Flight of Dappled Shadows

Chapter Three

The forest was not as it was supposed to be.  The green leaves, the rust-brown, cinnamon and russet bark, the flowers, even the undergrowth and bushes; all the color had been drained away, replaced by shades of light.  That was the way Layne saw them, though they were nothing more than blacks and grays.  Shapes became defined from one another not by their color but by the presence of their light, though the darkening and brightening was as it would have been if color was present.  The dappling of sunlight on leaves was like little spots of milk fallen onto a dirty floor.  The leaves dancing in the wind, the branches swaying, silver and gray and black melding and moving like an intricate puzzle.  It kept moving, kept morphing, but like all puzzles it was as of yet incomplete.  There was something missing that, even as things changed, remained constant in its not-presence.  It took her a long time to realize that it was the sound.

The sound was not entirely gone.  It was muffled, but that was not the way it seemed either.  There was something absent from the sound, leeched from it.  Layne realized this quicker.  It was sound on which her world centered.  It was sound and touch and taste and scent on which she acted the most, like Hazzi.  She'd picked up most of her habits from watching the wolf, and it was because of this that she realized the truth.  Two truths, really.  The first one...

The sound has no color, Layne thought, amazed.  Noises could be associated with colors.  Hazzi's various barks and howls, the distinctive chirping of birds, the thrumming of insects, the little animals that moved, the ocean, the wind; all of them made a sound that was incredibly its own that brought to mind a quick flicker of color before only the noise was left.  Happier ones were often shades of the sun and sunset, but not red because red was the color of anger.  Green was life, energy.  Blue endlessness, and so on.

The rustling of the leaves sounded subdued, lacking.  The insects seemed to be moving in slow motion.  She took a step and brought her heel down on a stick.  The crack rang out like a gunshot, but whereas it would normally have reminded her of the hot white-blue of lightning, there was no image. 

All this led to the next truth, which took her longer to realize.  This was a dream, familiar only in the blurring around the edges of her vision and the sound which seemed to come not from outside her but from within her core.  Layne's dreams were normally of flying over fantastical scenes, coming almost directly from her storybooks, except they were usually warped out of proportion.  And she didn't know it was possible to fly so high and so effortlessly, to leave her wings spread and to glide for such long distances without doing much more than adjusting the occasional feather angle.  This dream was lifelike, startlingly vivid except in the ways that it was not.

Layne cupped her hands around her mouth and called for Hazzi , feeling foolish even before the sound passed out of her.  It was a dream.  Of course Hazzi wouldn't be here. 

Suddenly, everything froze.  The trees paused.  A grasshopper halted in mid-jump.  The wind fell.  There was utter silence.  She couldn't even hear herself breathing.

Then, the first true sound she'd heard since the beginning of this dream, echoed throughout the forest.  It bounced around, increasing in volume until it was deafening.  Layne fell to her knees, clamping her hands over her ears, but the powerful voice rang its one insistent note until it seemed to be reverberating through her very marrow.  The fine hairs on her arms stood on end, her nerves were sizzling uncontrollably with nonexistent sparks. 

The note fell away.  Layne breathed a sigh of relief, but it wasn't over yet.  The voice was less powerful this time, more feminine.  There were words, words she didn't understand, that seemed to have no reason being put together; they punctuated deep into her heart, worming in through her pores and becoming a part of her, implanting themselves into her brain so she could not forget them.