Aeolia

19: Infinity's End

As her feet touched land once again, the woman gasped. A shock stitched her breath for an instant, and all was normal again.

     The grass here was light green and sunk as she waded through it. The blades twined around her ankles and torso. Her eyes shifted to a luminescent blue. The bird's feathers mirrored the colors of a sky's first May sunset.

     Haze bounded ahead of them, springing through the grass like a jubilant stanza of poetry. The stalks reached high above her head. Her ears stood alert as she listened for the others.

     The air was even mistier here, but it parted for the group as they continued west. "Are we nearly there?" the woman asked quietly.

     Haze paused and sat on her haunches, facing Ravine. "Listen."

     The woman shut her eyes and strained her ears. After a moment, she heard it: movement. Movement of the kindest paws, stirrings as fur brushed the grass. The woman smiled. The songbird hovered in the Mist, his wings absently sifting through the air. He, too, heard it, and closed his eyes. Haze nodded.

     "Open them now," she said.

     Awe arced in the pair's chests as they took in the scene around them.

     They were in the center of a ring of whisperers. The animals' fur shimmered in the feeble sunlight and dewdrops glistened on their whiskers. Their eyes were narrowed in focus. The woman felt nude as these all-knowing creatures took her in. They crept closer to her, wordless.

     "They'll do it now," Haze told the woman and bird. "Ravine, I think you are first. Rest, relax, and bow."

     The woman couldn't explain the feeling she got next to save the world, but she knew it when they started. The whisperers wasted no time and no breath. They searched inside her now. She fell into a massaged slumber.

     Still they extracted her ponderings. Thoughts swirled vividly throughout her skin and muscles, confined no longer. Her eyes were windows—like the optic section of a lighthouse, standing fervent on the crest of shore rocks, the pines its companions, the roaring of the sea music in this spiraling world.

     Haze joined in the extraction and saw the same gorgeous images as her fellows did. Ravine was a poetic soul down here—but they had to reach beneath it. They had to know why the Viper hunted her through a greater scope than the confines of dream. Why was it so angry? Was it sick or simply set in hunger? Was there any danger to their planet?

     And on a smaller scale, yet still important, why was Ravine so hesitant? The Viper wasn't the only cause. The woman's head was like an underground forest tangled with taproots of indecision. The taproots curled and spiraled like paper scrolls, written with her language's words and her oldest memories.

    Haze blinked. Scrolls. Spiral. Spiraling world.