The slender, eager hand caressed the rainbow-coloured bubble, slowly forming itself out of shades too bewildering to comprehend.
“It is time,” suddenly rasped the shadow behind her. “Time to cast the final spell, time to let go.”
The bubble stretched and shimmered slowly on her outstretched palm, drawing her into its swirling mazes of light, away from the darkness and secrecy of the ruins around her.
“You know what you hold so tenderly, don’t you?” the black figure mocked. “A surface so thin you can’t even begin to imagine, and beneath it… nothing. Just a handful of air is all you have.”
She shuddered, and the bubble trembled in response. Swiftly she turned back to the flames, and began to chant a song over it, a strange haunting cry with no words, only a piercing voice that invested in the bubble all the pent-up emotion, all the words there will be never be time for, all the promises that will never be made to be broken. The other one watched over her shoulder expressionlessly, silently.
The diagrams on the floor, the frescoes on the walls, even the ancient moss-clad stones themselves spoke of a ritual the ruin had long lain dreaming of, and now that the moment had finally arrived, wanted to hold on to and prolong with all the anxiety of a miscalculation.
The cry rose to a sharp keening wail, and in the smoke above the fire there arose mysterious images, like the flickers of dreams half-seen in the waking hours of the dawn. The hooded figure leaned forward now, watching eagerly. The visions twisted, solidified and finally took form. The bubble seemed to be imbued with all the sacredness of the last survivor of a long-forgotten race.
“There, ‘tis almost done… now let go.”
She crossed the glowing ashes and carried the silvery, quivering bubble to a wall, and a word from the shadow threw the entire wall open, and the night sky, in all its star-strewn magnificence, rushed in to engulf them. She held her arms aloft to the sky, and gasped at a sudden sensation of gigantic wings, brushing past her and disappearing. When she opened her eyes again, the bubble had vanished.
An anguished, terrifying howl rent the night breeze, but not from her throat.
She turned amazed, as the cloaked one sank to the ground.
“And in his leaving, shall he come back to me…” emerges a whisper of content.
