Dancing With Amora

They took me mid shower. I must've looked like a dog does when you scratch just the right spot. My hands were up in my hair and the rest of me was on full display when they turned on the holostream. My mouth was hanging open just enough to showcase my underbite. Not exactly an image I wanted the whole world to see.

Dignity seems so important until it's gone. At least, the façade of dignity is like that. Real dignity might be precious, but I'll never know — humans never can, what with all the stink from feet and bad breath, pooping butts and bleeding vaginas. As obsessive as we get over appearances, we're just a bunch of pompous blood bags, really.

Not like them.

My fear evaporated with the steam off my body, replaced by raw instinct. I stood under some kind of dome of multicolor chiseled stained glass, bathed anew in an intense light that filtered through it and painted tie-dye patterns on a brushed aluminum floor. Adrenaline heightened my senses enough that every tiny groove in that floor seemed to dig into my bare feet like a fingerprint a million miles deep. The smell of burning lavender soap mingled with the sterile air in the dome. A droning high pitched buzzing filled my ears with pressure. I started to freak out, but I couldn't move or speak. Something deep inside bid me to stay very, very still, locked in the gaze of a predator.

"You will care for her." I don't know if I heard it, or thought it, or read it somewhere, but the words were there. I only knew their source when a creature — if it's fair to call it that — appeared above me, above the dome, and encircled it.

Spiders of lightning and ice crawled up my spine and raised bumps in my skin where my hair stood on edge. Horror struck me in the gut, but was somehow made more palatable by awe. Seeing it was difficult, not because my eyes were struggling but because my mind was.

It was something like a roiling stream of molten gold that twisted in a spiral which seemed somehow to move towards me even while staying still. Its surface bloomed with shapes that forced shifting connotations, like an inkblot test that on second glance betrays itself not as ink, but a million ants, and then not ants but quickly crumbling blackened skyscrapers. As if unsatisfied with my mind’s wild grasping, the gilded magma all at once blossomed with the image of a great golden dragon — all screaming eyes and damning fangs — and then a vaguely familiar woman wrought of lustrous and moonlit marble splintered by cracks like lightning strikes, and then a burning mountainous pillar of dust and gas beset by stars.

Sanity demanded I look away. I looked at my feet. The metallic floor became a glossy mirror, rippling with those subtle ridges of texture that did little to distract from the alien reflection looming over my head. The golden beast morphed into a great eye, sucking plasmatic waves crashed in towards its center as the eye focused on me. My reflection saw me, and tilted her head, and for a moment I was the alien, looking back at her. Such loneliness and love and outrage and pity and apology and wholesomeness I’ve never felt. I wanted to hug myself and cry and plead and tell it — me — that it was a good boy. A sense of depth made me dizzy until my mind analogized it.

I remembered sitting underwater as a kid, cross-legged in the sand at the bottom of a man-made lake, at least twenty feet down. I looked up at the dust drifting about in the undercurrent, turned into little aquatic fireflies by a light that couldn’t reach me in the depths. Instinctively, I held my breath, though the air in the dome was perfect. When confronted with a new thing, my mind had brought me back to an old thing to help make sense of it. I wish it wouldn’t do that.

I always went to the pond after my mom died. She drowned, or at least that’s what they told us back then. My sister never went near water after that, but I found myself drawn to it. I’d take a deep breath and sink to the bottom, grasping the poor little plants in the sand to hold myself down, and look up. Always pushing myself to stay longer, testing my limits. Sometimes dancing spots of white would cloud my vision. Sometimes they were accompanied by a fading to black in my periphery before I’d finally succumb to fear and swim back up to gasp for air. Maybe that’s why I ran from my cushy life. Terror and curiosity. That’s what the eye reminded me of.

"Care for her." A screaming baby lay at my feet. We were back in the shower.

I suppose you don't get to choose when to get abducted by angels or demons or whatever they were. If they'd asked, of course I’d have refused. Then I never would've learned how being thrown up there with nothing left to hide would melt all of my façades away.

Sure, everyone saw me butt naked in the holostream that filled the sky that night. Everyone saw my stretch marks and cellulite and the pimples on my freckled back. If anyone gave a single fuck about any of that in contrast to the whole-ass circus above me, or the crying baby beside, they’d never dare say it, and I’d never again dare to care.

The babe cried and I rushed to swaddle her with my bath towel. Luckily, Hinter had noticed the goings-on and turned off the water. He was staring at me, wide-eyed and slack-jawed when I reappeared.

I hadn't planned on having kids again. I'd been pregnant twice and lost both of them. I figured I was defective and decided to stop trying. Hinter, my husband, wasn't too keen about that. He wasn’t the type to give up hope.

I was raised noble, spent my time learning to paint and sew. He was raised in a mine, and learned primarily to lie. He was a myriad of pretenses, but he never had any pretense of dignity to lose except when he was putting on an air of importance to scam one nobleman or another.

My nobility had been mercifully forgotten the moment I married him. I told my family I was moving out of the city and they just believed me. They never checked. Maybe that's why I didn't have second thoughts about stealing from their ilk.

We lived on the outskirts of Ebernacky, near the temple. That place and all like it had been mostly abandoned ever since skyscrapers and steam engines had replaced prayer when seeking health and harvest. I used to go there to calm myself during anxiety attacks. Occasionally I’d see a true believer tending the grounds.

The temple courtyard was ancient and beautiful. A worn angelic statue was a centerpiece above the fountain, surrounded on all sides by tall sunstone pillars wrapped in trimmed ivy. Their garden is one of the few places left where you can get away from the smog if — like us — you were too poor to go up into the city.

I say poor, but we lived well. Hinter fooled a few rich folk a year and that was enough to keep us and our neighbors fed and warm, mostly. When we had a rough go of it, our neighbors helped us out in turn. We had hot water and enough soft blankets and clothes. A bit of a den of thieves, I guess. In my days at the palace I only had the vaguest notion of what life was like for everyone else, and never imagined the life I was walking into when I abandoned my father.

But I’m glad for it, even though nobody ever looked at us down there. Well, until that night anyway.

"We have to get out of here." Hinter quickly told me about the holostream. My image — and the creature’s — had been projected onto the smog above the city in place of the usual news broadcast or theater, he didn’t know who did it or how. Normally, I might have felt violated. Just then, I didn’t care. Looking down at the infant in my arms, how could I?

"Get dressed." He didn’t ask if we’d take the baby, or anything else, he read it on my face. His instinct was simple: to silently run as far away from attention as possible right up until he could control the spotlight. A man of few words, and a swindler. My rarity.

As for me, after that moment caught in a predator’s gaze, running felt right. Luckily, we kept bags pre-packed, it's one of the advantages of being a criminal. There were disadvantages too, like the fact our kindly neighbors would be just as curious about events as the church or the state would. They were always looking for an opportunity.

There was a knock on our door. We left through a window. It was dark out. I remember wet hair on my scalp, and almost making it to the woods, but the mud bore our footprints and the crying baby left a raucous trail.

"Hail!" A tall man in officer garb pulled up beside us in a Shaver. "You can't outrun wheels, you know. Isn't it a wonder?" He gestured to the vehicle, a contraption of thin brass plates that upheld a dark cushioned box in the back and some monstrosity of pipes in the front. He stepped off it into the mud. Two other soldiers had been riding on spikes which protruded from the hubs of the three-meter-tall back wheels. They had been balancing with grips placed on an inner wheel that didn’t seem to turn. Men gestured with pistols in hands for us to board.

“Oh, don’cha mind us now off’sir, we’s just hittin’ the outhouse but ya can see we havs a young’n with us, can’t go lettin’ em outta yer sight now cans ya?” Hinter seemed appropriately on edge as he turned and stood up tall so that his broad shoulders mostly crowded the space between me and the soldiers.

I think if the circumstances hadn’t been so ridiculous, he might have actually talked us out of it. But the officer just smirked and pointed at his bracelet, an ornate thing of woven rose gold shaped into a leaf opposite the clasp. It marked him. He knew who I was, and had his orders. "You'll be treated fairly, come with us."

I could almost feel Hinter cringe at the word fairly, and his shoulders slumped again. It’s weird how men in uniforms feel just as empowered to lie unabashedly as a con man putting on a face.

"Comfortable, ma'am?" A young soldier asked as we boarded the craft. I remember because it was the only question anyone asked on the whole trip. I always figured their kind had allegiances, but maybe they're just brainwashed. How else could anyone resist asking questions about that? Or had they not seen the holostream themselves?

We were escorted up into the city. I'd not been there for nearly a decade, but it hadn't changed at all, especially The Pearl. As a kid I marveled at that tower of white stone, at the history burned into the walls, the murals and statues at the base. A cannonball had lodged itself into a marble pillar near the gate, beneath it was a plaque that read "We remember."

As a kid I’d always liked the graffiti that usually covered that plaque, a cute caricature of a piglet with the words "before swine" scrawled beneath it. It was there every day, no matter how aggressively they washed and guarded it. I suspect now that some of the guards were in on it. Maybe they liked how it made little girls like me giggle, or maybe they hated the institution they worked for. I don’t know.

As an adult, all of The Pearl's luster was lost on me. It was just another vaguely phallic building among many.

An archbishop's carriage greeted us at the outskirts with its reds and blacks and golds, as did a row of nobles. Despite the fan-fare, all eyes were on us. Hinter was staring at his feet. At first I thought him defeated, then I realized he'd likely scammed a number of these types and didn't want to be recognized.

We were led up many floors of pristine steps and through some dark oak doors into a grand office. The ceiling was a hanging garden, and the walls bore windows of false light. Here was another magic I loved as a child which I detest as an adult. Waste.

"I must impress upon you the church's interest in this matter. This borders on heresy, not to mention the nudity. We're grateful that you've already dismissed the matter as a hoax publicly, but-" The archbishop's voice was a unique mixture of gravelly and grovelly that made me want to take another shower. He turned to greet us with wide eyes when he heard the baby.

"I assure you we have the matter firmly under control." The Verdant Hand was a politician of the highest caliber — nobody lesser ever attained that seat. She was also my sister. At some point since I left she'd climbed the ranks significantly. She betrayed only the slightest hint of recognition when we locked eyes. Her face was organized for me, full of subterfuge only I would see through. She didn’t know what was going on, and that scared her. And that scared me. She would be dangerous if backed into a corner.

There was a long moment of tension. Usually Hinter was the first to fill those spaces, but he remained quiet. Even the baby grew still. I didn't know what to say. It was all so odd.

"When did your robes start competing?" The words burst from me forcefully. The two leaders looked at each other with quirked eyebrows, then down at their feet. Faith — my sister — wore a velvety green dress clasped around the bust with a familiar rose-gold leaf, which trailed out on the floor behind her, and the bishop's own trail lay much less colorfully in a heap at his feet. His robes were puffy, and the shadow they cast was much larger than he.

Faith cracked a smile, but the bishop let out a huff of indignity. "In ancient times, the length of a king's trail marked his many victories in battle." He was the sort who couldn't help but spell out every little fact for those he considered his lesser, as if a lesson or two might show us our rightful place.

I began to nod and mouth "wow" but the weight of the baby in my arms and the memory of my encounter left me raw and ruined my attempt at mockery.

"Kind, it's good to see you." Faith spared me. Oh yeah, my name is Kind. I live up to it twice as well as Faith does her namesake, which is to say hardly at all.

The bishop once again looked shocked. "You know this... woman?" The word whore couldn't quite escape him, but he blundered on. "Listen, if this is some kind of political ruse we have a right-"

Faith held up her hand to silence him. "Fear not. I used to know her, not anymore. Trust me that the Promise is just as curious as you are. Please tell the Cantor as much, and have him visit. It's been too long." She was poised to strike. I knew that, but the bishop clearly didn't, he just nodded and muttered "But of course".

She was out of his league.

I heard a soldier's boots at the door.

"Do you care to explain things, dear?" Faith stepped towards me with an intense and mildly sinister gleaming curiosity in her eyes. As if on cue, a soldier rocked up beside me. That’s when it occurred to me that perhaps it was me she was poised to strike.

The soldier grabbed at the baby and time slowed down. Looking to my side, I expected a gruff face, but was met with boyish confusion. I guess if you dress him in fatigues and train the brains out of him you can call him a soldier, but I just remember him as a poor boy forced to play war.

It must've looked ridiculous, the kid clearly had no idea how to handle it when he'd gotten his hands under the babe’s arms and I just kept hold of her feet. He looked at Faith, bewildered. She just nodded at him.

"Don't worry, we mean her no harm." Her silky voice didn't put me at ease. I'd have trusted her more if she screamed at me and yanked my ear like she would've when we were young.

The boy soldier pulled harder but even then the babe was completely silent. A stronger soldier stepped forward to grab my wrists painfully. I looked over my other shoulder to Hinter, but when I saw the fight rising up in his eyes I finally let go. He'd die there if I let him.

The bath towel hung loose, pressed between the soldier's hands and the baby's skin. As soon as my hands were pulled from her feet, she bawled. The towel burst into flame. The soldier screamed and his arms lit up in flames too. I caught the babe even before he dropped her. He dropped himself, too, and began to roll around to put the flames out. She looked unharmed by the fire, and pacified the second our skin met.

Chaos followed. Faith and the bishop tried to leave in the confusion, but men with guns trained to see everything as a threat lined those halls, and they all came pouring in to blockade the door. They tried to take her from me again, but as soon as my skin parted from hers the flames returned. Eventually, it was just me clutching the baby and them all gawking at me awkwardly, like they didn't know what to do with their guns. Hinter just knelt with his hands up, shaking.

They put out the small fires. The bishop spooked and tried to run. They shot him in the back in the hall, I think. I heard it, and saw a blood stain later when they took us to a detention room. Some guys with different uniforms — the new royal guard — appeared and escorted Faith out of there. We caught each other's worried glances on the way.

They separated Hinter and I, but they dared not take the baby from me for a while. I didn't see Faith again. The room they put us in was dark. There was a toilet and a bed, nothing else. They slid food and water through a hatch in the door a few dozen times, which I think marked about a week's time. I bid my time and cradled Amora — that's what I named her. Nursing came naturally. She didn't cry much.

Occasionally questions would ring through the door. I answered them honestly, told them the whole story. Not that it was believable.

I was starting to go a little crazy when they finally came for us. The light from the open door blinded me for a moment before I adjusted. I was greeted by a huge glass tub of water with wheels, a few dozen armed men, and a priest.

"I'm sorry. We have to do this." He looked nice, the priest, like he really didn't want to follow his orders. But he did. They all did. Again, she cried when they took her from me. But this time she opened her eyes and looked at me, and I swear they were smiling eyes even though her cry was ear piercing. I could smell the men's hands burning before they tossed her into the water. She sank to the bottom and the water began to boil. Three of them pinned me to the wall as they pushed the tub away. All I remember after that is blind rage.

They threw me back in the room.

She wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. Not my daughter. She’s an alien. A demon. Like that thing she came from. Not human.

I didn’t eat.

A few days passed before the door opened again, revealing two faces I knew. Hinter looked truly ragged, I think they broke his nose among other things. He hung on me for a while. The other man was a monk I'd seen at the temple in the Downs a few times.

"I heard what happened. The Hand and Cantor have been at odds more than ever this week, but evidently they took what they wanted from you already." I'd never heard him speak, but his voice was soothing. Like my fathers. "I told them you're harmless to them. They believed me."

And of course, we were. We left in a hurry, on horseback this time. I cried a lot after that. I don’t like to remember the years that followed. Hinter became obsessed with saving the daughter we never had. I told him she wasn't real. I told him she was dead. Drowned. I told him to stop reminding me of her.

My façades never grew back, and it was hard to function without them. Especially for Hinter. My unfiltered misery weighed on him.

But he wouldn’t give it up. We barely knew her, but he kept scouring the city for any information about her. It was uncharacteristically irrational for him, but I loved him for it.

The sun faded and winters grew longer and the boilers failed. Every year more of us froze, until after more than decade into that long dark there was a military coup followed by a small civil war, and the Cantor seized power. I knew Faith was probably dead. Miraculously, the heat came back to the city. Folk became religious overnight.

Hinter found some kid, a prodigy, and hatched a plan. He told me about it one night after Embers. “He’s in with the fats, and gullible as they come. Genius, of course, but stupid too.” At the time, I had no care left in me.

But Hinter’s energy made me smile. We’d grown increasingly poor, and I sat on a dirt floor wrapped in discarded oil rags. Still, I smiled. “What’s happened?” I wondered aloud.

“She’s there.”

“What do you mean she’s there? Who?” I began to shake. God damnit man don't do this to me.

“Amora.” Like it was nothing. He never stopped believing.

“Kid led me right to her. I just had to convince him I’m a holy man.” I must’ve looked skeptical, he must've understood why. “I talked him into position, in the street. My pal Rosenberg was above. I pretended to have a vision of the kid's death. Counted down, ten, nine, eight, and so on. At one, I raised my hands and screamed ‘live your life!’ spooky as I could. Scared the shawl off the poor boy, and he backed up before the sheet metal Ros’ tossed down hit the ground between us. After that, he believed me a prophet, and when I told him of my visions of a burning baby he brought me straight to her.”

At this, Hinter settled down beside me. “Kind. She’s alive.” His words hung for a long while. I looked down at my trembling hands. So old already, wrinkled. Three lost, now two? Is that better? After a while, I believed.

Like clockwork, some part of me inside twisted into a different gear. Hope. She’s alive. In that case, she is real, human, mine.

“Does she remember me?” I blurted out stupidly.

He laughed. “Weirdly, yes. She recognized me, but spoke of you. There’s something else, the clergy trust her. The new Cantor is from the temple in the Downs — the monk that got us out. When they caught me sneaking in they just let me go. And they’re about to have a parade… for Amora.”

Anxiety and confusion has blurred the next few days together, I’m not sure of the order of events. Things came back into focus around the time I saw her.

They’d adorned her in gold and carried her between cities, calling her “Avessal”, a gift from God. Her eyes were hazel, pupils unnaturally large. I remember thinking she had my button nose. Insanity. Ashen hairs bloomed from her once-bald head into a thick mane. She was covered in jewelry. Her dress was white, with burnished gold flames emblazoned on the shoulders. She locked eyes with me from her perch on a red velvet seat raised above a growing crowd, then stepped down between two engines, reached out to each of them, and ignited some elements with a snap of her fingers. They roared to life. Warmth spewed from them and the crowd cheered.

Now on the street, Amora took two steps towards me. She was still a kid, no older than the soldier who’d taken her from me the first time. The crowd recoiled from us. “Hello, Kind.” Two more steps. She took my hand. “I never forgot your comfort in those first days.” We hugged. I wept. She didn't.

I didn't let go of her for days. Hinter was beside himself. In his mind, he did this — saved her, found her, brought her back to me. Even the smartest of us are simpletons in the heart sometimes. When they were done with the fan-fare she told them she was leaving them, and they just let her go. We brought her home to our tent pitched on barren ground with a fragile fur flap for a door, no amenities. She didn't mind.

She was a whirlwind in my mind in those days, a tempest of wildflowers, lit at the top. I sat in the eye of the storm. The fire kept burning further down it like a wick, and every time I thought it would torch me on the ground I was greeted instead with a gentle word or a kiss on the hand. So alien and so familiar.

“Come with me, to the woods. They’ve given me a farm there. We can make up for lost time.” At first we refused, I'm not sure why. She stayed with us and bade us again every couple weeks until we gave in and went with her.

Hinter and I weren’t suited for farm life, but in time our instincts settled into that new normal.

In time, she told me her story. Her childhood, even her infancy, was spent heating coal or water in one boiler room after another, devoid of human needs. But as the years bled by her fire waned and her humanity grew, which was why we’d all nearly frozen to death. The elite had grown too accustomed to her provision of heat, infrastructure hadn’t grown as fast as needed. But then, right before the coup, a new Avessal appeared, so they had no more need of her. My heart broke at the thought of another poor child left alone to burn, but Amora comforted me. They bore it stoically, she said, and always knew their purpose.

I asked a lot of questions she refused to answer.

I taught her to paint. She taught me to laugh again. Somehow, as her heat faded her warmth only grew. She shined like a beacon through increasingly smoggy skies, carrying herself with a gentle magic and brazenly forgiving us all.

I never forgave us, though. I told her as much. I was never cut out for politics, didn’t have a flair for words. I’m convinced she knew what I meant, that we were all horribly guilty and there are some prices, even for survival, that aren’t worth paying. “We have to do better.” I said. But she disagreed.

Her voice was melodic and soothing. “No. You don’t have to do anything. Just be. Being is enough. Good doesn’t contrive, it begets.” Though in my eyes she was my daughter, she was raised by monks. Sometimes it showed.

I didn’t listen, she preached anyway. "We with souls are never just one thing. More than simply intelligent. Wit unmatched will serve you well only if guided by your heart and tempered by your wisdom. Otherwise it will kill you cruelly. Worldly eyes see evil deeds and miss the hearts behind them. The tired, the scared, the cold.” She eyed me with a grin. “Be. Kind."

But I could hardly hear her back then. It would’ve meant admitting that I am not better than them. I’d spent her whole life loathing them for taking her from me, for killing her. In truth I hated them long before that, for thinking anyone with power in a world this broken deserves it. Even as my hair grew gray like hers, I lacked the wisdom she exuded. And like those I hated, I abused her warmth too.

When the heat from the city faded once more, she kept us warm. The burns returned.

After all she’d done for them, they forgot her. Maybe that was lucky. We were left alone to live.

“Why?” I asked one day by the fire, gesturing at her hands through teary-eyes.

“Because love is a promise, not a contract. A gift, not a trade. Remember that.”

I remember.

In her late teens, I taught her to dance. I stepped on her feet, she bruised my shin. Healing silliness observed beneath graying skies.

“You ought to take the lead, I might meet a boy one day, you know.” She jested. I tried, but I'd never learned it that way. “If you were an animal, you’d be a lemming.” She lamented. Maybe it was a joke, but I saw some truth in it.

"Yeah? Well you'd be an owl. Wild-eyed mystery incarnate. If you meet a boy, I feel bad for the bastard.” I hated those birds, especially the one that liked to swoop in silent as a zephyr in the middle of the night and perch right outside my window. I swear he was hexing me with those soul-sucking black eyes. Can’t deny he was beautiful, though. And weird, like Amora.

"Oh?" Surprise from her was a rare look. "You know that owls eat lemmings, right?" Her mischievous smirk alluded that I was exactly right.

Painfully, I remember.

Hinter died. Conscripted. Maybe a late vengeance from some wealthy sod. Maybe just another body in the soil the city was built on. The burns on Amora’s hands had mostly healed by then, replaced by calluses formed with farm implements, but from that day on she kept a candle lit on his side of our bed at my request.

Things come back to me, one at a time, like faces long forgotten now perfectly etched in my mind's eye. The fiber of wood floors, older even than me. Blurry orbs of green and gold that marked the place of plant and hearth, enticing my waning vision with the new magic of light captured imperfectly. We sat on a porch swing made by tired hands and swung. On her face I saw a vague white line. Her smile. A cure for me.

For a long while that's how I saw the world. Vagueries guided by guesses, counseled by memory. Things transformed from simple "what is where?", to “why, and who cares about it?” To the old, plain things tell stories of joy and loss and laughter. Of pain. Wisdom chased me, step by step, until I grew the eyes to see it. Right before I went blind.

But pain drags me unwilling to the present, conjuring up that churning, abominable miasma of now. The wildflower tempest taunts me again, its wicked fire eaking ever closer, threatening to taint perfect memories with its smoke, and she can’t stop it now. She’s my daughter. Curse any reminder of that unknowable alien eye.

"And curse this broken body." Grumbling. Typical. Particularly out here, with aching feet trudging through cold mud in a graveyard in the middle of nowhere because we couldn't afford any place better.

"That old defense?" Amora knows that I know better, for she's already preached a characteristically delicate and soul-shattering sermon to me about it.

I know she's right, but there's a cost to really accepting that I am not just a mind piloting a body, to admitting that I am — at least in part — a body. A hefty price. To pay it I'd have to sell everything: The room I shunt my trauma into so I can pretend that what's happening to my body isn't really happening to me; the scapegoat whereby I act like my body's dark necessities aren't really mine; the mask of mere flesh I don when I'm loathsome, grumpy, selfish, or prejudiced — this last I've painstakingly autographed, writing "Poor little Kind, I was just tired and hungry". A holdover of noble blood, perhaps.

Then there’s the hope that the dead I love aren't really gone just because their bodies failed. That my own failing body won’t soon destroy me.

It costs too much.

I feel my breath on my face. With the flutter of wings and prods from beak and claw, she leads me through the brush. A long trek for my old bones.

"All this for a few flowers and I can't even tell if they're nice. Are they nice?" I hope her patience will hold out.

"Do you think the dead care more about the smell of a flower or the look of it?" She replies. Sometimes, I adore her wit. Sometimes I dread it.

"Okay. I get it, no more dilly-dallying. What do you see?"

"Well, I see the pines. Both kinds. Tall, majestic trees cloaked in a hazy twilight. And beside them, you. They seem miraculously undisturbed by your company. If you must pine away can't you take after them? Even caught alone in a field of stumps there's no self pity in the shadow of one of these. You're blind, not dead. Count your blessings."

"I have counted. I have exactly one blessing left. You. Remember when you told me it's okay to just be myself? Where's all that compassion now, huh?"

"Well, back then you needed it. Now you need someone to kick you in the proverbial ass. Progress, wonderful progress." Somehow I never thought sarcasm suited her, but here it was, deftly tailored.

“Okay, but when I asked you to guide me I meant it more literally for once. What do you see?"

“I see the dark.” Poignant.

"I'm blind dear, what do I care if it's getting dark?"

"Because it's also getting cold, and I can’t warm you."

Another flutter of wings and all at once I know she's looking at me. I picture her the way I always used to dream up a painting before it ever touched canvas. She'd be a silhouette of mingling cryptic browns cut twice by all-seeing bleeding eyes. A brutal thing, the owl. Soft with me, though. A direct stare was her way of being vulnerable, and it so happened that dead-on was the exact angle needed for a dolt like me to notice that her eyes were blooming flowers, a gift of love and acceptance, and their pale petals cloaked a raging golden dragon beneath. I dreamt of her there, happy, lit on one side by the waning sun, basking in the rustling of wind through leaf and feather, perched on a limb up high to cast herself against the indigo sky so that I couldn't miss her.

How can I ever stop missing her?

Crickets begin their chant beneath the squawking of geese. Maybe they don't know where to fly as the world grows bitter and brown. Or maybe I just imagine it that way.

"Careful. There's quite a few gravestones. Mine's the third on your left, by dad. Grass looks wet."

She never met a boy. Lung rot, probably from all the coal.

I feel across the surface. At least here, etched in stone, her name remained. "I'm here. I found you. I see you."

Shakily, I lay the wildflowers against the stone.

"Amora? Done pestering me, aye?" Silence.

I guess her ghost went away. Maybe I don't need her eyes anymore. Maybe my ghost will follow soon.

A familiar, intense buzzing fills my ears with pressure. In my mind's eye I see a ring of gold and flame in the sky above. They came back, after waiting for my last breath. I take it, and smell the burning oil, and hear the distant screams. Maybe they didn't take kindly to Amora’s pain. Maybe they came to rescue their other Avessal. I don’t know.

Then, now, or sometime I awoke here in a sterile room, alone, youth restored, told to write and paint. I’m sorry, time is all blended together like the color on my makeshift palette, so the thens and nows and laters are touching.

But a thought hangs in my mind through all this remembering. As one is, so one sees. How come, being blind, I see everything?