The Loch Langaig ConnectionJames Rowland
6000 words The car park was empty because it was dying. When Cassandra first visited it, so young that it existed only in a patchwork of fraying memories, it was just a gravel outlet. Little more than a tumour of the road, the car park was a benign growth to allow the occasional traveller to stop and marvel at the mountains shimmering beyond the mist. Years after her first visit, a guide book mentioned the view, and then a blogpost shared the stories of the bridge. Cars grew and multiplied. The road clogged. Freshly mixed asphalt was laid down for a glorious car park fit for tour buses and heavy four-wheel drives. For a decade, they came in their thousands, rain or sun, wind or midges, and each evening the bitumen’s pleads fell on empty ears. The road cracked. The car park sagged. The earth itself gave way, burying a Range Rover in one final, liberating act of revenge. The official report, which no one thought to read, blamed it on poor foundations. It concluded, an empty voice in the night, that it wasn’t an efficient use of taxpayers’ money to repair. It didn’t matter to Cassandra. She hadn’t arrived at the car park via wheels. A full ten miles away, she had laced up her boots when the weather was still fair and the world full of promise. Clouds came dark and swift on Skye, though. By the time she came down from the hills, her dark fringe stuck to her face and her bones had marinated in the rain. There was another hiker huddled under a tree, hunched over a sandwich and his thermos. She waved. He nodded. A conversation that befitted both their needs. Cassandra scrambled down the riverbank before either of them could say anything more. The river was swollen; the water muddy and brown. It was an enflamed wound, a symptom of a far greater disease that came from sky and sea. Standing on the edge, the water lapping near her toes, Cassandra tried to spy the stones that could guide her through the arch of the ancient bridge. They had all been swallowed by the river. It now reached up high along the stone wall that had once tried to tame it. Cassandra sighed and reached for her shoelaces. There was no other option. Tying her shoes together and throwing them over her shoulders, and pushing each trouser leg far higher than was safe, she stepped into the water. The water bit down hard. It was stupid. No amount of experienced tramping across the countryside could harden the skin enough. When all other choices were vanishing though, desperation did what it had to do. Teeth chattering, fists clenched, Cassandra pushed deeper into the river, the water rising too fast, soaking her trousers, reaching for her jacket. She could see no writing on the stone of the bridge. She walked under anyway, stepping out into the other side. Nothing happened. *** Her parents stood by the car, eating egg sandwiches, and consulting a faded ordnance survey map. Her brother sat on the boot. His shoes bounced off the bumper as he watched a golden eagle circling overhead. No one noticed Cassandra disappearing down to the river. She was eleven years old and prone to such adventures. Her knees were still red and angry from two days ago, where she had attempted to climb up the Old Man of Storr, veering from the track carved through by a thousand hikers who had come before. Her parents took the view that, generally speaking, she would be okay and everything else was a learning experience. The river was famished. Rocks punctured the surface with the same regularity as the teeth in her gums. She watched the water trickling downstream and couldn’t understand why anyone had felt the need to tame it. A baby could have crossed it without much difficulty. All the same, the bridge was there, ancient and cracking, its archway framing the mountains visible on the other side. Looking over her shoulder, a perfunctory check that there was no impending telling off, Cassandra did what any eleven-year-old would do. She leapt onto the first rock. The river tiptoed around her. Her smile stretched as wide as the horizon. Rock hopping was an art and Cassandra had spent years honing her craft. Her eyes scanned for dry, smooth surfaces. Occasionally, she was seduced by a particularly daunting stone that whispered tales of adventure and excitement. Several times she teetered, but never did her shoes get wet. The bridge loomed over her, sheltering her from the world. The old bricks were marked with strange carvings. It wasn’t English. She thought it could be German, except she was fairly certain that they used the same alphabet. She reached up to try and run a pale finger along the jagged, harsh almost ‘y’ that loitered above her. She couldn’t reach and Cassandra knew better than to jump. While there were many things she could hide, a pair of wet shoes and trousers were not one of them. When she looked back down, the mountains beyond the bridge had slipped away. In their place, the archway framed a rich, towering, green forest. Like a herd of elephants, sturdy oaks huddled close together, whispering of the eons usually only experienced by oceans. In their leafy hair, Cassandra swore she saw scattering yellow stars, dancing through the foliage, a rolling wave that breathed in and out. Transfixed by the movement, drawn in like a fly, she took a step forward. Her foot broke the placid surface of the river. She screamed from the cold. Someone screamed back at her. In the years that followed, Cassandra tried to convince herself it was just another child. If she didn’t think too hard, she could almost succeed. Short, fair hair, pale skin, these were all attributes that could be disregarded. Always, though, Cassandra would see those eyes which were as clear as a pristine sea, or the ears that were sharp as a carving knife. Behind those features was the weight of something far beyond the eleven years Cassandra had spent in the world. Once the not-child stopped screaming, they grinned at her. “That was fun,” they said. “Should we do it again?” Cassandra retrieved her foot from the river. Her skin burned inside her shoe. “Sorry,” she said, because while she still wondered what had happened to the mountains, and what this person was in front of her, her mother had taught her the importance of manners. “Sorry. It was the river; it’s cold. You didn’t have to scream too.” “It looked fun!” The not-child tucked a strand of plucky, nomadic hair behind their pointed ear. “I’m Brid. That’s Brid, mind you. Not Bird. The Birds don’t much like us being confused. They say it isn’t becoming.” Often adults said things to Cassandra and while she knew precisely what she wanted to say, she could never lay a finger on what they wanted to hear. This was not like that. She had no idea what she wanted to say to Brid, but she understood that she could at least offer something in return. “I’m Cassandra,” she said, sticking out her hand. Brid mimicked the gesture, their fingers not quite making contact with hers. Cassandra liked that. Handshaking was weird. Brid looked over their shoulder and pulled a face. It caused that strand of hair to flee its prison. “You really should be more careful with who you give your name to, Cassandra.” “You told me yours.” Brid rolled their eyes. “That’s different. You can’t do anything with mine.” Cassandra didn’t like the sound of that, but she disliked not understanding the world around her more. “Where are the mountains? Where did those trees come from? Why are there lights?” Brid grinned. They were just as excited at Cassandra’s questions as she was for her answers. “Do you want to find out? Just a quick visit. And keep your voice down, we don’t want anyone knowing you are here.” There were other children that wouldn’t have taken Brid’s hand. Children who sat on cars and watched hawks, or children who grew up into adults who ate egg sandwiches and looked over ordnance survey maps. Cassandra nodded, leaping from the final rock and following Brid from under the bridge. *** There were three other tents around the small loch that loitered beneath the shadows of the Quiraing, three brightly coloured strips of fabrics framed by the dark rock of the earth. The outlines of figures punctured the stillness of the water. Cassandra gave them as wide a berth as she could, looping around the loch before settling on the far side. Hoping the body of water served as an adequate barrier for social interaction, she set up her own tent and settled in for the night. The melodies of bad, nineties rock music echoed from a tinny, Bluetooth speaker. Cassandra willed the northern wind to howl in response. Nature had other plans. It was still. As she set up her gas stove, pouring boiling water over cheap, bitter instant coffee and working through a bag of ready meal pasta, she could hear snatches of idle conversation. Words about floods, fires, heatwaves, and food shortages reached her as she pulled a headband torch on in the fading light. Measuring time via the pages of her book, Cassandra only unzipped her tent once she was properly ensconced in the final days of the pagans, chased to the corners of Europe. Folding a corner of her page, she left it on her sleeping bag and stepped out into the night. The far side of the loch had fallen silent. The stars shone above her like the lights of a thousand cars to an anxious hedgehog waiting in the berms. The moon provided little guidance, and she kept her torch on as she turned toward the towering walls of the Quiraing. They were as impassable as the borders of a map. Night stole away familiarity and only her torch guided her. The cosmos did not offer one finger in assistance. The last time she had been here, when she was studying law badly and running through relationships even worse, Cassandra had sought only solitude. She hadn’t changed. The island had. Now, no matter where she turned, there was always some traveller, some hiker, but when she was twenty, Skye offered endless opportunities. Wherever books suggested paths, where customs dictated staying true, she turned and she diverged. In those days, she wondered if anyone even knew the cave existed. It took several hours of blind wandering to find the mouth of it again. Each step pushed away the Bluetooth speakers and the pained conversation. Cassandra’s breathing relaxed. Then, she stood at the mouth of the cave, and she screamed, the night swallowing more of it than the darkness. There was a blue plastic bag at the entrance. It was tied and knotted, clearly containing the remains of someone’s lunch. Heart pounding, her arms sinking into a deep cold, she pushed into the cave with her torch and turned to the walls. Where once there had been esoteric markings, some ideal of language that always danced just out of reach, there were now endless names: Kate, Pierre, Mohammed, Francesca, Arjun, Rawiri, John. The whole of humanity had settled into the cave, pushing out whatever existed before. “Brid?” she called out. It had been a long journey to realise it was the only name she cared about. No one replied. *** Cassandra had her doubts that the sea was endless, but that didn’t deter Brid from spending a week trying to convince her otherwise. Adolescent and early adulthood had shorn and chiselled away much of her innocence, and while Cassandra was willing to accept this place operated with fewer rules than her own world, nothing was infinite. Everything had an end, even if it was the ocean of a strange otherworld that shouldn’t exist. They sat together on the pebbled beach. Their campsite was up somewhere on the cliffs. Brid had been patient for those first few days, letting Cassandra keep the cave she ventured through somewhere in sight. After a while, once memories of their lives had been exchanged and they were free to consider future adventures, it no longer felt important to do so. She wasn’t the small, scared child anymore who had been by a bridge near a starry forest. “I’m really proud of you,” Brid was saying. Sitting on the beach, loose trousers and a looser shirt, they looked more comfortable than anyone Cassandra had seen. They plucked various pebbles from the beach, inspecting them like a jeweller on the hunt for imperfections, and like any artisan, they dropped each new sample back to the ground unsatisfied. “No, truly. Travelling on your own. That’s exciting. That takes a real something, you know? I don’t think it’s even allowed here. You’ve always got to keep some servile familiar nearby. Mother doesn’t go anywhere without at least seven crows.” “You’re here alone?” Brid considered the point in the ripples between waves. “That’s different. Anyway, I don’t like my crow. I locked him in a cupboard years ago.” Cassandra recoiled, eyes widening, and Brid added in a rush, “Oh, don’t worry. That cupboard knows how to cook. Probably even sings nightly to him.” “I went to the bridge first,” Cassandra said, leaving talk of cupboards and crows for another time. Her cheeks grew warm as she revealed her potential stupidity about some unknowable rule. “It didn’t work.” “Oh, we haven’t used the bridge in years. It’s dead. Too many people now. People, people, people. It’s too much! And that’s even before we get to the river. It’s angry now. It says you lot have made the water all wrong.” Cassandra nodded as if this made sense. Watching Brid continue to weigh and measure each pebble of the beach, she felt her eyes wandering upwards to the clear, vermillion red skies. Two great sea birds were dancing above them. They had been there for days now. Caught in some elaborate dance of gravity, they spiralled and spun, their movements paired and tied, each unable to escape or embrace, each pulling closer and then apart. If she strained her ears, Cassandra was sure she heard singing. There were lyrics marinated in the salt tears of sailors who, riding the waves of an endless sea, could never make their way home. It should have made her sad. It only made her smile. “How long are you going to stay this time?” Brid said. Their hand paused as it moved toward Cassandra’s. Their clear eyes widened, ears twitching, as they scrambled down to pull from the beach a pebble as smooth as glass. They bounced it off their palm. “I don’t know. How long could I even stay anyway? I’m a foreign object. You seemed very stern last time that my visit should only be quick.” “I was an idiot then. Now I understand we’re all foreign objects,” Brid laughed. They stood up and walked to where the sea drank the corners of the world. “You could stay here forever.” Brid threw the pebble. It sailed across the waves, barely clearing the cresting white peaks, before it struck the surface of the ocean. It bounced. Ripples erupted from its wake, oscillating, dancing, tremors fanning out in all directions. The pebble bounced and bounced again. Cassandra stood up, walking to stand next to Brid. Nothing lasted forever. She reached for Brid’s hand as they watched the pebble skipping all the way to the horizon, leaving behind its trailing vibrations as it disappeared out of sight. “I’d like to stay for another month,” Cassandra said. “At least.” *** Cassandra stared at the stars and saw only the constellations that others knew. Her memories offered promises of stranger designs: the Patient Crow, the Tripled-Crowned Stag, and the Spiral Shell That Beckoned. They did not exist here; they did not exist now. She rolled over and checked the time on her phone. It was late and she wished she needed her sleeping bag. The air clung sick and sweet to her, an unwelcome lover. From her campsite, the tent unnecessary on a stifling night like this, she stared down at her destination on the horizon. The land sloped away, descending, stumbling, falling out of control until it pulled out of its dive and ended with a cliff that tumbled down to the sea. She watched that cliff until it fell away into darkness. The alarm of a dozen squawking birds woke Cassandra from her sleep. They didn’t sing sad songs, or at least she did not know how to hear those broken words. Using the nearby stream to wash her stiff body and to brush her teeth, spitting the toothpaste into the grass, Cassandra wished she had something better than water or bitter coffee to drink. Within ten minutes, her bag was packed and slung over her shoulder. She walked down the hill, legs protesting every step. For once, there were no tourists, no photographers, no ambling, smiling hikers offering pleasantries as they walked. A previous Cassandra would have been embarrassed at that silent, cutting thought. She knew better who she was now. She enjoyed the company of a distant highland cow that had wandered too far from the herd and now ruled her dominion of a peninsula of unspoiled pasture. Skye had a surplus of waterfalls. Travel writers only really needed three: the famous one, the off-the-track one, and the back-up-off-the-track one for when the track extended its grubby little hands further across the island. Cassandra supposed they would need a fourth and fifth soon enough. Her waterfall, though, wouldn’t have warranted even top ten billing. A small stream that tumbled over the edge of the cliff and onto the sands. There were probably a hundred of them across the island. Except, as a twenty-five-year-old, Cassandra had discovered the cliffs here were marked with strange characters and shapes, and the water shimmered, beckoning a particular type of soul to walk through the falls. She didn’t bother tracing a route down from the cliffs to the beach. Cassandra knew what she would find. She had only come here as a last resort. One single glance over the precipice provided confirmation. The sea hungered now. It had claimed the beach and was crawling up the cliff’s face. The waterfall now cried into the salt water and the markings had been washed away. Something tightened inside her chest and wouldn’t stop. It squeezed and it sank hard, sharp fingers into her heart. As she closed her eyes, trying to push back the panic rising from her stomach, she hurled abuse into the wind. There had to be another way. This couldn’t be how it ended. *** “I smell like a department store,” Cassandra said. The words were sharp and cold, as if she didn’t enjoy it, as if each morning she didn’t pirouette in the rich and varied fragrances. Brid was at the window. They surveyed a realm that would one day be theirs, a monarch-to-be watching from the top of the tallest tower of the largest castle. Wearing only a blanket, the pale fabric whispered sweet tales of gentle curves. There were three birds standing in the room: crow, owl, and eagle. They waited as patient as the stones of the world. They observed with round eyes for a signal to attend. Brid gave nothing. They said nothing. Growing bored, they took flight through the door and down empty hallways where echoes stretched for miles. Only once Cassandra could no longer hear the flapping of wings did Brid move from the window, grabbing the plainest of dresses left in the room. “Come,” they said, grabbing her hand. “Let’s go up to the battlements. I want to argue with the stars. They owe me.” Cassandra had grown familiar with such talk. One strange day as a child, one warm month as a lost student, and now approaching the happiest year of her adulthood, secured as anyone could be in something as uncertain as identity. Her co-workers thought she was in Nepal. They raved about her drive to explore exotic places. Cassandra had laughed most of the train ride north. If only they knew. Expecting Skye to greet her as an old friend, she instead found herself battling the island that was changing under the weight of a thousand tour buses. The bridge remained stagnant; the cave placid. Cassandra found the waterfall, though, and she knew she had found her door. They only recently had come to the castle. Days passed first with the company of philosophising trees, the concerto of rivers, and the fair hosts of leaves and flowers. They could have carried on like this for years, but the birds soon swarmed. Shrill human words poured from their sharp beaks. Brid was to return home. They ignored the messengers. More were sent. Insects bit strange letters into their arms. Pollen made them sneeze in code. Only once a river had reared up like a startled horse, drenching Cassandra in a deluge of scalding water, did Brid finally relent. Cassandra did not expect a warm welcome. She imagined cold rooms and harsh parents, raised voices and words that sliced to the bone. There was nothing of the sort. A handsome boatman had carried them to the front gate, telling embarrassing stories of Brid’s childhood adventures that Cassandra could have lived off for a month. Meeting them at the door, a dark woman with stark, cutting features made sure they were both well fed and dressed. Cassandra had never been one for princess stories, and at thirty-one, any fantasies had long since been cremated and scattered into the recesses of her mind. After two weeks of strange, otherworldly luxury, though, she was falling in love with the castle perched in the ocean-like lake. On the ramparts, Brid stood under the core of the Spiral Shell, the trail of stars leading the eye right down to them. They were saying something in a tongue Cassandra had no hope of understanding, words dark and sharp lunging up at their quarry. The last speck of pure, radiant white gold hung not fifty metres above. Cassandra dreamed of reaching up and plucking it from the sky, storing it in one of her many pockets. With metal from the ground, washed clean in the deep of the ocean, she would have the star set in a necklace of endless chains. Her desires for flights of fancies were growing stronger and thicker roots with each day spent in the castle. She now conversed regularly with the birds, even when Brid did not. “I’m to see Mother and Father tomorrow,” Brid said, still staring up at the skies. Cassandra kept one hand against the cold stone of the wall in front of them. It grounded her where nothing else could. The heft against her fingertips allowed her mind to give up images of necklaces and stars, focussing on the one question that lingered in every corner of every room, in every clause of every sentence. If Brid had been summoned home, why was no one demanding to see them. Cassandra did not know the answer or understood why the question had now shifted to something else. She took one step closer to Brid all the same, resting a hand on their shoulder. “Did you want me there too? Or should I make myself sparse?” Cassandra said. “Whatever you need.” Brid laughed. It was drained of all its usual music. It was a dusty, rough sound, a stone forgotten in a windswept desert. “You have to go, Cass. You need to leave. Now.” The poles of their relationship shifted with all the suddenness of the worst of apocalypses. Cassandra had grown used to the simple rhythm of their lives, ever since they were children walking along the edges of a forest that housed galaxies. Brid would hint for Cassandra to stay longer, and she would demure, needing to return home, to see family, to wrap herself in something she had once considered her real life. Now, just as she had found peace with what reality was, Brid demanded her departure. “I can go away from the castle,” she said, offering suggestions to Brid, even as they withdrew from her touch. “Head back to the cave maybe?” “You don’t understand, Cass. You never did,” they said, turning, wheeling, spiralling as much as any constellation, hurtling to some unseen destination. “I’m doing this wrong. I’ve been doing it wrong for my entire life.” “I didn’t know there was a right way.” Cassandra realised the world had fallen silent. No birdsong, no chorus of insects, she was certain even the imperceivable humming of the stars had retreated. “You should have never left the first time. And if you did, it should have been in tears, never to return.” Brid’s eyes were unsteady, drunk, unable to settle on anything for long, and least of all on Cassandra. “Humans do not get to enter and leave here like some merry holiday. The stories are very clear on this. We abduct. We steal. We take and take, until there’s nothing left.” Taking a step forward, because there was nothing more important in either world than her not backing away in this moment, Cassandra took Brid’s hands. She stroked their fingers. Cassandra knew the stories too. In her years of exile, she devoured the books left on dusty shelves in libraries. She understood the forgotten lore. Brid should have stolen her away and Cassandra did not care. “But you never did. You didn’t steal me. You let me leave. And that is why I’m willing to stay, Brid.” Their fingers pressed against her palm. She felt the gentle mapping of unseen roads along her hands, and then Brid pulled away. “No,” they said, meeting her eyes at last. “You can’t leave your family like this. No explanations, no goodbye. And I can’t promise you anything here. This is more than you. I have been flouting the laws of my kind for too long now. I should not still be so free. I should not shift in the tides. There is a reckoning coming, and I cannot promise that you’ll be safe. It’s over, Cassandra. You need to go. I need you to go.” All the fine foods she had eaten threatened to rise back up her throat. The last thing Cassandra wanted to do, when Brid needed her most, was to turn and walk away. No matter how comfortable she had become, though, she knew that here just as much in her world, she could not control her destiny. “Okay, then. I’ll go. And I’ll back later. The same as ever.” *** Cassandra sat in the beer garden of a stone pub, eating salt and vinegar crisps and drinking a pale ale that burned all the way down. She stared at her maps and pretended there was still some option left. A young man with too clean shoes offered a glass of wine. She turned it down as politely as one could. She accepted the pack of peanuts from a man who had been carved from the stone of the island itself, all cracks and crevices. They sat together for an hour in the sunset, talking about favourite haunts and sharing their pain at where the guidebooks had gone too far, erasing what they glorified. “What’s left then?” Cassandra said, the sun sinking into the hills. She offered the last peanut to the man and he took it with a reverent nod. “If you wanted to disappear, just vanish from everyone, where would you go?” The man’s gaze turned a little too hard. His eyes clicked into focus. Cassandra was taken with the idea that he could see memories on her face that even she didn’t know existed. Everything in her body told her to wilt like a flower and look away. It suddenly felt very important to her that she shoved that desire far away, that she had to pass whatever examination was now occurring. Only once the sun departed did the man swallow the peanut in his mouth and run his tongue along his teeth, collecting the salty residue. The laughter that followed was deep and full-bodied. “Alright, then. If you really want to know, I think you’re one who deserves it. What I would do, if I was you, is to pick a river. Any river, mind you. And I’d just walk it, lass. Inland. Guidebooks and tourists are always drawn to the sea, so you walk right away from it. I’m sure you’ll find something interesting. Eventually.” Cassandra picked her river that night. She left roads and paths, walking through grass that was too high and praying her trousers kept the ticks at bay. At sunrise and sunset, the midges rose from the river like a veil. There was at least some life in Skye that appreciated the ever-growing heat. The repellent did as best it could and Cassandra greeted the bites as a welcomed distraction from the complaints of her joints. Throughout the days, the clouds danced in their endless, never-repeating pattern, an endless display of the creativity of nature. Dark rain-bearing smoke and misty light frostings weaved around the rare moments when the sun was allowed to take centre stage, a starlet who understood the power in rarity. Cassandra drank from the river and then in the early afternoon, when the midges were at their most merciful, she would wash in it. Her supplies of preserved meats, pre-prepared pasta and bags of sweets dwindled. Her map sank deeper into her backpack. It couldn’t tell her what mountain ranges she was pushing deeper into now. On the fourth day, as the faint embers of the sun nestled into the peaks before her, Cassandra saw the circle. It was not very big. Countless hikers would have missed it before. Three stones on one side of the river, three on the other, and a stone submerged in the middle. There were no crisps packets or bottles of water pressed into the sludge of the bank. The rising sea levels had not swelled the river here yet, in the middle of the island. The markers had not all vanished beneath the water. The circle still existed, bridging this specific artery of Skye. Cassandra cried for longer than she expected and her tears christened a spot that perhaps no one had ever cried on before. As the light vanished, though, she knew she could not risk disappointment alone in the dark. She reached for her bag instead of the river, setting up her tent. She would try in the morning. In the pink gold of dawn, Cassandra rolled onto her back and stared up at the light folded into the creases of her tent. She took a deep breath. No visions had come to her, her sleep as placid as any loch. Outside, perhaps there only was an old stone circle, built by people who had long vanished, never to be remembered, never to be known. It could be as simple as that. As she considered the oppressive weight of the blanket of oblivion, the still morning was ruptured by strange, misplaced words. “Well, that’s one way to put it. An awfully rude way to put it, but then again, I shouldn’t expect any better from birds, should I?” “Squawk,” the bird replied. Cassandra didn’t free herself of her sleeping bag, but rather stumbled and fell out of it in a series of stages. She didn’t bother dressing. She leapt from her tent in just shorts and a shirt that had seen far better days. The bird, a dark, composed, magnificent bird, looked at her with a disgust best reserved for worms that insisted on burrowing deep inside the earth. It took flight, disappearing into a pinkish sky. Brid stood there saying nothing and everything, their face exploding into the broadest smile that Cassandra ever had the pleasure to see. They both took a step toward the other and then paused. Brid considered Cassandra’s appearance, stained and holey shirt, and unshaved legs, and Cassandra noticed the blood and scratches that marked Brid. There was a sword propped up against one of the stone markers behind them. Allowing herself just enough time to make sure that Brid could handle the impact—that the wounds were as superficial as wounds could be—Cassandra broke out into a run, throwing herself at her oldest friend. “Are you hurt?” What happened? Tell me you’re okay.” Words escaped her lips when they could. Brid laughed. It was the same as always, carrying all the innocence of the songs of birds that they so deeply despised. “Let’s just say there was a policy disagreement about my approach to relationships with humans and visitation rights. Oh, don’t fret. We were due a civil war anyway.” “War?” Cassandra pressed her hands into Brid’s back, making sure the skin was whole, making sure that they were real. “Don’t tell me you went to war for me?” “We both know,” they said, “that it is incredibly thrilling and exciting to have a war about you. It’s all the rage.” When there was no retort of bite, Brid added into the growing silence, “It wasn’t just you either. It was everything, Cass. My world, you’ve seen it. It’s grown too old. Stale and stolid. Think of everything it could be, everything we could allow it to be, but instead we manufactured our own chains in some search of control. I hate it. I hate it, and I love you. It’s a very simple equation.” Cassandra stiffened at the implications of those words. She thought of her summers that now came without rain, farms turning yellow and bare. Picturing the sea that crept forward each month under the cover of darkness, she saw the coast crumble and tumble into the frothy dark. The voice of a newsreader she could not place echoed in her ears, telling stories of failing governments, famine, civil unrest. Brid’s world may have manufactured chains, but here there was only a dwindling reservoir of hope that should have been carefully harvested decades ago and never was. “No.” The word was as firm as she had ever said it. “You can’t stay here. I can’t let you do that.” “Oh, yes. I’ve been told that it’s all a bit of a disaster, the crow was very clear on that,” Brid said as if they were commenting on a poorly planned lunch. “He was outraged, in fact. A bit of a poor show, really. All this time I’ve been wanting to visit, and no one ever bothered to tell me that it’s burning.” Cassandra stared into the twinkle in Brid’s eyes and understood what was hiding there. “You don’t care one bit, do you?” “Not one speck,” they replied. “And I can’t exactly go back now, can I?” “All burnt bridges?” Brid smirked. “You’d have to sift the rivers for the ashes.” Another second of eternity passed. The pink gold of dawn had given flight, dark rain clouds forming over the mountains that lurked from every side. The midges had embraced the morning, darting through the air, twisting and turning like starlings that misunderstood the scale of the world. Cassandra realised she wasn’t wearing trousers. She would regret it later. It didn’t really matter. “Well,” she said, cautious, slowly trying a suggestion on for size, “I suppose we could just stay here for a while and see where it goes.” Brid took in their surroundings for the first time. It pleased them. “I’d like that.” Cassandra took their hand and led them back into the tent. |
|
James Rowland
James Rowland is a New Zealand-based, British-born writer. When he's not moonlighting as a writer of magical, strange or futuristic stories, he works as an intellectual property lawyer. Beyond writing (fictitious or legal), he enjoys travel, photography, reading, and the most inexplicable and greatest of all the sports: cricket. You can find more of his work at: https://www.jamesrowland.net/.
|
|
Baubles From Bones © 2025
|