Rosa: A Wangxian Reincarnation Story

Rosa 13: The Sword's Edge

Halo was nervous and apprehensive. On one level. the people she was riding with inside the red Jeep Cherokee were people she knew but it was as if she were seeing them through a kaleidoscope lens fashioned from mercury glass. Shattered images of many people; some she could discern as her companions, others familiar from past lives, still others strangers that had belonged to lives without her. Occluded even further from the damage caused to her in this one, it was difficult sorting through all the input. Her anxiety was rising and Quen sensed it, taking her hand loosely, so she would not feel trapped, but still could feel her loving calm and reassurance. She began to breathe deeply, slow breaths as Quen had taught her, only concentrating on their current personas and not seeking deeper clarity. Clarity meant beginning to shed her shell. Right now, that shell seemed preferable to any sort of life in the open. If she tried to step out and begin to enjoy the entirety of their mutual pasts, it might make this life's reality unbearable.

She knew, on some levels, the severity of what the others had surmounted but the energy it would require seemed impossible for her to summon. The heavy exhaustion that permeated her bones was deep and unrelenting, The energy that Alain and the others shared daily helped some but it faded quickly as sorrows met it with a hundred gaping maws and sucked it away from her, greedy, grasping, and insatiable. She felt like she existed only for the slow descent into the finality that waited for all living creatures. That is if you called her existence living

Alain sensed her slipping further away each day went by, into a land more shadow than reality. This fragile woman was hanging on precariously and he was not going to let this one slide into darkness. Not this time. He owed her too much and he owed it to his sister as well. He could feel Quen's quiet panic and fear. So today he, Scott, and Xavier were taking the women to a place they discovered, a lost and quiet place, and they were going to attempt something different. It may or may not work, but it certainly would not hurt.

They forged deep into the Blue Ridge Mountains and the longer they traveled the more the sense of untouched isolation increased. Roads changed from asphalt to composite to dirt. Trees became thicker in number and wider in girth and the underbrush became denser. It seemed like hours before they reached a larger clearing in the middle of nowhere, once cleared by long-dead hands. Alain pulled over and switched the ignition off. They piled out and looked around.