Cernunnos

Cernunnos was born on the darkest day of the year, in the shadow of winter’s solstice, in a forested region revered for its ancient groves and sacred stones. His family were minor guardians of the land, people attuned to natural cycles and the rhythms of the seasons, but his connection to the wild far surpassed theirs. From the earliest years, he moved differently than other children: barefoot in snow and rain, listening to the wind and whispering trees as though they spoke to him directly.

Even as a boy, he bore the mark of duality. Animals approached him without fear; plants seemed to bend toward his presence. He was playful, restless, and untamable, a child whose laughter carried the cadence of the forest and whose gaze was ever watchful. Circles fascinated him: patterns in the snow, stones arranged in the clearing, the roundness of fire-lit glades. He did not know why, only that they felt alive.

By adolescence, his energy was unmistakable. Where others saw chaos, he saw opportunity. He was vigorous, playful, and fiercely alive, laughing easily and challenging others to races, hunts, and feats of endurance.

His first connection to magic — what he would later understand as the life-force and energy of the land — was violent and sudden. He had been defending a grove from hunters who would have desecrated it, and in his anger and fear, the forest itself responded. Trees shifted slightly, fire leapt without fuel, and a wind tore through the clearing as though alive. Terrified yet exhilarated, he realised that the energy within him was raw, potent, and dangerous. Yet even then, there was restraint in him. He stopped short of cruelty. He pulled back before excess. The wildness ran hot — but it did not run blind.

This was what Beltane noticed first.

He was fifteen when he first encountered the priestess who would shape his life. Beltane observed him running through the woods, testing the protective circles of the village with instinctive grace. In him, she saw the raw potential to channel life itself, to serve as a guardian whose energy could be honed rather than feared.

Under Beltane’s tutelage, Cernunnos learned to move with purpose. Circles became his anchor: stones arranged for protection, fire traced along pathways, steps taken in precise sequences. Each ritual honed not just his skill but his sense of restraint. Wildness, he discovered, was not something to suppress entirely — it was something to honour, to weave into duty.

The union with Beltane was symbolic and living: she, the May Queen, presiding over the festivals of life and light; he, the Green Man, embodying the vitality, strength, and protection that ensured those festivals endured. Together, they maintained sacred boundaries, warded against malevolent forces, and preserved the balance between human and supernatural realms.

Beltane, the May Queen

Beltane first encountered Cernunnos during the preparations for her festival, when the veil was thinning and the land itself seemed restless. She was already High Priestess, already steeped in ritual and responsibility, already carrying the weight of guarding her people against what stirred beyond sight. Where others saw a youth running half-feral through sacred ground, she saw a necessary answer.

He was not merely strong. He was aligned.

Beltane understood cycles as few did. She knew that protection required more than wards and prayers — it required a living counterweight to Samhain, something rooted in life, vitality, and the land itself. Cernunnos was not trained for this role. That was precisely why he could survive it.

Their early relationship was cautious. She did not command him. She watched, tested, redirected. She set boundaries and waited to see if he would respect them. He did — not out of obedience, but because the boundaries made sense. Where others chafed under her authority, he asked questions. He wanted to understand the why beneath the ritual.

In time, mentorship softened into partnership.

Beltane did not seek to civilise him. She knew better than to cage what the land itself had shaped. Instead, she taught him how to return — how to come back from the edge of instinct, how to step into the circle after running free. She gave him language for restraint, form for power, and meaning for sacrifice.

What he offered her in return was presence. When the rituals grew heavy, when Samhain’s shadow pressed too close, Cernunnos stood where others faltered. He did not fear the wildness the rites demanded. He was that wildness — willing to enter it, touch it, and come back changed.

Over the decades, affection grew quietly between them. Not possession, not dependency, but trust deep enough to bear consequence. When they lay together, it was not escape but communion — two forces aligning for a purpose larger than either of them.

They were never naïve about the cost.

The Festival of Beltane

Beltane was not a celebration alone, it was a living ritual.

From dusk to dusk, communities were bound into the working: bonfires acted as nodes in a vast lattice of energy, hearths linked to the fires, offering ash, flowers, and blood to anchor wards, appease the Aos Sí, and strengthen defenses against Samhain’s encroaching power. Fertility, life, and protection flowed through each flame, each chant, each ritual step.

The great fires were not symbolic; they were anchors, burning with power drawn through Beltane herself and fed by Cernunnos’ presence. Every hearth lit from the central flame became part of a vast protective network, binding households, fields, and borders together.

Cernunnos’ role was not to preside, but to enter.

At the heart of the rite, when the fires were strongest and the Aos Sí pressed closest to the world, he became the focus through which excess life was bled away and reshaped. Vitality, fertility, and unspent growth were dangerous in such concentration. Left unchecked, they could tear the veil as surely as death.

So the Green Man took it into himself.

The antlers were not adornment. They were the visible mark of transformation — his channeling of the land’s abundance into a single, containable form. For the duration of the festival, he stood at the boundary between man and myth, absorbing what could not safely remain diffuse.

The sacrifice was real.

Six months after Beltane, at the height of summer, the stored vitality reached its limit. The land could not bear it any longer — and neither could he. The ritual death of Cernunnos was not punishment or tragedy, but release. His fall bled the excess back into the soil, renewing the cycle and ensuring the world did not tear itself apart under unchecked growth.

Beltane presided over this with unflinching resolve. Love did not exempt him from necessity. If anything, it made the cost sharper.

Others might have wielded the power with brilliance or ambition, but none could endure it without corruption, exhaustion, or destruction. He bore the burden quietly, living simply outside the festival: hunting, running, tending borders, sleeping beneath open skies, refusing priesthood or hierarchy, existing in motion and vigilance.

Each year, he returned.

And each year, it took more out of him.

Who He Was Beyond the Rite

Cernunnos’ daily life was deeply intertwined with the land and its cycles. He moved barefoot through groves, tracking the habits of animals, the subtle shifts of rivers, the moods of seasons. Birds, deer, and foxes treated him as kin; the Aos Sí observed respectfully from the edges of the veil. He sang the land’s own songs, whispered to streams and stones, and even when unobserved, he maintained the sacred rhythms he had learned from Beltane.

Though solitary, he was far from lonely. He aided travellers, redirected hunters, and repaired wards with quiet precision. His understanding of power was intuitive: Saidin was companion, not weapon; a force to be measured, released carefully, and returned to balance. Samhain’s shadow always lingered, testing him indirectly, threatening to push him into wild abandon. Each year, as the veil thinned, he reinforced protections, monitored the land, and prepared for the ritual season with patience and exhilaration.

Cernunnos’ wildness remained untamed but disciplined. He leapt, ran, and danced for joy and for testing limits, but always measured against consequence. Laughter, song, and motion were both release and ritual. Where Beltane shaped energy externally, he grounded it internally; where she stabilised the festival across the land, he stabilised it within himself. Together, they made the impossible repeatable, each festival a living lattice of life, protection, and restraint.

He enjoyed simple things: running at dawn, cold water, the weight of a spear balanced just right. He laughed easily and deeply, though he grew quieter as years passed. The ritual marked him. Each cycle left him more thoughtful, more measured, as though part of him remained always at the threshold.

He never met Samhain in person.

But Samhain tested him all the same.

The Long Pressure of Samhain

Samhain’s influence crept rather than struck. It pressed on Cernunnos’ doubts, whispered that restraint was cowardice, that sacrifice was wasted, that the land might be safer if he simply took what power he could and held it.

Samhain’s energy called to the wildness within him, tempting him to abandon restraint for raw power. Each year, as the veil thinned, Cernunnos practised stillness and discipline, anchoring himself to Beltane, the land, and the sacred circles. In the face of temptation, he learned that vigilance was as vital as skill.

During the thinning of the veil, Cernunnos felt the pull keenly. The same wildness that made him fit for his role also made him vulnerable. Samhain did not seek to corrupt him directly. He sought to exhaust him — to make the cycle feel endless, the sacrifice meaningless, the discipline unbearable.

Each year, Cernunnos resisted not through force, but through habit. Through returning to the same paths. Through completing the same small tasks. Through choosing the circle again and again instead of the unbounded forest beyond it.

This, too, became part of the ritual.

The Final Beltane

The system that had preserved life for centuries could not last forever. When the final Beltane arrived, the ritual began as always. Fires lit, songs rose, circles drew tight — but the land no longer rebounded. The energy surged beyond the boundaries that centuries of ritual had maintained.

Cernunnos faltered briefly, and the force of generations, stored and contained, sought release all at once. Wards fractured unevenly. Samhain’s pressure found opportunity in the failure. He understood immediately what was required.

With a deep breath, he absorbed the final surge. Saidin roared through him unchecked. He bore the brunt of the collapse willingly, his body, will, and life serving as the ultimate containment. The ritual tore at him, unraveling flesh and spirit, but the lattice held. The land survived, the veil remained, and the forces that could have devoured the world were restrained — at the cost of him.

His death was not symbolic. It was mechanical, deliberate, and total. The cycle broke with him.

Legacy and the Shape of the Soul

Beltane survived, but she never lit the fires again. The festival endured in name and memory, but the true working was gone. In time, the Cernunnos the man blurred into the myth. Stories remembered antlers and fire more readily than patience and vigilance. Yet his vigilance, endurance, and wildness lived on in stories, in groves, in the rhythm of earth itself. Beneath every telling remained the truth:

Cernunnos was not chosen because he was the strongest channeler. He was chosen because he could stand at the boundary without losing himself to either side.

This soul would remember that lesson.

Again and again, across ages and names, it would return to the same pattern:
the guardian who does not rule,
the lover who accepts sacrifice,
the wildness that submits to form not out of fear — but out of care.

Even beyond the festival, he remains a touchstone for what it means to balance raw power with patience, freedom with duty, and love with alignment. The Green Man was never tamed, never bent to mortal will, and never abandoned the land he had chosen to protect. In life and legend, he embodies the enduring pulse of the world itself: wild, disciplined, and quietly eternal.

Personality

Cernunnos’ wildness persisted through all ages. He was impulsive but disciplined, fierce but protective. He moved with an animal grace, read the intentions of others instinctively, and could remain completely still for hours. Silence, for him, was never absence — it was attention, listening to things others could not hear: the wind shifting, the soil settling, the faint hum of energy beneath the earth. He had a habit of tracing invisible circles with his hands or feet when thinking, pacing in patterns while meditating, and humming or chanting under his breath when weaving power.

Despite his vigilance, he was not without joy. He laughed easily, often when alone, as he sprinted across snowfields or climbed trees too high for comfort. He sang, sometimes in the old language of the Tuatha de, letting the sound ripple through groves and valleys. He was curious — watching human communities with a gentle fascination, sometimes leaving small, inexplicable blessings along roads or riverbanks. His wildness never faded, but it was tempered by purpose and patience.

He was drawn to artists, musicians, and storytellers, recognising their ability to channel emotion and energy, to create circles of influence without knowing it. To him, such people were mirrors of Beltane’s own magic: capable of shaping reality in ways others ignored.

The fires had already been lit when Beltane found him.

Not in the city, where the singing had begun and the drums were gathering speed, but at the edge of the grove, where the trees thinned and the ground still held the day’s cool. Cernunnos stood barefoot in the grass, head bowed, palms resting against the rough bark of an old oak. The firelight did not quite reach him here. Shadows clung to his shoulders like a second skin.

“You’re meant to be at the circle,” she said gently.

He did not turn. “I will be.”

Beltane stepped closer, the hem of her dress brushing the dew. Around her neck hung the symbols of her office—bone, bronze, and hawthorn—but she did not feel like a priestess in this moment. Only tired. Only human.

The oak’s leaves stirred though there was no wind.

“You always come out here first,” she said. “As if you’re saying goodbye.”

This time he did look at her. Firelight caught in his eyes, green and gold, bright with something that was not fear but acceptance.

“I am,” he said simply.

She reached for him then, resting her forehead against his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart. It beat too fast already. The land was waking. She could feel it rising through him like a tide.

“You don’t have to,” she said, quietly enough that only the trees could hear. “Not tonight. We could—”

“No,” he said, and there was no hardness in it. Only certainty. “If not me, then the circle breaks. And if the circle breaks, Samhain will feel it.”

She closed her eyes.

This was the part she hated—not the ritual, not the fire, not even the sacrifice—but the choice he made every year without being asked. The way he offered himself not as penance, but as duty. As love.

She lifted her hand and traced the line of his jaw, the familiar curve of his mouth. “When I first saw you,” she murmured, “you were running through the ash fields like nothing in the world could touch you.”

He smiled faintly. “You were angry with me.”

“I was furious,” she admitted. “You broke three ward-stones.”

“They were badly placed.”

She laughed despite herself, the sound catching. “You never did learn to be reverent.”

He leaned down then, pressing his brow to hers. “Only for the right things.”

For a moment, the world narrowed to the space between them. The fire roared in the distance. Voices rose and fell. The veil thinned, soft as breath against skin. Somewhere beyond it, other eyes watched.

Beltane lifted the circlet of hawthorn and antler from where she carried it, hesitating just long enough for him to see her doubt.

“Look at me,” he said.

She did.

Whatever he would become tonight — Green Man, guardian, offering — he was still here. Still himself. Still choosing.

She set the circlet upon his head.

The change was immediate. Power stirred, answering power. The land exhaled. Antlers unfurled like living branches, firelight dancing along their curve. His breath shuddered once, then steadied.

“Come back to me,” she said, her voice low and fierce. “At the solstice. As you always do.”

He took her hands, pressing them to his chest. “I always do.”

She kissed him then, not as priestess to consort, not as goddess to god, but as a woman kissing the man who would bleed the summer back into the earth for her people.

When they parted, the distance between them felt already wider.

Cernunnos stepped away first, turning toward the fire and the waiting circle. Beltane watched him go, standing alone beneath the oak, counting her breaths until the drums swallowed everything else.

The night closed around her.

And the ritual began.

Other Lives

• 1st: Dominik Vas
• 3rd Age: Corvalen al’Cirhan
• 7th Age: Lancelot du Lac