April 10, 2008
The Pure One.
She hovered in the air, brushing back her cloud-fine hair. Every touch of her feet to the warm water below drew vital energy into her body. As she grew stronger, she strode determinedly ahead, flying with regal purpose towards the approaching land. Eyes the color of storm-tossed seas surveyed her domain – and it was hers, though she knew, deep in her heart, that she was only passing through.
The little people flee ahead of her – or hunker in their dens, waiting with bated breath for her to pass them over. She pays them no mind – they are ants to her, things that scurry across her path, too small to notice. She walks on.
And, at last, she steps up onto the land.
Her grey, rain-woven cloak lashes the land as it shivers in the fury of her wind. She darkens the sky, her greatness turning the world to her favored shade of steel water. The ocean, loath to let her go, draws up around her feet, chasing her onshore, lapping at her heels. Her breath, her voice, her hair – it is all the same to the little people – one long roar.
She touches the world around her with a strange curiosity – half an innocent child’s, half a jaded scientist’s – and watches with remote, implacable eyes as the world crumbles around her. She keeps walking.
She is weakening now, the water that was her sustenance having finally fallen back, but she walks on, alone and inexorable, to a destination known only to her – if known at all. Her voice cracks and dies, her cloak is tattered and faded, and her hair dries away. She is fading, piece by piece, and knows it – though it does not bother her at all. It simply is.
Soon, only her eyes remain, and she takes one last look around before they too vanish.
The chill of her passing remains. The marks of her footsteps remain. The world remains, silent in her passing, changed forever.
She is a momentary goddess, born of water and air, drawn by unknown purpose across the land, fading back to air once the water releases her. Like all spirits, her spirit remains – eternal, inexorable, inhuman – even disembodied it is felt.
I have walked in from the sea, a spirit of air and water. I have touched your lives, and you will feel me forever. I am the youngest of the goddesses, born from the ocean, dying on the land, returning to the air that is my parent, and I will remain. I am your ghost, your nightmare, your adversary. I am what I am…
And Katrina smiles.
