent hours poring over his sketches. It was late evening before either realized that the storm had long since ceased. When they left, they went for a pint (which became three) before he walked her home. Vincent kissed her cheek as he bid her goodnight.
They didn’t go many days without seeing one another after that. She’d loved Vincent fast, and he loved her well in return.
He had now been dead for four months.
The taste of love lost was cruel, and the permanence of Vincent’s death left her shattered.
These days, her run was less pursuit of wonder and more fleeing from feeling; a desperate attempt to escape the pain of his loss and her own guilt at how she could have stopped it.
It was a fifteen-minute jog on her slowest days. St Michael’s Tower, the marker of her destination and the lone structure on the Tor, loomed as a vague dark mass in the pre-dawn light. The tower was nothing more than four stone walls with no roof overhead. If she’d kept jogging when she reached the Tor’s level top, she would have continued straight through an open arch doorway on one side of the tower and out another opposite, where it opened to a terrace the size of a back garden with a geographical compass right in the middle. It looked like a round stone bench, but on closer inspection, the silver disk at its center had fine arrows etched into it, pointing in all directions. They marked the bearings for what an observer would see if they could look far enough: twenty-five miles north to Bristol (where Vera had gone to university), eleven miles southeast to Camelot (yes, the one of legend), seven miles southwest to Somerton … and on.
More days than not, there were others in town who craved to shake the shackles of mundanity on the Tor at daybreak. Today, there was no one else.
Vera walked past the tower, thoughtlessly trailing her fingers along the stones as she always did out of a visceral pull to connect with the ancient things around her. She looked westward toward the ruins of the Glastonbury Abbey, remembering the time during a school trip there when her primary school teacher scolded her for touching every ruin within reach. It wasn’t light enough to make out the town a mile or so down the lane. She couldn’t see the abbey ruins from here anyway. The impressive stone columns of a once grand cathedral were tucked away right off the High Street, nestled so tightly that it was another spot of astonishment for visitors. One moment a traveler had their eyes glued to their phone for directions, and the next they rounded a corner, looked up, and had their breath taken away by the scope of the ruins.
When Vera’s fingers found the corner of the tower, they lingered there for a breath longer. With minutes to spare before the sun’s daily miracle, she took off her shoes and socks and tucked them next to the tower’s base while she ventured out onto the grass and wiggled her bare toes on the cool, dew damp ground.
It was barely a stone’s throw to her favorite seat in the house. Almost exactly between St. Michael’s Tower on one end of the Tor and the large stone compass on the other, there was a perfectly smooth patch of grass for sitting and watching the day begin. According to the compass, she faced legendary Camelot, included in the list for tourists, yes; but locals believed the legends more fervently than anybody else.
It was clear by now with only one, maybe two minutes left before daybreak, where the sun would first appear. Vera trained her eyes on the glowing spot, hardly daring to blink. It was a perfect sunrise day. No clouds to block the view, yet thick mists had gathered low, surrounding the Tor. They would burn away within hours, but when the mist packed in densely, it was like a blanket laid over the valley that held the moment suspended, containing it for an extra second. She held her breath, knowing the first eyelash of sun was on the edge of fluttering into view.
And there it was.
There were taller mountains and more stunning landscapes, but Vera would be hard pressed to believe there was another sunrise quite like this one anywhere in the world.
She stayed for the whole thing until the sun had cleared the horizon, and it worked to buoy her soul. At least for a moment. Then she gathered her shoes, touched the tower one last time, and jogged back the way she came.
If she’d turned to look as she passed the old White Spring temple at the foot of the hill, she might have seen the cloaked man standing in its doorway. He’d arrived inside the temple the moment the sun crested the horizon, and he would be gone, Vera with him, by the time night fell.
