Author: lazaruscarpenterauthor

Lazarus Carpenter I have lived in Wales for over twenty five years. Born in North Yorkshire, I am now an author, actor, musician and song writer, previously being a therapist, trainer and researcher, specialising in mental health. He was educated in Middlesbrough, Sheffield and Cambridge. With a fascination for Welsh History, I create worlds within worlds; magical, haunting, spirituality permeating sound moral codes of life. I live quietly with Debbie Eve (also my illustrator and our dog, Noodle in a small cottage surrounded by the beauty of the Brecon Beacons in the Valleys of South Wales.

The Empress

May 8, 2026 lazaruscarpenterauthor

The Empress sat beneath a canopy of gold-green vines, her throne carved from living wood, roots curling into the earth like patient fingers. The air carried the scent of blooming orchards and distant rain, a gentle symphony soothed even the bravest hearts. Beside her, a stream braided through a glade, its waters silvered by moonlight, spilling secrets to the stones and mushrooms alike.

Into this sanctuary stepped a traveller, eyes wide with longing and hands empty but for a seed wrapped in cloth. The Empress regarded the seed with a softness that felt like sunlight on bare shoulders.

“What do you carry, child?” she asked, not to pry, but to invite honesty.

“The future,” the traveller replied, “yet I fear my hands are too small to shape it.”

The Empress smiled, and a warm breeze lifted the cloth, revealing the seed: a tiny ember nestled in soil’s embrace. She plucked a fern from the ground, coaxed a green sprout from its heart, and placed the sprout within the traveller’s palm.

“Growth begins where care is given,” she murmured. “Nurture what you plant, and the world will refine itself around your intent.”

She led the traveller to a grove where trees wore crowns of fruit like lanterns. Each fruit glowed faintly with a memory—some of a plate shared with strangers, some of a homecoming long awaited, some of a dream dared and then delayed. The Empress touched the first fruit, and it opened to reveal a scene: a grandmother teaching a child to count petals, a village gathering to mend a torn banner, a garden where laughter grew as surely as tomatoes.

“Abundance is not merely plenty,” she explained, “it is the visible care we extend to every living thing, seen and unseen. When you plant with tenderness, you harvest with gratitude.”

The seed in the traveller’s hand warmed, threads of heat weaving into their skin, a quiet certainty taking root.

“Create,” the Empress said, returning to the traveller’s side. “Create not from scarcity or urgency, but from the quiet persistence of care. When you honour the cycle—the sowing, the growing, the blossom, the rest—you become a conduit for the Earth’s own generosity.”

Night began to settle, and the glade glowed with a soft, amber light. The traveller, now steady and sure, stood with the embers of a new purpose kindling in their chest. They thanked the Empress, who nodded, a reflection of the dawn in her eyes.

“Go,” she whispered, “And tend your seed as if it were a promise you intend to keep.” Then, with a gentle rustle of leaves, she faded into the hush of the forest, leaving behind a trail of tiny luminescent orbs—each one a reminder that nurture, patience, and love are the most fertile soils of all.

The traveller stepped into the night, seed warm in their palm, a clear path unfurling ahead: to nurture, create, and to share the bounty with a world always hungry for a little more light.

Lazarus Carpenter

2026

A Little More Tenderness and a Little Less Fear – The Story of Bryn the Hermit

Apr 28, 2026Apr 28, 2026 lazaruscarpenterauthor

Elderly man with long beard sitting cross-legged on a rock, wearing layered robes, with a walking stick and pouch beside him, mountains in background — ***Bryn The Hermit***

In a corner of Wales where the wind remembers every ancient road, there stood a plateau crowned by a stubborn old mountain. Not the tallest peak, perhaps, but one wearing its clouds like a shawl and keeping its secrets tucked beneath mossy stones and bracken that whispered in the rain. On this plateau lived a hermit, a man they called Bryn, though few could swear they’d ever heard him speak more than a few quiet words at a time. The path to Bryn’s dwelling was narrow, carved by the patient steps of seasons. It wound through gorse and bramble, climbed a stair of loose slate, and finally opened onto a small, stone-creaking cabin perched at the edge of the world where the land fell away into a thousand green miles. The cabin had no fancy bells or bright windows, only a single small lattice blinking gold in the sunset, and a smoke-blackened chimney never seeming to stop sighing into the dusk.

Bryn lived alone, but he was not lonely. He kept company with the forest’s patient rhythm: the slow turning of the seasons, the wary glances of deer along the ridge, the sly intrusion of badgers at dusk, and the countless songs of birds nesting in the eaves when the storm blew in from the sea. He tended a garden seeming to grow where it wished, herbs and roots thriving in soil that was more memory than earth. He spoke softly to stones, and the stones, if you listened with your heart rather than your ears, spoke back in a language of weight and time. People from valleys below would sometimes find the path to the plateau, drawn by a rumour of wisdom and a need for counsel. They carried with them the burdens of ordinary life: a quarrel with a sister, a fear of the future, a decision that would bend a life into a new shape. And when they stood before Bryn, they found a man who looked at them with the patience of rivers and the calm certainty of a tree that has weathered many storms.

“Tell me what you carry,” Bryn would say, not as a demand but as a door opened by trust.

And they would begin, slowly, as if peeling an apple grown too old to hurry, revealing the weight inside: a grudge burning like a coal in the pocket, a dream grown stiff with doubt, a plan that had forgotten to breathe.
Bryn listened as the forest listened: with a generous stillness that let the speaker feel the full gravity of their own words. Then, without booming judgment, he would offer a thread of truth, sometimes wrapped in a parable, sometimes in a small, practical act. He spoke of rivers that do not hurry to the sea, of mountains that rise not to impress but to shelter, of nights so quiet even the heart could hear its own breath. He urged patience, and offered questions rather than answers, because questions, he believed, were the hatchways to the hidden rooms inside every choice.

On one such day, a storm rolled in from the sea with a beard of rain and a voice like clattering armour. The plateau trembled under the wind, the slate rattled underfoot, and the forest hissed with the warning of sap that might freeze on a moonless night. A young woman, eyes bright with stubbornness, stood at Bryn’s door with a letter clenched in her hand, the letter she dared not send, the one that would either mend a family rift or burn it to ashes.

Bryn welcomed her with the quiet smile of a man who has learned to recognise the exact moment when a storm has become a story and not a danger. He listened as she spoke of kinship and clever plans, of promises made in the glow of the hearth and promises broken in the cold arithmetic of daily life. When her tale ran dry, he pressed a small seed into her palm, a seed that looked, to the untrained eye, like any ordinary seed but carried, in its dry shell, the memory of a hillside that never stopped growing.

“Plant it where the earth remembers your laughter,” he said simply. “Water it with your patience, and answer with your presence, not your justification. If the seed grows, let it teach you where to bend and where to stand firm. If it does not, then you have learned something no letter could teach: what you truly want to carry into tomorrow.”

She left with the seed nestled in the folds of her mind, and the storm broke into a chorus of rain and wind sounding like old trees sobbing with relief. Bryn watched the girl go, the plateaus, the mountains, and the sea beyond them settling into a gentler rhythm. He did not possess tools for every problem, nor did he pretend to. He had something rarer: a way of listening that allowed people to hear the right questions inside their own hearts.

Time in Bryn’s life did not rush. It curled like smoke around the chimney and drifted through the cabin’s wooden bones. The forest grew older with him, or perhaps with him inside it, becoming a book whose margins were carved by the rain. And the plateau, that quiet crown on the Welsh hills, remained a place where endings did not announce themselves with thunder, but with a soft light softening the edges of a life already worn just enough to fit a wiser future.

If you asked Bryn the meaning of wisdom, he would point to the gentle hinge of a door that leads to a room you never knew existed, a room where you can choose a different path without losing your old self. He would tell you wisdom is not a shout or a flame, but a steady breath in the long corridor of tomorrow. And so the hermit lived, not as a figure of mystery but as a patient reminder: that a life kept in harmony with the forest, its rain, wind, and quiet growth can teach us to slow down, listen, and perhaps, just perhaps, choose the path that asks for a little more tenderness and a little less fear.

‘Elliot’s Marbles’

Apr 27, 2026Apr 27, 2026 lazaruscarpenterauthor

In a town that wore fog like a shawl, there lived a man named Elliot who walked with the gravity of someone who had misplaced his map to the world. He had a peculiar habit: every morning he would open a cardboard box labelled “Marbles,” then stare at its empty hollow as if listening for a chorus no one else could hear. The box sat on a creaky shelf above his window, where the sun pressed its pale yellow into the dust and painted slow secrets on the walls.

People in the village said Elliot had lost his sanity long before the box grew quiet. They spoke softly about the time when he kept the marbles polished and bright, rolling them across the wooden floor in careful, ritual rhythms. He would count them in a voice keeping time with the clock on the mantel, whispering numbers like prayers. But one autumn, the marbles stopped gleaming in his eyes, and the counting began to falter, and then, one day the box no longer held marbles, only a stubborn, stubborn absence.

Elliot tried to explain to the townsfolk the marbles mattered because they were not merely glass; they were memories compressed into spheres, each a small galaxy of yesterday. Some marbles held the taste of rain on cobblestones, others glittered with the laughter of a girl who used to visit the bakery every Sunday, her cheeks flushed with sugar and stories. He would tell this to anyone who would listen, which was rarely.

On especially quiet mornings, he would sit on the doorstep with the box in his lap, the lid pressed against his chest as if to keep something from slipping away. He would murmur to the marbles, or to the air where the marbles should have been, a conversation that drifted between fevered tenderness and stubborn insistence.

“You’re here,” he would say, “you’re here, I know you’re here,” and then the wind would carry the answer far down the lane, where the children played and the old trees leaned like tired professors with chalk-streaked bark.

The villagers, who believed sanity was a lighthouse to be kept bright, grew uneasy. They offered him tea, then sympathy, then a ledger of remedies with letters after their names, potions and prescriptions promising clarity, clarity that would surely return if he would only take the right dose at the right hour. But Elliot refused to bow before the jar labelled “Closure.” He insisted that the box was not a cabinet of cures but a museum of what had vanished and a doorway to what might still be found somewhere else.

One winter, the box’s lid grew cold as a tomb, and the air inside it seemed to sigh with a hollow sound, like a bell that had forgotten its ring. Elliot stood before it, hands trembling, and eyes a little too bright, and spoke to it as if it were an audience.

“If you’re empty,” he said, “then let me be empty with you. If you’re full of something I cannot bear, then let me bear it with you.”

He pressed his forehead to the lid, listening as if the marbles might press back from the other side of the glassy world. The box remained stubbornly empty, yet Elliot began to notice minute changes in the town. The baker started leaving notes in the bread with chalk-drawn weather symbols. The clockmaker added a new chime that sounded like a sigh. The mayor, weary of the whispering fear of losing people to the sea of forgetfulness, declared a small festival of memory, inviting the townsfolk to share a story that mattered, even if it mattered only for a night.

At the festival, Elliot stood on a small stage, clutching the “Marbles” box as if it were a passport. He spoke not of healing or puzzles solved, but of the tenderness found in the act of remembering. He told of a girl who once pressed her ear to the floorboards to listen to the rain, of a man who chased the sun down the street until even his shoes wore thin with excitement, of a time when a simple box could hold a universe if one only believed enough to tilt one’s head and listen.

The crowd listened, not to fix Elliot, but to remember a shared fragility, the way memory can glow for a moment and then slide away like a firefly on a too-cool night. When he finished, a small child stepped forward with a handful of smooth, glossy marbles stolen from a thrift shop years ago. The child placed them into the open box, then stepped back, eyes wide with the wonder of an ordinary object becoming something sacred.

The box accepted the marbles with a soft clink, as if sighing with relief. Elliot looked at the glinting orbs and smiled, not with triumph, but with the quiet acknowledgment that some things cannot be forced into order or reason. Some things, like memory, are not always held in place by logic; they are held by longing, by the grace of those who choose to remember with you rather than for you.

From that night on, Elliot no longer spoke of the missing marbles as a tragedy. He spoke of them as travellers who had temporarily stepped away to rest, and who would return when the world was ready to listen again. The box stayed in the room, not as a locker for certainty, but as a doorway that invited others to pause, to remember, and to believe that even when sanity seems to recede, the act of sharing a memory can keep a person, and a town, from drifting entirely out of reach.

And so the man who had lost his sanity kept a vigil with the box, not to reclaim what was gone, but to honour what remained, two simple truths: that memory, like marbles, shines for a moment, and that sometimes, the best way to keep from losing everything is to let others keep a little of it for you.

Lazarus Carpenter

April ’26’