Name: Clare
Story: The Wasteland
Colors: Tyrian Purple 5, winged messenger; Heart Gold 12, There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. - Friedrich Nietzsche
Supplies and Materials: Bichromatic
Word Count: 1,807
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Notes: Just a quick piece to fill the time before NaNoWriMo. Same sub-setting as in The Fullness of Family--this woman will found that society.

Idne was ill. They all said so—her mother, her father, her doctor. But she knew it wasn’t true. The fever was only the violence of her grief.

At least they were leaving her alone.

Except for the endless pots of tea. There seemed to be another one at her bedside every time she woke, her sleep fitful and broken. She was grateful. The tears pouring from her were dehydrating her body, and she needed to replenish its water supply.

She could tell when they started to get low on chamomile; they started giving her mint. And then they started giving her rose-petal-and-lemon, and then something with anise in it, and it didn’t matter, as long as it was herbal and not going to dehydrate her further. She drank it down and sobbed and fell back into sleep.

There was no reason for her to do anything else—except to keep herself alive, because she knew he would not want her to die for his sake. So she drank the tea and as much of the soup as she could stomach before she made herself nauseated, and she lay in bed for three days, tossing and turning but feeling no strength or inclination to rise.

On the third day, as the house was silent and she saw the red morning sun through her curtained window, her eyelids slipped closed and she fell into a sleep that she knew even at the time was more real and more lasting than any of the sleep she had had in the past three days.

In sleep, she found herself on a silver road. There was a woman—no, a man—no, she could not tell and it did not matter. The person was silver, or dressed in silver, and great silver wings sprouted from their shoulders.

“Who are you?” asked Idne.

“I am a messenger,” said the silver person in a voice that was also silver.

“Is this a dream?” asked Idne.

“Yes,” said the messenger. “But that does not mean that it is not real, for it is only in dreams that we can reach you.”

“Who are you?” asked Idne, meaning the “we” to which the messenger had alluded, but the messenger only responded again with the same answer it had given.

“If you are a messenger,” asked Idne, with none of the impatience with which she might ordinarily have asked for clarification, “do you have a message for me?”

“Yes,” said the messenger, opening its wide silver arms. “The tower is falling.”

Idne started to ask what the messenger meant by that message, but then she realized that images were appearing on its silver garb, as though projected there, and as she looked into the images she fell into them and experienced them as moving all around her.

First there was a crowd of people, all running and screaming, and one by one they began to fall, clutching at their throats or chests or faces, until all around Idre was a sea of nothing but people fallen to the ground. They had not seemed to see her, and whatever made them fall did not affect her.

Then there was a battle, men and women on both sides in indistinguishable uniforms, shooting each other and throwing bombs and grenades. They were killed and there was blood and body parts and fallen soldiers everywhere, but more and more soldiers appeared to take their places. The bombs and grenades stopped, and then the machine guns, and then the guns that shot one at a time, but the soldiers still fought, using bayonets and swords and spears and things that gave off green gas and knocked down everyone around them. The blood and body parts and fallen soldiers piled up until Idne could see nothing but piles of bodies, and then they stopped. She felt, though she could not say how, that ten years had passed, even in her dream.

Then there was a hospital, like the hospitals in wars, with many beds in one long room and a soldier in each, and men and women in white coats running about between the beds. When someone in a bed died they put him or her on the floor and led another person to the bed. But the doctors were falling to the ground, too. And then the lights went out for a moment and the air was filled with screams and groans until the emergency lights reappeared, but when they did, everyone in the room was dead.

Then there was a highway, filled with cars going both directions, until one and then another and another stopped dead, and the cars behind the broken-down cars crashed into them, and there was a terrible noise of metal on metal and the screams of the injured and dying.

Then there was a small family, two parents and three young children, hiding in a cave. The youngest child was sick, and its parents kept mopping its brow with cool water from the stream nearby, until the child recovered and all rejoiced, but they still feared to leave the cave.

Then there was a man walking through an empty town and looking about hopelessly for anyone alive or any home with electricity still working.

Then there was a girl being dragged screaming from a house by angry men and tied to a long line of sad-looking girls with dirty feet.

Then there were five people running from a group of angry men with swords. They stopped and one of the women turned, flinging up her hand. The men with swords ran at them, but their swords bounced off of some invisible barrier in the air and they fell backward, astonished. The people running kept going until they found empty fields filled with rich, dark soil, and the four people who had not created the invisible barrier held and kissed each other all together, and the woman who had protected them looked on and smiled. And the vision brought Idne closer to the woman’s face and she saw to her astonishment that the face was her own, but that there were strange double pupils in her eyes, and she seemed to see something beyond the four people whose love she delighted in.

Then there was Idne again, but this time she was seated on a beautiful chair surrounded by children, and she was speaking to them with a smile on her face, and they were all watching her with smiles on their faces. As she watched, her future self (for this Idne had wrinkles by her eyes and touches of grey in her hair) seemed to finish whatever story she was telling with a gesture, and all of the children screamed with delight and clapped and jumped up and down. And Idne laughed with them and caught them up to hug and tickle them. And it filled the present Idne’s heart with joy and love to see them, though she knew somehow that none of the children were hers—for after all, after his death, with whom would she wish to have children?

Then the children’s parents came and took them away, and each child went away with a set of four parents (one of which was the four people she had been protecting in the previous scenes), and each set of four parents had many children, and they were all happy.

Finally Idne seemed to retreat from the scenes until she was once again standing in front of the silver, winged messenger, which folded its sleeves again as the images disappeared.

“What does this all mean?” Idne asked in a whisper, so awed was she by what she had seen.

“That you will have to discover for yourself, Idne,” said the messenger, and its voice seemed familiar to her. She looked up at the messenger’s face and saw that he was her dead love, that he had only been hiding himself until now. She reached up for him, but she could not touch him; his form retreated from her at the same speed as her arms moved.

“Wait!” she cried, in horrible distress. “Where are you going?”

“I cannot say,” he said in a voice that echoed as though much farther from her than his form appeared. “I am only a messenger.”

She ran after him, but the silver road seemed to move under her feet so that she never made any forward progress. “Don’t leave me again! Take me with you!”

“I cannot.” And though his face and form were farther away than ever before, she could see his smile more clearly than she had seen anything else. “You must do this on your own. I love you, Idne. We will see each other again.”

The messenger retreated and retreated until he was barely a speck of silver in Idne’s vision. At the moment that he disappeared, her eyes opened and she awoke, healthy and refreshed, in her room filled with the brilliant golden light of the rising sun.

She rose and went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She had only her usual brown eyes, with single pupils in the centers, dilated now by the fluorescent light—but she could see, as if a shadow or a premonition, where the second pupil would appear. And she knew it to be true.

She went downstairs to where the others were and told them that the world was going to end. And they were astonished at her health, and coddled and cosseted her and fed her hot oatmeal and fresh fruit, and also asked her how she had come to learn of the war, because they had gone to great pains to hide the knowledge of it from her while she was ill. She did not answer, but took the newspaper that had been offered to her and read about the nuclear warheads that had begun to be flung about the world.

She felt sad and sick and she knew it had begun. And she looked at the faces of her parents and knew that the time would come soon that she would never see them again. But she said nothing of this to them, because to them she was still a child, and one who was recovering from an illness and could not be held responsible for anything she said.

But she folded the newspaper and closed her eyes and pictured the faces of the two men and two women she had been protecting in her vision. She knew that she could find them, and she would find them, and they would live through this war and the sickness and whatever else was to come.

And the face of her love came to her again, and she smiled, and she knew she would see him again.