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NO-TREE
The hitchhiker had passed on, sensing something in the distance before leaving. It was she howling thing. She and she alone held the key to Rohan's wasted world. But now that she was so close, so close to her being, how would she give it to him? Would she dangle it through the air before his dry and empty eyes? Perhaps she would twist it through his aching heart and stake him to the one tree.
She knelt and buckled in the thunderstorm air of the plain of no-tree. She feared for her own life. She had shed her wings on rooftop suburbia. Her skin had become brittle and scaled, her feet claw-like and clutching the air currents. She dragged her belly across the cragged mountain. The void was surrounding him, within him. She fingered her throat, dragging on her stomach, transforming herself in to something other. Her dead hair went streaming into darkness ten thousand feet above her head. The love she held for him was splitting her insides and there was no release. When would her finally turn to accept her into himself?
The love of him that was of her was destroying them both. When would her turn his being into darkness and finally accept her? A first hint of fear, that had always been near, rose up to touch her mortal consciousness. Would she be lost from herself forever within him? Would it be the death of her like all the others who had gone before her? Would there simply be change for the better? No. She had been close enough to see his eyes. They were the essence of each other. She flew from sky to horizon. She crouched and slobbered on the stone, flaying her tail in the dust of time.
Something terribly dark was close to him now. If he didn't wake up it would swallow him entirely. Like the quiet breath of night that crosses the light to dawn - it threatened to eclipse him and carry him away into the coming storm. It is her. It is she howler whispering on warm currents of air like breath on his mind. He had heard her weeping in the desert. He must help her but was afraid to reach in any further, in case he fell into the emptiness and was lost from himself. This storm of the plain had been building up for a forever day. He had chosen to come here. There was nowhere else to go. All he could do was wait. |
