Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
her eyes she saw more cairns, a pair at each place... she had closed her eyes
when the room around her spun black and white and had found that instead. It
doesn't matter, she thought desperately. There wouldn't be any of them on Alisim
now. A name came to her from the spin of the world-altar: Sorsi, and she saw
Nisstin watching a fire, night around him, face yellow in the flickering light. The
priestess had been buried there, she realized. The world-altar. The shaping of
what Altasimic was had continued after they had gone through the portal, the
world she'd grown up in had continued.
She told them, finding herself describing the land, the air, how different each
place was and how they made her feel. The people buried there, adding Willi with
Tennin, knowing that as certainly as she did any thing else. And seeing Nisstin
again, a very old man dressed in Temple robes with black cords braided into his
long white hair, his flesh shrunken against the bones of his face. The death chant
sounded around him and smoke from the joss sticks scented the crystal air. A
young man stood beside him, slender and with the silver-blond hair of his
mother.
Cayse and Anga let her talk without interruption, waiting for something to
happen, she thought, feeling possibilities like bubbles in her chest, she had to
breath past the lumps and was out of breath, her pulse hammering in her ears.
And she couldn't stop pacing but walked holding her arms wrapped around herself
as though she needed reassurance that she was solid.
“Garm said that the Opening, the lives that were caught up into the pattern
lines, they went to shape what we actually were, not just what was planned.”
Sorsi and Tennin and Willi. She stopped walking as she lost the feeling for the
flow of what she was saying. Tennin. If the Opening was trans-reality, he would
be too. And what he'd seen at the Mound, the thing that had half killed him. Or
eaten him, she thought, shivering even as one of the lumps made it into her
throat and she thought she could cry for a man she had hated.
A man that Rit had loved. “I asked him for an ordinary life,” she said.
Possibilities were flying, she felt them like wing stokes against her face, soft
feathers and softer air. The sensation was seductive and she smiled at the
thought, then threw her head back and laughed.
When the echo died, she could hear Hic'lic. Tic noises, spastic sounds, his head
was bowed, his forearms brushing his eyes as though cleaning them as a cat
would. Except the motion was as spastic as the sound. “Wings,” she said, going to
kneel next to him, putting a hand on his thorax. He stopped his motion. “Do you
understand?” A Voice and a cook, an old Wa'tic and well traveled, he had said.
Worn eyes looked at her with the garden reflected in their facets. The missing
sections were like holes, or winks when he moved his head. The bristles between
each facet were stiff and this close, a lighter brown than his chitin, but as dusted
with the yellow of age.
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca