SS - Sleeping City

from "Sleeping City" - Kutless

Rain on asphalt. Sun on glass.

The City doesn’t weather the weather, it enjoys it. Fragments of rainbows -appearing in the trod up dust and vanishing again- are the City’s version of a sleepy smile. The changing of days and seasons mingles with the changing of the City’s dreams. Cold is a caress and heat is a blanket. The City slumbers under both. When the sun is bright, the City turns its own lights low, and when the night comes, the City festoons itself with vibrant colour for the striking contrast of radiance against the black. Stars above are seldom seen but they twinkle in all of the City’s dreams.

Built by artists and entrepreneurs, the City now houses dissolute youths and embittered elders. The war between generations is quiet and cruel. But the City’s dreams are populated only by the simply and seriously merry. Working and dancing and eating are all a part of the endless games that the City dreams.

Once, thirty-nine years ago, the City awoke for a moment. A tremulous glistening electrified moment before sunrise. A child wandered away from the boardwalk to the statue at the end of the pier and pressing a warm small thumb to the large stone one said, “hello.”
But before the City could reply, the mother came running and snatched the child away. A maelstrom of fretting and fussing and kisses and warning. But the City fell back into sleep the moment the connection was broken and never knew.

The child grew up and moved away to be an artist somewhere else. And every third painting was of the slumbering City. The artist never knew why.

So the City sleeps in contentment, unaware of pollution or politics, feeling only the reverberations of nature. Buildings fall or decay or burn and others are built. Every summer the roads undergo noisy construction. Every winter snow is sullenly shovelled from one place to another to melt before the cherry trees blossom. Cacophony turns to harmony within the City’s dreams. Disaster turns to delight. Nothing in the waking world holds the power to disturb the City’s rest.

But sleep is not meant for forever.
Dreams cannot defeat time, they can only cheat it for a time.
Neither are cities immortal.
Will the City awake before it dies?

Rain on asphalt. Sun on glass.

A very old woman -too old to be doubtful of magic- sits at her window and wonders. She has grown to be simple and learned to be serious but if there was ever anything merry within her, there is nothing left now. Frigid rain and smothering sun bellow through the cracks and rainbows swirl in the dust. She lights a candle in the day and nothing at night. She hears the grumbles and the curses, different language from different ages but the same tone. She ponders. She waits. She hopes.

The day she falls asleep for the last time is the day the City stirs and startles and, finally, awakes.

SS - Putrid Poetry

from "Burning in My Soul" - Matt Maher

Shiver down a moon beam and dance here with me
Forget the sound of hundreds of feet marching over rock
There is a fire that burns in rain…

    “What are you muttering?”

    He shrugged and laughed self-consciously, “nothing really, it just seemed to fit.”

    Adelaide hiked up her dress to cross a fallen tree, “What seemed to fit? Are you writing poetry again?” She tripped and would have fallen on her face if Jake hadn’t reached out to steady her but it was his face, not hers, that burned red with embarrassment.

    He coughed. He hopped over the tree, avoiding the slippery patch of moss that had almost upended his fellow sojourner. But he couldn’t avoid her gaze.

    “Well?” She prompted. He didn’t have to look to know that she had her hands on her hips and her head tilted ever so slightly to the left.

    “No.” He said. “It wasn’t nothing. Don’t slow down now, we got to get at least to the gate before dark.”

    “Sure.” She skipped past him, a queer mixture of grace and clumsiness in her movements that he still found disconcertingly distracting after months of travelling together. “But I rather think that any beasty prowling in these parts could be turned back by the power of your witted words.”

    “Shut up.” He spoke the thought out loud but not so loud that she would hear it but at that moment she stopped so abruptly that he almost crashed into her.

    “Hist!” She whispered harshly.

    He couldn’t see or hear anything that would cause her alarm. He opened his mouth to question and breathed in the unmistakeable stench of Anfarri dire wood.

    And I was so looking forward to a quiet evening and green beer at the Dancing Foal Inn!

SS - Resurgam Falls

From “Crisis in Asgard” - Patrick Doyle

A river of stars flows down from the Dark Mountain and dazzles the eyes by day or night. The pool it flows from has never been seen, deep within the mountain’s cloud, but there are those who say it is birthed at the heart of the world. It whispers as it streams over the molten rock but thunders where it meets the Yellow River at Resurgam Falls. A sacred place that binds earth and sky, fire and sea, Resurgam Falls draws immortals and mortals alike, to the peril of the former and the salvation of the latter. Enter for worship or because of avarice, for ambition or simple wonder, it is the doom of all who come that they shall find what they truly seek.

Listen for the tread of those who gather now. A flutter of wings, a tentative step, the smallest of things can disturb the constant thunder for the thunder is music not noise and the melody is changed every time someone or something beholds the hallowed cascade.

Twirling down through the mist, a flower faerie flits, her eyes alight with mischief, heedless of the rocks and rapids. She comes to play a deadly game. A surge of heat blasts through a crevice on the western side and the Lord of Chaos appears. Curved horns, rugged mane, a grimace on his face, he comes for answers. Bubbles filter up from the churning of the waters in the estuary, Old Mother Turtle breaks the surface and swims with ancient strength toward the base of the Falls. She comes to die.

Three would be a fitting number for any story but in this one there is a fourth and a fifth: a brother and sister playing on the banks of the Yellow River.  Caught up in their own joys and fears, they do not know where they are about to tumble into or whom they are about to meet or what will happen to them there or how they will leave or when. Some of these things will not be discovered until the end of the story. But the why will be understood at once.