Elysian Fields - (Excerpt)

He felt the wet sensation of cold hit his lips as it's gentle smear spread through their crevice, and the sweet flavor of something unknown breached to the tip of his tongue. Raising from unconsciousness clouded his rationale, and so his first thoughts were that his daughter was playing with him, with possibly something she had concocted from the kitchen. She was always able to reach everything beyond her limitations of 3 feet high. The thought grew to a dead end, as he opened his eyes and saw before him and endless world of white and sculpted blue. Cold. Flakes of snow gradually fell illustrating silence upon stillness.


He pressed himself from the frozen ground which he realized was but an aged wooden platform; the only iceless surface from what he could see. He took hesitation as he grew curious of what could be awaiting his arrival here. Though the cold wasteland he saw before him was not inviting, nor was notably comfortable, still felt more like company than the drafty shod of a house in which he had spent his last days. At least this was something that seemed to stand out from the rest of the world he had always known. It almost felt as if it were manifested for him. Now as the air began to shift into a wind, his bare arms felt the sting of the land's wintery hand. He trudged on only guided in hope that destiny would answer.


Just ahead was a forest naked of spring, but full of winding limbs and branches spiraling into each other sheltering the ground below from the ambient glow of the grey-clouded sky. On it's edge was the hint of a forking path. Options he did not have time for, to wager his weight of wisdom that would be nothing more than a guessing game at this point.


He turned to look behind, and nothing but the lone wooden platform that might as well have been drift wood that brought him from a misty sea to a frozen hand of dismal deed lied in his sight. Beyond it nothing but white. He turned back and for the first time the forest seemed to offer a proposition. So he walked to it's edge and without hesitation knowing his time was short let whatever foot that led to the forests' edge first be the fork of the path he took.


Aimless, knowing no such thing of North, South, East, or West here. He picked up his pace down the left fork feeling this path now had to be right. Not knowing why the other path would even be wrong but it was for the first time, he felt a nod of fate's concurrence reside warmly in his conscience as an ember growing into flame.


Darkening, the deeper he stabbed onward into the belly of this lifeless forest. Swiftly on the tracks of this winding trail he ran, making sure not to trip on the large knotty roots that suffocated the path from both sides. Not knowing what lied ahead he could only for at the very least hope for the sound of someone's presence. Just then was a crack was heard in the distance, which jolted him to a halt. As he stood still, he felt the sensation of perspiration elate his skin with a chill but was quickly defeated by the heat of his body that had been churned from his hasting pace. Through his deep breaths he listened intently as a hare in full alert, attempting to decipher if the sound was him, something foreign, or just in his mind all together. Taking one deep inhale to quite his body, he hoped for another sound.


Nothing.


He propelled back into his previous stride and the first sense of loss fell darkly in his mind. He began to ask why he was here. What has this world to do with anything about him. The previous two were strange enough, but at least they had presented misfit children to tell him of his misfortunate past. The other but an aimless oaf that talked in nothing but riddles that all seemed to hint at only his current state.


He began to think of, his daughter. How he missed her eyes. Blue and full of life, now gone existing only in etching memories scribed from all his mind could tell him; and his wife. She was the other half of the world he had grown up in and never known until they met. She loved the stars as much as he. Though he was a scholar of the night skies, it remained absolute that when seeing her she showed him constellations no book or professor could ever tell. If only they were here now, he would feel the warmth and guidance they both offered. Most of all he just wanted to be able to give himself to them again. If they were only alive to feel his solitude, together they could reinvent this world into the paradise it had never known.

Celestia

The wind gave way to the lonely figure set against the moon. She felt it dance around her ankles like little secrets born just to touch and teach her to feel. She harmonized light with darkness making sense of all she knew, only to leave its weight at the bottom of the ocean that crashed like a wailing memory below her feet. As the waves resounded into a hush and she felt only herself against the past; she felt the grass underneath her palm, how soft it was, comforting, befriending. If only it had eyes to look up at her and feel the need small innocence would feel. She would love this patch of grass like the universe loved infinity. She pushed back the quivers and shakes, she was much too big for that now. She imagined her release, if she were able to step onto thin air and walk on that imaginary stairway that led to endless stretches of existence. Would she then find what it was she was missing? Then, she heard a sound that was reminisce to the songs of rain. The horizons drew in colors that were foreign to observance in both legend and lore. They spread carefully, and confidently on her chest they lay. As if they had ordained her with a new light, for the first time she knew that life has never been a waste, everything was for this moment. Mistakes were but a soliloquy in the making of understanding, that all she had to do was let go, and let herself be. Then she felt the sun resonate with the vibrations of her skin, and press against her soul. Lifting slightly she closed her eyes and found a new world for a new her, there she would start legend and end as the one the world would need.

The Keeping

Time stood still. She looked up from her knees on the plush carpet, and through her hazel strands of hair into supernatural depths of darkness that now preceded the realities of her once quaint modern home. As the tears dried on her face so would the tensions of fear and doubt; because what she saw againts this fabric of endless unknowing was a thread of promise. It was there in the dismantling of her universe that she found the last existence of hope.

A tiny blue speck of light materialized into a glowing ribbon. Ethereal in its motion it seemed harmless and almost befriending. In her curiosity she stretched out her hand and as if it were a greeting of truce she placed her palm gently on the light as if it could read her very soul.

As the defining moment of flesh to spirit occurred the ribbon of light slowly fell over the back of her hand softly twisting its way around her arm; and then raising its tip to her ear very slowly as if were a gentleman's lips laid as a leaf to water onto her neck. She quickly drew in a short breath in exhilration, as her mind was stimulated beyond what any creation before her could know. Her heart slowed into an instictive calm of confidence. As one more tear fell in her serenity, so did all that she had come to know.

The walls around and the floor beneathe her began to crumble into nothing. All existence began to dematerialize; and the blue light wrapped itself around her as a mother's arms over a newborn. As the universe fell away without a trace the blue blanket of light grew brilliantly vigil, entrenching itself into her soul and reaching beyond the boundaries of the universe it would save her from this end and bring her to her new beginning.