Best of both worlds
Prologue
Hair as red as the sunset, eyes as green as the grass that blankets the hills that surround the Lake.
My son, I regret and grieve that I must send you from me, to the shores on another world entirely, but I have no choice.
It is this, or you fall into the Mists as Avalon itself does. I pray that wherever your life takes you, you remember what it means to be what you are. A Son of Avalon.
The words were engraved on the locket that the boy wore around his neck as the words were spoken that sent him from Avalon, the invocation that sent him through the mists, not into the world of the Priests and their Christian God, but to another world that still knew the God and the Goddess as the ever-lasting presences that they had always been for those who wore the deerskin and the crescent moon that were the signs of the followers of Cerridwen.
"Do not grieve so, Eryn." Nimue spoke in a low and patient tone as the auburn haired Tribeswoman stood after the boat that had born her son away disappeared from sight. "You know the priests of their God would kill such a child, calling him the result of sin, or an abomination. It is better he be sent to a place where he might have a chance to be accepted." The blond Priestess gentled Eryn with long fingers through the deep russet strands, wanting to be reassuring to the woman who had just sent her son away.
"I know this, Nimue. I do know, but I can not help but mourn for the only son I will ever bear, nor for the knowledge that he will never know the sisters that he has whom will disappear into the mists with the rests of the priestesses." Still, Eryn had followed the dictates of her heart, as she had been told to do, and she swore she would not regret. "I simply hope that those who find him will treat him with kindness. He deserves it."
The blond priestess smiled. "He does indeed. He is grandson to our former Lady, and though I know you dallied with Lancelet only once, at the Beltane fires, that child was well and truly his own, even if in spirit more than in body." In body, the boy had taken on the moon pale skin and the sunset-colored hair of the Tribes, as Eryn herself, and her parents before her, possessed, though he had taken the brighter hair of his grandfather.
"May that serve him well, for he will need the pluck and strength of heart he may gain from being son to one such as the Great Lady Viviane's son." Nimue spoke the words like an invocation as the mists dropped back down around the Isle, the great pathway their magics had opened closing, like a door that would remain locked, never to open again at any cost. The babe would not be able to return here unless he found his own path, and Nimue suspected that no magic in either world would ever show him the way back.
"He is headed for a destiny of his own, My Lady. What that destiny may be, I don't know yet, but it is better than any he might find here." Eryn's voice had taken on a quiet quality, and she gave a soft head shake. "Well, portents and meanings will not be found in this on this day. It will be years hence before we discover them, I suspect, and even once we do, they will be different from our expectations."