* * *
The morning sun arose to find Gef sitting on the rocks that sheltered the little beach, staring at the rolling sea. Merrith ran out to sit beside him. They remained quiet as they gazed out over the sparkling water. After a few minutes, she looked up into his face and said, “Will we go to the butterflies today?”
Gef didn’t want to look at the child, all bright and golden in the morning sun. Her presence made him feel warm and cold all at the same time.
Merrith reached up one hand and Gef saw a butterfly land upon her forefinger. Shadows fell over them and Gef looked up, expecting to see storm clouds. Instead, to his astonishment, he saw that hundreds of the colorful creatures hovered there. It looked as if a rainbow had come apart and showered over them. The air filled with blues, greens, oranges, purples and yellows. The tiny creatures swarmed and settled over them like an iridescent blanket. Gef felt the magic of the moment fill a spot in his heart that had been dark and closed for a long, long time.
Merrith laughed joyfully. “Here are your butterflies, Gef. They came to you.”
He slipped his arm around the girl, sheltering her. “Aye, the butterflies! You are the Child of Prophecy, aren’t you? I feared to believe it, but I knew it in my heart the moment I saw ye.”
Merrith didn’t answer but looked into his eyes with a tilt of her head. The knowledge of her power and her need for his protection filled him. She had loved the Lady Barrow and Farra but knew if she stayed with them they would be endangered. She needed to be away from the towns while her power grew into fruition. She didn’t want anyone hurt when the priests tried to find her. She sorrowed over the sinking of Lagnor’s ship and even the death of the Captain himself, though he meant her harm.
Gef’s heart filled with new life, like a butterfly that just burst out of its cocoon. He rose and turned toward their camp. Pulling her up into his arms, he shouted to Krell and Magdalah, “Let’s get packed up, we’re heading South today.”
The End
GUIDING STAR
Teresa Garcia
Raelmaz pulled herself together from amongst the stardust she had spread out into during her rest cycle, concentrating into one plane of the universe and one point of reference in the High Plain of Heaven. Her essences formed a rough egg shape as she did, just as when she had first been laid, a very slightly elongated pearl in those aeons so long ago. The tickle of the dust passing through her, and her through it as she fell further into one of the material planes from ethers where she had been, brought a delicate shiver through her entire being. The desire to dance in the swirling arms of the universe rekindled in her core and spread through her like molten lava from an effusive eruption down the sides of a volcano. Dimly she remembered the last time that she had felt the touch of another of her kind pressing through her field and mingling with her in a glorious swirl of light. The cold depths of space had lost their charms aeons ago, the dance of the stars always following the same cycles. Her kind were too far spread now, and too few to meet often.
“Condense to a point. Hold. Explode. Spread. Dance. Attract. Join. Condense to a new point...”
At the edge of her influence she felt the ripples of passing motion through the fabric of the universe. It moved too fast for a comet, and the energy projected from it held far too much of a living pattern. The back of her mind tickled with memories seeking to be heard, but were too old and wan to burn through the haze. Like needles she had witnessed countless races use, before succumbing to the fate that met everything at the end, something punched through and sent ripples through space-time. The fabric that punctured, as well as the mystery of the “needle” that pierced it, caught her attention and awakened her. It seemed as if the fabric had puckered even before the stitching. Raelmaz coalesced even more as thought returned more and more quickly to her.
“Such is the pass from plain into plane. Follow, this one deigns.”
Once more she felt her body, which she had previously abandoned, and stretched out across the heavens in a luxurious wave of motion, forming it to her current true shape instead of the waking shape. Iridescent scale hissed softly against under-scale as she swam the solar and other currents between the star systems. Here she had no measure of how much she had grown or how long she had slept, although looking down at her translucence she found that she was no longer the soft grey of her adolescence nor the pearl-light of a hatchling. Now she shone with the blues and purples of an adult female, a borealis effect imbuing her with ever shifting streamers as her mane and wings spread.
Just as the craft of souls had, she pierced the fabric of time and space, diving for the level it had kicked into. Time stretched and condensed, and for a flicker space around her truly did seem as fabric forever being woven on the loom by the invisible hands of her distant ancestors.
Then she was through, trailing the energy of the old system and dimension behind her and strewing its dust in her wake, fertilizing who knew how many new realities and perhaps seeding new life on planets not yet born. In less than half a breath she crossed three star systems...not that her kind breathed per se. The closer she came to the craft the more strange information flooded her. So many voices and thought-voices screamed from the little metal vessel with its twinkling lights and myriad decks filled with tiny moving space ants...or sardines.
“What was a sardine anyway?” she thought as soon as the observation formed, then wrapped herself around the craft, unflinching even as its antennas and other strange protrusions passed through her non-corporeal body. Being on another level of vibration she had no need to worry about the molecular damage they could have otherwise caused.
In answer to herself she fished out the image from the writhing mass of minds. Some unappealing tiny silver-brown swimming creatures – fish – that were as sleek as herself in some ways, emerged.. They were packed tightly in strange rectangular contraptions, cans, opened by a key...these images survived in the collective unconscious of the race despite no one having seen cans for untold generations. The next image was murkier and more fleeting, tiny silver darts of light through a sea more dense than that which she swam.
The images made her hungry. When she was smaller she did eat similar creatures when she visited some planets.
Raelmaz reeled at the unexpected wash of guilt that emanated now from the vessel, as if she had brushed things that still rode in their genes that had yet to be repaid. Visions of billowing smoke, the scent of ancient pollution, dried planets withering beneath the spreading touch of blades that laid low the hairs, the trees, of countless planets before, their own included, spread through her being. Raelmaz wretched, feeling as though it were her own whiskers and luxurious mane being shorn so callously.
“Such blasphemy!” She toned low and then high, vibrating on countless levels. “To think that a planet belongs to one race alone. That would be as my kind claiming all of space and the dimensions.”
She delved into their minds again, intent on seeing what these arrogant creatures believed they looked like. Two arms, two legs, and one head formed in her mind. Many of them tall and slender, presenting a range of skin colors from pale cream to the charred iron of impacted meteors. They had hair, like herself, ranging from star-white to void-black, and seemed to insist on covering their bodies with great drapes of cloth. None would easily allow an uncovered image, unless they were busily performing the dance of procreation together. What they allowed her to see represented ‘beauty’ as they conceived it.
Raelmaz recognized this race. Once she had swam their seas and had alighted in their temples in a favorite part of their world. It had not been their first.
“So they killed that haven I gave them...” She rumbled to herself. Did she dare delve deeper into this matter? Had she done wrong pitying them and answering their calls for the help of a ‘wise and beautiful stardragon’ so many millenia ago? In re-teaching them how to carefully use the riches around them? “The place they came from before that I remember was being drawn into an expanding sun...
according to their memories then.”