Rift between Worlds

Rift between Worlds

Who are you? I woke up with the question on my lips. I touched them and they tingled like some half-forgotten dream that I longed to remember. I stood up, sheets spilling onto the floor behind me as I crossed the room. I could still smell her in the air. She smelt like wildflowers and sunshine. Like everything that was good and beautiful. I pulled away the canvas that covered a charcoal drawing that I had been working on for months.

It wasn’t right.

I had drawn hundreds of sketches, dozens of oil paintings of the landscapes she whispered in my ear as I slept. Her voice was a melody that depicted a landscape so vivid that I could see it in my mind. I knew it wasn’t real. It just a dream that haunted me.

I longed to touch him. My heart ached for it. My arm reached out and he spun around suddenly. I cried aloud as he phased right through me.

I drew my hands over my mouth to stifle the sob that built in my chest.

Ezra.

It was my fault. I tormented him, I sang to him in his sleep and in the morning he painted beautiful portraits of places long since devoured by greed in his world. My hand dropped to the heartstone around my neck. I longed to be free of it, but it not my fate. My gossamer wings sagged slightly behind me as I watched him walk to the small kitchen in his studio apartment and make himself a cup of coffee.

I drank my coffee and ran my fingers through unruly hair. She had plagued me for months now. This voice like nothing I’d heard before. I had considered going to the doctor, but…maybe I was crazy after all. Part of me liked the madness, part of me liked to listen to her stories of a time before humans tamed the wild places of this world. A place like none that existed now, full of magic.

I shook my head to clear it.

Sid, my agent was coming today to look at the new collection. She wouldn’t like to hear me talking about fairy tales.

I sat on the bed staring into the portrait he had been trying to paint of me. He had done my hair in ringlets of flowing gray, the charcoal as light as he could get it without there being nothing there at all. He had put me in a dress and had even the inclination to place the barest hint of wings on my back. Where he had stopped was my face, in the center of the paper was nothing, just a hole where I should have been.

Sid knocked sharply and when I opened the door she brushed past me at walked straight over to the pile of canvases I had stacked beside my bed.

“Hey Sid, how are you? How it’s been?”

Sid threw me a withering look, “I have been after you for months Ezra Blaise and you have sent me nothing, not even a sketch. Then all of a sudden you call and say that you have something to show me? This had better not be a waste of my time.”

Sid was…abrasive, but you learned to love her. She was damned good agent and perhaps the only reason I was living in an apartment and not doing the whole starving artist thing.

“Trust me Sid, you are going to love this new collection. I’m calling it the Rift between Worlds.”

Sid snorted, but didn’t say anything as I reached into the pile and pulled out a landscape for her to inspect.

I watched her expression turn from hardened indifference to something that might have been an actual smile. With Sid it was hard to tell.

“The Ford of Time.” I intoned with Ezra as he showed his agent the landscape painting. That had been the day this had started. The day we donned our heartstones and faded away from the humans. My toes barely skimmed the floor as I flapped my wings closer. My grandfather had been there. I remembered how my mother had pointed him out to me. How she had told me that today was the day we would finally be free.

“So you’re telling me that this painting is some sort of tribute to a race of fairy people who became invisible to save their race from humans?” Sid was skeptical, I could tell, but she was also enamored by the landscape and the way the fairy people with their half translucent wings stood on the side of a river to cast away the lives they had before and start something new.

I pulled out another canvas for Sid and she actually gasped. “Mother’s lament.”

My mother had been a proud fairy. She liked to believe that we would not stay hidden forever, that the humans would come to their senses eventually and the natural world could be restored. In the painting Ezra showed Sid my mother was on her knees weeping as she watched helplessly while the grove of trees she had planted and tended as a child were cut down and hauled away on trucks belching smoke into the sky.

“What about this one?” Sid asked jabbing out a lacquered nail in the direction of a faceless girl. My brow furrowed.

“That one’s not finished.”

Sid laughed, “I can see that Ezra. Who wants a girl without a face?”

I forced my grimace to be a smile, “I know, I guess I just can’t picture it right. Every time I try to see her face it’s like I’ve forgotten how to draw.”

Sid shrugged, “Artist problems I suppose. How about this, I’ll talk to Manny on Yarrow Street and get you set up with an opening for this collection. If you finish this one before that I’m sure it will be a show stopper. Good job Ezra.”

I offered her a half-hearted smile and she patted my arm, “I know you can do it. I’m sure her face is locked away somewhere up there.” she jerked her chin towards my head and I nodded slowly.

I watched him sleep that night. A few months ago I had come here in malice. It had been these apartments that had been built on the grounds of my mother’s orchard. I had come like a specter to hurt the humans here like they had hurt my mother. I had come to scream at them and to sing nightmares into their sleeping brains, but then I had met Ezra. He talked in his sleep, he commanded me to stay. I could not ignore a command from the master of a house I had been invading. I had become trapped, by a man who did not know he had a prisoner. At first I sang him only nightmares in an effort to get him to cry out my release, but he had started drawing instead. I had grown greedy, I wanted to see the places of my youth again. I wanted Ezra to see them too.

Now he wanted to know me. He wanted to see my face. That was the one thing I never described for him.

“I release you.” Ezra said suddenly and I jerked around to see him sleeping peacefully. I felt the bond lift all at once like a weight had been taken off my wings. I knew I should flee at once in case he’d sleep drunk mind changed suddenly, but I couldn’t bring myself to move as I stared at the faceless painting in front of me.

I stood up and crossed to the canvas. I picked up a piece of charcoal and held it tightly. I began to draw.

I woke up feeling empty and I knew she was gone. I rubbed my chest absently as I sat up and stretched my arms over my head listing to my shoulder pop. I stood up. The drop cloth was back over the faceless girl. My hand trembled as I reached for it.

It fell to the floor and I stumbled back.

A lovely, but sad face had been rendered into the opening. “Feather.”

Her name had been Feather.