A breath of fall breeze caught my hat and tried to fetch it from my head. I reached up, plopped my hand atop it, and walked onward. Beneath my feet, the grass crunched away to dust. It caught the wind and fluttered away, dead and worthless to anyone or anything.
The sage, however, was putting up a better fight than the rest of the greenery. Of course, few things were what you would call green in the high plains of New Mexico. Not so long ago, it'd been just plain old Mexico, but the world was changing faster than ever and everyone wanted to pride themselves on our brave, new world.
I'd walked through the Valley of the Damned, nearly drowned in a sea of sand, and roasted beneath the hot, red sun. And, as I approached the tired, battered hovel, it was all worth it. This lousy shanty, this boarded up old shack; this was what awaited me at the end of my too-long road.
Breaking the boards over the window could have been done by coughing on them. I sneezed as they fell away and into the building if someone could really call it that. There was no door, but I bunched my skirt at the hip and hoped no one was around to see my boxers. One leg first, then the other, I slid in and gasped as agony burned through my back.
Translucent wing flesh caught on an old nail jutting out from the window shutter, I grabbed the low edge of the roof outside and pulled myself up. There was a hole in my wing the size of a dime by the time I was done, but it would heal in time. Fairies aren't particularly vulnerable to lockjaw, so I wasn't very concerned about the tear. Pain was a passing gesture and had the nail been iron, I would have known it already.
It did stand to reason that it should have been. Weren't iron nails meant for the wilderness? Horseshoes and wagon wheels, blacksmiths clanging away at their anvil; those were the typical trappings, weren't they?
Perhaps someone with modern ideas had shown up and, at some point, bothered to replace the original boards with new ones made of aluminum. I couldn't imagine it had been recently, but the harsh desert climate often took its toll on untreated wood. I shrugged the matter away for later thought and sought to discover the interior of the house.
It was a single-roomed shack with a pair of old shelves in one corner. A rusted woodstove lay on its side, the unfriendly maw of the iron catastrophe threatening to consume me. I skirted around it, intent on a stain in the center of the room.
Brown with time, the dirt thick across it, I shooed the sand away with my slipper. The blood stood out against the slate floor and I crouched to examine it, running my fingertips over the rough surface.
"The stone drank it in, allowed it to become part of itself," I murmured, lifting my hand to my lips. Dried years long past by the heat, baked into the rock, I frowned. I hadn't come prepared to excavate a block from the floor, but where there was a will? There was a way.
I lifted my hands to the sky, fingering the dirt between each set of my index finger and thumb. Spellwork like this was difficult, but I knew what I was doing. I concentrated. The energy that lay beneath the ground, the pooling lava desperate to breach the surface, was more than willing to allow me to tap it. I did so and pulled with everything in me.
Like a laser, the lava ripped upward and made neat cuts in the floor. With a puff of hot air, I blew a fragment of the blood-imbued stone into my hand and examined it. Though I preferred to work with fresher materials, it would have to do. I allowed the lava to simmer back through the cracks in the earth, climbed back through the window, and began my journey back down the mountain.
Again, the sage swayed in the wind. The weeds danced across the trail in front of me. And the grass turned to dust beneath my feet, useless and worthless for anyone who needed it.
Just like my mother.
My grip tightened on the rock in my hand. She had spent years being ever so careful never to bleed in front of me, knowing that the vengeance I craved would work only with a drop of her blood. Yet, she hadn't considered that I would enter the mortal realm and find our place of becoming. She hadn't thought that I may find some way to do the impossible and extract the blood I needed from stone.
Because if she had, she would have gotten to it before I did.
I stepped through the portal at the bottom of the hill, head held high, and into my destiny.
Topic: First Draft: A Daughter's Affection (Read 415 times)