| Subject: on distant shores |
Author:
Angelina
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Date Posted: 10:57:54 06/10/05 Fri
The mud was cold and clammy, a soothing balm to her countless cuts and scratches. She smeared it all up and down her limbs and dabbed it on her face, reveling in the relief from the hot spring sun. She had been too long in the northern reaches, and was not used to the heat here in the south. Angie looked over her shoulder at the endless plains and swampy marshes, the waving brown grass and slender trees with wide spreading boughs. A little swarm of insects buzzed around her and she swatted at them absently, turning back to face the task at hand: namely, the Still Sea, the ocean without tides or waves, a calm glassy surface extending south and west in a long fat crescent. Angie stood near the blunted tip of the crescent - she could see it, hazy with distance, in the northwest - up to her ankles in the cool water. Lilypads and weeds choked the border about fifteen feet out, making it seem like a glorified lake, but Angie had prowled the edges of this water and knew its reaches, had seen the giant frowning cliff-faces where the Forbidden Mountains met the Still Sea at the fattest part of the crescent, over five hundred miles wide. She expected that it would extend on the other side of the mountains, as well, via some deep archaic tributaries, but she had never visited it on that side.
A child called Angie stood looking out into the water, knowing very little about herself and not really caring why. She wanted to swim, to immerse herself in that cold fresh water and swim down at the farthest edge of light where the pressure almost hurt and stay there until her lungs were about to burst and then, only then, come up to the light and air and break the glassy surface, shatter it, and swim and swim and keep swimming until she reached her safe place, her haven, the island of stone where nothing grew and no one lived.
But she hesitated. For no reason at all, she thought of Alexis, and had the sudden impression of the pale girl walking alone with a Silent Paw at her side, weary and sad but refusing to rest. Punishing herself...but for what?
For the second time in about a week Angie found herself feeling lonely, without having a name for the feeling. She thought of calling out to Alexis over the miles and miles that lay between them, calling back to the Blue Valleys, but did not have the courage, though she would not have admitted it.
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