Always Together

June 10, 2018July 31, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

Alli was sitting at the house in the field, burnt out, twisted out, more than thirty years ago. The moon floated overhead; the flowers tossed in the evening’s gusts. A little lantern sat on the porch between them. Page, the Thunder Avatar, sat in the adjacent rocking chair.

She was dressed like a young professional. Her tall, lanky frame was graced by a slate pants suit and an obsidian blouse. Her raven hair flowed like silk and caught the deep blue of the sky, the spinning, sparkling stars – like a kindly, modern Morgan le Fay. Clear water had nothing on her almost translucent blue eyes, bright and burning in the dark.

“Aro didn’t tell me you would be this humble, this small,” Page began.

“Well, I am very short,” Alli admitted, embarrassed.

“So, you went to Dartmouth,” Page said, leaning forward, peering at her in the darkness.

“Well, you did go to Yale,” Alli answered, heat rising in her cheeks, a substitute for a blush.

“Yes, I went to college around the same time as you,” Page said in a soft voice, turning her drink on the armrest of the chair.

“Your mother served as the Lightning Avatar, the diplomatic head of the Atevars. What was that like?” Alli wondered, in awe.

Alli heard her smile, “It wasn’t that immense, really. I thought about going to the State Department, in this world, but I just became a lawyer.”

“This is the first time anyone in my family has even heard of Atev, much less became any of the Three Avatars,” Alli confessed, spreading her hands wide – a placating gesture.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Page murmured, reaching across the divide – the gap between their wooden chairs – her hair falling into her face, her right hand sporting a gold Yale ring, “You’re not going to be out of your depth. And I am sure your parents knew about how permeable this world is with Atev.”

Alli sighed, with Page’s hand resting on hers, breathing in the Thunder Avatar’s perfume – a heady feeling. The woman was a snowy pale, accentuated by her bright, red lipstick. Alli, by contrast, was folded into a warm, comfortable, pearl fisherman’s sweater.

She glanced up and knew Page was looking into her eyes, in the night. She squeezed Alli’s hand, “I know it sounds trite, but whatever comes our way, we’ll face it together.”

Wind rustled through the grasses and crickets chirped in the underbrush. The odd firefly winked in and out, working its way back to the main road. The two held hands, staring out into the void.

Song

F O R E C A S T – Conscious Thoughts

Fountains in a Tea House

May 19, 2018May 20, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

The clouds above were roiling and gray. The wind tore through the trees, ripping off small branches. An untethered, rotted tennis court net flapped in the wind. Alli walked across the leave-strewn hardcourt.

A house loomed, lopsided and in disrepair. Alli entered through the familiar red door, swinging off its hinges, hanging by a screw.

She strode down the long corridor. The hall was lined with crumbling Corinthian pillars, some with whole chunks smashed out of them. The rest of the room opened out on both sides of her – broken windows letting in the cold, shattered mirrors, reflecting nothing.

Water from the afternoon rain poured down from holes in the ceiling. The cataracts framed the room, like the off-white pillars, stained with mildew. Streams sluiced through the ruined floor, irrigated by cracks in the tiles.

Nealy stood at the far end of the room, in her beige suit, smoking a cigar. She inhaled the exhaled smoke back into her nostrils. Her eyes glinted in the darkness at the far end of the room, away from the daylight streaming through the many gashes in the house – a sudden shift of light in the background, like the quick flare of flaming ash. Whorls of smoke twisted away into the blackness.

“Did you bring it?” she asked, spitting out a piece of tobacco.

“Yes,” Alli said, hefting the ax from behind her.

Nealy stood out of the way. Behind her, in the inkiest depths, in a shallow pool of water, was a blue and black beast, a cockatrice at least the length of a Winnebago. Its leathery wings unfolded at regular intervals, but it was wounded, conserving its movements.

“Get rid of it,” Nealy said. She turned away, toward the distant remnants of a torn-out window pane, taking a deep drag on her cigar.

The wyvern’s neck heaved in a useless bucking motion. Its teeth clacked as it opened and closed its jaw impotently. It couldn’t shapeshift anymore – it didn’t have enough energy. It was a dark avatar, frozen in that form.

The constant patter of water flowing down from the roof was all Alli heard. The whole house exuded the essence of soaked, dead wood, forgotten splinters. Alli smelled, at the edge of her consciousness, a bright, green whiff of Honduras. She raised the ax.