Read the Prologue:hereWordcount: 384 Part: 5/ongoing
Anywhere Else
The soft flicker of my vanilla cinnamon pumpkin candle, the steady background of lo-fi music, and the continuous ticking of my little pomodoro timer should have been enough to keep my head in my books all evening. But maybe it was a bit much with my fluffy fleece blanket and Tigerlilly purring on my lap. Such a perfect setup to study. It must be my brain that has the problem.
Civil rights in the 60’s. Not the coziest subject, but definitely something that should hold my interest. I shuffled my little stack of index cards. Names, dates, events I was collecting. Each card would serve as a memory in the pastel fog of my mind. I would need paper to keep them for me tonight. Tomorrow I could refer to them and know I had actually been here.
I began reading a passage aloud to Tigerlily. She blinked up at me with her mystical eyes. She seemed a little board and eventually became a tiny loaf and fell asleep. My voice trailed off and I sighed, glancing at the timer. Thirteen minutes left in this session. I had to keep going.
Outside, the clouds were breaking up and beginning to glow softly. How big were those distant thunderheads? How far away? Were they over another city or just over the lake a few miles out of town? I was a poor judge of distance. Especially in the sky.
“If you could leave Dreamscape, where would you go?” Mom had asked me yesterday evening. I hadn’t been talking about leaving Dreamscape. Funny how it keeps coming up.
“Isn’t the whole world a lot like Dreamscape?” I asked. And that was why I couldn’t leave. It wasn’t because the whole world was so much like Dreamscape. In truth, Dreamscape was much like the whole world. Everywhere else was just another view of the same sky. Why did it matter what changed on the ground?
“Someday, you might want to go somewhere else,” she said.
“But Dreamscape is okay.”
“Dreamscape isn’t real.”
“Would you and Dad come with me, if I ever left?”
“Of course, we would.”
The timer was going off. I shook myself. Where had I been? Asleep? I had been thinking about a conversation I had recently had with Mom…or was that a dream?
The storm was dead. It had dissolved long ago, though I couldn’t say when. The voices of the bells had returned. Or was that really what the sound was? I had forgotten how the bells actually sounded. I had forgotten a lot of things. From a distance, I observed that my mind was falling apart. It had started when I got here. Piece by piece my mental faculties drifted away into the expanse. I didn’t know how far I was from where I started, or when I started. I’d forgotten where I was, and how long I had been there.
But this hardly bothered me, because now, all I knew for certain was I was searching for something and I couldn’t remember what.
And then there was nothing but the glass prairie, and the marbled black sky, and the music. It would have been a terrifying moment…if I had been there.
An enormous blast of light and heat surged through me. I knew this feeling. My body threw itself and the light went out. I couldn’t breathe. I was lying under shallow water, but I couldn’t remember how to move. My face burst above the surface and my head whipped from side to side. Thunder exclaimed through the atmosphere and lightning beat at the foggy rain. I was in the bell grove again. How had I gotten there?
I staggered to my feet and squinted through the rain. Had I really been struck by lightning? Apparently I was alright, which didn’t seem likely. I mopped my hair out of my eyes and took in a breath. Tormaigh was there, loitering between two shorter bell-trees. He didn’t act like he knew I was there.
For a minute, I watched him weaving around the trees. Suddenly, he sprung into a low branch and reached out to a pair of young bells. He barely touched the before they started to ring through the storm. There was a pause, and then I strode to his tree. “I found out something,” I called up to him.
For a few seconds he sat there with his eyes closed listening to the bells. He opened them–pools of silky darkness–and slowly looked down at me. Then he jumped out of the tree, hood falling back on his shoulders. The feathered ear-crests flicked up from the fluttering mass of mane-feathers. “What did you find out?”
For a second, I couldn’t talk. Then the questions came. “What do you mean only the thunderbird could do it? Why did you make me go after it when you were right there? What’s the cloak for? Why did you pretend you couldn’t talk?”
“You understand now. I knew you would.”
He smiled and the fangs showed. For some time, we stood there in the stormy bell grove. I had no idea what he thought I understood. He didn’t answer any questions. He didn’t say anything more. Lightning flashed and I felt a huge wing sweep over me. I breathed in a gasp of bright electricity, stumbled, and fell backward on the cold wet grass. I blinked in the clear light of early morning.
I got to my feet and wiped my grassy palms on my thighs. My clothes were dry and the fog was gone. So was the hum of the bells, or the storm, or the music, whatever it was. “Well, huh,” I said.
I don’t see Tormaigh anymore. Whoever or whatever he was, seems to be more or less confined to Echoland. I still don’t think I had been there before that morning. I don’t remember it. Why wouldn’t I remember if I had? You don’t just have these kinds of experiences and forget all about them once they’re over. At least I haven’t forgotten this last time, not yet.
I do see the thunderbird sometimes. He’s quiet when he comes here. No thunderbolt-hurling and tearing up the sky. Usually he’s just sitting in some treetop, pretending not to watch me. I think he’s just making sure I don’t forget him.
Last Friday I was driving back from the studio—driving, because it looked like rain. It was around six at night, and getting quite dark for the time of year. When I turned east, I could see why. A rolling mountain of storm clouds was moving in over the dark green fields and shadowy woodland. Lightning flickered in the haze of distant rain and I could hear the melodious rumble of approaching thunder.
When I got home, I stepped out of the car and slung the strap of my gym bag over my shoulder, staring up at the storm engulfing the sky. I half expected to see the bird flying in the middle of it, and I don’t think it was my imagination when I heard him singing—not really.
I smiled and started toward the house. But my first step faltered, and I wasn’t sure the ground was solid. I’ll be alright, I know I will. It’s just that I thought, for a minute, that I was back in Echoland.
THE END
Author’s Note: Thanks so much to everyone who read Echoland all the way to the end. This is the first serialized short story I have ever released on this blog–the first of many to come!
If you ever feel like sending me a couple of dollars for encouragement, my Ko-fi link is at the bottom of ever fiction post. You have no idea how inspiring your support is to me!
Synopsis: The thunderbird takes off again, leaving Jasmine alone, exhausted, and hopeless.
I didn’t feel the fatigue when it set in. I didn’t feel it for hours. I didn’t realize that the storm around us was a slow-turning carousel of stifling wind and blinding rain. None of it was real to me. There was only the dance in its impossible logic and grace. I don’t know how long it would have gone on, if he hadn’t flown away.
The sky burst, and glass shards spun across the ground. Light devastated everything and shocked my mind into darkness. I don’t remember falling. I don’t remember hitting the ground. When I opened my eyes the storm was dead, the bird was gone, and the music had been jarred from my memory.
Stunned, I pushed my limp body upright with the heels of my hands. Pain sparked down my back and through my arms. I felt like I had been beaten with a crowbar. My muscles could hardly contract. Blackness swarmed over my vision once I was on my feet again and I couldn’t breathe for a second. I could almost swear my heart had stopped.
My mind returned like a bolt of thunder. My vision flew to the empty sky, the empty land, the melted craters all around me. What had I done wrong? Why had he flown away?
“Tormaigh!” I hardly had the breath to yell, but I channeled all the miserable remains of my energy through my voice. “Tormaigh, I did it. I did everything you said. You told me to talk to him. You told me to find the bells. You told me to dance with him. He’s gone.”
The air rang silent around me. Even the hum of the bells and the wind was gone. There was nothing but miles of glass prairie and black sky. The grove of bell trees had disappeared. My eyes widened against the darkness. “Tormaigh?” Nothing. “Tormaigh?”
No. He wasn’t going to appear this time. He had no answer. I started to walk. Every step sent waves of searing pain through my muscles. There was nowhere to go, but I didn’t stop. There was always the horizon.
It wasn’t much later that I collapsed. I couldn’t walk anymore. My strength had run out. My will had run out. I had to lie down on the cold glass ground and stare, unseeing at the towering sky, a bottomless abyss of cloud and air lurking in the obsidian shadow of the world. Was there a sun in Echoland? Was there anything outside the sky, beyond the glass? Or did it all roll on forever, trapping me in infinity, alone? The weight of the sky lay heavily on my chest. I shut my eyes. I couldn’t stand the distance anymore.
“You could go after him.”
I opened my eyes and turned. Tormaigh sat on the ground a few yards away. I sat up. “No, I couldn’t.”He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “I can’t chase him anymore. I’ll die before I can get him to listen. He can’t understand me.”
“Yes, he can.”
“No.” I got up and came over to him. “Listen to me. I need to get back home. The bird isn’t going to take me. You have to do something. You know everything about this world. You probably know how to get me home as much as the bird does.”
“I know,” he said, almost under his breath, “but I can’t take you there. Only the bird can take you there.” He looked up at me. “You have to find him.”
“All I could possibly do at this point is sit here and wait for him. I’m too exhausted to walk. I couldn’t possibly dance if he wanted me to do that again. I would still be willing to talk to him, but he doesn’t listen, all he does is sings at me.” Lightheadedness swept over me and I sat down, hugging my knees.
“When you find him, he will take you home. But you have to go after him. I promise he will take you home.”
“But how do I know I can trust you?”
“There’s no one else.”
And he was gone.
The wind wafted against my face and I stared into the infinite landscape. Lightning flickered maybe a five-day walk from where I sat. I saw the greenish light bounce off the glassy ground and into the clouds again. Shutting my eyes, I breathed in a long breath. I had acquired a taste for ozone. I couldn’t remember what rain smelled like when it soaked an organic world of living green and soft black earth. Thunder crackled. I had to walk. I knew I did. I pulled myself to my feet, and the wind rippled around my numb body. Maybe the storm in the distance was coming my way and we would meet by morning.
Or maybe it was going the other way.
I placed my bare foot on a seam in the glass. If I had nothing else, there were the cracks. The cracks were paths to the horizon. At least with them I would know I was headed in a single direction. So I walked, and I didn’t stop for miles and miles of monotonous glass prairie.
There was no way to know how far I had gone. There was no time as long as the sun was down, and there was no space without landmarks. For this reason, there was no way to choose when to stop. I tried to count strides, only to discover, to my subdued horror, I had completely lost the ability to count in a straight line.
I didn’t know it, but the night was circling around. Time was passing. The change was too slow to appreciate, but the east was, in fact, paling. After a while, I was able to see the difference between the green fabric and the gray lining of my jacket. I could see the contrast between my dark brown hair and the midnight slate of the glass. But I couldn’t see any difference between where I was now, and the place I had been when I started.
Read the Prologue:hereWordcount: 431 Part: 4/ongoing
The Cub
It had been too cold to leave the window open last night, but I still didn’t shut it. The chill awakened me before my alarm and I lay quiet and still for a while, staring at the pale sky. I sighed and pushed my comforter back, stretching and combing my hands through my tangled hair. I liked to give myself an hour and fifteen minutes to get ready for school in the morning. Well, at least in September, I did.
I brewed a cup of chai and mellowed it with milk. The creamy white clouds roiled up in the amber darkness and swirled to fill my cup with the soft color of autumn. For a while I sat and stared out the steamy kitchen window watching black squirrels race up and down the trees in the backyard.
This would be the year I became an all-A’s student, I told myself. I told myself that every year, but a couple of B’s always found their way in. Did it really matter? School? I don’t know. But maybe I had better pretend it does for one more year.
I finished my tea, washed my face, combed my hair, put on the outfit I had laid out the night before. And when I went back out into the living-room, a little tiger kitten was sitting on the outside windowsill looking in.
It was gray and white with soft downy fur that caught the early morning light in a halo around its little figure. The eyes were still dark and blueish, not yellow yet. When I opened the window, it came right in.
“Do you think we can keep it?” I asked Mom after we fed it some scrambled eggs and before I went out to catch the bus.
“We’ll see if anyone else knows where it came from, but I doubt your Dad cares. It could be nice to have a cat.”
She was still at the house when I got back from school that afternoon, and she followed me inside as if it was our little habit to come home at the same time. We called her Tigerlily, and every time she heard her name, her soft oversized ears lifted, and her eyes grew round. It was like someone had called her that before. I’m convinced it’s not the only word she understands.
Strange thing about the kitten: No one we asked had ever seen her before, and there aren’t many strays or drop-offs in our neighborhood. She was too young to have traveled far by herself.
Synopsis: Jasmine and the thunderbird find their common ground at last.
The thunderbird dove into the clouds and was gone. I spun to face the emptiness of the bell grove around me. “He’s gone again. He flew away. Tormaigh, where are you?”
Thunder rolled and the wind blew against the multitude of bells. The musical drone rose in pitch and volume, notes against the rhythm of the storm. I searched the trees for Tormaigh. I knew he must be nearby. He didn’t wander far from me. Lightning pulsed from the approaching cloudbank. I scowled at it. Maybe the bird liked bells, but clearly, his real problem was storms. How was I supposed to get anywhere when he was always flying off to jockey lightning bolts around the sky? Where was Tormaigh?
“Well, follow him,” he said, standing at my elbow. “Aren’t you going to go after him?”
I faced Tormaigh. “I can’t. He flies so much faster than I can run, and when he gets above the clouds, I completely lose him. Besides, I can’t get him to listen when he’s thundering.”
“You might be surprised.” He crooked an eyebrow. “He’s always been listening to you.”
I shook my head. “What’s the use? I can’t find him now.”
“Try.”
I sighed and turned toward the darkness. Light burst inside the towering cumulonimbus clouds. For a few minutes, I watched for the bird, but he didn’t appear. Tormaigh had gone. All that was left to do was start walking.
My hands dropped into my pockets and I trudged through the dark navy water to the glass shore. I was glad I hadn’t bothered with shoes that morning when I tiptoed out onto the dewy lawn. I would definitely be getting blisters by now. For about twenty minutes I walked against the wind. The sound of the storm grew.
Then, he dropped out of the clouds, blazing with electricity, feathers combing upward through the wind. Lightning burst everywhere, spreading to the edges of the sky. The mammoth bird dove, wings spreading, crests fanning to an enormous frill that spread out all around its head. It called, drowning the thunder for an instant. I drew in a breath and ducked. There was another flash and he pulled in his wings.
A shockwave broke through the atmosphere and I fell on my hands, jarring my wrists. I spun back around and looked up. The bird was standing there blinking at me intently waiting for me to get back up. I got to my feet and he jumped backward a good seven or eight feet. He landed bending one knee and stretching his other leg gracefully straight out behind him. He swept his arms back and made eye contact with me.
I couldn’t respond. Dancing? He jumped, spinning around in mid-air and landed a few feet in front of me, emitting a brilliant ringing call. His ears flared and flicked down. He jumped backward and repeated his bowing routine. Again, his eyes focused on me. “You want me to dance?” I asked. Before I could finish the question, he trilled and sprung toward me again spreading his arms toward the flickering sky. I couldn’t help but smile. “I can’t dance like you.”
The bird ignored my objections and circled around behind me. The sound of the bells and the wind was changing. I could almost hear a full chord emerging out of the ambience. I’m sure what happened next must have been my imagination. When the bird circled back in front of me and spread his arms skyward, I cleared the lingering frustration from my mind and mirrored him. For a second he held the position, and I let my thoughts settle into dance mode. I could do this.
From there I followed his every move. Every step was clear and smooth, a natural transition from the one before. He started slow, the solid black eyes absorbing the rhythm of my dance. The wind picked up and thunder sounded overhead. We were moving faster now. We sprung sideways to the left and took sweeping steps backward away from each other, in perfect sync. Soon, I realized I couldn’t tell if I was following him or if he was following me. I found myself anticipating the moves as if I were formulating them myself. The delay between his movement and mine had been erased.
We closed the space between us and lightning swept over the glass prairie. The bird trilled and I smoothly pivoted so that I faced away from him. We now faced the same direction, yet the difficulty never entered my mind. I struck out into an arabesque and leapt back onto my trailing foot. He must have jumped at exactly the same time. Electricity pulsed through my veins. There must have been something to that—the charge that raced over my skin when we passed within inches of each other. He was generating some kind of an electrical field.
Lightning spread over the sky, forking off in every direction. I spread my arms back and upward. Feathers brushed against my wrist. I spun back to face him, and thunder ripped through Echoland. I couldn’t see the wings, but I knew they were there. He stepped back from me, and for an instant, his face changed. For an instant, he was human, he could understand me. But I couldn’t shake myself from the spell. I jumped back toward him, and the dance picked up like the storm that circled us.
Read the Prologue:hereWordcount: 521 Part: 3/ongoing
They Were Saying
“Hey, Sarah!”
I swear I had never even seen the girl before. I had no idea how she knew my name or recognized me from a distance. She called to me again as I waved hesitantly to her from where I stood preparing to jump on my bike and head home. School was over. The busses were dispatching on the other side of the sprawling high school building. It was a bit of a workout getting home on my bike, but I preferred it to the noise of the buss at the end of the day.
The girl sprinted up to me, fluffy black hair tossing in the crisp September wind. She had a checkered black and white backpack over her shoulders with a plush white tiger charm dancing on the zipper. “Hi,” I said as she jumped up onto the sidewalk next to me.
“Everybody thought you we’re leaving town. Everybody said you wouldn’t be back this fall.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Everybody? Who?”
“No. Everybody.”
That was the funny thing about it. I only had a few friends in school, and yet this new girl told me the whole school had been whispering about my rumored departure. Kayleigh was her name. Somehow, she already knew all the cool kids. But how was it that suddenly, all the cool kids seemed to know me?
“But I never said I was going anywhere. Not even after graduation.”
“Weird. Guess I’ll tell them they were wrong.” She shrugged and snapped her gum. “See you Monday, then.”
“Nice meeting you,” I called after her as she went to join a couple of other girls on their way out.
“You too.”
On the way home, I often stop off at a little gas station that sells muffins. The lady behind the counter knows I’m never leaving town. As she reached into the case to get me a blueberry muffin, I noticed, for the first time, the tiger tattoo on her forearm. I passed her two dollars and fifty cents in exchange for the oversized muffin, and she threw a sharp glance at the prices on the sign. She shook her head. “Almost twice what it was,” she said, “when I started working here two years ago.” She closed the case. “You could get a ticket for fifty cents more.”
I laughed in response because I didn’t fully understand what she was referring to. I guess, in retrospect, I still don’t know for sure. But I have a feeling.
I coasted home with the muffin in one hand and the other hand on the handlebars only half the time. The air was slowly losing its summertime softness, and every here and there, a shower of brilliant yellow walnut leaflets fluttered across the road. Along the telephone lines, rows and rows of blackbirds faced into the wind. It wasn’t time for that yet, was it?
There was music somewhere. As I cruised into my driveway, I could hear laughing. I looked up at the sky and saw a glowing blue break in the smokey gray clouds.
Synopsis: Jasmine discovers the place where the bells grow, and the thunderbird’s strange obsession.
I was standing almost ankle deep in sandy water gazing up at a copse of soaring glass structures. I would equate them to both trees and the remnants of some enormous gothic building, but I don’t think they were either. Their translucent tendrils reached up into the mist, and on the stronger protrusions of the limbs were the bells.
The water’s mirror surface broke and swirled with my steps. Now and then drops of moisture dripped from high above, echoing like the hesitant chirps of tiny birds. I stopped and stared up at the bells. They came in every size, apparently at different stages of development. A gentle breeze whispered through the grove, but the bells hung still. Then I realized I had discovered the source of the hum in the atmosphere.
There was a sound like a breaker coming against a sandy shore, and I turned. The thunderbird had landed in one of the glass trees. It put its huge wings away and moved out on a well-developed branch, flicking its crests back and tilting its head upward to the bells that hung from the branch above it. The black eyes closed, and it strummed a series of three hand-sized bells with its beak. The ambient ring intensified, gaining an eerie voice-like overtone.
For a long time, the bird didn’t move. The breeze played with its long flowing tail where it hung only a few feet off the ground. Slowly, the eyes opened, and it turned its head, gazing at me as if in a dream. After a while, it moved farther out on the branch, reaching for a larger bell. It struck a deeper tone, and the bird closed its eyes again and was still, listening. Then the bill opened almost imperceptibly and a deep melodious call flowed out, dancing around the bell’s tone.
As the low bell’s individual chime faded into the hum, the bird looked down at me again. He wasn’t afraid at all now. Talk to the thunderbird. I drew a breath. “It’s beautiful,” I said. The crests relaxed further and the bird blinked slowly. “You really do like the bells, don’t you?”
As if in reply, the bird turned and strummed the bells again, all four. Once again it closed its deep eyes and sung along with them. I waded toward his tree. “I didn’t know you could sing like that. I’ll bet you wouldn’t if you didn’t have those bells, would you? You love the sound of them.”
He sung to the end of the chimes’ echo and then crouched down looking up at the sky.He leapt into the air and glided in a circle over the bell grove. When he came back around, he batted his wings once, mounting into the air, and then dropped in a brilliant flash into a clearing between the trees. When my vision returned, he was anthropomorphic again.
I tiptoed back behind one of the bell trees. He was flightier on the ground, ironically. It wouldn’t hurt to be cautious until I knew he was comfortable, this time. I could hear his footsteps in the water. Slowly, I leaned back around the glass tree and let half my face show. To my surprise, he took a step sideways and cocked his head at me. When I didn’t emerge he came further sideways and a bit toward me. He seemed to be curious about my presence, in contrast to his previous concern.
Would he take off again if I moved? I stepped away from the tree so that he could see me better. “Don’t fly away, okay? I’m not coming after you,” I said. His ears expanded and tipped forward slightly. He stopped mid-stride, one foot suspended over the water. “It’s alright.” Come on, don’t get scared again, silly bird. The taloned toes spread and he set his foot down. “Why anybody who can drag a giant bolt of lightning around with them without getting fried should get scared of a little human that just wants to be friends, I don’t know.”
The smooth black eyes blinked and the feathery ears swept back. Never taking his focus off me, he sidestepped to another bell tree and leaned against it. The breeze fluttered his cape feathers and he blinked. Apparently, thunderbirds don’t use human facial-expressions, but I almost think he might have meant to smile.
All the while I kept talking to him. It wasn’t much of a conversation, but it seemed to put him at ease. After a few minutes, he sprung up onto a low branch of his tree and reclined on the limb in a way that must have been comfortable for him somehow. His attention wandered for a second to some new growth shooting off from the branch. The ends of the twiggy structures were developing thimble-sized bells, and for a moment this was too much for his obsessive mind to overlook. He flicked one of them, and it rang almost too high for me to hear.
I paused and said nothing while he listened to the bell. After a few seconds he looked back at me and his ears opened toward me. I shrugged. “You weren’t listening, so I stopped talking.” I let the remark hang in the air.
The bird’s featureless eyes changed somehow. He was looking at me like he looked at the bells, rapt and expectant. I laughed. “What? I thought you were busy with the bells. I wasn’t saying anything worth listening to, anyway. Go ahead. Ring the silly little bells. I know it makes you happy.”
As I spoke, the black eyes closed and he tipped his head back, relaxing his ears. Quietly, he began to sing. I stopped talking and he waited, eyes still shut, ears quivering slightly against the wind. “You…like my voice?” I asked. “My voice makes you sing too?”
The moment I spoke, he started singing again. We went on like this until late afternoon. He completely forgot the bells as long as I talked to him. I didn’t know what kind of progress this was, but it must count for something. Gradually, I crept closer to the tree, and eventually, I stood at the roots and was almost directly below where the bird lay singing. He was perfectly still, and his eyes were shut. I could have reached up and touched him.
Then, the atmosphere thrummed. His eyes opened slowly and he stared out into the horizon. A wall of clouds was building up. Evening was falling and a storm was on its way. Darkness swept over his skin and his body tensed. He got up and walked toward the end of the branch, ears flicking back and head cocking at the sky.
“Don’t fly away,” I called. But my voice startled him, and he sprung from the branch. In a violent blaze of light, I saw the sweep of massive wings and the bird took flight, soaring away into the storm. I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Come back!”
Synopsis: Jasmine tries to talk to the shy confusing creature.
“Hey,” I said. I took one step toward him. What do you say to a thunderbird? “Don’t fly away. It’s okay. It’s alright.”
It remained perfectly still, eyes unblinking, ear-crests laid back level with the crown of the head. I came to the edge of the crater. Should I go down? No. It could certainly bite. I just needed to keep my voice going.
“Did you hear me call you, in the storm? Did you see me? Could you hear me over the thunder…Thunderbird?”
Finally, the eyes blinked. It tensed slightly all through its body and emitted a brilliant whistle, louder than I could shout. It ended quickly and the crests fanned upward. Unlike in the avian form, the crests were actual ears, but ornamented with sweeping glossy feathers to a rather Mercurian effect. The ears swept forward a bit away from the head, quivering slightly. The expression on the thunderbird’s face hadn’t changed since it heard the chip of glass fall.
“Thunderbird….” What to say? “Tormaigh said I should talk to you. You know how to get me back to my world? You can get me home? Tormaigh said you would.”
The ears flicked back alongside the head and it sprung lightly to its feet. The bird pulled itself up incredibly erect, more so than a human probably could. It stood high on its toes, keeping the spurred heels far from the ground. It crossed one foot over in front of the other and tipped its bony shoulders back, lowering its chin and flaring its crests. I could now see that the long mane was composed not of hair at all, but of fine sickle feathers, like a rooster’s cape. The eyes were even bigger than they had been before. It chirped again. Apparently, human as it looked, it retained a bird’s vocal chords.
It was scared of me. How do you convince a bird you’re not scary? Keep talking. “It’s okay. It’s okay, pretty bird.” Pretty bird. “You know who Tormaigh is. Tormaigh is your friend. Tormaigh is my friend. It’s alright.” I stepped toward him.
The eyes glimmered.He turned, and sprung into the air.The air filled with white light and I dove away. Thunder clapped, sending wind in all directions and when I could see again. The bird was flying into the horizon, avian again.
I sighed and my head dropped. This was impossible. I made my way out of the fulgurite grove and into the emptiness again. The storm was dissolving now, or rather, it had probably followed the bird. It was more devoted than I was. I needed to talk to Tormaigh. There had to be an easier way to get home.
But, in spite of my better judgement, I didn’t try to call Tormaigh for a while. I wandered aimlessly around the glass prairie first one way and then the other, as lost mentally as I was physically. Tormaigh was certainly wrong. This wasn’t any place I had ever been before.
I couldn’t decide whether there was any reason to keep the fulgurite grove within view. The bird didn’t seem to have any real intentions of returning there. But there was something comforting about having a focal point in the vast expanse. Slowly I gave it up, drifting out into the open again, searching the sky. He was just going to keep flying away. There was no sense in this.
Back at home, the only ways to tame a bird that I knew of involved offering food. There was no food here, not that I could see. I would probably starve myself before I had time to worry about finding food for him. Except it was well past my breakfast time and I wasn’t hungry at all, or thirsty. So no food. But what then? What could I use to distract him from his flying-away instincts?
Bells. That was why Tormaigh had mentioned them. I needed to find some bells. I scowled across the empty land. Did they really grow out of the ground here? I certainly hadn’t seen anything growing yet. I was going to have to see if I could summon Tormaigh. I had a question for him—or ten. For a minute I stared around wishing he would appear before I started talking to him. “Tormaigh? Can you hear me?”
“Hmm?” He was standing on my right staring out at the horizon.
“You need to tell me where to find bells,” I said.
He smiled. “Bells.” I blinked impatiently at him. He turned to me. “They grow by the water.”
“What water?” Now we’re getting somewhere. This place has geographical features. He pointed into the distance. I aligned my eyes with the point of his finger and squinted. I saw nothing but the hazy blue horizon. He let his arm drop to his side and we faced each other. “I don’t see it.”
He veiled his eyes and looked back at some distant area. “It’s like a backwards mirage. If you keep walking that way, you’ll eventually come upon it.”
“How far?” I asked.
“Maybe fifteen minutes.”
I sighed. When I looked back at him there was an expectant smile in his eyes. He had an odd face. I couldn’t say in what way. That first time I saw him, I recognized him, but the memory of that familiar person who shared his face was gone now. He nodded and pointed again toward the invisible body of water.
“Alright,” I said. “But I really hope he likes the bells enough to come to them even when I’m there.”
“You might find he’s already among them,” he said.
“I’ll just end up scaring him away with my approach, then.” My voice dropped. “Oh man.” Tormaigh had disappeared. What made him think it was socially acceptable to do that at any point in a conversation was beyond me. Especially since I really didn’t know him very well.
I gazed out at the “backwards mirage” he had indicated, and drew in a long breath. Off to the bells then, I supposed. I put my hands in my pockets and set out for the dark haze on the horizon.
I had no internal clock at all since I came here. It didn’t do me much good to know it was a fifteen-minute walk from my starting point. I tried counting steps, because counting seconds didn’t work. But I lost track. Eventually, I sensed a change in the level of the ground, and the smooth glass became increasingly gritty. I looked out ahead of me. In the space of a couple of paces, everything changed.
Synopsis: The thunderbird touches down and takes on a strange new form.
If I called Tormaigh right now, would he show up in a couple of seconds? Maybe there was something about space around here I didn’t know. For that matter, the bird might be an arm’s reach away at any given time, as well. Maybe right behind my back. I stopped and turned around. I wind came out of the west, dark and wet. A shadowy wall of cloud soared miles high, and below it the land was smeared like a watercolor painting. Lightning crackled through the cloud-mass. I had been going the wrong way.
My hair whipped against my face as I looked back toward the clear east. I assumed if the wind was coming at me, the storm was too. I’m not sure that’s always true but when I looked back at the west, it was already visibly closer. I zipped up my jacket and started back in the direction I’d come from. He must be there. I would go and meet him. Maybe he could see me from where he was. Not running away from him might be a good first step in becoming friends.
That was a truly amazing storm. As the thunder rolled through the ambient atmosphere, I could almost feel it slam against me on its way by. I could taste the rain in the air. It was raining hard under that massive storm-cell. I wondered what it would be like walking on glass ground in a downpour. The clouds had spread over two-thirds of the sky already. High above, cumulonimbus fingers reached for the east, clawing through the smoky blue, and blocking out the daylight. Purple lightning spread across the western horizon.
I stopped and waited, the wind buffeting at my ears. A spray of rain came against my face. I knew he was there. My eyes curried the underside of the cloudbank. I could see light glowing inside the billows—leaping and zigzagging—coming to a head. And then a huge dark wingspan lashed through the murk.
In the next instant, there was a massive pulse of energy and the bird’s silhouette was lost behind a bolt of light the size of a LEARjet. I stepped backwards. He was half a mile away, but really too close to be playing with that kind of firepower. Leastwise, he surely wouldn’t hear me if I called to him now. I would have to wait until he let go of it and came in closer. I couldn’t tell if he had even noticed me yet. My hands rose to my ears as the bird skipped like a dolphin in and out of the cloud-cover. He dropped the lightning bolt and it shattered to the ground. It sounded like someone had dropped four tons of sheet metal in a cathedral.
As the sound cleared I whipped my hands away from my ears and scowled into the sky again, searching for the bird. He was above the clouds again. My eyes were drawn directly overhead. Light pulsed in the clouds, and there, just above me, the shadow of a huge pair of wings unfurled. My breath hauled in and I lifted my hands to my mouth. “Hey!” Rain washed down against my face and the downpour surged in full-strength over the land. “Can you hear me?”
Lightning flashed again and the shadow was gone. I turned and gazed around at the storm that enveloped me. Lightning dropped far away. All Echoland vibrated with a profound bass note. The rain made my hair stream down the contours of my face and blurred my vision. Talk to the thunderbird.
I looked straight up again into a strobe of bluish lightning. The clouds gave and the bird tumbled down fifty feet in front of me. The wings opened, dark luxuriant feathers spreading over the sky. I could see its face clearly for the first time since I had arrived in Echoland.
The flight-feathers—each one as long as I was tall, spread as the wings drew upward against the raging rain. The feathery horns twitched back along its neck and the toothed beak opened. I would have been scared–I probably should have been scared—but the eyes were so tranquil, so deep—orbs of summer night sky. And the song was lush and echoing, almost like a mammoth whip-poor-will. I had expected a rough scream, like a hawk.
As it approached, the near wing dipped, and the bird swung into a wide circle. I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but I think it was watching me. The uniform darkness of the eyes made it hard to know exactly where they focused. They seemed so still. It beat the rain off its slate wings as it swooped back around and called again. It wasn’t gathering lightning, but I was beginning to think its huge bulk was driving a tornadic wind.
Without warning, it called, flicked its wings and dove into the clouds again. “Hey!” I called after it. I should have said more while I had to chance. The wind died around me and the rain came down straight. Thunder clapped against my ears and another mass of lightning dropped out of the clouds a quarter-mile away, heading away from me. I could see the capricious bird dragging it along.
My shoulders dropped. He didn’t care. He had other things he would rather do. Besides, certainly he couldn’t understand me. I hugged myself. I was soaked through now. I’d gotten this far. I remembered a childhood friend who once owned a parakeet. She talked to it all the time. Maybe it didn’t understand, but birds have a definite appreciation for voices. Maybe thunderbirds had something in common with budgerigars…a bit of something.
Thunder exploded and the bird was gone again. I started walking in the direction of the place he had vanished. There he was again. I could see the wing-tips flashing in and out of the clouds, eighteen or twenty feet apart. He was still flying away from me. I picked up my pace, but I didn’t dare run. The ground was slick under my feet. I lost track of him in half a minute and was left turning around in circles, searching the sky.
“Where’d you go?” I asked, too quietly for anyone to hear. Thunder crackled in the darkness. Lightning illumined patches of the cloudbank, but revealed nothing. It didn’t take long for me to suspect I was alone again.
To the north, a city-sized net of lightning dropped to the ground and returned. Then nearer, a mass of fiery veins flowed between earth and sky. I stumbled back. For a minute the world seemed to hum with electricity. Then the universe burst into pure soundwaves.
As the steam started to clear, my eyes widened. There was a grove of low leafless trees there. I hadn’t seen it before the lightning struck. As I approached it, I noticed that all the cracks in the vicinity were converging. In fact, they all radiated from the thicket. The air was warming at an unnatural rate as I walked. A few yards from the trees I stopped and crouched down, touching the wet ground with my fingers. The ground itself was almost hot.
Warily, I proceeded into the wooded area, ducking under the low limbs of the gnarled gray trees. I reached out to sweep a branch aside, and my hand met strange resistance. I scowled and my fingers slowly curved around the hot twigs. My hand slid up the branch and strained to bend it. I let go.
My mouth dropped open and I gazed around at the woodland. They weren’t trees at all. I could see it now. They were fulgurites. This grove really hadn’t been here before the lightning struck. Then, I saw movement.
Between the warty branches of the glassy formations, something twitched. It was dark gray, and moved against the wind. As I moved closer, it sunk out of sight into a lower part of the ground. I persisted through the fulgurite brush-land, keeping my eyes anchored on where I thought I had seen it. It had seemed much too small to be the bird, but I hadn’t seen it well, and what else could it be?
Now I could see that the grove surrounded a shallow crater. The lightning’s heat must have effectively smoothed the sharp edges that you would expect to find at a blast site in a glass world. The depression was about ten feet across, but I couldn’t see the bottom of it yet. I crept silently as I could in all the standing water, up behind a large broken fulgurite at the crater’s edge. Now I could see what was there.
At first, my mind couldn’t process it, but there, lying in the bottom of the glass crater, was the most fantastic creature I had ever seen. It wasn’t a bird at all, but a humanoid being with long graceful limbs and translucent charcoal-gray skin.It was dressed in trailing gray cloth, and though there was a lot of fabric, most of it didn’t actually cover the creature’s body. Down its bare back ran a wind-tossed mass of glossy hair that apparently didn’t absorb water. I could see one long feathery backswept ear, but the face was turned away. It lay still one the wet ground, apparently enjoying the heat.
With all the stealth I could muster, I crept around to see if I could get a look at the face. My eyes fell to the long legs. The shins were armored with dark scales, and the feet, though mostly human, bore long curved talons on the toes and a formidable spur on the heel.
I kicked a smooth chip of glass and it coasted over the edge of the crater.I backed behind the fulgurite. The being pushed itself up with its arms and looked over its shoulder at the piece of glass. The face was angular, and the gray skin darkened and shifted toward blue around the enormous silky black eyes. The ears fanned and leveled, and it looked up toward where I hid. It blinked and tilted its head. The lips parted, showing the very tips of fangs.
I swallowed, a flash of icy heat spreading from my spine. I backed away three steps and then stopped. It was the bird. It had to be. Would it bite? Would it fly away? Would it blast me with lightning?
Talk to the thunderbird…. He can be quite personable when he comes down.
Link to part one:herePrevious episode:here Wordcount: 1,195 Part: 3/9
Synopsis: The mysterious hooded person tells Jasmine his name and a bit about the thunderbird after it almost kills her.
I wandered toward the horizon I could still see. Was that the pale rim of dawn there, or the end of the storm? In an instant, the sky exploded, and the air overhead dropped flat to the ground. My blinded eyes snapped up to the surge of light racing just under the clouds. A tangled mass of purple-white lightning sped through the sky. The light fluctuated, and in a moment of dimness, I could see the bird.
The light went out and the bird flipped over and dove into the clouds as if gravity went the other way. In the wake of the lightning trail, the atmosphere slammed back together almost breaking my mind. I dropped to the ground and grabbed my skull, pressing the heels of my hands into my ears. That was the bird I was supposed to talk to? That weapon of mass destruction was why I was here?
I turned on my hip, dropping my hands against the glassy ground, scowling into the distance. Through the fog I could see another massive surge of lightning falling out of the clouds farther away. It swept through the sky and blazed into a bright raging mass. It was coming at me again. This thunderbird clearly had issues with my invading his territory. Scrambling to my feet, I tore away as fast as I could. No good at all. There was no shelter anywhere. If the bird was intent on vaporizing me, it could certainly do that.
Before it reached its position directly overhead, the bird rolled over and vanished again. Thunder slammed down, and I stumbled and almost fell. The blast pounded the air out of my lungs and I collapsed again, choking. I stayed there, waiting for the bird to reappear. I never would have known what the bird was capable of when I saw it in the ash tree. It looked so placid sitting there.
The thunder must have taken a whole three minutes to clear. Just as I was starting to hope it had gone, daylight erupted, and the air went hot and dry. I jumped and charged out of the line of fire. The bird seared the air thirty feet overhead. Something like a shockwave snapped the ground under my feet and I could hear the crack over the thunder. A jagged line of gray appeared in the dark glass. “Help!”
I saw the bird’s face the moment before it plunged into the clouds again. The toothed beak was open, and the fanlike crests flicked back as it flew. I think it was singing.
I rolled onto my back.My head throbbed. My spine was numb. If that bird dropped out of the clouds one more time—
“I forgot to tell you my name. It’s Tormaigh.” I turned around and sat up. He was sitting on the ground a few feet away. Half his face smiled and he shrugged. “Just so you can stop calling me ‘Help’, you know.”
“What am I supposed to do about this bird?” I demanded, getting to my feet. “It’s trying to kill me.”
“It’s just showing you what it can do,” he said, as if it was rather nice. “You need to befriend the bird. It’s really a very nice bird, as far as birds go.”
“What do you mean, ‘befriend’ it? How?”
He got up. “Like I told you before–talk to it.”
“It’s too busy making its stupid thunder to hear me, even if I knew what to say to a bird.” His gleaming eyes blinked patiently, waiting for me decide to do the only thing I really could–try it. My shoulders drooped and I looked back at the sky, then at Tormaigh again. “Is it a he or a she?”
“Thunderbird.”
“Last thing I knew there wasn’t a specific pronoun for that.”
Tormaigh glanced at the sky. “He. If you express your interest in friendship, he’ll be distracted from thundering, and come down. You’ll see he can be quite personable when he comes down. And he likes to dance. You’re a dancer too. Sometime, you can dance together.”
“You dance with it. How am I ever going to get home? Back to my life?”
“That’s just it. That’s what makes this all very important. If you can’t get the bird on your side, nothing is ever going to make sense again.”
“That doesn’t make any sense in itself. You mean the bird can get me home?”
Tormaigh crimped down the corner of his mouth. “You could put it that way, I guess.”
I sighed and stared into the clouds. It really was getting lighter now. One part of the horizon was growing distinctly pale, even as the mist turned to fog. That must be east. That is, assuming the sun rises in the east here. “I’ll try to talk to him,” I said.
“Good. And one more thing you should know.” I looked back at him. He smiled a little closed-mouthed downward smile. “He likes bells. All different sizes of bells.”
I scowled. “Do those grow out of the ground here, or something?”
His face lightened. “Yes. See, I knew you would start to catch on.” And he was gone again.
It seemed I was going to have to get used to the physics of this place. Until I found that bird and persuaded it to take me home, I would have to explore a bit. At least my encounter with the thunderbird got me over my fear of the ground giving way under my feet. If it took an explosion like that to even crack it, I probably didn’t have much to worry about.A gentle wind began to lift the fog. I could see the whiteness of morning coming through. My hands slipped into the pockets of my jacket and I started walking toward the brightening horizon.
After half an hour or so, the sky was clear. It was a strange sky—blue, but not as bright or as uniform as ours. If I watched carefully enough, I could see the color undulating and changing. It took me some time, but eventually my quiet mind put forward the theory that it wasn’t a clear sky at all. I was looking at very high-altitude blue clouds.
The bird was gone, anyway.
I really didn’t have any way of knowing how or where to find him. Even simply walking didn’t make a lot of sense. With the landscape so level, I would only see anything new gradually. What’s more, I wasn’t even sure that the bird ever landed. If he did, he would have nothing to do but sit there on the ground. From what I had seen, he seemed more comfortable above the clouds than below them. He might still be above them now.
But there was nothing to do but walk. Every now and then I would stop and gaze around me, scanning the horizon for something. Anything. Where did these bells grow? Maybe if I could find the bells, I could find the bird. I must have walked for hours. I got to thinking if I lived in this place, I would probably be quite fond of bells myself.
