Leave a Sleeper Be I
Posted by fictionforum on November 16, 2010
The voice begins somewhere far beneath, where root meets core, a dark and sacred space where its words presumably fall clear and free from crumbling ancient lip. At such a depth, even the smallest of ears may tune in to the eternal noise unimpeded, but here, where sun breaks canopy like a cat in a china shop… too deep, too quiet for human ears. It resonates. Starting at the seed, it travels slowly down root and up branch to hum through bones. Earthquakes on a sub-molecular level.
Those gathered between two house-sized buttresses of root flare have faces pressed to the bark, ears flattened to the sound. The voice is saying slowly something that sounds like, “He hasn’t been to see me yet, but the other, the tall pale one who thinks himself of the cloth, he tiptoes around the borders at night. Perhaps he feels I do not pay attention in the Earth’s darkness. Perhaps he dreams. Perhaps.”
Maroon boats of leaves sail silently around three gathered heads. One, face hidden in a ragamuffin tangle of desert floor hair, begins quietly, “I saw them at the playground, the other-” but stops short to examine his friend’s wide gray eyes. And even quieter, “They were talking about your… your return, I guess.”
Softly, but clearly and unshaking, a voice issues from nearly unmoving pale pink lips in a twinkling monotone. “It’s alright, Scal, you don’t have to dance around me. I won’t to break anymore.”
“He-”
“You mean Dyon?” The question comes without hesitation, any tremor or waver flattened under the stone of need in Ash’s voice.
“Yes. Dyon. He wanted to know what ‘woke little Ashley up,’ as he put it. He thought it was Red Calla.”
“No, not that one,” the vibration felt in the teeth interjects, if anything said in such an even, calm tone can be called an interjection. “She came to mourn your missing within my branches, but never mentioned looking for you. She knows enough to know to leave a sleeper be.”
-I'm back!
Bargain Puppy
