It came to pass in one of these goldening years that Earth played in the field behind the house, as he often did. Long afternoons in fair seasons made dashing amid rocks and dirt piles the glory of boyish life. Now and then the sway of crops now growing well beyond their home under the azure sky, new homesteads, larger farms, caught his eye. For himself, Earth was more than healthy, and not without a special audacity, though from which man in the village he inherited such valiance it was hard to say. 

The Mistress was out. His sisters were busy with preparations for the evening meal, the breeze tainted with the hint of lilacs. He dashed beneath the shady branches of overhanging greens, but he knew that he was no longer alone. 

He heard her. Not laugher, but neither crying. Not quite, but neither singing. He only knew she was real, she was a child, and, unlike him, she was very, very alone. With the compassion that only children know, he loved her, this poor, wandering spirit. He ran about the branches, then sought her in the crops at the edge of the yard. She eluded him like the breeze. 

He laughed. It was a game, after all. Was it not? A fine chase. But his breath ran out and he called for her. 

“Talitha!” 

Silence. 

For reasons he could not explain, he felt he would cry.

He did not. A moment passed. It was all good fantasy. Back to play and dance and slaying the enemies of the Shadowsun wherever they hid with sticks and twigs his mighty weapons of rended steel, like the stories told.

That night, after his sisters were long asleep, while the Mistress bathed and wrapped him him with her special poultices, the ones charred in the fire and chanted over with weirded words, the ones he must not speak of, even to his siblings, he remembered her well. She was no dream. He may have been but a boy, valiant and whimsical with all the grand prowess of childhood, but he was already man enough to know the distinction between the mind and the world. 

He loved her still.

“Do you know who she is, Mistress?” he asked as she draped the deep, violet-scorched bandages upon his chest and arms. She had come again, this night as he cut the wood for the hearth before the early seasonal snow set in. She came almost daily now. Clearly there, sitting upon the broad stone beside the new wall running the length of their property, enclosing them and all of Elusa from the ever-stretching farmlands that spread well outside the small city. Her hair was the color of hushed straw. She dressed plainly. But sleek. Bold. Beautiful.

If she was real. She had to be real. How could she not be?

“What are you babbling about?” she asked, paying him little heed as she focused on her work. She rarely let him talk in the evenings, when she burned him with her secret bandages, dressing his upper body first, then his legs and feet, lastly his head. He tensed as another heated panel draped over his cool, bare skin.

“The girl, Mistress. She comes to our yard.”

She stopped stiff, her hands gripping tongs to pull of the next poultice from the fire. Hesitation. Discomfort. But she only delayed a moment. 

“Is that so?” she asked, then returned to her labor unabated.

“It is.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“No,” he said, shocked to think he had not tried such an obvious thing.

“I see,” she said, coming to him again and laying the burning medicine upon his stomach. He hid the wince as best he could, masking behind pretentious offendedness.

“You do not believe me,” he said. 

“You are a child. Children play games.”

“This is no game, Mistress.” 

“So you say.”

“I am too old for games. I will be a man soon.” 

“You are already a man.”

“Then why don't you believe me,” he asked, sitting up. She pressed him back, leaving the liquid fire to sink into his limbs.

“Earth,” she never ceased her task. “Should I even want to believe such a silly thing as a girl finding her way into our garden, there is a newly constructed wall, fine as any. Unless she is a mystic or some ghost unknown paths, she could not possibly have been in our yard.”

“That's just it. A mystic. She’s a mystic.”

This time the Mistress stopped. She left the hearth and returned to him, the son she raised with such intention, whom she weirded so tediously. Every art she ever studied was poured into the balance of this boy. Could he absolve her of her wrongs? He lay upon the work table, covered in those deadly bindings which would one day make him so much more than a mere man.

“Earth,” she said. “I have trained you better than to say such a mindless thing as that.”

“I am not just saying it.”

“Then you have not told me everything.”

“No,” he replied, glancing away.

She sighed, eyeing the fire as it crackled with dancing flames. All her labors. Her hopes. Could the blood-weirding have actually mattered? She could not imagine how.

“How long has it been since you first saw her?

“I don’t see her much. I mostly hear her.”

“How long?”

“As long as I can remember remembering.”

Could it possibly be?

“Then, as I said, you must speak with her.” She took her tongs and lifted another drape from the fire. “Ask this ghost her name.” 

“Who are you?”

The words startled her. She sat upon the snow-buried stone by the wall in the garden, though she didn’t leave a dent in the drift. Earth’s feet dredged broad, ugly marks in the yard. His intended only to grab a sheaf for the fire. But there she was, amid the drifting snows of high winter as if it were the finest summer’s day.

“Oh!” she said. Her eyes were blue. He knew that blue. “I didn't see you.”

“Didn't see me? I am right in front of your face.”

“Were you? I must admit it is hard to see in this fog. Every so often, if I sit still enough, the sun breaks through and the blue sky and the sparrows and a touch of the breeze come through. But that is very rare.”

“It's snowing. The wind is frigid.”

“Is it?” Her surprise was honest.

“What is your name?” 

“It is a fair question,” she answered with a smile. “But first, you must tell me what you are doing here in my fog-bound and dreadful home? You are not so severe as the normal servants my father sends to tend me.”

The question set Earth back, standing as he was in the yard he had known since his first steps. “This is my home,” he said. “I have come out from the house to gather a sheaf for the fire. And you are on my favorite stone, the one I used to leap from as a boy.”

“But you are only a boy,” she laughed. It offended him, though the way she covered her mouth with her hand when she giggled was delightful. It was almost enough to stop him from furrowing his brow, but not quite. “Oh, do not be angry for what you are.” Her smiled was most winsome. “You are a boy and I am a girl. And, more than that, it would seem that we have the same home, for you are at your house and I am in my prison, yet here we sit, conversing as if at a merry town square.”

Earth forgot everything else in that instant. Her loveliness every moment grew more real, her ghostlike form taking on firmer flesh, as if two alternative worlds converged on a lynchpin. For her part, she noted a moment of brisk wind and the occasional flake of snow. But their thoughts were hidden from each other. 

“Prison? I don’t understand. I want to believe you. There is weirding at work, or I’m a fool. But if you are no mystic, if this is not your doing, then how are you here. You cannot be both in prison and also roam free unless you intend it.”

“I do not understand it. I am, after all, only a little girl. As I told you, I did not even know that I had escaped at all, nor that I had intruded upon your home. I was merely sitting as I always do, looking vainly for the sun.”

Even as she said the words, she began to fade from view. A moment ago, the vision of feminine perfection verged on incarnation, so close that he might smell the skin of her neck or feel the ruffle of her hair. Now, a bleak fade with icy eyes and harvest hair all but whispered her final words. In her world, the fog was descending with heady weight, driving away all but itself, as its so often did. She saw the face of the young man receding into its deep clouds, his eyes daring about in earnest search for her. 

“I am Lyf!” Did he hear her? He was gone now. “My name is Lyf!”

Artwork