Jesus-tap-dancing-Christ...

The scene that has held me back on my novel for the last, oh, I dunno, SEVEN MONTHS because it was critical and I just couldn't get it right?

Yeah. That one.
 
DONE. Unpolished on a first edit, but wrapped as it all fell into place. The flow is authentic.

Finally... I can move forward in this story.

Thank you, whatever force reached through the shimmerthread veil of otherworld to give me the needed inspiration.

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THIRD SCENE OF CHAPTER IX

Chthonic and trackless, I fell against the glittering undergrowth: diamond cut foliage basking in the Otherworld twilight. I was in a succession of moments, vibrating with it and drained of some fundamental vitality.


Sweating.


Shivering.


Straddling a difficult Eros between the flesh of the Altwald and the polyrhythmic press of my body to that dampened earth, it was palpable to my awareness. Self became a creaturely sensation, capricious and tilting towards vertigo. Deprived of the benefit of empirical reason, I spent that evanescence translating patterned shafts of light into tactile sensations; a robust breath of color that rode along my skin with all the splendid delirium of an artist deep within his craft. I turned over on my stomach and stretched against the soil. The Earth was new and eager under my touch, young enough to respond with the undiluted affection of a child.


The Bright Man… He was deep in his fury; I felt his presence as surely as I felt the backdrop from which all things began. I opened my eyes slowly.


“I will not be drawn out!” How many times had he said these words? It seemed he had been caught in the momentum of his own emotions, stimming this stereotypic vernacular, for a long time though I was only now processing it as something significant.


“Are you flesh?” He whispered, clutching the sides of my face. His voice hurt, inside and out, cutting to the very marrow of my understanding.


Was I merely dreamwalking again, subconsciously responding to aerial summons, or had I truly made the crossing, bodily and of my own volition?


It was a distinction that mattered to him, though I lacked the context as to why.


Father. I splayed my fingers across his breast and spilled the thought into and through his elastic skin; skin that took on its own white-hot glow at each colliding vertex. Violet magic was pulled from me, effervesced through the sun-bleached tendrils of light snaking upwards and around my arm. I am here, all that I am, and under my own will.


For that ripple in time, the world spun for me and me alone. I leaned upwards, balanced both hands over the sharp angles of his hips and kissed him full on his too-wide mouth. He shot to his feet, skittered backwards, and threw me into the fragrant brushwood. My head lolled to the side and I couldn’t help smiling. I felt contagious under the electric shiver of these hallucinations.

Are they hallucinations? I wondered, once, briefly. Did it matter?

“NO!” He was screaming, tendons and veins standing out red and angry across the whole of his body. “No, no, no!” As I watched him wail and convulse under the sheer force of his denial I saw him as a chalice. The Bright Man; gilded under Providence, balanced somewhere between too much history and not enough time.


I laughed; I laughed until I felt resplendent with it. More than a little intoxicated and reeling, I rocked forward until I was teetering on the cusps of my knees. He seemed paralyzed by the noise, a diffuse radiance fading from his chest even as I watched. Yet he was fixed on me, cataloguing my every nuance.
          
It felt like coming home. More importantly: I was right.


Father… Of the many and varied things that he was and had ever been, he was that, too. Blood of my blood, and possessed of a spirit that responded to the same heartsong of my soul. My father.


I knew it in my bones, and that knowledge skittered through my awareness in flash-fire parlor thoughts.


“Father.” I said it out loud, smiled and caught his eyes, eyes that were the very twin-set of my own. The Bright Man was a flux of subtle movements, body language that seemed to capture and absorb the many-splendored luster bleeding from the very quintessence of this place, this time. He was listening, albeit with all the gun-shy strain of a cornered animal.


I stood, examined all the little eccentricities that defined my Shadow Self: the pulse of purpled veins bleeding color into all the delicate corners of my flesh, the halo of dark hair that caressed my shoulders as though floating in gossamer seas, claws, fang-teeth…


Beautiful witch-eyed girl… Yousef’s words.


When next I spoke, it was with the conviction of absolute supplication.


“Please. You reached between worlds to find me, or protect me, or maybe because you didn’t have any other choice. It’s time to tell me why.”

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“Paindancer,” By Lineia Corell

Copyright © 2010/2011

To Tally, with love...

Exciting things are in the works on "Paindancer."


In the meantime a passage from the "Book of Taliesin", dedicated to my son - named after the Chief of Bards himself.


Taliesin Orion, Tallymander, My Little Nomad, Aelden Prince... You inspire me to laugh, to create, and above all thing to persevere.


For all that and merely for the creature that you are -

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"I have been in a multitude of shapes,
Before I assumed a constant form.
I have been a sword, narrow, variegated,
I will believe when it is apparent.
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.
I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns
A year and a half,
I have been a continuing bridge,
Over three score Abers.
I have been a course, I have been an eagle.
I have been a coracle in the seas;
I have been compliant in the banquet.
I have been a drop in a shower;
I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand:
I have been a shield in battle.
I have been a string in a harp,
Disguised for nine years.
In water, in foam.
I have been sponge in the fire,
I have been wood in the covert.
I am not he who will not sing of
A combat though small,
The conflict in the battle of Godeu of sprigs."
~ Excerpt from "The Battle of Godeu", Book of Taliesin VIII

"Paindancer" - Second Scene of Chapter IX

I've been away awhile. I'm okay with that.

"Paindancer" is straddling the 40,000 word mark. Momentous, as once I cross that boundary it's officially a novel.

I really... really... really... like how the imagery of this scene - and the pacing - came out.

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I tried to sleep that night, I really did. Despite the amicable terms we’d parted on – as much as humanly possible, anyway – my conversation with Sialk had left me feeling provoked and anxious. I felt like I still needed to give her a few days, unless Mallory called me first. It was complicated. Everything was complicated all the fucking time. I was sick to death of complicated. I wanted to tear it apart and rebuild from the rubble.

Time to deconstruct… I couldn’t tell whether the thought was mine or not. It appealed to my sensibilities either way.

I yawned, glanced at the clock, and cracked my neck. I pulled a loose knit shrug over my head, left my hair loose and rummaged around for pants. I leafed through the clean laundry basket left at the foot of my bed and paused for a moment. The corduroy patchwork pants I’d worn to Salem’s when I stormed into his apartment and… well… yeah.

Running my hands over the fabric, I spread them over the bed. On some of the lighter patches you could still see a spray of tiny rust-colored droplets; blood from my back, whipping off his belt and onto my clothes. It hadn’t come out in the wash. I hadn’t noticed before. I touched the reddish inkblots and shivered all over.

Whatever I could or couldn’t have with Salem now, it wasn’t this. Flashbacks of that night crowded my mind.

His Beast. His passion. That exquisite cruelty he had kept leashed until I’d driven him to let loose the reins.

The coppery tang of my blood comingled with his as he backhanded me across the floor.

The way he fit inside me.

The slippery belt tightening around my throat.

My faerie-fire surging through him like the tide.

His face in those moments…

It hurt to love him and realize one of the best nights of my life was one of the worst of his. Human though he was, his Shadow Aspect wasn’t a challenge or a mystery ripe with incentive as mine was. His scared him. He didn’t want to go there again. Wouldn’t. He fought his darkness; I tried to reconcile light and dark.

I wished he trusted me, or even just himself, enough.

Complicated.


I pulled the pants on and grabbed my iPod before taking off into the midnight haze.

I queued up a playlist as I walked: The Silversun Pickups, Fuel, The Verve Pipe, Live, Snow Patrol, The Sisters of Mercy, Gossamer, The Goo Goo Dolls, Matchbox 20, Nirvana, Depeche Mode, Eluveitie, Gaelic Storm, and so much more…

Time to burn it to the ground.


I cranked the volume to eleven, fit the earbuds to my ears and clipped the screen to my waistband.

Finavir. I hit play. The noise hit me like a punch to the gut. My lashes fluttered against my cheeks as I let the sound absorb into and around this mortal coil. My fingers rapped against my stomach.

My hands crackled over with static-fire. My core was seafoam against the moon. My toes grappled with the earth. My hair strained against the ragged edge of the wind.

And I danced; abstract and freeflow. I responded to the music like a lover, let my fingertips raise and amplify goosebumps in fractured curves across my skin. It was like throwing back one too many energy drinks; I couldn’t not move. The electric-threaded vibration assaulted my ears, ran through my body in a bubbling jet. I felt invisible wires affix to my wrists, my hips, my ankles, shoulders, neck, and along each delicate fingertip, each lacing back and toward a rhythmic subversion of self. I relaxed into it, let it pull me here and there, up and down, and back in upon myself. Every movement was a lush and dangerous surprise. I was a marionette spinning entropy across the forest floor.

I let it take my breath away.

And there was the light, always the light, a pale and emergent radiance. Only this time instead of photons racing tangents through dead space, the candle-blaze flickered from my gaze and caught on the midnight breeze.

A subtle silvering of the atmosphere at first, the more it caught and held my attention the brighter the definition grew.

For God only knows how long, it was all I thought about. I was sweating, dancing on a turnstile, making love without direction, as I painted the air with my eyes.

A glance here, a pulse of eyelashes there, a surrender of vision… Whether I created it or merely uncovered it I don’t know, but I saw. A dense and fibrous network extending as far as I could see in every direction, light dripped through the skein like dew collecting through a spiderweb at sunrise. Brighter here, echoing there, and all of it tethered back towards the undifferentiated brilliance of Finavir.

I tore through the fine latticework of strands as I passed, demolishing old pathways and recreating them anew in my wake. I felt it. Galvanized spirit-threads snapping against my skin in a sensory spray; I reached out and touched pockets of heliotrope crossfire. I was breaking the surface-tension and bathing in the overflow.

Where were my fireflies in this shining morass?

I felt their tremulous and impending warmth, and that was enough.

I was closing in concentric circles around Finavir’s trunk; Finavir who punched through realities like a monolith crucifies the sky. The scintillating reverb was roping me in.

I let it. I spun en pointe, rocked on my heels and back again.

Closer, closer, closer… My breath boiled in my lungs and lightning scalded my skin. Otherworld ley lines became a tangled snarl of razorblades, flaying and peeling my human visage from my body.

I slipped fully into my Shadow Self at the same moment I went crashing through Finavir and into The Savage Garden.

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“Paindancer,” By Lineia Corell
Copyright © 2010/2011