Lazarus Rising

1.13 Manifestations

Entering Haydens outer office, Cheyenne was suddenly gripped with an overwhelming sense of seeing reality within a new, unique coherence. Life appeared less dark, the dimness that had often clouded her thoughts had dispersed. It was as though she had emerged from a long soporific illness and on the cusp of recovery from this debilitating sickness her whole body had flooded with an unbearable lightness of being.

All around her the world shone in a warm, edifying light. Every surface, every object, appeared shot through with an inner energy that seethed and twisted in an almost dream like flow of constantly changing, inner illumination. Whether it was seeing this for the first time or due to her sudden relapse in her apartment, she was drenched in an overwhelming feeling of elation.

Rous was standing waiting for her in the anteroom, wearing a long, black dress so close-fitting it could have been sprayed on. "Hygge, Sweetie, they're waiting inside for you. Boots, if you don't mind." Her face creased as she looked Cheyenne up and down inspecting her armour clad clothing. "Expecting trouble are we?"

"I've been busy Rous, I didn't have time to get back to the apartment when you called me." She sat on the small bench and unclipped the buckles on her boots. Looking up, her eyes widened. Rous's body had taken on a gentle throbbing, metallic hue. Cheyenne could see thousands of minute silver whorls pushing their way up through her skin, forming a multitude of feathered eddies of light that ran lightly up and down her face and arms like a thin layer of early morning mist caught in the dawn light as it drifted across a motionless lake.

Seeing the perplexed look in her face Rous asked. "Are you alright Sweetie?"

"Yes......I'm fine," Cheyenne stuttered and bit her lip. She wanted to reach out and touch Rous, to feel with her fingertips these beautifully strange eddies that shrouded her whole being. Reluctantly she drew herself back and resisted the urge. "Yes, I'm fine." She repeated.

"Ah, we are a quorum then, I think?" Haydens welcomed her. "You know the Captain by now and Ventner has been telling me you are old friends. Rovin....," He paused, carefully choosing his words, "and you are associates. So all old friends. Except perhaps our visitor from Mars whose appearance, I'm told, is most fascinating."

Cheyenne was for the moment, speechless. Haydens whole body was giving off a wide, pulsing, golden aurora. Like the suns corona, it shimmered and boiled around his body emitting long streams of ethereal light into the room. Every now and then a small globule of molten gilt would detach itself from the field, rise into the air and vaporise into a thin cloud of glistening particles.

She looked at the others, had they noticed? How could they not? It was like the pictures of old where the Archangel stood omnipresent before Gods Disciples. The handsome Captain sipping from his cup on the couch, tipped his head in acknowledgment of her presence. Rovin peered at her from behind his thin glasses with a look that was half way between a suppressed smile and a sneer. Ventner standing by the bar, draped in an immaculate suit seemed, more perplexingly still, to be at the centre of his own luminescent field of energy, which discharged in a gentle, pulsating pink glow around him.

She felt a hand touch her arm. It was Charisa, her changelings face full of empathy. "Are you alright after the incident at the Collective?"

Aware of the silence in the room Cheyenne gathered her thoughts and tore her stupefying gaze from Haydens. "Thank you, Charisa. I'm fine. I think I'll sit down." Hesitatingly, she took a place on the seat next to the Captain.

Haydens turned away to the panoramic glass window and the endless, icebound lake smothered in acres of thick, grey snow.

"The snow geese have not come this year." Rous observed.