He lifted his nose to the cool wind.
He could almost taste something.
He thought of burning buildings.
He wondered about unholy things.
He could feel her motion.
He could hear her heart.
He knew she was near.
He couldn't see her.
He was old, so old. He laughed at his act, the image he presented to the thinkers who were slaves of their impressions. He knew they saw an old one, with a slow hesitant mind. It wasn't contrived, it was natural. It was the wearing of their expectations as a form of protection.
He let them define him. It wasn't out of anger, or sadness. It was expedient. He could feel their definition, he just didn't attach to it.
Paradoxical it was, that the summations of those he moved amongst, those restrictions, actually protected him and allowed him to move freely, yet it was true.
He needed to move, because he was searching. He wasn't looking with his eyes, because the view just complicated things. He wasn't listening, because the sounds of the world were distracting. He simply had the fire in his heart and he was feeling.
Its the fire, Ignis, that is so responsible. The fire burns through the madness of oil consciousness. It casts its light upon an entirely different experience. The fire leads one to its own fulfillment, beckons with its own requirement, if one allows the fire to stir and blaze according to its own will.
She was in his dream, so physical, so real. He wondered at it. In the dreams were no barriers, no extraneous circumstances, just them, and the music of the darkness. Yet when he opened his hazel eyes and saw once more the world physical it was only him, and so it was that he wandered, hunting, searching, following the scent trail with a dogged determination.
It wasn’t something he spoke of to anyone, because it was not something they would have understood, much less agreed with. He designed his day with the maximum chance to meet her, all based upon that feeling, that when they came together the world would blow itself to pieces. No more planet, only a smoking crater. The separation and division coalescing into devastation.
It was, if he had thought about it, the breakthrough to the mythical plane. It was the rediscovery of that reality that this place was the ground of finality. Nothing here to make sense of itself, and with only itself to compare itself to, a place where fulfillment meant a final exhausted breath.
In his dream their coming together was a pure dancing energy. Sometimes she was the cup flowing over, or the shy blushing flower, but always she was there, with his fire to light the fuse, to bring the explosion to end this world forever.
He packed his suitcase, he took his chance. His passport was ready, and he had some cash. When the plane touched down on the runway, he was almost there, Marseilles.
He was walking in that foreign country past a buisy road side cafe’.
He felt that tug on his heart that immediately seized his attention. He saw her then, so cool, so distant, so exotic. Her flowing dark hair contrasted so completely with her milky white complexion. She was lean, but not emaciated or boxy. Rather she seemed to be an expression of muscular energy. Her ruby lips sipped at a cup of coffee, and her eyes were hidden behind her black sunglasses, yet he knew they were blue.
He found himself standing at her table. He placed his hand upon the back of a chair opposite her. He ran his hand through his wolf fur as he sat and beheld her. They regarded each other almost warily. He realized she carried an illegal pistol in her bag as her thought went to it. He wondered if she had a desire to use it-no, no she was casually playing with the idea, the way a cat might play upon scenarios that involved killing a bird.
He gestured to himself and spoke his name. She said nothing, regarding him over her coffee. It was clear she had the energy. It was also true that she felt very similar to her whom he met in his dreams.
Yet it was anything but certain that she was that manifestation, that projection. Everyone and everything is always far more complicated in the world of finality.
The waiter finally arrived and she paid gracefully, before almost by accident letting a piece of paper flutter down to the table. He seized it with a snap before the wind could take it. In beautiful script was a woman’s name and number. He looked up, but she was already gracefully melting in to the crowd. He watched her walk, approvingly. The muscular ease with which she moved was intoxicating.
From afar he could hear voices pleading. Broken bits of conversation, half completed thoughts. He realized the waiter was asking if he wanted something. He ordered a coffee absently as he contemplated the seat still shimmering with her energy. He was content to sense that feeling, and breathe it in.
It always amazed him, how full each moment seemed, even as it was fleeting. All too quickly, he left the cafe, the precious piece of paper in his breast pocket, tied down with a button.
He wove aimlessly through the buisy streets of the foreign city, convinced as we was that his pointless wandering had a purpose. The sun was beginning to dip in the heavens, and the shadows grew longer as he rounded a corner, only to be thrown against the wall of stone, with a slim blade cutting into his neck.
He managed to catch a glimpse of his attacker, and he smiled perhaps a little too triumphantly, as the knife pressed harder and the blood, his blood began to run through the pain. He felt strangely vindicated, almost proud that he was right: her eyes were blue.
“Do you want to live forever?”
Her lips were close to his ear. Her words, more of a breathing than even a whisper. He reached down to her slim, muscular waist, seized her and pulled her so close that their was no space between them. Their eyes met, locked, and he felt a great sadness fall upon him, the desperation of a moment that could be stretched no longer, convinced as he suddenly was of their impermanence. She put her arm up, and expertly drove her fist into his kidney, her sharp nails digging through his shirt.
There was this gulf between them that could not be breached. They were two different lights, try as he might to hold her, she was elusive.
Suddenly he released her.
“Decide what you are going to do, yourself.”
The knife pressed harder. The rage and ferocity behind it was real. He could feel her silent shriek, the waves of sheer, unbearable anger. He held her blue gaze in an iron grip. He knew she was like no other.
“I should kill you here for having the temerity to worship me.”
The knife disappeared, but the cut remained, lightly, gently bleeding.
“I was going to call you…eventually.”
She tossed her mane, and slid the knife back in its hidden sheathe at her well shaped thigh. He heard it snap into place as she regarded him.
“I have plenty of men who want me, everyday. Sometimes they are fun, sometimes they just complicate things, sometimes they are just a pain. Are you then another lost puppy?”
“I’m not afraid of being lost. I don’t think you are, either.”
Her eyes flashed. He sensed her memories racing, all the clueless gropers she had to put up with, all those who wanted to overpower her, and leave once they got what they wanted. She learned not to give anyone anything. She was lean, and certainly a woman, yet she had a strength and grace and deadly power, and she had learned how to use them, as the throbbing kidney and cut on his neck proved.
“I’ve never sold my body.”
“Me neither”, he managed a smile.
“So, why do you, like all the others, want me?”
“How could I not want you?”
“Fair, I am gorgeous.”
“Yes, you are. I want to walk with you, and tell you more, but not here.”
She felt the river of her passion throw her caution away. All the loss, all the pain, all the overwhelming anger, everything she had known up to then. She could keep her current life, she she could stay in her current way, she would be strong and beautiful for quite a while.
Yet the way of the world always has the final say. She suddenly knew and saw the Wolf who stood before her, and while she could never be sure that she knew what she was doing, it was the fire within her that had its way, on that fateful day.
The hand of destiny can be many things. It can be a giant fist that grabs you, swings you in the aire and slams you down on the unforgiving tarmac. It can be the iron you will never bend. Destiny is also that whisper of the wind that comes howling, it is the gentlest kiss upon your cheek, it is the taste of red lipstick after you kiss her.
It is that walk on the beach.
He wasn't worried about the pain, as he took her hand with his that had some of his blood glistening upon it, where he had rubbed his neck. He was too buisy listening to that immensity, the silence of certainty that flew before them in the form of a Swallow. He always hated the anxiety that lurked in the corner of his mind. It drove him into corners, it made him shake all over, made him cold, promised him death's door, but only delivered the suffering. He removed his shoes and rolled up his pants. He was almost comical, almost tragic. She laughed as her caught her, letting herself fall into his arms upon the burning sand.
He didn't ask her what was chasing her, and for once, he didn't care what was chasing him, either. He wasn't going to think, or wish, or make plans, he was only going to live, for as long as he could.
The dream or vision that always followed the recurring one, of them meeting, was not intruding upon their moment, not yet. All he knew, or even cared about now was the genuine smile she turned his way. She conquered her rage and pain, under the setting sun upon the beach, she was alive again. He gasped at the wonder, feeling like the first man to behold an incomparably unique snowflake, so fragile so beautiful, too precious yet a endless mystery to behold.
The last day in Marseilles arrived gliding. Yet there was the oil coloured dragon whose wings kept to the shadows in the clouds arriving. The dragon was careful, stealthful, an eater of corpses not yet done walking. Even those who worked for him in the agonized hidden bureaucratic agencies never actually saw him. All they saw, even in their rare moments of lucidity were strange clouds. It made him believe that he was impervious to the dull senses of people.
Thus it surprised him greatly as he was arriving, that she dreamed him. The flash of recognition caused him a sudden start. It was a novel impression, indeed. He might have been flattered under different circumstances, but this woman, whose blue eyes pierced through him, had become a problem, and the fact that she perceived him made her a threat.
He sailed in silence, spread across the shadows caused by the artificial haze. He preferred places like this, where nanoparticles and synthetic biology made him feel comfortable, a different type of living than his former home deep within the caves, burrowed into the bottom of the ocean.
He had his bag packed, his papers ready. He shook his head to dispell the uneasy feeling, the filtered sunlight dawning with the day. She burst through the door, her eyes like coals that told him immediately that their spell of joy was broken, and the evil dream of antihuman intention was on the march once again.
The darkness of the in between places grew tentacles that tried to grasp them. He payed his hotel bill constantly glancing over his shoulder, his hands revealed a slight tremor as he clutched his coffee.
Out in the day, in the relative safety of the light, she told him of her dreaming, the oil coloured dragon, and his henchmen who were drawing up dossiers on both of them. They hired a car, and the driver took them to Languedoc, where the Gnostic Ghost still haunts the land.
At first glance they were in that ordinary physical space, moving invisible within the throngs of people, sitting outside, until they looked up to the sky.
It was then that their hands found each others. Their heartbeats slowed, eased and synchronized. It was without pretense, without barrier that they found one another. Suddenly, the smile remembered, and the warmth of that mysterious engine that powered the cycle of breath. It was fully, completely known to them that no force that chased them could ever stop the unfolding harmony.
They found a place on the earth beneathe the wide branches of a Wolf-tree. It was neither desire or the drive for sensation that moved them, it was the mutual exploration and discovery, unburdened by the chains of the world.
Their embrace was the tectonic ripple in the earth. Their gaze, so enraptured with each other called forth a power more terrible than the oil coloured dragon. They lost their hopes and their fears, they were freed from the nagging concerns, the lava that broke through the crust to run and tumble was their own expression.
She vanished into the energy of the terrible Goddess, wrathful devastation as she danced furiously upon the corpse of the world. He became the single column of light, growing finer and brighter as the vision climbed above the planet to the stars.
In that moment the doorway opened, and without hesitation they found their steps to the liminal tunnel, the brick constructed in between corridor, so physical and real. They tested the solid walls with their hands, the cold unyielding feel. Unheeding the voice, beseeching them to retreat, they opened the farthest door together, and in one final heartbeat, one exhalation, they were gone.
Lovely writing style!
Engrossing…😉