500 Words On….Vision.

Nockatee was with him – and then, all at once, she was not.

Her eyes were still turned toward the makeshift stage made of the White Hart‘s wide porch, but he could feel that her vision had turned far inward, to places within her awakening memories that made no sense to him…

The part of her that needed the life she had known before he found her crumpled upon the forest floor worried at the scrap of dialogue that had set the swirling energies of that life once more to life within her….

She was sitting beside him, but she was elsewhere.

The words echoed in her mind, and images and feelings and thoughts gathered around them.

“Doubt thou the stars are fire.”

And, although it was, as Horatio had said, “wondrous strange”,  she -  felt - that it was true. She knew the fire of the stars,  within  Everdeep.  She was unafraid, there, and cherished the sight of starfire streaming past the bow of…..

She made a small, gasping, sound, and her fingers groped for his, clutching with that desperate strength that had so frightened him when first they  met.

Her breath was coming fast, short and sharp, and, within her mind, the pain gathered.  She could feel the stars; she could feel, too, her mother, whose arms and breasts and scent meant comfort, whose voice was always, it seemed, at the edge of song. and whose laughter was a tickling delight in her soul…

And, of course, Father was there, quiet, kind, endlessly patient, answering all the questions her mind could ask – she was, in the memory, too young to speak – in a way that made sense and gave her always more to wonder upon.  Father, whose gentleness was endless, who did not hunt or eat meat, and who held her upon his lap to read old stories, for as long as she chose.

The memory was clear, and sharp, and for a moment, Henry could see their faces, and knew them with her same infant love.

And the loss of that struck her to her quick, sharpened the hurt he could not take from her….

All he could offer, against her mourning, still sharp and fresh, was himself, and what they shared between them.

~~I love you, my wildling.~

He sent the thought to her, along with all the waves of what he felt for her.  He opened to her in a way he never had with anyone, offered himself as the shelter for her pain and sorrow – and even for her rage that all she knew had been taken from her….

But she could not take his offering of love and devotion, not yet. Once her vision fixed on her past, she could only strain to know, to understand, to find her way back to the life she had known.

She exerted all her effort, her body taut with the struggle. Her short, blunt nails dug wounds into his palm; Henry bit his lip to keep from crying out.

Sweat stood on her lip, and her jaw was set tight, but as nothing to the tensing in her mind, and in their bond.

And then, she relaxed, and she flowed into him, joyously, another piece of her jigsaw memory returned to her.  She did not try to understand, only reveled, for now, in the knowing.

Her eyes glinted with truth as they claimed his.

~I come from the stars, and their fire.~

I had no idea I was going to write a flash fiction piece for this one. I couldn’t find a way to begin an essay on vision; maybe I’m not quite ready for that.

Everything I wrote felt like lecturing.

So I deleted, and it occurred to me that what I was meant to write about was Henry and Nockatee.

And that is what I did.

Every time I write one of these little pieces, I connect more fully with the characters, and in a more visceral sense.

Maybe it’s because so much needs to be accomplished in a very small space. Maybe it’s because I’m not trying to create an entire novel, just to create a vignette.

It occurs to me that doing a slew of these before starting a novel would give me a much better sense of the characters and their interactions and motivations.

OOOH! I want to do some of these as the basis for each scene in Blood and Breath’s missing chapters…

If each scene is an embellishment of a flash fiction story, there will always be a degree of conflict and resolution, and probably tautness, too!