It has a title! I'm not sure I'm in love with it, but it came and told me it's here to stay, so there we go.
The post with the story, my thoughts, and process behind this editing round, is up
on my blog, but I'm going to paste the whole story in here as well this time.
I didn't change a whole lot, but I think I changed an important thing or two. We'll see how this goes.
_____
Sometimes Our Skies: Draft TwoThe Giant climbs the mountain one narrow, cut-into-the-slope stair at a time, carrying in her arms a dying spirit of the skies. She pushes against the chilling wind and raindrops swirling before her face, her heart drumming the rhythm,
almost there, almost there.#
On the eve of the equinox, the Spirit fell from her skies by the wish of a lonely child, and concocted a plan to trick her.
#
More-stairs-than-she-can-count up the mountain, the Giant pauses to look back, for the first time since she started the climb. Far below, the stairs disappear in the ocean of white, where islands of smaller mountaintops peek through the clouds and early snowflakes await to flutter upon the giants' cities. Up ahead, the stairs lead into the quiet mist of further heights, to new, thinner clouds caught against the sharp peaks. She still has ways to go.
#
On their first night, the Spirit asked not for the child's name, because she wouldn't be staying long. On their first dawn, the child cried not to be alone, and the Spirit held her hand.
#
Step, step, step. The Giant hums to herself a song in a voice made hoarse by the cold, and it's an upbeat song, a hymn to the adventurers designed to bring spring into one's step and courage to one's heart.
"We're almost there", she tells the bundle of tawny fur and ashen curls in her arms.
The Spirit says nothing.
#
On the night of their first year, the Spirit remembered she had plans. She would get the child to make another wish soon, and the wish would tear her apart to take the Spirit back home. Soon, she told herself.
But to the child she said,
you're growing up.And the child, as children may, chuckled.
Not fast enough.#
The Giant reaches the top cold and tired. Her fingers might be blocks of stone, even shielded from the worst cold by the furs around the half-conscious spirit. There?s the tower, up ahead, almost there: on a pier of concrete between the worlds, a structure of metal and hard work rises up to meet the sky, built to withstand millennia by the giants of the old. The stories say they lived for hundreds, thousands of years.
The thought, even through the cold, makes the Giant's chest warm with excitement. Oh how wonderful it would be, to live that long, to live forever. But perhaps so lonely, too.
#
On the last day of their fifteenth spring, the Spirit's eyes fluttered closed. It was the birthday of the giants' matriarch, an evening festive and alive with colour, and the Spirit feared.
I am tired, she said.
The child who was growing up held her close, stroke her hair and whispered small poems into her ear, and said,
Please don't leave me.And the Spirit didn't even think of seizing her chance.
#
The Giant climbs the tower with the last of her strength. She now carries the Spirit in a makeshift sash across her chest, and if there wasn't for the scarf wrapped tight around her face, her lips would be brushing against the softest curls she?d ever touched.
Quietly, the Spirit stirs. She senses the closeness of her skies, of the home she's already thought lost.
"We're almost there," the Giant coos.
"I will miss you," the Spirit whimpers.
#
On the morning of summer solstice, when the child was a child no longer and the Spirit had paled to an ashen shade, she told of a plan long discarded and said, I will extinguish like stars before the morning sun. But I will not let you burn in my place.
On the morning of summer solstice, when the leaves on the trees were bright, the child who was no longer a child said,
I wish to take you home.#
The tower pierces the skies. It enters the realm of the spirits with a sharp peak bright with snow and stardust, but the Giant doesn't climb that far. She stops when the clouds swirl closer with the wind, the skies excited and concerned to meet their long-lost denizen.
She unwraps the furs and kisses the Spirit's forehead, the skin burning hot against her lips despite the weather. And she says to the wind and the cold and the heights, "She's going to be alright."
The winds take hold of the Spirit's pale curls. They tug at her sweater?the one the Giant made her, purple and blue and silver like the evening?and, finally, lift her up to where the heights chatter in voices of all the others,
our lost one. Welcome back home.And it's now, not when her knees had started hurting or the Spirit had been so silent in her arms, not when the elders of the city had warned her she would not return from the mountain, that the Giant cries.
She doesn't speak, because she can't find her voice. But she holds the Spirit's hand, and for a moment it's like holding a torch, like touching a star. The clouds light up with all the shades of autumn and fire, all the pinks of chilly dawns and golds of warm sunsets. And she puts in her touch all she needs to say, a fragile plea upon tear-stained memories:
Don't forget me.She watches as the light flashes once more and goes out, the touch gone from her still-reaching hand. She is ready to start her climb down, only hoping the cold and the exhaustion would catch up with her far enough for the Spirit not to have to witness it.
But the sky lights up again.
#
The Spirit reaches with a hand no longer so pale, smiling that lopsided smile of hers that sends the Giant's chest fluttering. And as the wind calms and the voices of her family sing a quiet song of gratitude and welcome, the Spirit makes a wish of her own:
stay with me.
Topic: Sometimes Our Skies: Draft II (Fantasy) (Read 505 times)