Unsweetened Darjeeling

Link to part one: here Wordcount: 1,749 Part: 4/9

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: here Previous 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.

Link to Part One: here Wordcount: 1,357 Part: 2/9

Synopsis: Jasmine discovers a strange, lonely world and meets a frustratingly mysterious entity in a hooded cloak.

Wherever I was, I was completely alone there. Overhead, the huge sky was stormy and still dark. The ground was cold under my bare feet, but not wet like ice. Otherwise, it looked more or less like ice. It was smooth and flat. Several yards from where I had fallen (if I had fallen) there was a fine white seam, like a stress fracture. I walked over to it carefully, easing one foot at a time. I needn’t have bothered. The ground, I found out, was perfectly solid. I placed one foot on each side of the crack. Here, I could see—almost–how far it went down. The ghostly seam extended deep into the crystal blackness, down, down, until either it or my vision dwindled. How thick was this sheet of glass? Or maybe, I had been transported to a glass planet. Perhaps it was solid glass all the way down.

  And the sound was still there. It was louder now, but even harder to define. It was some perfect, eerie cross between music and thunder—maybe the way thunder would sound in a place like this, resonating off the endless glass. I stared up at the sky. Lightning frisked between the patchy black fleece and the midnight-blue that seeped through it. My eyes swept down and around the horizon.

  Well, whatever this crazy place was, there was clearly nothing to do here but wait around until you got struck by lightning. And if it didn’t kill you, you would have to wait around until it happened again. In the mean time, I decided to follow the crack.

How long I traced it, I have no idea. Looking back, I don’t think there was any reason it might not have been eight to ten hours. This place had absolutely no landmarks, it seemed, and likewise I began to doubt that my mind or my body still processed time. I’m not even sure if I had any thoughts all the while—not until I started to rationalize what it could all mean.

  I had to either be dead or in some kind of an altered state. Remembering back to my last few moments in the backyard, and up though the point where I fell through to this place, it all seemed impossibly unnatural. I don’t think the ground was what shattered at all. Something had happened to my mind, or my nervous system. Maybe I lost consciousness. Maybe I was struck by lightning again.

My eyes jerked up and I stopped. I’d been enveloped suddenly by an uncanny feeling. I felt like someone was asking me a question in a voice I couldn’t hear. I scowled and looked around me. Was there breathing? No. But there was someone. Should I say something? What was the risk? If no one was there, no one would think I was crazy. If someone was, I wasn’t crazy. “Hey, uh, what’s going on around here?”

  My voice stopped in the air. I turned fully around, twice, I think, before I started to feel silly. Nobody was there. My mind was playing tricks, because I had fallen through to a world where nobody lived and had no way to ever get back. How stupid of me not to assume that right away. People have the hardest time recognizing total solitude when they’re thrown in the middle of it and can’t get back out. They start imagining other presences.

  “Help!” I screamed at the horizon. The figure standing in front of me started back.

  “I was just right about to answer your question.” The face in the dark hood crooked an eyebrow and shook his head a bit. “A little patience never hurt anybody. Hey?”

  I stepped back a bit and looked him up and down. The prairie’s atmospheric drone crackled, and in a lingering flash of lightning I could see his face clearly for a full second. I was so sure I recognized him, the name almost twitched off my tongue, but it was gone before it came. “Well?” I said, shaking it off.

  “First off, I assume you came looking for the bird,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows and looked around at the sky and then back at him. “Bird?”

  “You know, if you’re going to pretend you didn’t see it, we’ve got a long way to go.” He turned and looked back over his shoulder. “Let’s go find it.”

  I could hardly see him in the lighting when he turned away, but I could make out his cloudy shape moving at a good pace when lightning flashed. I sprinted forward a few steps. “What is this place?” I asked. “How did I get here?”

  “Same way you’ve always come,” he said.

  “I’ve never been here before.”

  “That’s what you think.” I stopped and he turned around. He sighed. “It’s called Echoland. You’re here because you had questions about the bird. You’ll see it in a few minutes. Might not be a great deal to do before morning, though.”

  “If you’re worried that I might get bored here, I think I could suggest a few more immanent problems.”

  “Boredom’s a problem, Jazz,” he said.

  “Kind of like a thousand miles of open land during an electrical storm, I suppose,” I said. “And don’t call me Jazz.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “Because it’s my name, and I haven’t told you that yet.” I tucked my hands into the pockets of my jacket and followed him for a few minutes of quiet. The wind rushed across the openness, and I couldn’t help but search the land and sky for any sign of the bird. There weren’t many places to hide out here. I came up to walk abreast with my hooded companion. He was moderately tall and appeared to have dark eyes, but it might have been the lighting. I couldn’t say anything else for sure about his coloring, it was too dark, and his hair was hidden, along with everything else, by his mantle. “Are you going to explain to me how I got here?”

  “No more than I’m going to explain how I got here. You’ll figure it out. You’ve done it before.”
  “I haven’t either,” I said. “Stop for a minute. I’ve never been here before. You must be mistaking me for somebody else.”

  “Somebody named Jasmine who looks exactly like you and is looking for the bird.”

  “And I’m not looking for any birds. I don’t know why you think that. I really just want to get back home. I don’t care about birds.” Either my eyes were adjusting or the clouds were thinning as we spoke. Now I could clearly see the expression on his face. He seemed to think whatever he was thinking about was clever, and he was clearly not thinking about my argument.

  “You’ve been looking all over the sky ever since you got here.”

  “Because it’s a weird place with nothing else to look at.” My eyes lost anchor and my vision spun in confusion. “Where’d you go?” I yelled into the empty landscape.

  “Talk to the thunderbird.”

  “Huh?” My eyes lifted to the sky again. There was nothing but clouds up there, matted, flickering, cumulous clouds. There were as many birds up there as there were hooded ghosts down here. My head whipped around as I searched one more time for my disappearing friend. I was alone again, and his voice, disembodied though it had momentarily been, offered no further assistance. “Further assistance.” As if he had been any help at all.

  I noticed a mist was beginning to rise off the glass prairie. All this time, in spite of the clouds and the thundering, there hadn’t been a drop of rain. I had been able to see for miles in those conditions, but now the dark horizon was growing fuzzy. The thunder died away and the humming filled in, taking a slightly different timbre as the mist thickened over the land. The breeze pulsed through my hair. It wasn’t a cold breeze, but it was becoming wet. I pulled my jacket around me and looked up at the sky. No birds.

TO BE CONTINUED….