FORM

Chapter 2 : rebirth

There was time here. And it passed, in a sense. There was someone else here. A boy of glowing silver. His eyes were frozen, whiskers shivered. It didn't seem like fear this time, more like anticipation, a stirring towards speech. She waited for speech to come, serene curiosity incarnate. Instead he turned and fled, into darkest dark that enveloped him like a womb. A womb. Puzzlement worked its lightning up and down her back and legs as she opened her eyes. Opened her eyes. People's eyes opened only once in their lives. She had to ask someone about this. The silver boy, he would know. He had all the answers, she was sure of that.

He had fled that way, into the thick darkness. She followed, pushing through using her hands to pry apart an opening in the thick soft wall... Without was dazzling color of every hue and shade. The cacophony she had always known as life. Her father was there, concerned, more so than usual. She looked around at many others mostly Blue and green. Where was the silver boy? Belatedly she realized her whiskers had echoed her thoughts, maybe even carried some of the urgency she felt. The people looked at each other, there was much hurried conversation that expressed little more than (uncomfortable) perturbation. She didn't get an answer, but from their reactions it didn't look like they would be at all pleased at a repetition of the question. Instead it echoed in her head, this time unvoiced. She got up to look for him herself and crumpled ungracefully to the floor. Why was she so weak? She thought about asking that but though the waves of heated gestures had died down, the irritation was still plain on their faces, especially her father's. Funny, he seemed somewhat fatter.

Many days had passed, though how many was neither known nor significant. For a long time she had been silent. All of her questions were left hanging accompanied in the air only by butterflies of every kind. Their movement was somehow beautiful together with her speech. It changed her eyes somehow. Yet another thing she wanted to ask but never would. She could ask if she wanted, no one spoke to her anymore. Had anyone ever spoken to her? Not that it mattered though; she was certain the silver boy never had. His were the only answers she was interested in.

Chiding herself, she wandered around the little green room in her father's little green manor. It was where she spent almost all her time. She was only taken out to the groves on very rare occasions. It didn't bother her much. She didn't have much use for the trees, there was so much written on them, it ensured she would never get a straight answer. Only the silver boy had the answers, he had been about to tell her.

Sighing, she resigned herself to ignorance, likely the silver boy was just some fantasy she dreamed up while still in her father's womb. He couldn't actually have been there. She had seen enough trees to know the simple truths that every idiot knew. A man only bore one child, always a daughter, ever; just as a woman always bore exactly one son at some point over the course of her unending existence. Her father could not have born two children, certainly not a boy.

The silver boy was just a fiction, and it was fiction that she loved. Her fiction was greater than any she had ever seen or read. Entire worlds bloomed and waned in her endless imagination. Over time she composed stories and sagas, lives and deaths, poems and proclamations. She performed all these songs for her amusement and that of the mindless butterflies ever hurtling overhead.

She conceived butterflies who dreamed, and those dreams became alive and warred amongst themselves over beauty and height. Only in the climax of a dream did the butterfly squirm so as to alter the awaiting fate that it curved and fell, circling off in a new direction. The dance of warring dreams, the inner secret world of seemingly harmless backdrop of all life in this land.

Her songs were rife with trees who carried on conversations of timeless import, spreading news like oil-fire across the boundless sea of groves. Fire, she imagined that too, it was a hunger so great that it shined fiercely, more brilliantly than silver. The most beautiful of trees would take this fire of endless reports, hold it in it's belly, there amongst the twisted silver plaits it would grow in it's empty curled heart and become a child. A beautiful child of fire. The first time she had told this story she could feel the fire inside her, boiling her away and she collapsed unable to support her weight till the burgundy dawn had come and gone. The fire lingered in her hands and flowed whenever she told a tale after that.

Her fictional people, whose insatiable hunger wore away their own skin until oblivion beckoned, lived to die and become. Like Akina and Oliphae whose hunger to be one drew them into a pool from which they never rose. The remnant of their union was a silver tree that ever grew with age. Ever in her tales was silver, for it was silver that could never be in this land. Silver which, like the water, existed untouched and unchanged despite this world. Silver which, like the water, affected change in all else, for good or not. Silver which knew and wanted to be known.

As she grew, her songs and aspirations did as well. Perhaps her dreams would remain wondrous fictions as she knew they must. But she would tell such moving tales that the others would have no choice but to speak to her, to beg her for more, to express their joy at what they'd seen, at how she'd made them feel. She would move her audience, no matter how stubborn and deceitful they fancied themselves. Then, when she had them enthralled within her spell, she could ask her questions.