The Northern Lights

Chapter 14. Garden of Eden.

France, 2003

Eden is fast asleep on his mother's shoulder, snores lightly. He dreams of a familiar yet unnameable place. Sits on the edge of a therapeutic river that flows beside him. He cautiously dips his hand into the glittering elixir, slices the stream, his fingers feel brittle when taken out of the water. Moonlight scatters on the liquid surface. The air smells of apples and wine.

Eden is not alone, shrubbery to his left and a feathered animal to his right. Though he can't tell what colours they are, both look grape purple in the absence of light. His mind is silent, and at first glance, the world around him is too. Until he begins to focus on his breathing, the oxygen that drifts through his nose and into his lungs, flows through him along crimson rivers. Each breath he takes is as pleasant as the first.

Then he hears something speak. And that something, becomes everything. The wind carries voices, the water does too. Everything his eyes touch speaks to him, in an alien language that he can not comprehend. These voices do not make Eden feel threatened or confused.

He can feel his heart pulsate against his chest, his lungs expanding behind his ribs. The bird next to him stutters, Eden has never been so close to one before. He reaches out to feel its feathers, droplets of water still stuck to his fingers. The bird flashes away into the sky, Eden watches its wings flutter, until it vanishes into twilight. It chirps somewhere among the stars. Eden smiles.

His eyes glance at the horizon, far on the other side of the river. Silhouettes of mountains stretch as far as the mind can imagine. He scans from left to right, each peak with its own distinct shape. They seem to be the only things that don't have voices, until his gaze is met with a familiar mountain, one he has seen in reality before, Mount Arlo. Everything falls silent. The bushes no longer crackle in the wind, the river sounds as though it has become a frozen sheet of ice, the bird no longer chirps, and the voices no longer whisper. The reaper's silence is more threatening than the voices.

His stare is still fixed on the mountain. The silence is barely broken, the colossal rock begins to speak, but its voice is lost in the wind. Eden blinks, vision is blank for a millisecond. And as his eyelids open, the void of silence is replaced, and so is the river, the grass he sat on and the bush to his left. The wind screams in his ear now, almost deafens him. There is a cliff where the river once was, and snow falls all around him, he sits on a thick layer of it.

The mountain below him is audible, but still, Eden does not understand. He stares at the sky, these are the exact stars he observed before proposing to Azra. Remembers each one's composition, brightness and flare. And then he waits for them to be covered, coated with a layer of colour, an ethereal flow of green and purple. But before he is able to observe the sky, before it roars with colour, he is awoken by a familiar voice, "Eden."