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.
* * * * *
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
