SOUL OF THE STORM
Chapter XI
THE GODS OF GHOST RIVER
“Alone we traveled armed with nothing but a shadow.”
- Of Monsters and Men, Mountain Sound
••••
“Damn it, Tam, just let me just give you a ride home when my shift ends,” demands Marta, desperation leaking into her voice.
“Oh no, no… I’ve done this walk hundreds of times, besides I want to get that view of the sunset,” I laugh, but truly it’s that rare magic where sky and earth are one… saffron in the dying light.
Staring doe-eyed back up at me is a much younger visage of Marta, petite and leaner than her adult self, yet, still possessing that same muscular upper-body strength of a boxer. Her espresso hair locked in a side ponytail to embellish her ripped jeans and glam rock tee.
“Please, I just have a bad feeling, that’s all,” Marta pleads.
Her ability to wield authority with the subtlety of a surgical tool not nearly as honed as it will be in her maturity.
“You’re overreacting, I’ll be fine... jeez.”
There’s a familiarity to the voice connected to the eyes I peer through, something soothing, rendering my memory back to the comforts of sugary boxed cereal paired with Sunday morning cartoons. Tam… Tamera… Mom?
“But, I had this dream, where something came for you in the twilight, down that lonely road… I…”
“Stop, Mi Ma is superstitious enough without you losing your shit too.”
It’s uncomfortable being immersed in Tamera’s near end of adolescence, the venom seeping from her tone surprises even myself, a side of my mom I’d never seen in all of my years. She treats Marta so dismissively with a haughty arrogance that makes my stomach constrict into small knots. Am I like this?…arrogant? No, I know what works for me, it’s gotten me to this moment, to this point…. oh… or maybe, I step on the people who care deepest for me… a defect as hereditary as the golden tinge to my eyes. Defeated, White Fox throws up her hands, her silence speaking volumes larger than any words that could pass through her lips.
Fuck off Marta, quit trying to control every little thing. I hate this place, it’s such a dump… The Ghost River Reservation is just that, full of ghosts, long dead to the real world just beyond the painted hills. I gotta get out of this place, leave it far behind and never come back. The sting of guilt permeates to the tips of my fingers as I watch Marta gaze glaze-eyed at the convenience store counter, dejection carved into her expression. The temper that seemed so integral to my mood evaporates as instantly as it appeared. Shit, what did I do?
“Hey Marta, I’m sorry, truly. I shouldn’t have said that, I know you’re just trying to help. I’ll be extra careful… I promise.”
Marta nods, the warmth returning to her smile, “Keep it scrappy, sister!”
“You know I always do!”
•••
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Coral rays draw the western hills of the rez into shadowy indigo pinnacles against the falling summer sun, the first glowing points peering through the eastern sky. They could be planets, brighter than the average star in the growing dusk. I relish these quiet moments to myself, deaf to the world, my tape player rings with a progressive rock song about a crimson vintage racecar. If I had one wish, I would let this moment go on forever… Huh, maybe there’s something I’d miss when I finally adios from this place.
You and me both, mom… In Nico’s head everything felt disjoint, becoming absorbed in the sheer wrongness of it all, my anxiety boiling to a flashpoint. This mind tastes familiar, its flavor so similar to my own. I drift between the strands of her thoughts, consuming the essence of them, less an unwelcome presence, but instead an accepted passenger in a cognition as reflective as a mirror.
… Alone, something feels different, a foreboding tickling the tip of my spine, some people’s hair stands on end, but I feel it at the base of my neck where the bone protrudes, a sixth sense, maybe passed from the ancestors. At least, that’s what Mi Ma says. Mi Ma says a lot of weird stuff, but you kinda just flow with it. I’m extra alert, my trailer key held as a shiv, primed for whatever might await.
Pausing from the meandering stream of her mind, I listen as the pinpricks of adrenaline tap insistently at the end of her vertebrae. She pulls the headphones from her ears, evening sounds of the desert broken every once in awhile by the frenzied yelps of coyotes. She doesn’t buy it, something else is watching, a dark thing perched beyond a sense of time and space, the deep rasping breath of the anticipation of the cosmos.
Singularity
••••
“Riley?”
My eyes flitter open as we pull up to the tattered grey paint of Bobbi’s apartment. I must’ve dozed off, the stress of internalizing the death of Nana sapping my wakefulness. I try to push the past that doesn’t belong to me from my head, these strange visions of the minds of others becoming a troubling new theme in my ruminations. Sliding from the sedan, I tread softly, in the hopes Bobbi will allow me to exist in a state of quiet. In silence, we walk to the door, his hamster keys jingling in hand. Inside, Bobbie adjourns to the safety of the kitchen, opting to finish the task of scrubbing the blue corn pancake residue from the dishes left soaking in the sink… it seems an eon ago, the passage of things dilating, today could’ve easily been four months past… so full, I forgot to stop for cigarettes, fuck… yet another thing to sour my mood.
“I’m going for a walk,” I bark at Bobbi, as I leave through the sliding glass door.
A restlessness takes me, I need to get out, I need to think. Hopping over the patio rail, my boots land on the lifeless earth, too soft to be dirt, but too clumpy to be sand. Nervously, I pick a small scab on my arm until it bleeds, something a nice drag would’ve staved. For a few moments, I lean against the railing, looking out upon the mournful badlands of O’chohca, thunderheads gathering overhead.
Striding towards the mounds of sediment, their merlot hue turns to an ashen grey in the growing shadows of the cumulonimbus. My feet my guide, I don’t care where they lead, twisting between the barren wilderness, the darkness of the amassing supercell as intoxicating as it is perilous. A flash, that first crack of lightning beats against the distant box canyons, my anxiety melting from my body. Persistently that sensation, that creeping feeling of purpose, drives me forward, it isn’t until that second crash of zinging cyan electricity across the valley do I see that strange silver line, ebb and flow across the desert, beckoning me…
An open gully gives way to an enormous drainage plane, the last buildings of Vermillion long out of sight, only the clay-rich hills encircle me, that mercury thread coming to a finish abruptly in the center of the valley. Diligently I follow the waning path, until my boot touches something uneven against the desert floor. Stooping to pick it up, my fingertips find the polished edges of a blackened marble figure, visage of a badger, its turquoise eyes staring back at with me with vicious intent…
Gusts from the current of the accumulating storm yank on strands of my hair as I stare at the fine carving, drawn to it and comforted by it in an incomprehensible way. Fat raindrops splat against the parched ground as I fall to my knees and weep, tears lost to the drizzle. My time with Nana, robbed from me, some of which caused by mom’s reluctance to visit the rez, but most of it born of my responsibility. The depression taking such a stranglehold, I might as well’ve been the walking dead. Deceased to a world that went on without me, and left me abandoned in the wilderness to my own sorrow, grieving to this little stone badger. I don’t want to perish and waste away… I want to… FEEL. The chaos of the last week and a half brought me back… back to life, freed from that vise that now threatens to wither me into obscurity.
“I don’t want to fade…” I mumble to myself.
“Don’t let me fade…”
“Don’t let me fade…” listing back and forth, I sway rhythmically.
“Don’t let me fade…”
Shape, form, that prickling sensation at the base of my spine… a looming shadow gathers behind me.
“Don’t let me fade…” I pull myself to my feet as a thunderbolt crackles on the rim of the swirling tempest.
To avoid glimpsing the towering aspect, cautiously, I reach my hand back, beyond my sight. In the deepest fibers of my being, there’s a hope to find purchase on something familiar. Strands of soft fur…
“Don’t let me fade…”
“Navan’yu…”
Turning, there she stands, a revenant in the darkening storm, serenity taking her houndish features. If it weren’t for her immense black wings and unfathomable mercury eyes, I would find solace in her lofty presence.
“Don’t let me fade…” I plead… to her, maybe. Or maybe, it’s an appeal to the universe itself.
The beast’s lips curl around her petrifying array of narrow, bladed fangs. Motion, I watch as the fabric of the material world draws towards her grotesque shape.
“DON’T LET ME FADE!!!” I shout at the Great Spirit.
Blinding brightness slams into me, pouring forth from her shrieking maw. Tremors and convulsions, as I’m barraged by radiance, contorting in place, my feet strangely planted by an intangible force. Sheering agony, the feeling akin to my organs being pulled through my esophagus. I thrash against the current of light, hoping to disentangle myself from the ray, the whiplash straining the muscles in my neck and shoulders. That horrible brassy sound, piercing my eardrums, maybe even my soul. Heft, a great weight of something being dragged out of my throat, relenting as vivid illumination leaves my mouth, the beam making contact with the core of the squall with an earsplitting crack.
From the fading brilliance, particles glow, first magenta, then to crimson, onto scarlet, dancing against the rotation of the thunderstorm. Captivating, most formless, but some take brief shape to resemble fleeting moments, enough to swear that the carving in my hand, for a fraction of a second, held its counterpart in the swirling embers. Inorganic fireflies playfully coil and unspool in the updrafts, only to condense and crash back into me. Shock, I’m frozen, my hand clutches the chest over my heart, breathing deeply to evaluate the damage. As I attempt to decipher what happened, that warmth within me returns, percolating through the membranes of my lungs, burning brighter than ever before… life… what it means to be alive, all of the complex flavors of things, from elation to untenable torment. I stare at Navan’yu, her gaze unrelenting, until consumed by the downpour, vanishing within the cloudburst as if just a shadow. Nothing will ever be the same… I know that now.