He had never learned to dance. Perhaps a lack of skill, perhaps a lack of opportunity. Perhaps only a lack of courage—he did not know. But he felt his lack most keenly when he watched the others. They moved without thought, without fear, without shame. He wondered what that must feel like: a body unencumbered, a mind unbridled, a life untethered. His wonder reached out to them, but his fear drew him back into himself.
Perhaps . . . he thought. But it was always an unfinished thought. Instead, he hid himself and watched the others from his secret place.
The village was filled with stories of the others, but no one claimed to believe. Those who knew best said that the others were only air and tales, only good for filling the empty spaces, for filling the hollow places in village life with imagination and possibility, for filling the dreams of the gullible with childishness and fancy. Yet all those wise and worldly minds did not risk going out in the rainfall, did not dare to visit those places where tales danced at the edge of the wild. No, for all their certainty, they did not risk encountering those things they did not believe.
And so he always came alone. The forest was dark and dripping around him, alive with the sound of rainfall. Yet he did not mind the wet chill as he crouched and peered out into the clearing. He only saw the others dance when the raindrops fell. He could hear their footfalls among the patterings of rain as they danced between the drops. They moved like a mist, furling and unfurling beneath the moonlight, their mesmeric undulations filling the empty spaces. He crept through the trees and shadows to watch—alone, but not unseen.
She was fresh as the rain, ancient as the rain, timeless as the rain. She knew all the creatures that scurried through her forests, and he was no exception. She had seen his soul-deep hunger, seen the joyless scraps life had fed him. Through the music of the rain, she could hear the rasping, rattling knell of his spirit’s hunger pangs. It was a sound that she knew too well: time after time, soul after soul. Souls that had found their way to her forests, begging for scraps of a new beginning. Souls that had struggled, choking, against a life too tightly wrapped about them. Souls still young, still fledgling, encaged in bodies of dust and bone and age. Countless souls she had gathered into herself, tended, restored. Lost souls, now found.
On these nights, she breathed those souls into the rainfall, spun them amid the falling drops. There, they found their steps, their freedom, their life. There, they would soon find him, recognize him as one of their own. They would be the ones to draw him in, step by dancing step. But she would be the one to draw him out—out of his mortal vessel and into their endless dance.
∼ Miriam H. Harrison
© Copyright Miriam H. Harrison. All Rights Reserved.
Pen of the Damned 