Through a frame of verdant foliage came a fork of white-blue lightning. The midday sun had been silenced to an almost twilight grey. The rain beat down in such drumming waves that the tree canopy could have been simple bare winter branches. The air that had been heady with floral scent an hour ago had become a cold scream over the skin, raising goosebumps and billowing the clothes. Until they reached the comfort of home, there would be no shelter from this sky-born rage.
The quarry was a rocky pit no longer. The once granite faces were alive with waving fronds. Their foliage, as years passed, was becoming earth with a freckling of flowers. In their time they too would become the soil and, in more time still, we’d be standing upon a new meadow. The tincture of nature will become a bathing aroma. The ground will regain its natural cushioning.
It was as if the rays of that dawn, pulsing through freshly clothed trees, were my heartbeat drum. With every dance of my limbs the tune became ever freer, its notes ever lighter. Head up toward the sky, watching more sun-born spotlights than anyone could count, my wakeful life was better than my dreams. For so long I’d been in the dark, no more, no more. From here on in it’s sunlight and dancing every day.
Before the dawn light, though every keyhole and wall crack, came the raging tide. Rain was not rain, yet Poseidon’s fists. Rain was not rain, yet cannonballs. How it hammered down as if our town reduced to splinters was not enough. No suffering, abject or deepest misery, was enough. Swim or drown. Cling or be washed away. Of mercy, there was none. And so, before the first struggling rays came cloud filtered, all but the very strongest had perished.
A water dragon is born when cold sea currents meet a tropical flow; an ancient magic is stirred by the collision. From nowhere, they say, a new light is born. Some say it is the very light of the stars brought to the newborn dragonlet through magic. None can say for sure. All we know is what is told in the myths, written in squid ink on parchment scrolls, this creature does not come from an egg and arrives fully formed. One moment there is only the brine and then there is this king of the deep.
Echo sat in the dark. Water dripped. The wind whistled through winter denuded trees. Upon the window pane beat a wisp of a twig, a twig so thin it was almost a ghost. A mean draft reached under the door of her cottage, reaching as if it were an octopus formed from vapour-snow, if such a thing were to exist. With a shivering sigh, Echo picked up a piece of long dried firewood and placed it in the ash-freckled hearth. She struck a match, shielding it with her free hand. Its tiny glow illuminates an old photograph.
How nice it must be, she pondered, for such memories to feel sweet. It had been so many years since those happy days and still they were printed in her uncried tears. Before her eyes could gloss, thunder rolled across the city and she re-gazed at her unlit hearth. What a difference it made, she thought, when the flames leapt in their merry dance illuminating her home with their sepia glow. Yet before she could ignite it, her pager sounded and with a flick of her hand the nascent fire became a smoky charcoal trail. Duty called once more.