michellewebster (michellewebster) wrote in goddessland, @ 2017-09-16 11:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | character: michelle webster |
Stranger in a Strange Land, Part 2
Who: Michelle Webster
Where: Goddess Island, a field
When: September 16, Dawn
Warning: Possible gratuitous sex and/or graphic violence, ribald conversation
Status: Completed
Michelle's tears slowed, then stopped. She relaxed out of her rigid posture, feeling her muscles protest their mistreatment. She dug a handkerchief from bag, wiped her eyes and cleaned her face. Drew a deep breath. Storm's over. Time to get back to work.
She retrieved her sword, examined it carefully, dried it on her sleeve, then secured it in the sheath on her back beneath her blouse. She got to her feet again, feeling the dampness in the seat of her jeans from the dew on the grass.
She picked up the tablet, gave it cursory look. It wasn't hers. She didn't own a tablet. Her smartphone--she slapped her front pocket. Her smartphone was missing. Damn it. She shoved the tablet into her bug-out bag and pulled it on. Maybe a villager had a phone. If there were villagers. She paused to look at the egg again, wondering about it.
The egg had a crack in it. The crack hadn't been there before, Michelle was sure. Had she done it?
No. As she watched, the crack grew longer, and wider. A piece of shell fractured, pushed away by the creature within. Michelle squatted, fascinated, to watch whatever it was fight its way into the world. It took time. The shell was tough. And the...creature inside was not a bird. No beak. Was it a lizard of some kind?
More time passed. The shell broke open to reveal a lizard. A lizard with wings. It was the exact same off-white as the shell from which it had just emerged. Only its eyes differed. They were black and gleaming. They fixed on her, stealing her breath away. She flinched as it reached out with hands it didn't have and seized her face between them to hold her gaze.
She felt the same shock of renewed life she remembered all too well from her first resurrection. That first gasping breath that went on and on and on, feeding oxygen-starved tissues. It had burned through her like fire, fading slowly as her body settled down to normal functioning again. This didn't burn, though. It wasn't life renewed, it was life shared.
She felt the dragon's awareness of her, filling her up. It looked deep inside her, saw everything, and it loved her, flaws and sins and all. But it didn't go only one way. She knew the dragon in that instant just as thoroughly, just as deeply, and she loved it too.
She'd known this sort of rapport before, but only briefly, and always through a miasma of hatred and terror, when she'd taken a Quickening. For just an instant, victor and vanquished knew one another as no mortals ever could, with no barriers, no secrets between them. For an instant, before the the vanquished immortal's identity shredded in the storm of the Quickening, and was snuffed out.
But this--this didn't end. Michelle knew, perhaps because the dragon knew, that it would never end as long as they both lived. As long as she lived, she'd never be truly alone again. For the second time that day, Michelle cried.