The Druids of Avalon

Look, sweetling. Look a few thousand years south of you, and look just a little further. Look and see, and we will stretch the time.

Two Celtic armies march on one another. The war drums sound the heartbeat of inevitability. The chieftains smile viciously — they have waited years to settle old scores. There will be battle. There will be carnage. Even the earth is parched for the wine of slaughter.

But what is this? Between the two marching armies, a single, robed man stands. This gnarled man raises a gnarled staff and brings it down upon a stone with a crack. The war drums cease. The bards’ battle songs cut short. The chieftains sheath their blades in their scabbards and sheath their death-leer teeth behind their lips. And everyone goes home. And there is no war. For the man with the gnarled staff is a druid, and that is the kind of respect his people garner.

In times you mayfly apes would consider ancient, the druids served as high ranking professionals among the Celts — as hierophants, advisors, physicians, and legal adjucators. They were also keepers of lore, though their laws forbid committing these secrets to writing. it takes twenty of your years to memorize all the verses of their knowledge in oral form. Not one word of it has made it to your modern printing presses, not even in translation.

So too were they workers of the supernal arts. Sometimes these were fueled with blood sacrifice, sometimes human, often criminal. Wave to the wicker man! Drowned sacrifices to Teutates, hanged sacrifices to Esus, and sacrifices by fire to Taranis — the threefold death!

Fast forward. The now. Or at least your now, sweetling. The Druids of Avalon live on as a faction of the Secret World. Perhaps they are not as large an organization as, say, the Templars, lacking a global level of influence, but they’ve carved out a place for themselves in the Council of Venice. They are making moves, entering the spotlight. This is a point of contention among an organization that is secretive even among the very secretive. Their leadership is arguing about it right now. Their need must be desperate.

At the time of each equinox, you might find a representative of the druids in Agartha. Their fortress, however, lies on Avalon, an island that is cloaked from detection, both supernatural and mundane, by powerful magic. There a dead king sleeps. There the druids hold court with fae, immortals, and beings from the Otherworld.

If one believes such things.