Part 1 "...Reflecting You"

[butterflydreaming]

Original Short Story/Original Poetry
Romance, Fantasy
PG-13 (so far) for sensuality
Part 1 (WIP)

“…Reflecting You”

 

It calls back, this bright blood,

To the time when time was new

A spell cast out, into dark dreams,

My ruby jewel, reflecting you.

 

 

 

            When my Master dreams, his body twitches, just like a small, domestic animal.  He frowns, and the expression looks petulant on his softly-lined face; his straw-colored hair, which is long, tangles in his sleep.  When he is patient with me, he allows me the time to comb those tangles out and brush his hair until it gleams like brass.  He is usually patient with me.  It may be his only virtue.

            I knew that I was being disobedient, stretched out beside his sprawled body, my face close to his face so that I could watch his expressions kaleidoscope, so I could  breathe in his exhaled breaths.  I wanted to touch him; my hands kneaded the sheets as I resisted the urge.  I wanted to dream with him, to go into the Shadow Places with him.  He took his magic from those places, bringing forth dreams as spells and power.  They were dangerous places.  I didn’t want him to go there alone.

            I came from the Shadow Places.  My Master brought me forth from a dream and gave me form to suit his needs and desires, to simply be his servant, the kind of all-purpose spirit that a sorcerer finds himself needing.  He never considered that I might have my own desires, or that I could develop my own needs.  That was an error.  I was an error.  But he could not be other than human, and I could not but forgive him.

            He always became very still just before waking, so when I saw the twitching cease and his sleeping body relax almost completely, I waited with anticipation for the slow opening of his eyes.  He blinked himself awake, staring into my face without comprehension.  Then awareness smoldered into life.

            He reached out and touched his fingertips to my bare skin.  “Jewel,” he murmured, sounding gravelly and disapproving, “you’re in my bed, again.”

            “Yes,” I answered.  I squirmed under his light touch.

            “Are you supposed to be?” he questioned, sliding closer and pulling me against him.  His voice was scolding, and his look was dark, and his actions were contradictory.  He was in all ways an embodiment of contrasts – light hair and stormcloud-dark eyes, rough hands and soft skin.  He was immensely powerful as one who used magic, and he was elegantly gentle as a man.  His moods, too, could change in a moment from midnight tempest to dawn stillness.

            I ran my thumb over the stubble of facial hair on his cheek, my unnaturally dark skin another contrast against his fair coloring, like black coral against river shell.  “No,” I answered.  I was sincerely contrite, but that did not stop me from shamelessly lipping the curve of his jaw and dragging my lips down his neck.

            “You have to stop doing this,” my Master reprimanded, the baritone of his voice hushed, the movement of his hands simultaneously beginning an encouragement to my disobedience.

            I wove my fingers into his knotted hair during the activities that followed, knowing that, later, he would not be very patient with me.  I netted in his kisses as if each one was the last that I would ever be granted; I touched my lips to his in reflection of our lips’ first meeting.

            More than guilt shaped his face when we were done.  There was anger there also, both at me and at himself for what he perceived as a weakness.  I quietly removed myself from his bed.  It took only a few moments to lay out his clothes, and then I left the room to draw his bath.

 

Fishnet fine, and rope net strong,

A dream that deeply dives for pearl

Into the Shadow, places deep

Where veiling mists and currents swirl

 

            A melancholy came over me as I tested the heat of the water.  The amber-scented bath exhaled a haze of dense mist, and the currents passed between my fingers like the morning’s stolen caresses.   Perhaps I was homesick.  Perhaps I was lovesick.  But when I heard his naked feet stepping across the bath room’s stone floor, the cloud of my melancholy drifted onward, and I filled with light.

            “You’ll need a shave,” I stated, rising from the edge of the bath.

            He handed me a drape of airy cloth, which I wound around myself and tucked into a neatly close-fitting dress.  I could have woven a garment out of the notes that a lark was singing outside of the window, if I had wanted, but I was not particularly modest.  It was another thing for which I was often scolded.

            “Perhaps I should grow a beard,” he answered me with a sigh.  He slipped into the steaming water without splashing.

            “If it pleases you,” I replied.  “But I thought you complained about the itching.”

            He rubbed his chin and emitted a non-commital grunt.  But, after all, he let me attend him.  I climbed into the deep bath still clothed, and with movements of my blade practiced and quick, denuded his face of the new growth of hair.  I took advantage of the excuse to test my thoroughness and cradled his face in my hands.  We found ourselves looking into each other’s eyes.

            He blinked very slowly; his lashes were lightly dewed with steam.  “This can’t go on,” he said, after some time had passed.

            “Why not?” I asked in answer.

            His answering sigh was a zephyr in the damp air.  “Because it makes me miserable,” he said.

 

The fall of sleep, the plunge of dream

Wherein this magic’s prize is sought

And carried up the troubled path

Into my world, your essence caught

 

            I let my hands fall from his face.  “What do you do,” I asked quietly, “when a dream plagues you?”

            “I wake,” he answered, his words carefully chosen.

            “And if the dream stays with you?” I continued.  “If it returns when, again, you sleep?”

            I was no longer looking at him; I could not see his expression.  Yet when he answered, I heard the apology in his voice.  “Then,” he said, “I begin another dream.”

            “Then,” I answered in turn, moving away from him, “dream another dream, and I will leave.”

            I had given no thought to my words, but once they were spoken, I recognized how long they had been in my thoughts.  I wanted his happiness more than my own, or, at the very lease, I could not bear to cause him misery.

            “You will need another servant,” I continued.  My sodden dress squelched against the stone as I lifted myself out of the water.  “Once you are attended, I will go from you.”  As much as I wanted to turn back to him, I knew that my hastily-fashioned resolve would disappear if I did.  It was already beginning to ebb.  I hurried from the room with long strides.

            In the hallway, I peeled the wet cloth from my body and banished it into tendrils of shadow; they fled into the natural shadows of the house, away from me, away from the growing whirlpool of my sorrow.  Beginning to run over the smooth boards beneath my feet, I changed my form mid-stride to hurry my flight.  My wings snapped out around me, barely contained in the space of the corridor; I headed for a room with a balcony, and open air.

. . .