(Filed under: Prologue, The Velvet Warpath. Origins.)
THE CALL
She looked around, trying to place where she was.
Wherever this was.
Woods. Damp. Mossy.
The floor beneath her was sharp with broken branches
and cold, broken things.
Maybe she heard it on the wind,
maybe she felt it before she heard it.
It sounded like a song,
or the shape of a song—
floating on the edges.
She wasn’t frightened.
She was curious.
But she was cold.
Wet.
Hair clinging to her face, stuck in places where she’d been sweating.
She had ashes on her hands.
She looked at them like they weren’t hers.
She didn’t remember where she’d been,
or how she’d gotten here.
She felt her face with her fingers.
Wet too, but not with rain.
Brushed her fingers against her lip
and pulled them back to see speckles of red.
She looked at it;
studied it without emotion,
like evidence.
She heard it again.
A call.
Or an answer to something whispered against the walls.
She listened.
Head tilted slightly.
There.
Her feet moved.
She wanted to chase it.
It sounded familiar but odd.
Like it was hers,
but she’d never heard it before.
She moved faster,
pushing at branches and limbs that smacked back against her.
She couldn’t move fast enough;
the ground was holding her
like it didn’t want to let go.
She caught a glimpse-
gold floating on the wind,
bending this way and that.
“Wait… wait…”
Her voice was faint and raspy,
like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
Or like it had been held in her throat.
The harder she tried to grasp it,
the faster it flew.
The faster she ran toward it,
the more it slipped away.
She broke into the clearing
and skidded to a stop
at the edge of a tall cliff overlooking a stormy sea.
She watched the golden sound
float over the ocean
like petals being carried away.
Her fingers reached,
as if waiting for a hand to reach back.
“Don’t leave me here,” she whispered,
and her voice broke.
“Stay.
Please… stay.”
She woke in her bed,
the faint sounds humming in her ears and her chest.
Her eyes filled with tears
and she curled around herself again like a question mark.
Then quiet, fractured:
“Can’t I just go with you?”
There was no one there.
Just her
and her old stuffed bear,
watching silently from his post
like he always had been.
His threaded mouth long gone,
his eyes somber
like they’d seen too many of these mornings.
She sobbed
and had never felt more alone.
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