Wednesday, November 24, 2010

[RP] The Tree, Part I

Okay, guys. I want you to remember the last few posts, how nice and hopeful they were. I want you to remember how sweet Fenniel is to his Libby, and how Libby would do anything for her dear Fenn. In spite of everything, they have made a lovely home together where almost all is sweetness and love. Isn’t that something we all want?

I want you to picture a welcoming hearth, in a warm, lamp-lit house perched over the sea. Smell the herbs and roasting game of the evening meal, the pie cooling on the immaculate table. Hear the muffled sounds of hot pitch popping inside the wood-burning stove, the shuffle of coals and the wind outside. Libby, sleek in her feline form, sprawls out across her husband’s lap in a moment of tranquility; he is content to scratch her ear and listen to the howl of the anguished wind that cannot, no matter how it tries, find a way into their sturdy, tidy little home.

I want you to take a good, long look at this cozy scene. It’s the last one you’ll see.

Now let’s get this show on the road.

___________________________________________________


The simple prayer had become the cadence of her life. When she scrubbed the floors, each motion forward and back was punctuated in her head with the same four syllables.

Hear me, Mother.

When she prepared the meals, mixed her draughts, or basted with methodical stitches the holes in her husband’s shirts, every cut, stitch, stir and slash was a song in her mind.

Mother, hear me.
Hear me, Mother.

It soothed her in some small way, just as her repetitive washings did; there was a calming effect in the re-ordering and counting of her herb stock, over and over, every day, with the flat intonation of her plea to the Earthmother resonating within her.

Hear me, Mother.

Awake, Libby only vaguely recalled the sequence of events that led to this hellish severance of communication with the spirits of the earth, but in her dreams she still felt the blast of static electricity lift her fur and make her hair stand on end, the flood of arcane energy engulfing her at a fierce, final battle in the Netherstorm.

Fenniel may, with such information, have been able to explain to his wife the concept of an electrical short, ending or redirecting her meditative mental whispers, but he had no way of knowing. So she continued on a course amplified by her inherent compulsive tendencies, and while her decline was stealthy beneath her happy, honeymooned exterior, it was devastation in the making.

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