|
Video Blogs
More Video
Navigation |
Bird of HermesAh...yes, hi. Haha..ok, I don't really tend to post this places, because...well, it's my baby. And I'm shy. And I don't want to jinx the story by posting it everywhere and then abandoning it. At this point, I think I'm stuck with it, haha. Anyway, this is actually an UBER! A Xena uber, at that (wait, people still write those? ;) ), set in a "low-fantasy" sort of world. I started writing it when I was 15 (I'm 17 now), so excuse the bad writing in the beginning (my style is fairly...quirky...anyway) Also, I don't know whether this will end up being a flat-out romance or not - I'm not exactly a romance writer (and this story isn't necessarily about romance, though it certainly has romantic ideals), but there's definite subtext already anyway...and subtext is fun for everyone! I think I've blabbered enough. Oh, and I'll be double-spacing between paragraphs, since tab doesn't work. (some of the spacing will be messed up...the forum doesn't seem to like "unneeded" spacing between lines, lol, but sometimes it puts in too many spaces??) Official Summary™: The world is cast in grays. There is only half-life and half- living, dangerous emotions taken by guardian angels before they can lead to darkness, and magic is a symbol of greed instead of light. A forgotten angel, once sworn to protect her people and keep them from shadows, Leah is on her way to the City of Wings to regain what she's lost. And maybe, with the help of a small, unexceptional magician, she'll discover that you don't need wings to fly.
Bird of Hermes
Part I: Meetings Wings
The first thing Leah noticed was a woman crouched at the side of the house, tending to a garden of weeds. Her hands worked in the absent, hasty way of a worried mother who knows she can't save her dying child but has to do something, so she tends to her garden. Only this woman grew weeds.
Leah stepped into the yard. Immediately, she could feel the whispered, tainted presence inside the house - the sick child. The first thing the woman noticed as she looked up with tired, tired eyes was that Leah had wings. Her hands let the gardening tools drop and she trembled in front of the young woman. Why are they taking my child? her eyes asked. Leah felt a part of her slip away with the breeze. Her wings folded in on themselves and she walked into the house, unable to look at the broken woman tending to weeds like they were flowers. Shivering, the child was curled up on a rug dangerously close to the warm fireplace. Pale green eyes stared through Leah and into the gloomy darkness of the dying. The room was small, the walls seemingly closing in on her, a couch losing its stuffing taking up most of the room. Next to it was a small table with flowers that were wilting. Leah took a tentative step forward and felt the darkness around her. The whole house - the roses, the child, the soil outside that could grow nothing but weeds - was cursed with a dark horror she should have been able to stop. "Are you an angel?" The girl's voice was a whisper, cutting through Leah like icy daggers. Why didn't you save me? "Yes," Leah said and placed her hand on the girl's head. How could she have missed the darkness so completely? "I'm afraid," the girl whispered. "I don't want the darkness to take me." Why didn't you save me? Leah shook slightly and kept her hand on the little child, trying to break the shadowy bonds clutching her life. She could see them in her mind's eye and they were so strong already, but she couldn't just let the child die so cold and her wings wrapped around them both as she wept. She cried and held the girl trapped in darkness in her pure white wings because Leah wasn't strong enough. Why didn't you save me? Because the darkness was so strong and Leah's light was too weak to see it before it took someone this time. Because Leah remembered the girl's father was taken by the darkness too and maybe he was buried in the garden of weeds. "What's your name?" Leah asked and her voice was soft with grief. "Rosalind," the girl said and her voice was just as soft with death. Beautiful rose. Why didn't you save me? The girl gasped, a heaving sigh, and then was still as her head sagged forward with the weight of broken dreams. Later the woman who'd lost everything buried her daughter, who was buried with dead roses of dead dreams in the garden of weeds. Leah left, wondering what sort of angel she was if she couldn't stop the darkness in the town she was supposed to protect. Why didn't you save me? She flew away, quickly, desperately, above a town she could feel living and breathing in the back of her mind. She flew to the top of the guardian tower and underneath the prominent, pointed roof, and slipped quietly through the door in the floor of the concrete and into her room. And she slept, and tried to forget, and was lost in darkness. When Leah woke up, she had no wings.
Fear
An anguished cry railed against the mountains. The lone woman raged at the heavens, her horror echoing back to her over and over, more eerie and ghostlike each time. Her lips tried to form words but the aching pain inside drew them back in a defiant snarl. Only wordless pleas and curses escaped.
My wings, her mind screamed, My wings! They were gone. Why? She felt uncomfortably weightless, unreal, as if everything - her life, hope, meaning - was all just a passing dream. Her hands gripped the railing in front of her as she swayed, unused to this strange feeling of overbalance. What did I do wrong? she asked silently, knowing she would get no answer. The cries faded, a last whispered plea dying after only a breath of time. Why didn't you save me? Leah stood dazedly on the watch tower that looked over the small, sleepy town she was sworn to protect. As if oblivious to the staggering changes she woke up to that morning, the sun rose over a distant hill in unconcerned cheerfulness. A new day was beginning and she felt a disquieting silence inside, where the thoughts and needs of those resting below the watch tower usually whispered to her soul. Beneath her feet the solid concrete began to tremble slightly in preparation, before a loud, booming chime seemed to sweep over the town, awakening its people.
She barely moved as if in a trance. The morning bell continued to ring loudly beneath her.
These people who she'd grown to know through dreams and through the darkest corner of their hearts - these poor, unsuspecting people... Her thoughts trailed off and her grip on the metal railing tightened, her eyes watching in absent habit as each household came alive. But normally Leah could feel it, could hear their life singing back to hers. We're alive, they would seem to say without words, we're alive. Not today. Today there was only silence, and the wind, and distant people who were once so close to her. She wondered if anyone was truly alive at all. She wondered how people, normal people without wings, could stand this quiet all the time. A dark spot in the distance - a car? - rumbled down a far-off road. Did they know this had happened to her? Did they know their protector, their guardian, their angel couldn't hear them anymore? Did they know she couldn't hear the darkness, couldn't stop it if it took them? No, she thought with a wry smile twisting her lips, no, or they wouldn't be outside their house, in their car. They would be locked in their houses, in fear. But they wouldn't know what that sickening feeling was, that sinking in their gut. It was her job to keep it and hatred and darkness away. She felt it now, though, felt her hands slide against the metal as she sweat in fear. Fear, she was told when she first got her wings, could poison any heart, could turn the mind to darkness in a panic of things ending and things unknown. Now who knew what was going to happen. Leah wondered if the people below her could feel it yet, could feel all the darkness she'd held at bay for so many years. Leah wondered if her heart was poisoning right now. Her mind and soul were confused, overwhelmed with a sudden rush of feeling and it was terrifying. Well, she thought, well. Only one thing to do then. Leah watched the sunlight illuminate patches of land to burnished gold, turning everything into extremes of shadows and light. She looked to her hand, gripping the railing, a stray beam of sunlight lighting the strained skin briefly. Only one thing to do. She would have to travel to the capital. Blue eyes looked to the heavens and narrowed defiantly.
Quiet
Leah slung a bag over her shoulder and looked at herself in the mirror. Sunlight filtered in through the window, lighting her reflection in an odd halo of colors. The prism in the window swayed briefly and a rainbow streaked over her face like a fleeting, cheerful memory, a warm hand reaching out to trace her features in a last goodbye. Trembling slightly with the ache of suppressed memories and feelings and the terrifying thought of things ending, her own hand reached up and passed through the colors and she swore she could hear thousands of familiar voices whispering to her, calling to her. She smiled and closed her eyes, remembering.
Lost
It was nights like these when Zoe thought, and no one could reach her. The spring air was cool and brisk but gentle, carrying the scent of a winter slowly fading and a new season beginning. It was a scent that always reminded her of things past and things future, a scent that made time pause and rest as she sat with silent thoughts in the quiet outside.
She breathed in, let the air fill the strange emptiness inside her. A paper in her hand rustled as she breathed out slowly, carefully, trying not to be too loud as if afraid someone walking by under the streetlights would suddenly notice her. As if afraid that they would see this small, young woman with blonde hair her mother always said was too short, that they would see her brightly dyed clothes and see her for what she really was, and she would lose this quiet and this remembering and time would start moving too fast again. The steps were cool and hard underneath her but she didn't shift, barely moving like a mockingly gaudy statue so bright. Look, Zoe imagined people would say; look, so colorful, like life, and yet look - she's still, unmoving, and her eyes...Empty, lifeless. She thought she might be overdramatic but she was lost and confused, and her left hand tightened around a black wrought iron railing that was old and the paint was chipping, and she knew black paint flecks would be stuck to her hand when she took it away. In her right hand was another rejection from the Academy of Performing Magicians. Her mother would be pleased, she thought wryly, staring at the carefully scripted letters. Zoe sighed, looking up at the night sky. No stars were visible, a bleakly dark mass of clouds looming and drifting in and out of patches of light from the city. It was nights like these Zoe thought, and the sky seemed unreachable, and life was empty and strange and yet familiar like a friend from long ago who'd changed beyond recognition. Her eyes turned back to the letter, tracing the elegant words. Then she folded it carefully, evenly, and tucked it into her pocket. Zoe looked to the sky, then looked down at her watch and smiled. It was time.
Lie
The lights dimmed, darkness drawing over the crowd in a wave of silence, each person sucking in a hushed breath and holding it in anticipation. For long moments every man, woman, child leaned forward in their seats eagerly, waiting, hands tensing slightly and faces lighting with youthful vigor in even the oldest grandparents' eyes.
A sound echoed from the stage, a single footstep sharply resonating across the theater. Everyone leaned in just a little more, stretching, squinting, as if trying to see through the veil of darkness. "Long ago," a strange voice whispered, toneless and soft and slow, and yet carrying across the room through the hearts and minds of every person, "it is said, the world was filled with darkness. And the world was only chaos, and war, and all people lived in fear..." Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a mist rose from the floor beneath the feet of the audience and the room was cast in eerie, chilling grays. The people shivered and drew their feet back instinctively, and children waited with wide eyes for the darkness to lift. Leah watched from her seat close to the stage and kept carefully still, interested and intrigued despite her calm visage. There was a rustle from the stage, and another footstep. "...Until...light." The word was breathed out, barely spoken as if a prayer, and with a sudden breeze hundreds of candles lit along the walls, unnoticed before, flames flickering and waving in complicated rhythms. Shadows danced in time on the high brick walls, crept up the brightly colored curtains on the stage and inched across its wooden floor, all seemingly towards a single, still figure standing at the center of it all. At the beginning and end of the shadows was a small woman dressed in all gray, and it made her seem ghostly and unreal, frail, her skin looking strangely pale in contrast and her green eyes dulling to the color of ash. Short blond hair could barely be seen underneath a gray knit hat, shifting gently, looking as wisps of forgotten light brushing against her face with melancholy remembrance. Leah thought perhaps it was overdramatic, and she'd seen better shows before, but something kept her still, kept her in her seat and she thought that maybe it was something in the eyes of this magician that promised something more. Something...different. And for the first time in a long while she felt herself anticipating what happened next. "And this light," the voice said, and it was not the girl's own but rather seemed to come from all places at once, "this light brought the angels, our guardians," a figure seemed to appear behind her, tall and looming with wings seemed to be made of light itself, "our protectors. They took the darkness from the hearts of people, and entrusted those with the purest of hearts the precious gift of magic, and chose even fewer still to become angels." The young woman smiled suddenly and it seemed to spark the ashes in her eyes to a roaring flame, and there was an explosion of color that filled the room at once. To Leah it was as though she'd never seen color before, that she'd never been able to see before as if she'd been blind all this time. The room seemed bursting with shifting, lustrous iridescence and Leah found herself pressed against her seat, her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide. A child sitting next to her clapped and laughed. On stage the young woman was grinning a bright smile that made her look even younger, and gone were the gray, lifeless clothes, replaced with the cheerful luminescence of color that most magicians wore. A half-robe was draped over her and secured by a sash around her waist. As she waved her hand and bowed over it, one long sleeve seemed to flow in a rush of color down her arm, the shades changing and shifting from green to purple to red to blue. Leah wondered if it was Illusion or True Magic, but found herself not caring as she watched with the eye of someone who'd once lived magic herself. Bracelets dangling silver and gold bells jangled on the girl's bare left arm, sounding a cacophony of ringing that somehow blended into one harmony of magic. Leah felt senses left from her time as an angel hum and sing in time with the bells. Their ringing seemed to pulse in tempo with the colors of her robe and the colors of the drifting shades that filled the whole room, barely perceptible to the common eye. Definitely overdramatic, Leah thought to herself, and yet rather than seeming fake or forced or gaudy, the young woman instead appeared bright and genuine and so very alive. But what was unique, what Leah hadn't seen before in the last few months of staying in hotels and theaters and seeing an endless parade of performing, penniless magicians, was the light purple sleeveless shirt the magician wore under her half-robe. A swirling, dancing design seemed to shimmer across it. It was a calm, moving pattern that was at once so profound and simple and spoke of such a sense of peace that, to Leah, it seemed to bring light to the darkest corners of the room. Somehow it was familiar, almost achingly so, like an echo of something long past that she'd lost and she wondered where she'd seen it before. It seemed to represent all things, swirling and twisting as the young woman danced lightly to the front of the stage with feathery steps, or perhaps it embodied all life. Leah leaned forward unconsciously, her hands gripping the armrests tightly because she knew with a feeling of sinking or floating or soaring that this magician was something special. And it frightened her. In all her years as an angel she'd glimpsed into the hearts of magicians, and saw not once the fabled purity or light, but rather a dark creeping greed and flamboyancy that robbed hapless ordinary people of their money. True Magic was not used, but rather the thieving Illusion that appeared to their audience as impressive displays of lights, colors, objects floating and moving when in reality, it was all disgustingly fake. In her few months as a human, she found herself unaccountably drawn into the magic world, despite the sick feeling she got at the shows of pride as each magician tried to out-trick the audience. Perhaps it was because she'd had a sort of magic before, though it was True Magic, the magic of light and the heart, and not the Illusion and forced brightness. She had never, once, found a magician with True Magic before and had always assumed it belonged to the angels. Magicians were at times dangerous creatures, carefully watched by the guardians for greed that would lead to greater darkness, and Leah was sure that, wherever they had come from, it was not because of angels. Magicians were Illusionists, perceiving the world as not really there, as capable of being bent to their will through unreality and surreal forms and figures. They desired power while knowing they could never possess it. And yet this girl, Leah thought, watching the shifting colors of her clothes, the gentle way she seemed to wake up life all around her...This girl possessed something the others had not. Her gift of Illusion was weaker than others, missing the extravagance of hundreds of things occurring at once and rather seemed to flow and move slowly like the design on her clothes, swaying in time to the wild harmony of her decorative bells and the mild hum of magic simmering just beyond the ability of the eye to see. Yet there was reality underlying it all, a sense of Truth that Leah, having been an angel, could still feel herself cry out towards. She would not believe it was True Magic, could not. True Magic was dangerous because it was real. There was no unreality, no thievery of perception. Those with True Magic felt fear, and anger, and hatred, and all the darkness that angels normally took away. The idea that a small, unexceptional young woman could possess it was ludicrous. Terrifying. World-shaking and world-threatening and Leah felt something shift inside her in fear, before it vanished, taken by the angel of this city. Most of all, she was afraid because she believed in it, in this color, this light, in the green eyes that were an echo of a young girl she once saw lost to darkness. And the green eyes said back, I believe. Never had magicians believed in their magic, their Illusion, their life so much as this one showed with every grin, every dip and bow of her body and the way her own face lit up in joy as a ball zoomed out over the crowd and seemed to morph mid-air into a bird. Or the way, when she called upon fire, she held it gently and delicately as if it would really hurt her rather than being mere fakery and seemed to sing softly, noiselessly to it and make it grow and shrink and dance. Leah felt hope again, and she was so, so scared. She got up abruptly and left, trying not to look back, trying to ignore the laughs and cries of children and even adults, trying to ignore the way her beaten heart cried and laughed with them after having slept for many years in the darkness of others. She tried to tell herself she would leave this city. She would go and forget, and walk under the streetlights that looked just the same as any other city's or town's and watch people living without fear or hatred or anger and pretend she was normal, everyone was normal, that no one could possibly possess True Magic. She would leave and forget and pretend she didn't feel a strangeness whenever she saw the color green. In the end Leah stayed for an entire week, and did not leave alone.
Pathways
Zoe had never been a particularly remarkable or exceptional person. Sometimes she wondered if that was why she gravitated towards performing, to be center stage, to look upon the faces of a crowd of people and know that they saw her. In her heart she knew that wasn't true, but sometimes, when the night was dark and the moon a grim presence, she thought and wondered.
Being a magician she was always noticed; the very nature of magic made it so. Her bright clothes shifted and moved and nearly breathed with life and presence whenever she moved. And yet, she was only one in a thousand other performers, dancers, attention-seekers. So people glanced at her and then dismissed her as penniless, gaudy, greedy. She stood out but it was in an unexceptional, unremarkable sort of manner. Perhaps it was the way she seemed to brush past others without ever actually touching them, as though merely a memory whispering along and forgotten soon after. It seemed, sometimes, as though she was the one who didn't see them when in reality she saw all people and it was overwhelming and frightening and confusing. Or perhaps it was the distant look in her eyes, the slight quirk of a smile to her mouth, as if she was really living past the crowds and the people and the exhaust from the cars rumbling by, as if she was could see into a different world not bound by the limitations and impossibilities that held everyone else captive. And so perhaps in a way she wasn't even really there. In reality, Zoe lived in a world of bright colors and vivid possibilities and belief and magic, and few could reach her there. She felt things other people could not feel, for the very nature of her and her magic was to believe and belief, some indefinable part of her asserted, could not be done only with half-emotions. Even angels could not change that. So Zoe was strange, and unusual, and different, and because no one else could feel or do or believe to the extent she did they found they couldn't speak to her, look at her for more than a few passing moments. Not out of any will of their own, as she thought many times, but because human nature is to connect and breathe life into others and these people found they could not connect with her or understand her. Zoe often found herself alone, and for someone so bright and living, whose very being was to perform and express, the only path left was a lost, confused one. Still, she was not sad, because magic for her was a happy thing, but only lost and empty as though her other half was missing. She performed, then, giving people who couldn't feel or do or see like she could all of these things back, and that gave her happiness long enough to last until she went back to her small apartment where limits were obvious and suffocating. Zoe did try, at the end of every winter and spring, to apply for the Academy of Performing Magicians; she thought perhaps she could connect there, that she would find others who could feel, whose stomachs dropped when they were up too high and whose hearts burned with fiery rage when they saw injustice, however brief. Instead they told her that her gift was not enough, and she would tuck the letter away in a drawer as a reminder. Of what, she wasn't sure - perhaps that maybe she was born for something else, something greater that didn't involve being trapped in a university being told how to express her magic. In some depth of her soul or her self or whatever it was that drove the human spirit, Zoe knew she was born to do more than just this, than just living. After all, in the world she saw through her eyes, possibilities were endless, limitless. Anything and everything could happen and the world was so vivid in color and sights and sounds she was content sometimes to simply watch and be. But only sometimes, and then she felt restless and eager to do something. Never control life, though, as other magicians often wanted, but rather flow with it, through its endless rivers, and into the heart of all things where she knew there would be no emptiness. Maybe that's why, when the strange dark woman with blue eyes that told her they saw and once believed too walked up to her, she felt a connection, some piece of life slip into place that had been missing before and maybe this was the way the river flowed. Leah, the woman's name was. She was just passing through the city, a phantom wandering not really aimlessly but slowly, steadily in one direction and almost unwillingly. They stood against the chipped brick wall outside the hotel, one tall in muted shades and the other short and bursting with color. For long moments neither spoke, Zoe still out of breath from her performance, eyes bright and wild in the dim light of far-off streetlamps. Her heavy, rhythmic breathing slowed in tempo until finally there was only silence and she looked to the dark shadowy figure standing next to her. The blue eyes glanced at her, a whole meaning given to her in only a brief half-second of time, before gazing back into the darkness out front and they watched the last stragglers from the crowd leave and wander home. Finally the woman spoke for the first time after finding Zoe backstage and introducing herself, and her voice was like the winter air turning into spring, soft and carrying a note of things past and things future. "What does it feel like?" Her tone was almost pleading as if seeking resolution from something indiscernible to Zoe. "What does what feel like?" She turned slightly, her half-robe shimmering from gold to green to light blue. Part of her wondered why she was standing here, why she wasn't home sleeping or reading, but she knew in those things there was only emptiness and somehow the pleading question kept her there talking. "Your magic. What does it feel like?" It wasn't uncommon for people to ask her about her magic, her show, how she did things, but there was some undercurrent underlying the question and she knew it was for the same reason this woman's eyes carried the look of someone who used to feel, too. And she answered differently this time instead of her usual terse response, maybe because she curious or maybe because somehow she knew that this was what she was born for, whatever this was. "It's..." Zoe paused, gathering her thoughts as if somehow knowing it was important. "It's calm, and peaceful, and happy and sort of like seeing colors inside your head," she said, her voice getting stronger and her hands gesturing as though seeking the words she wanted from the wind. "And I know, and believe, and it feels like there's no limits to anything I can do. It's like I'm reaching into the center of life and pulling out a thread that strings everybody together somehow, and everything suddenly makes sense." There was silence for a moment, Zoe now standing away from the wall and looking upwards while Leah watched with an indescribable look on her face. Perhaps it was shock or fear or astonishment, or maybe would have been those things before. Or maybe it was an understanding that Zoe couldn't accept. "Most of all," the magician continued, turning to face the woman still standing in the shadow of the building with a soft smile, "it's like coming home." Later Zoe would walk down the streets under the dim lamplights, watching people living without fear or anger or whatever haunted the woman she just talked to, and she wondered at Leah's abrupt departure. The longer she walked the more determined she was to forget and, for the next day at least until her show, she would pretend she was normal, that everyone was normal and not carrying such strange sadness and loss and understanding. Because really the thought of someone understanding her scared Zoe to her very soul, which had so long been hidden from others the thought of it being so suddenly bared was inconceivable. She would go and forget and pretend no one understood, walking down those streets at night, and the next morning when she saw the sunshine she would pretend she didn't feel a strangeness whenever she looked at the blue sky. By the end of the week Zoe found her path and the strong, silent river that ran beside it. Well, that wraps up part one.....hopefully (since now you're at the end of my egregiously long post) you enjoyed it. I hope it was okay to post all of that at once? I know long stuff may seem daunting, but hopefully the short chapters made it more bearable. I'll start posting part 2 soon as well (I'm only partway through it...haha, yes it, it took me 2 years to write that....well, there was an 8 month period when I didn't write at all, but yeah). Submitted by Short Stuff (49 posts) on April 18, 2008 - 6:29pm. |
User login
Recent blog posts
|
News, Reviews & Commentary on Lesbian and Bisexual women in Entertainment and the Media
Recent comments
34 sec ago
1 min 3 sec ago
1 min 6 sec ago
1 min 19 sec ago
2 min 6 sec ago
2 min 58 sec ago
3 min 38 sec ago
3 min 41 sec ago
4 min 6 sec ago
4 min 34 sec ago