Of Guides and Glittering Flames

“I have something vitally important to tell you,” Eshin whispered in his usual dreams-and-glitter voice.

It was nighttime, and we were lying in the meadow that stretched out listlessly beneath the rose garden. The grasslands, and the woods beyond them were filled with sound: owls and cicadas and nightingales, their voices blending into one another beneath a shifting canopy of stars and the crackling rasp of our campfire that painted everything drawn near it in the sunset hues of autumn. Beyond, the grasses and the treetops, the flowers and the distant mountains, were all cast in silvered moonlight: ghost-like shapes drawn in chalk against the night.

I shifted, my head rested in his lap and my eyes resting on the fire. I turned until I was looking up at him and could reach out with an amber hand to twist the locks of his fire-golden hair.

“What is it?” I asked, although my voice felt loud and clumsy in the bonfire-tempered hush.

The flames danced apprehensively against his eyes. He took my hand in his, and the warmth of his skin reminded me of the chill held in the sharp, night air. I shivered, and he pulled me closer to him, drawing the frail, cobweb blanket up about my shoulders.

“I need to tell you,” he said again. “That everything will be all right.”

I felt, for a moment, as though he had struck the delicate keys of my soul with his elegant hands, and now my whole world reverberated with the shock of it. I looked away, gazing back into the fire, looking at anything but him. I tried to find my most convincing disaffected voice.

“Will it?”

My tone quivered. I couldn’t stop it. Once again, my voice had conspired to betray me.

Eshin gave me his most sympathetic smile and rubbed my back as though to warm me.

“I know that everything inside you is frightened and confused, my Rosalie,” he told me with compassion. “You forget, I see it because I am you, and it is because you are me that you will listen when I tell you this: With time the tempest caught inside of you will fade into a gentle rain, and not long after that everything you see, and hear, and feel, and count on will soon soften and make sense to you. They will comfort you instead of horrifying you, and the World Between will soon resolve itself into a harmony of colour and of light. Do you trust me, Rosalie?”

I swallowed hard and gazed into the fire, still far too human to dismiss such silly thoughts and feelings as the ones that ravaged at the corners of my desperately bewildered mind. Eshin caught up my hand in his, and urged again:

“Do you trust me, Rosalie?”

I nodded, and in that instant all of Eshin’s previous intensity broke like a wave that’s run ashore. He smiled, and lay back casually into the grass.

“Then everything,” he said so carelessly. “Will be all right.”