#there's no time to look on; the affected dignity of its speech When it passed through the wheel of A herd) of balloons with their vacuum to | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mygalfriday · 5 years

Text

All’s well that ends well to end up with you

{ao3}

The sun is just beginning to peek over the London skyline and creep its soft pink rays across the floor when Aziraphale slips from Crowley’s bed. Knowing how much the Crowley likes to sleep and how utterly unbearable he can be when woken before he’s ready, Aziraphale navigates the bedroom as quietly as possible.

Quite uncharacteristically, his clothes are scattered across the floor without much care. There had simply been no convincing Crowley to let him fold them properly and put them away. To be fair, Aziraphale hadn’t really tried very hard to convince him. Such as task would have involved far less kissing as they stumbled toward the bed and…well. Aziraphale quite likes kissing. Especially when it includes Crowley.

Unwilling to endure the petulance of a sleep-deprived demon, Aziraphale decides not to forage for his things and instead scoops up the nearest article of clothing - which happens to be Crowley’s dressing gown draped over an armchair in the corner. He slips it on and ties it at the waist. It fits a little too snug but a small smile tugs at his mouth at the intimacy of wearing something that belongs to Crowley. He rubs a fingertip over the black silk sleeve and casts one last fond glance over his shoulder.

Crowley sleeps sprawled on his stomach, one arm outstretched as though reaching for Aziraphale in his sleep. His lips part slightly as he breathes, his cheek pressed into the pillow. His freckled shoulders are bare and the sheet has bunched around his narrow hips. There are red marks along his exposed throat, lasting evidence of Aziraphale’s mouth. All the worry lines and prickly defenses have disappeared from his face. Crowley looks as carefree as he had the day Aziraphale had met him in the Garden, as though one night has erased six thousand years. He looks, Aziraphale muses, like a painting. The rising sun setting his auburn hair aglow and tinging all his lovely bare skin a warm shade of pink.

His heart full of wonder that such a creature would want him, would love him as fiercely as Crowley does, Aziraphale turns away with a secret, besotted smile and slips silently from the room. The kitchen is his first stop. They’d had quite a meal at the Ritz last night, celebrating their newfound freedom from the pressures of Heaven and Hell, but after what they’d got up to after their meal, Aziraphale feels peckish again. A cup of tea and a few of those biscuits Crowley keeps around for him will do nicely.

He has been to Crowley’s flat before, of course, but he never stayed long and certainly never overnight. It hadn’t felt safe. To be quite honest, Aziraphale hasn’t felt truly safe since the Arrangement began. He’d always been convinced discovery was right around the corner. Some nights he’d simply paced his shop and wrung his hands, wondering how he would protect Crowley when the time came. And now here he is, roaming barefoot throughout Crowley’s flat with a cup of warm tea cradled in his hands. The irony of feeling safe inside the home of Hell’s best demon is not lost on him but Crowley has never been a threat to Aziraphale. Even in the Garden, he’d known that somehow.

His aimless exploration of Crowley’s flat eventually leads him into the atrium. He’s only ever seen Crowley’s plants in passing before and he breathes out an excited hum as he steps inside, surrounded by vibrant green plants of nearly every variety. There are Chinese evergreens and English ivy, and even Saint Helena Heliotrope - which he’s quite sure has not been grown anywhere since sometime in the early 19th century.

Gently petting one brilliant leaf, he murmurs a delighted, “Hello there. Aren’t you beautiful?” The plant seems to tremble at his touch, leaning almost hungrily into his hand and the quiet praise. Aziraphale beams. “He takes such good care of you, doesn’t he?”

At this, the heliotrope droops a little. The tremor of leaves sounds like a complaint.

Aziraphale tuts. “None of that now,” he murmurs. “He’s all bark, you know. Showing affection is difficult for him so we must be very patient, mustn’t we?”

The plant straightens at this gentle admonishment, the leaves perking up a bit in reply.

With a wide smile, Aziraphale offers it another gentle pat. “Very good, you lovely thing.”

He takes another turn about the room, cooing over the succulents and giving the philodendron a bit of encouragement, before he finally wanders out and across the corridor, finding himself standing in Crowley’s office. Unlike the atrium, this room is just as stark and cold as the rest of the flat. Aziraphale briefly considers the prospect of shopping for new furniture with Crowley to make the place a bit more inviting, a bit more…them and has to shove such thoughts aside before he gets ahead of himself. It’s been one night and he’s already mentally redecorating.

Steady on, old bean.

Tossing a wistful, admiring glance at the da Vinci portrait on the far wall, Aziraphale moves further into the room and runs a hand over the back of Crowley’s chair. Really, more of a throne — his sweetheart does love to make a statement. Aziraphale pushes the chair back and settles into it, placing his teacup on the desk. Crowley doesn’t have many books but he’s rather hoping there’s something here in his office to read as a way to pass the time. Knowing Crowley, he could be asleep for days before he gets hungry enough to stumble out of bed.

Sliding open the top drawer and hoping to find a secret stash of cheap romance novels or even a wayward copy of National Geographic, Aziraphale instead blinks down at a scattering of black and white photographs of himself and Crowley. All of them have been taken at a distance and at various points throughout history, long before the humans had even invented cameras. There they are feeding the ducks at St. James Park, watching rehearsals at the Globe, and sharing an umbrella outside of Aziraphale’s favorite little patisserie in Paris.

There’s something troubling about the photos, almost voyeuristic in nature. Aziraphale frowns, stroking a fingertip over Crowley’s profile in one of them, and wonders where all of these strange photographs had come from and why Crowley had them stashed away in his desk.

Which is just how Crowley finds him moments later when he comes skidding into the room like something half-mad. The wild, panicked look in his eyes fades the second he spots Aziraphale standing behind his desk but it’s quite clear that he’d been under the impression Aziraphale had gone. Though his heart aches to reassure Crowley he doesn’t plan to go anywhere, Aziraphale only smiles, allowing Crowley the dignity of rearranging his expression into something a little less stricken.

“Good morning,” he says warmly. “Sleep well?”

Crowley only grunts, running a hand through his rumpled hair. There’s a crease on his cheek from his pillow and he still looks a bit rattled as he saunters into the room. It’s only then that Aziraphale notices he’s barely dressed, wearing only a tight pair of pants — no trousers or shirt anywhere to be seen. His long, lanky legs and bare chest are on full display. Beautiful. Aziraphale licks his lips, forcing his eyes not to wander before he realizes he doesn’t have to anymore. After last night, there are no more secrets between them.

His gaze drifts.

Catching his stare, Crowley smirks. “Morning, angel.” He pauses when he reaches the desk, scrutinizing Aziraphale’s face. Perhaps looking for permission or trying to discern if his affections are still welcome in the light of a new day. Whatever it is, he must find it in Aziraphale’s smile because to the angel’s delight, he bends to press a soft kiss to his mouth. As Aziraphale hums and savors the sweet-sleep taste of him, Crowley strokes a fingertip over the collar of the dressing gown. When they part, he murmurs, “Suits you.”

“Hardly,” Aziraphale replies, blushing. “But you made certain my own clothes were quite difficult to find.”

Crowley doesn’t look even a little bit guilty, perching lazily against the edge of the desk. In fact, he looks rather proud of himself. “Just didn’t want you going anywhere, angel.”

“Well, no chance of that, I’m afraid.” Aziraphale reaches out a hand and cups his cheek, rubbing his thumb tenderly over the snake tattoo at his temple. “You’re quite stuck with me.”

Though he looks pleased to hear it, Crowley isn’t the sort for sentimental speeches. At least not yet, anyway. Eyes warm and soft, he leans in for a kiss instead and Aziraphale has no choice but to sink into him with a sigh of quiet, giddy contentment. This belongs to him now — this intimacy, this longing finally met, this demon he has loved from afar for centuries. The thrill of it, still so new, makes him dizzy.

Crowley’s hand wanders across his shoulder, bare where the dressing gown has slipped amidst their embrace. Touching a reverent fingertip to the bite mark there, still a vivid red against the pale of Aziraphale’s skin, he asks, “All right?”

Warm all over under his attentions and the memory of exactly when Crowley had bitten him last night, Aziraphale breathes, “Oh, tip-top, darling. Perfectly perfect.”

Crowley looks only marginally less poleaxed by the endearment in the light of morning, avoiding Aziraphale’s affectionate gaze by leaning in to nose at his cheek. “Yes,” he murmurs, as though safe without eyes on him. “You are.”

Aziraphale blushes, his heart thrilling at the smallest hint of sweet nothings from Crowley. As he stares over Crowley’s shoulder and tries to hide a smile, his eyes fall on the photos still scattered on the desk. Remembering his curiosity, he says, “I was looking for something to read and I found those. Where did you get them?”

Crowley turns, following the line of his gaze. “Oh. Gabriel had them.” He rubs a hand over the back of his neck and avoids Aziraphale’s expectant stare. “I nicked them on my way out. Turns out they’ve been keeping an eye on us all along.”

“Well… I’m quite glad I wasn’t aware of that.” Aziraphale grimaces, imagining the nightmarish panic it would have induced. He probably would have agreed to run off to Alpha Centauri just to protect Crowley and who knows if poor young Adam would have had the courage to stand up to Lucifer without a couple of hands to hold. If Aziraphale had known about the existence of these pictures, the Earth might very well have been destroyed. Unsettled by this, Aziraphale turns to frown at them. “But…why take them, my dear?”

With a sniff and a careless shrug, he says, “No reason.” And then, as though sensing Aziraphale’s disappointed stare weighing heavily on him, he sighs and waves a hand he probably intends to look careless. “Oh, you know…thought I’d add them to my collection, that’s all.”

“Collection?”

Gritting his teeth — possibly to hold in something sentimental on the tip of his tongue — Crowley lifts a hand and snaps his fingers. A long, slender black box appears on the desk beside the surveillance photographs. It looks full, the lid on top askew and the mysterious contents beginning to peek out over the edges. Crowley gestures at the box wordlessly.

When Aziraphale glances at him, his cheeks are a bit more full of color than usual. The sight of Anthony J. Crowley, suave demon extraordinaire, blushing is so distracting that it takes Aziraphale a moment to register the words coming out of his mouth. “Open it.”

Hesitantly, Aziraphale reaches out a hand and lifts the lid off the box. And blinks.

Inside is a diverse conglomeration of paraphernalia — mostly photographs and all of them featuring Aziraphale, either alone or with Crowley. Aziraphale reaches out, sifting curiously through them. He moves aside a black and white polaroid of himself standing outside the bookshop sometime in the 1950s; a sepia-toned photograph of him and Crowley posing in their suits and top hats just days before their argument over the holy water; and another Crowley had taken on his mobile just a year or so ago, a closeup of Aziraphale’s face when a butterfly had landed on his nose in St. James Park, his smile wide and his eyes creased with laughter.

There are even a few miniature portraits from the days before the humans had invented cameras. Other little trinkets are nestled inside the box as well, theatre ticket stubs and wine corks from bottles they’ve shared, a few brittle envelopes with handwriting Aziraphale recognizes as his own, and a very old advertisement for the first showing of Hamlet.

Taking it all in, Aziraphale feels a lump begin to form in his throat. Crowley has been hoarding little mementos of their time together. And for quite a while by the look of things — long before the Arrangement even began. Aziraphale spots an oyster shell sitting atop a stack of photographs, thinks fleetingly of Rome, and his trembling hand gently sets it aside as he sifts through more their memories.

Standing beside him but refusing to look at either Aziraphale or the box on the desk, Crowley crosses his arms over his bare chest and frowns into the middle distance. Out of the corner of his eye, Aziraphale notices that his cheeks and the tops of his ears are still flushed. Crowley doesn’t say I love you the way others might. He may not ever say the actual words but Aziraphale hears it when he shows up at the bookshop with tickets to a new play Aziraphale mentioned wanting to see once. He hears it when Crowley orders dessert even though he barely eats any, just so Aziraphale can have a taste. He hears it when Crowley says things like little demonic miracle of my own and we can go off together. And he hears it right now, staring at their whole relationship tucked tenderly into this little box.

With an achingly fond glance at his dear one, Aziraphale plucks a shard of sea glass from Crowley’s collection. Admiring the way it catches the light, he asks, “Might I inquire when-”

“That weekend we holed up in Vladivostok and worked on our reports to Heaven and Hell together.” Crowley risks a glance at him, finds Aziraphale watching him intently, and makes a noise like he’d very much enjoy turning into a snake and slithering away. “It was the first time we’d spent more than an evening together and I…wanted something to remember it by.”

Aziraphale thinks briefly of the tattered, singed volume of Agnes Nutter’s prophecies and Crowley sitting in a pub drinking himself into a stupor. His heart tightens and swells in his chest as he whispers, “A souvenir.”

Caught, Crowley looks away again. “Yeah.”

Rubbing his thumb over the glass, smoothed and worn down by waves and time, Aziraphale asks delicately, “Weren’t you afraid all this might fall into the hands of…the wrong sort?”

Crowley shrugs. “Kept it in the safe with the holy water but…” He sighs, lifting his head and finally really looking at Aziraphale for the first time since the box made its appearance. “Yeah. All the time.”

The sea glass grows warm in Aziraphale’s palm and he curls his fingers around it, swallowing. And it feels like the glass is in his throat, cutting sharply on its way down. “But it didn’t stop you.”

With a sniff, Crowley pokes at a photograph of the two of them dressed as Brother Francis and Nanny Ashtoreth, Warlock cuddled between them and beaming at the camera. “Couldn’t bear to part with any of it.”

Aziraphale bites his lip, the deep well of tenderness within that has always been for Crowley rising up to war with the sharp disappointment he feels at his own cowardice. “You’ve been so much braver than I, my dear.”

Crowley lifts his head from inspecting the contents of the box and frowns. As if he truly doesn’t hold it against him. He really is so much better than he’ll ever believe he is. “I didn’t have anything to lose, angel. You did.”

Carefully depositing the sea glass back into the box, Aziraphale turns to Crowley and shrugs the dressing gown up over his bare shoulder. Crowley follows the movement with his eyes, looking faintly disappointed, but Aziraphale won’t be distracted. “You can’t possibly believe I was afraid of losing anything but you.”

“You-” Crowley blinks at him, mouth opening and closing soundlessly for a moment. “What?”

With a patient sigh, Aziraphale reaches for his hand. “I tried to keep my distance for you, Crowley. Not because I was afraid of Falling or earning Gabriel’s wrath. Because I feared what hell might do to you if they discovered us.” In his grasp, Crowley’s hand trembles and Aziraphale squeezes his fingers, rubbing his thumb soothingly over one of Crowley’s sharp knuckles. “It was never fear for myself that kept me from you.”

“Angel.” Crowley breathes out unsteadily, a hushed reverence in his voice that Aziraphale has only ever heard in the prayers of the devout. Until last night, at least. Crowley is nothing less than worshipful when they’re in bed together — a strange contrast to the blasphemy dripping from Aziraphale’s lips when Crowley touches him.

“I’ve always been so afraid for you,” Aziraphale confides in a whisper, his breath washing warm over Crowley’s cheek as they stand together. “Forgive me, my love, for pushing you away to keep you safe.”

Crowley squeezes his amber eyes shut, swaying forward to press their foreheads together. His slender hand wraps around the back of Aziraphale’s neck to keep him close, his fingers digging in tight like everything will slip away if he doesn’t hold on with all his might. “I really don’t deserve you.”

Keeping his eyes open — all the better to admire him with — Aziraphale smiles fondly and points out, “Says the man who risked complete annihilation just to hoard a few keepsakes in a shoe box.”

Crowley scowls, eyes blinking open to glare weakly at him.

Aziraphale keeps smiling, lifting a hand to stroke his sharp cheekbone. “I believe it’s safe to say we deserve each other, my dear. For better or worse.”

Turning to nuzzle into Aziraphale’s touch, Crowley presses a kiss to his palm and raises an eyebrow. “That sounds a bit like marriage vows, angel.”

“Does it?” Aziraphale hums thoughtfully, watching Crowley through his lashes. “Well, it has been six thousand years, after all.”

Crowley makes an incomprehensible noise in the back of his throat, lips parting wordlessly. “What - uh, what happened to going too fast?”

Tracing a fingertip over Crowley’s jawline, Aziraphale replies honestly, “I suppose I’m not afraid anymore.”

“No.” Crowley wraps an arm around his waist and as he gathers him close, Aziraphale feels a soft, careful kiss pressed to his temple. Like he’s something precious. A treasure to be tucked safely inside the box on the desk, right alongside old letters and photographs. As though he’s something Crowley doesn’t want to forget. “Neither am I.”

With a hopeful grin, Aziraphale leans back just enough to look into his eyes. “Might I take that as a yes?”

Crowley huffs out a laugh, his face softening the way it had as he’d slept - like all the stresses of Heaven and Hell have been lifted from his thin shoulders. “It’s been yes for a long time, angel,” he murmurs.

“Oh, lovely,” Aziraphale says, just before their lips meet.

As he melts against Crowley with a happy sigh, he smiles broadly into their kiss —giddy at the very idea of adopting such a human custom. Nothing thrills him more than the notion of belonging to Crowley and publicly declaring that Crowley belongs to him too. Perhaps they could even invite some friends.

Anathema and Newt would surely attend and Madame Tracy, of course. Though Crowley might balk if she insists on bringing Sergeant Shadwell. He’d been a bit tetchy about the man when Aziraphale had told him the story of how he’d ended up getting discorporated in the first place. But surely the children could attend. And Warlock, of course. It simply wouldn’t be a proper wedding without their godson.

Oh dear. Perhaps they have gone a bit native.

Well. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the humans say.

Aziraphale breaks from Crowley’s warm, devouring mouth with a gasp. “I forgot something.” At Crowley’s soft noise of protest, he smiles and assures him, “Only for a moment, darling.”

Under Crowley’s watchful gaze, Aziraphale slowly slips the ring from his pinky finger for the first time in six thousand years. His hand looks strange without it - naked and vulnerable. No matter. Aziraphale suspects he’ll have another ring to wear soon enough.

“Angel,” Crowley begins, brow furrowing. “What-”

“I believe a ring is customarily presented along with the proposal.”

He takes Crowley’s hand, waiting patiently for approval. Crowley swallows audibly, his eyes wide. His hand trembles in Aziraphale’s reassuring grasp. After a long moment spent staring at the ring and then another moment studying Aziraphale, he finally clenches his jaw. And then he nods, once.

Pleased, Aziraphale slides the ring onto his finger.

And it fits.

The angel wings wrap snugly around Crowley’s ring finger and somehow, impossibly, the ring looks right there. As though it had never really been Aziraphale’s ring at all. It had always belonged to Crowley all this time and Aziraphale had just been keeping it safe until the proper moment. It’s a keepsake Aziraphale is only too happy to part with. “Look at that,” he whispers, smiling. “It suits you.”

Crowley stares down at his hand, at the ring on his finger, and blinks again. His throat works as he tries to speak but for a long moment, he manages nothing but a wordless noise of bewilderment. “Right.” He clears his throat, still staring at the ring. His voice comes out hoarse and unsteady as he asks with a drawl, “So… how do humans usually celebrate an engagement?”

Properly enamored with the sight of Crowley wearing his ring, Aziraphale beams. “Oh, with crepes, I should think.”

Crowley laughs, startled and fond and genuine. “Crepes,” his intended promises, his eyes warm and mischievous. “After we celebrate my way.”

“Your wa - oh.” Aziraphale yelps as Crowley grasps him by the sleeve of his dressing gown and tugs him emphatically in the direction of the bedroom. His new ring glints in the morning light, bright against the black of Aziraphale’s borrowed robe. Stifling a chuckle, he stumbles after him and agrees, “Yes, dearest. Definitely yours first.”

And as they tumble back into bed together, entwined and grinning, the rest of eternity promises to be very good indeed.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #aziraphale #crowley #gofic #my fic

416 notes · View notes

officialsatoko · 4 years

Text

SATOKO CH. 29 Deleted Scenes: Satoko yells at Ibiki

I wrote a version where Satoko does a loud monologue à la Naruto but ended up deleting it because it didn’t mesh with the change in tone throughout the chapter, and also character-wise it just didn’t fit. I’m really fond of the writing though so I still wanted to share :D !!

---

I burned holes into Sakura's back, hoping that somehow she'd feel my desperation and raise her hand; that somehow she'd get the message that she was my last and final hope.

Please, Sakura…!

Other genin in the room started raising their hands. Their numbers were called out and their teammates were disqualified along with them. Our numbers thinned one by one and with each team that left, the air grew thicker.

It's okay Sakura, we won't be mad…!

Her shoulders trembled. I sucked in a deep breath, watching with unblinking eyes as she slowly raised her hand.

Just hurry up and--!

She tucked her hair behind her ears and sat up proud, shoulders squared and chin up high. Her tremors were gone.

"DAMN IT!"

All eyes turned to me in an instant. I slapped my hands over my mouth, cheeks burning and ears thrumming.

Oh, fuck me STRAIGHT to hell.

There was no way I could pretend that didn't just happen. My voice was still ringing in the room and there wasn't a single person alive who wasn't wondering what my outburst was about.

Quit. Just quit. Just quit and walk right out and don't look back just QUIT--

I put an abrupt stop to my thoughts, however tempting they were. It would've been bad enough if I'd quit at all, but after an outburst like that? If Sasuke and Sakura were likely to disown me forever just for quitting at all, they absolutely would if I quit while embarrassing the shit out of them.

I had no choice but to press forward, lest I face the wrath of their combined forces. Which meant that I had to do the last thing I ever wanted to do under such circumstances.

I had to give a public speech.

But if I was going to have to do it, then I'd might as well fucking own it.

I shot up to my feet and pointed furiously at Ibiki's poker face.

"There's no way in hell I'm rejecting your stupid question!" I yelled, fueled solely by the adrenaline burning in my veins. "You have no idea what it took for us to get here! Our sensei beat the shit out of us! I had to wrestle a two-hundred-pound dog!"

Sasuke looked up at the ceiling and sighed. Sakura's mouth hung open, mortified.

Listen, I see your souls ascending up into the heavens, and I also don't want me to be doing what I’m doing.

There was no backing up on this freeway, though.

"We worked way too god damn hard for this to just give up now!" I continued with great ferocity, throwing my arm out for emphasis. "If we have to go through all that bullshit one more time-- fuck, I would literally rather run five hundred laps around the village than chase another god damn ninken down the street!"

I slammed my hand onto the table and looked at Ibiki head on.

"You hear me?! Literally nothing can be harder that what it took for us to just to even be here. NOTHING."

I sat down loudly, arms crossed and everything.

What's the point of trying to pass if my teammates are gonna hate me for this anyway?

My heart was pounding so loud I could barely hear what Ibiki had to say in response.

"I'll ask you one last time," he said, keeping his eyes firmly locked on me. "This is a decision that could affect the rest of your life. Quit now while you still have the chance."

I inhaled deeply and leaned forward in my seat, refusing to be the first to look away.

"I meant what I god damn said."

A hushed silence fell over the room but the tension had been washed out along with every shred of dignity I had left. My face was burning and my heart was pounding its way out of my chest, but I refused to break first.

After what felt like eternity, Ibiki finally ended our staring contest to communicate silently with the proctors. When he looked back to address the room as a whole, he was smiling wide.

"In that case, everyone who's still here… you've just passed the first exam!"

While the other genin were confused at Ibiki's sudden change in demeanour, I slumped back into my seat and sighed a breath of relief the size of my headache.

Straight to hell.

#satoko bts #satoko deleted scenes #post

27 notes · View notes

moonguilt · 5 years

Text

Voltron MMORPG AU: Chapter 2

alright here’s the next segment of overly elaborate headcanons. we’re finally getting some real klance lads

side note for people who dont RP: double parentheses ((like this)) indicate that the real person, i.e. lance or keith, is the one speaking. proper grammar is used for when they are making their original characters speak.

Chapter 1 | Chapter 3

finally, f i n a l l y, they are all playing voltron together

coran and pidge are still caught up in raiding and player-versus-player, but coran makes time on the side occasionally to act as dungeon master for the others, when they want to go on a particularly epic quest

meanwhile pidge adamantly proclaims they are all dorks, and when she attends their roleplaying sessions in-game, she insists that she is “only here to keep the high level elite creatures in this zone from killing you all while you're singing campfire songs like a bunch of camp rock dweebs”

when she eventually starts joining in on the roleplay here and there, under the guise of doing it “ironically,” no one comments on it

matt kind of gradually integrates himself alongside shiro. he shares absolutely none of pidge's qualms with the concept of RP, and in fact played a lot of dungeons & dragons as a teenager, so he manages to acclimate fairly easily

allura and keith both have a hard time getting into the idea of roleplaying. it strikes them as silly and they have trouble letting go of their dignity a little. lance whinges about them both having “major party pooper sticks up your butts come ONNN” but all the while, he is gently steering them in the right direction and subtly teaching them how to loosen up a little and immerse themselves in the fantasy world he has grown to love

sometimes they decide to hang out in heavily populated in-game cities together, where they can people-watch and build casual camaraderie among their characters. and perhaps interact with the occasional random player brave enough to approach their group's table in the tavern

“its not really OUR table” shiro points out one day when they walk into the tavern to find their usual seats occupied by other players

“YES IT IS” -keith and lance, in unison, approximately 29 seconds before their first RP bar fight

they decide eventually to create their own adventurer's guild so that they can easily connect with each other when they are online

shiro wants to name the guild “the paladins of voltron,” but pretty much everyone protests on the grounds of “shiro, you're the ONLY paladin in this guild”

the only exception is hunk, of course, who assures shiro that it is a very cool name, but perhaps they could just edit it slightly? maybe change “paladins” to something more class-neutral? like, “lions” perhaps?

yeah. yeah, “the lions of voltron” seems to work with everyone. whether that's because it's a good name, or because hunk is the one suggesting it, no one could tell you

as they all grow more comfortable with RP, their characters start developing bonds with each other

allura and matt, the guild's healers, hit it off swimmingly. they enjoy making their characters dramatic and exasperated with everything the others do. matt jokingly gives his character an enormous, embarrassing crush on allura's character just for the laughs

keith and pidge's characters both have dark, edgy pasts. pidge made hers extra dark because she wanted be funny, but keith seems to really enjoy the way their characters can bond over their shared trauma. she suspects there is an underlying reason for that and decides to never reveal that she intended for it to be a joke

the most interesting of all is, of course, the relationship between keith and lance's characters

everyone expects them to be rivals, to bicker constantly, etc

partially as a prank and partially because they think it would be fun to RP, they decide behind-the-scenes to make their characters the best of friends

“Oh, Keith, you are so strong and heroic!”

“I would be weak if not for the strength you gave me, my one true friend in this cold, dark world...”

“I am so glad I have a great warrior like you by my side...”

“You are my rock.”

“... even if you have a weird name.”

“((for the last time get off my case about the name, lance))”

“((literally never gonna happen. die mad))”

it starts to affect their relationship in the real world too, slowly, at first in the form of jokingly mimicking their characters' dynamic:

“oh, mighty keith, i require the salt on the other end of the table. would you please bless me with your aid”

“but of course, noble lance, i hereby entrust you with my sacred salt and place it in your skillful hands”

“illustrious keith?”

“yes, immaculate lance?”

“thats gay”

“fuck you”

R O M A N T I C T E N S I O N in the R E A L W O R L D

nobody fucking addresses it but everybody knows it's there. way worse than it ever was before somehow, which is saying something honestly. and it only gets worse as the days and weeks pass

“if I may say, good sir keith, you look particularly dashing today in this black ensemble of yours”

“why thank you dearest friend lance, i chose this specially to please you”

“then you may certainly consider yourself successful in this endeavour”

are they complimenting each other as a joke??? why do their eyes go half-lidded and their lips quirk lopsidedly when they shower each other in praise?? nobody knows

thats a lie. everybody fucking knows

no i never learned how to format tumblr posts. you will have to deal with my absolute trash aesthetic sorry

tune in next (and final) time for the most elaborate ridiculous speech i have ever written

#hope yall enjoyed #be sure to hit those like and subscribe buttons #see yall next time on:#'finn inserts her faves into an extensive au that only she can understand and subsequently gets no notes because the setting is too niche'#also known as:#'finn spends 10 hours on an au and 3 people find it moderately entertaining'#or simply:#'i am a dumb gay baby with easily injured pride'#rly tho if u read it THANK YOU i love you bye #and if u reblog it im going to personally come to ur house and kiss u #klance #vld #headcanon #video game au #this au needs a name somebody give me suggestions im bad at names #moonguilt content

73 notes · View notes

13thgenfilm · 4 years

Text

Team Building: On Wanda Bershen and Film Safety Nets

Written by 13th Gen’s Founder and CEO Marc Smolowitz, this article originally appeared in Filmmaker Magazine in March 2020.

On September 28th, 2019, Wanda Bershen died quietly, alone and under fairly tragic circumstances, after being rushed to the hospital from a rehabilitation facility on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 75 years old, and very few people were aware of her passing. This piece is one part obituary for Wanda—a remarkable woman who certainly deserves to be remembered lovingly in Filmmaker—and one part urgent call-to-action for our industry to have a long-overdue discussion about a difficult and troubling topic: the lack of safety nets, resiliency and end-of-life supports in place for aging independent film professionals.

The vast majority of you reading this did not know Wanda, but you may know someone like her—she could very well stand in as an everywoman whose story is far too common, one of those stalwart and passionate behind-the-scenes indie film culture workers who loved cinema and wore a compelling mix of hats: writer, curator, teacher, festival director, publicist, producer’s representative, film booker, television programmer and distributor. Her boutique company, Red Diaper Productions, made a huge yet hardly known impact on an incredible list of films and filmmakers around the world for more than 25 years. These efforts included focusing much of her attention and efforts on supporting women directors and organizing a powerful slate of word cinema touring packages, which introduced US audiences to contemporary cinema from Iceland, the Netherlands and various countries across Eastern Europe. Decidedly proud and fiercely independent, she did all of this entirely on her own as a freelancer, independent contractor and consultant. For most of her career, she managed to be reasonably vital even without the benefit of strong institutions backing her up.

There are countless people like Wanda who march through film careers, working hard without much recognition and likely without the means to plan—in any real or comprehensive way—for their long-term security and retirement. Wanda was also unmarried, without children or close family members nearby. Her community of closest friends and colleagues was a global one. While this is something to treasure when you’re well enough to travel to Rotterdam, Berlin and Karlovy Vary each year (the latter, in Czech Republic, was her favorite festival to attend), what happens when you stop traveling for work because it becomes impossible financially—not to mention physically dangerous? More important, what happens to someone older like Wanda when a new generation of leadership takes the industry reins without knowledge of her unique contributions? The sad, hard fact is that you kind of, well, disappear. This is exactly what happened to Wanda.

For many years, whenever I visited New York for business, Wanda and I would have dinner if our schedules aligned. I treasured our time together. Her wit and sense of humor were delightful, and her deep knowledge of film, especially international and genre cinemas, could put most film scholars to shame. But, in very recent years, our conversations became quite heartbreaking. She was struggling to find work that could sustain her financially. Her professional emails often went unanswered. When she tried to connect with others for networking opportunities at festivals and press screenings, she felt shunned and set aside largely because of her age and gender. The industry to which she had given her life’s work did not have space for her anymore.

Last August, I was planning a shoot in NYC, so I texted Wanda to reach out and get on her calendar. I got a message that her number was no longer valid and was immediately concerned. I sent her an email with no response. So, I did what made the most sense and went looking for her on Facebook. As I scrolled down her page, I realized there had been no posts from Wanda since March 13th. On March 20th, a post from her sister read, “Wanda Bershen was hospitalized Monday night at NYU Langone. If you are a friend of Wanda’s in NYC, please contact me…. Diagnosis is not yet determined. Wanda needs visitors and support as she goes through this. I live… too far away to be actively involved.”

It didn’t take long to uncover that she had experienced a devastating stroke and been bedridden without speech and the ability to move for the better part of five months. Her dearest friend in the city, also a film producer, had been valiantly trying to help, but if Wanda were to have any chance at survival, it would require that many more people get involved. Within days, I became part of a wonderful group of people from around the world—many of us filmmakers and film professionals who knew and adored Wanda for decades—who attempted (perhaps naively) to organize over email on Wanda’s behalf and advocate for her well-being and recovery. One of us referred to this small but mighty group as TEAM WANDA.

This sort of scenario is as dark and bleak as you might expect. In short, there were no immediate and apparent resources available to help someone in Wanda’s situation. When I managed to see Wanda in person several weeks later, it was clear very few visitors had been by. She lay in a hospital bed almost comatose yet her mind still seemed sharp, and she clearly understood the gravity and heartbreak of what was happening to her. I sat with her and kissed her forehead gently. I told her that there was a group of us around the world trying our best to help her. While I could sense her relief in hearing some encouraging news, I left her bedside that afternoon feeling helpless and hopeless. I urged the nurses on her floor to continue caring for her and to keep up her hygiene. My main concern at that point was her basic dignity. I knew in my heart that there was no way our committed worldwide cohort could move fast enough to change Wanda’s destiny. She died just 10 days later.

From my perspective, all of this is quite chilling, and the more I pondered what happened to Wanda, the more I wanted to kickstart a discussion among colleagues, so we can all work to make sure there are no more stories like this one. But, it’s not that simple. While we have a great deal of work to do on this topic as an industry, our nation seems unwilling to have an honest and forthright public conversation around the lack of meaningful policies that advance the cause of older Americans: retirement, long-term care and what it means to approach end-of-life with dignity. This is particularly concerning because we now live in a nation where people are both living and working much longer, yet we offer very little in the way of substantive help to our aging populations.

When one looks closely at specific industries, there are helpful models out there for safety net services and resilience (see roundup at right), but the independent film industry literally has nothing of our own, nor have we contemplated these discussions in any forum that I can find. By contrast, the Hollywood community, where there have always been more resources, has a great deal in place through its guilds and unions; for example, The Actors Fund of America. Even the visual arts have managed to develop funds to support artists affected by natural disasters (Craft Emergency Relief Fund, or CERF). And, of course, Visual AIDS was one of the most inspiring organizations that emerged during the worst years of the AIDS pandemic (see visualaids.org/history).

Not long after Wanda passed, I took to Facebook and posted about her story. While I certainly didn’t want to exploit Wanda’s passing, I also didn’t want her to have died without someone making a little bit of noise about the travesty of it all. What I encountered in the comments was revealing. Unsurprisingly, a great many people in our shared networks knew and adored Wanda, and there were just as many who were shocked to know she had even been so unwell. More important, there was a universal agreement when it came to one important point: We cannot let the tragedy of what happened to Wanda continue to happen to others like her who have helped build this business. To be sure, ours is a compassionate and beautifully collaborative industry with some of the most dynamic tentpole institutions around, many of which have been serving film professionals for some 50 years. We must turn to them now and insist on space for this mission-critical discussion. It will be an uneasy one to have, but we must do it for all of our own sakes.

_____

ROUNDUP OF SAFETY NET AND END OF LIFE RESOURCES:

National Coalition for Arts’ Preparedness and Emergency Response (NCAPER) ncaper.org/about

CERF+ The Artist’s Safety Net

cerfplus.org/stories-resources/how-to/

The Actors Fund

actorsfund.org/

Reimagine (End of Life)

letsreimagine.org/

Death With Dignity

deathwithdignity.org/learn/end-of-life-resources/

Speaking of Dying

speakingofdying.com/end-of-life-resources/

#film #filmmaker #film maker #film maker resources #aging #aging workforce #freelance #freelance issues #team wanda #Wanda Bershen #Marc Smolowitz #13th Gen #social safety net #film resources #film discussion

1 note · View note

believingbrook · 6 years

Text

taakitz hanahaki, 4

Kravitz takes the morning slowly.

Both he and Raven are early risers as custom, and it’s in the predawn light that Kravitz realizes his bed is empty, the couch vacant and its blankets untouched. The kitchen is cleaned from the disaster left from the party, but there’s not so much as a coffee mug on the table — Taako’s coffee is fragrant and delicious and Kravitz misses it.

Kravitz shows Raven the full-headed roses over Skype with a wry grin. It takes him fifteen minutes of constant pleading to convince her to go to work this week, and even then she takes the day off. They’re both stubborn — always have been.

Raven tries to convince him to stay home, at least for a day, but just as she did he digs in his heels and refuses to be swayed. Yes, he’s sick, and yes there’s leave for those with his condition and yes he works with Lup and Barry, but his life hasn’t ended yet and Kravitz refuses to stop until it does.

Kravitz doesn’t dare drive. On the train he passes his phone between his hands. Three times he opens the chat he and Taako share — their last messages, from yesterday, before Taako started cooking, are an aimless critique of red carpet fashion and a debate about cats versus mongeese — and three times he closes it, chest hurting.

Once he sends a message: Are you okay?

The rest of the ride passes, and he gets no response.

Lup and Barry aren’t at work, which is odd. Lup has called in sick for everything from cliff diving with Magnus to feeding a neighbor’s cat — which Kravitz knows because Taako told him — but Kravitz can count on one hand the number of times Barry has missed. The man rivals Kravitz in terms of attendance.

He suffers an attack once, that day. At this point it’s routine to smother his coughs as he strides from the room, to bend breathless over the sink. It passes, and not quickly.

He gets home in time to hug his sister goodbye, brush away her fears. She never cries — not for him, not his parents — but he sees worry clear in her eyes.

A day passes, then two. There’s no word from Taako; Raven calls him three times a day. His voice gets weaker with every call. Lup and Barry don’t show up to work.

Kravitz reads and rereads Taako’s critiques of an off-shoulder dress, then his own inane snark about mongeese, until he knows the words by heart. He calls once, twice, three times, and leaves voicemails; inane little things, fighting to keep pain from his voice. More than anything he just misses talking to Taako. On the first he can affect cheer, but by the third he has to hang up abruptly to his voice from breaking and he limits himself to texts, after that.

The texts on his end pick up over those two days: Are you there? Taako, are you all right? I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry.

I miss you.

Tuesday evening, he gets a text: Why didn’t you tell me?

Kravitz types and erases and retypes. A dozen responses unfurl in the chatbox and he deletes every one. In the cool empty dark of his living room Kravitz bites his thumb.

Finally he types, simply: Because I didn’t want to lose you, and lets the ensuing silence speak for itself.

He wakes up Wednesday morning unable to breathe.

He fumbles for his phone, hits speed dial. Raven answers immediately. He barely makes it through her name before she’s running toward her car, shouting at him to stay awake.

How strange she must look, he thinks, running out of her flat and begging the open sky to breathe.

“I couldn’t call in sick,” he rasps when Raven sprints through the door.

Her hair is falling from the neat bun in which she normally keeps it, one sleeve half-rolled up her forearm, and she laughs breathlessly at his words. He beams at the sound. He loves making his sister laugh.

“How are you?”

“Not good,” he says. Even like this, reclined in bed, his breath whines high in his throat. “It’s getting worse.”

She places a hand on his forehead, cups his throat gently. “It is.”

Raven slides atop the covers next to him, a silent crease forming between her brows. “You sounded awful,” she says. “This morning.”

“Love you too.”

“Kravitz.”

He sticks out his tongue. “People keep saying my name like that,” he mutters. “Hate it.”

She smooths his hair back from his forehead. “It’s because we’re worried about you.”

He can’t help the bitter snort that shakes out of his mouth. “Not all of you.”

“Has he called you?” Raven asks, mouth set.

Kravitz shakes his head.

“Texted?”

“Once.” He waves toward his phone and she picks it up, unlocks it. She knows his passcode, of course — T-A-C-O.

He should change it.

It takes Raven a handful of moments to read, and Kravitz lets his eyes slip closed. The click of the phone turning off sounds and Raven inhales sharply once, twice, three times, trying to work out what to say.

“It’s not been two weeks,” she says. “I know that. But I think it’s time to consider our options seriously.”

“I know.”

“Kravitz, you nearly died.”

He grins. “Know that too.”

“This isn’t — ” she breaks off, frustrated.

“Sorry,” he says. He hates breaking her composure. “I gotta joke about it, y’know? Or else...it’s a lot.”

“Kravitz, look at me.”

Kravitz obliges. She’s watching him intently, jaw clenched tight. “This has gone on long enough. It’s been three years, and he’s not even — he’s not doing you the courtesy of responding. It hurts, I know it does, but he just — he doesn’t care.”

Kravitz flinches. “He does.”

Raven pulls up the sparse chat, shows him the screen. Unnecessary; he memorized its contents three days ago. “Does he?”

Kravitz fiddles with the hem of his blanket. He wants to sit up, at least look her in the eye, but he’s stuck with a rasping breath and a chest that ignites whenever he shifts his body. “I think he does,” Kravitz says quietly. “He’s just bad at showing it. I scared him.”

“You’re dying, Kravitz.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“Because he hasn’t bothered to ask!”

“Raven, can we not — ”

“We need to talk about this.” She shuts off his phone and sets it aside. “There is no later anymore, Kravitz. It’s now or never.”

His sister doesn’t frill her speech; doesn’t indulge in metaphors. It is, quite literally, now or never. There’s a precipice of no return that his feet are dangling over and he’s toeing the edge, almost ready to fall.

He fell a long time ago.

“This isn’t just about him.”

“Those are his flowers!”

“But it’s not just that.” Kravitz reaches weakly for his hand and she takes it. Only from this close does he realize that her hands, too, are shaking. “I’ve done research, Raven. I might not just lose him. My capacity to love, Raven, I — I could lose everyone.” He swallows. “I could lose you.”

“The chances of that are small, Kravitz.”

“And they’re not ones I’m willing to take.” He holds his sister’s hand close to his heart. “Raven, you know me. You — you know me better than anyone. I’m not willing to live like that. I can’t live without love. You know that.”

“Just — ” her voice stutters and breaks and fear grips him. Gods, she might start crying. He starts to sit up, to hold her, but she pushes him back down, eyes shining but firm. “I can’t lose you. I can’t do that, Kravitz.”

“You lose me either way,” he says softly. “I’m sorry, Ray. It wouldn’t be — it wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t know anybody, I wouldn’t love anybody, and it wouldn’t — I couldn’t. I can’t.”

“Yes you can,” she whispers. She shuts her eyes, briefly, bows her head. “Yes, you can. It would be — harder, it wouldn’t be like it is now, but I would still love you, Kravitz, and I would take care of you.”

“I know,” Kravitz says. He struggles upright, bats her hands away when she tries to push him back down. He slumps against his headboard with a pained sigh. “I know you would. I never doubted that. But I don’t want to live like that. Even without — even without Taako, I couldn’t do it — not without Sloane and Hurley, Julia. Not without you.”

Later that afternoon, it happens again.

Unable to stand the monotony of his ceiling, he hobbled with Raven’s help to the couch. She dozes in an armchair, and when he starts to cough she springs up, at his side in less than a moment.

He can feel the gap in his windpipe closing, and closing, and sealing, until — there’s nothing. He cannot breathe. The roses in his throat are in full bloom, and where once there was a whistle of air threading through their petals, there is nothing.

Kravitz doesn’t fight it; he’d rather die with dignity, hands clasped with someone he loves, than make his sister watch him die in pain.

She’s calling for him, screaming — not crying, still, never his strong, brave sister — but he can’t hear her. He watches her, fighting every instinct in his body, and curves his lips into a smile. It’s okay, he wants to tell her. Don’t cry for those who have gone on. Weep for those left behind.

The world spins and Kravitz’s eyes slip closed of their own accord, and before the world goes dark he squeezes his sister’s hand.

Then he wakes up.

It’s violent and painful and he bites down on an agonized scream, and even as is he hears himself make a noise he’s never made before; his chest is burning, his head pounding so hard he can’t see and can’t hear. Can’t feel his hands at all, if they’re attached to his wrists or wrapped around his own chest in a futile attempt to knit himself back together, or still clenched around Taako’s knee or squeezing his sister’s hand —

“There we go, kiddo,” a gruff voice says above his head. As air trickles back into his lungs he becomes aware of a steadying hand on his shoulder, his sister’s fingers holding onto his own tight. Kravitz doesn’t open his eyes, not yet, but he realizes that his mouth tastes awful.

He fights, and fights, and — he can breathe.

“Merle?” he croaks.

“Got it in one, kid.” The hand on his shoulder gives him a metallic little pat, and Kravitz looks up weakly in time to see him stow a vial of something murky and foul-looking in his pocket. “Glad you’re back with us.”

“Surprised I am, to be honest,” Kravitz croaks. With one weak hand he signals Raven and she grabs a water bottle, guides it to his lips. He thanks her quietly, and she shakes her head.

“Don’t you dare,” she says. “Don’t you dare.”

“How did you do that?”

Merle drags a wooden chair from in front of the fireplace, leans back into it with a relieved sigh. “This little gem,” he says, pulling the vial and ten more like it out of his pocket. “It’s, uh, glorified weed-killer, t’be blunt. Probably tastes like shit, from what I’ve heard, but should give you a little more time.”

Kravitz breathes experimentally, and — yeah, he can breathe a little easier. Sure, the inside of his throat stings like acid, but the whistle of air through a thin throat that follows him always is gone. No, not gone — but fainter.

“Thank you.”

Merle grunts. “T’quote your sister, don’t.”

“I would anyway.”

“Yeah, I know you would.” Merle eyes him keenly. “‘s for Taako, isn’t it.”

Kravitz drops his gaze, lands on the wilted roses’ heads scattered around the couch. A pang of loss shoots through him. They’re faded and gray. He’ll need to put them in a different jar, somewhere.

“It is,” Raven says. “It’s for your boy.”

Merle looks at her, then sighs. “Yeah, he’s mine.”

“Talk to him,” Raven snaps. “Make him see sense.”

“Raven — ”

“Wish I could,” Merle says. “Love isn’t somethin’ you talk into people. Love’s somethin’ you feel. Somethin’ you nourish, and care for. You can cut it out, if you want, but that’s a dangerous line t’walk.” He adjusts his eyepatch with a sigh. “Wish I had somethin’ better for you, kid, but I can’t make my kid fall out of love any more than you can make him fall out of it.”

“Then bring him here,” Raven says. “Let him see what he’s done.”

“You’d make him do that?” Merle asks evenly. “Knowing it’s not his fault?”

“He hasn’t spoken to Kravitz since he found out.”

“Raven, please,” Kravitz pleads, laying a hand on her knee.

“No.” She takes his other hand, squeezes it, and lays it back on his chest. “He’s running from this. He doesn’t — he doesn’t get to run from this. It’s not fair to you, Kravitz.”

“It‘s not fair to him though, either,” Kravitz argues. “Not his fault. It’s only been three days and he doesn’t know.”

Merle arches an eyebrow. “He doesn’t?”

“Not like I could tell him,” Kravitz says, mustering a smile. “He isn’t picking up. Don’t think he’s reading my texts, either.” He pauses, fiddles with his thumbs. “Also, I haven’t put that in my texts. Or voicemails.”

Raven stares at him. “You didn’t?”

Kravitz shakes his head. Merle cocks a head at him. “Huh.”

“Huh?” Raven tenses. “That’s all you have, just huh?”

“That’s all I got. Well, that and this.” Merle hands her the vials. “Three drops every four hours. Should fend it off for a little while. Won’t be pretty, and it won’t be fun.” Merle stands, then considers Kravitz. “I’m gonna shoot straight, kid. It’s gonna hurt like hell.”

Kravitz shrugs. “I’ve survived so far.”

For the first time since Kravitz opened his eyes, Merle grins. “That’s what I like to hear,” he says. “Taako tells me you got a guest bedroom?”

Raven stares at him. “Yeah,” Kravitz says, and nods toward the door. “Over there. Small, though.”

“I sleep there,” Raven says, then shakes herself. “Why are you staying?”

Merle, already halfway to the door, pauses. “I’m a healer, kid,” he says. “This is what I do. ‘n sure, ‘s not good practice to operate when you got an emotional attachment, but...” he shrugs, gears whirring in his shoulder, “Like hell am I leaving.”

Raven’s face tightens. There are dark bags underneath her eyes, tension in the line of her jaw. “Thank you.”

“Don’t.” Merle nods at her, winks at Kravitz, and waddles on into his appropriated room.

Kravitz turns to her. “Where are you gonna sleep?”

“Your room,” she says. She laces their fingers together. “You shouldn’t move until you feel better.”

“Raven — ”

“No.” Her hand tightens around his. “You’re going to get better.”

He doubts it; he doesn’t tell her that. Instead, he chuckles, squeezes her hand, and says “Okay.”

#taakitz #hanahaki #taako #kravitz #taz

92 notes · View notes

awesomekatiestorymebeautifu-blog · 5 years

Text

UNRAVEL ME

I'm one of the many survivors of the human race who out of 40 million to 1.2 billion sperm cells came victorious so I'm a conqueror from birth and not by default. It was July 13th on a cold winter’s day, the sky was overcast with clouds and chilly winds were blowing when Noxolo Adams gave birth to a healthy 2.7 kg baby and that being me. She miraculously named me Johari, Swahili meaning precious and that I have value residing from within. Through Surgery is how I was delivered, that being a cesarean section as my mom had quite the difficulty when it came to vaginal delivery as it would put her or myself at great risk. Like any other normal baby, I cried as I soothe came into the world and in my mom's arms is where I found peace and layed to rest. I was welcomed by loving friends and family and of course I wouldn't know so my mom told me the story. My story. The story that began a journey of a thousand miles. A lot of good came into the family I mean a new baby was born, but like a shadow that's hiding underneath the surface was where my father's feelings and emotions about me where hiding. "Hooray congratulations wow it's a beautiful baby boy!!!" people would praise and in all that he had quite a lot to raise. He uttered loudly and passionately so, doubting that he being a man of higher status and of dignity within the community could never be so possible to bear a child like me. He muttered while he spoke and in a distinct way of character was when he clearly showed that he wants no part in my life. He packed and left. I was denied my own right of having a father. I was denied my own right to have those father and son moments, I was denied knowing and being in close contact with my biological father by my own biological father.

Growing up that gap of not having a father didn't affect me but it caught up with me in my teens. I had no older brothers to fight my battles and my father ran away so I was constantly in conflict with my mind. I was at war and I lost at every chance I got with all the questions I had which were left unanswered. My own blood ran away from his own family. I am my father's son and his blood I am but a coward I'm not.

I attended school not very far from home. Sandralls Preparatory School. A mixed school which served to service good quality education. School began at quarter to eight and ended at exactly two o'clock. My extra-curricular activity that I enjoyed doing at school was chess. Through chess I learnt that the decisions one makes have a great impact on the outlook of the rest of the game and so applies in life. In life we need to carry out proper decisions that don't hinder progress or harm in any way and that decisions you make today determine your future tomorrow. My father was more worried about people and himself and not about my mom and I. He was too self absorbed and selfish. I only have two friends, Tshepo and Joseph. I only see them at school because my mom is always trying to protect me from the world so I don't get to go out as often as I would prefer. My mom says the world is trying to hurt me. Mom would constantly tell me that in my difference I’m still the same and that no one is better than me.

I was born 16 years ago and medically I was genetically born with a condition that I inherited from past generations. I was born with unusual pigment with a lack of melanin. I have albinism. I'm not white but I might be close just with a different shade and maybe a bit pale. People at school call me snow white, white bone, snow man, but those who really know me call me Johari. Tshepo and Joseph are in the same class as I am. We take the same subjects except I do Mathematics and they do Mathematical Literacy. During most of our lunch breaks Joseph spends time with his girlfriend, Adeline. She has quite the looks I must admit, personality and she's focused in her school work but I still don't think she's good enough for my friend. Tshepo enjoys eating and chatting so while Joseph is in love land with Adeline I spend time with Tshepo chatting and eating. I think Tshepo is escaping emotional wounds that have been planted in his heart and that being the death of his twin brother who passed away 4 weeks ago in a tragic car accident because a night out partying took his life. They sneaked out of the house when their mom thought they were both sleeping but in them sneaking out Tshepang, his brother was taken to his grave. It's a pity we don't know when we'll meet the face of death so in us thinking that we are making the right decisions for ourselves is where great adversity is but that's also the beauty of life. Knowing that death exists makes us respect the lives we live now. Tshepo finds it very hard to move on as he feels greatly involved in his brothers passing and finds blame in himself. He doesn't have to talk about his pain but as his true friend I can see that it's affecting him. I think no matter how big or strong of a person you think you are or how well put together you may appeal to people, at the crocks of it we are all fighting battles inside trying to escape chains of suffering from things we can't change, those we can't forgive or from things we just can't move past. Those things hinder progress in your life if you become submissive to their heavy chains that hold you hostage as they bring immense suffering in your life so sometimes you just need to forgive, forget and move on.

Today is no different as I get ready for school. I am woken up by my alarm clock that is horrendously annoying and loud. People think that it's the alarm that wakes them up but it's honestly our holy father, our creator because if alarms truly woke us up then if we were to take them to the grave all those who have passed away would wake up. How wonderful that would be if it was possible. In the year 2005 I lost my Gogo (grandmother) who died at an old age home. I used to visit her time and time and again and I had a deep and intimate connection with her. Shouldn’t it be that the people who raised us and made us the very people we are today deserve to also be taken cared of? I don't understand why Gogo (grandmother) was taken to an old age home and maybe she was hurt and bitter inside so that might have killed her. Grandpa was in exile fighting emancipation under the white government. He travelled between countries such as Botswana, Mozambique and Tanzania as he was prohibited entry into his own country and had to escape being killed. He ended up getting shot at because some things you can't run away from and when he passed away it was decades before I was born.

As I enter and sit down to take my third period being English Home Language with Mrs Pillay, we are welcomed with devastating and horrific news with only 15 minutes into the lesson. We started off on a high with learning about the 8 parts of speech to finding out that one of our learners had been brutally murdered and had been found laying in a ditch near a river. At the very moment I knew what it all was and I took off with my school bag and I ran straight home. My mother had warned me of days like these and I heard her voice in my head say "I have to protect you, you aren't safe". In a country with so much democracy some of us have to still live in fear because of nonentities who think otherwise about who we are. I was born human too but the only difference between you and I is that medically so, I have albinism and it has been genetically inherited by me. I have the very same physical features and structures as you do which function the very same way as yours. Mentally I am in shambles and I am destroyed for people ever thinking that I was made for traditional medicine and for people ever thinking that I am of a higher power than everybody else. I ran a 5km marathon from school all the way home. My heart was beating so fast and in my mind I thought I was going to be next and like mom always reminded me, I am not safe.

In the amazing speed of a cheetah I swiftly arrived home. The door was locked and I bashed the door frantically hailing “mom open up”!. Mom quickly opened the door and asked what was wrong and if anybody had in any way touched me. I told mom that no one did anything to me but it is who they did it to and for awfully unlawful reasons. I explained that a fellow leaner who has the same condition as myself had been brutally murdered. She was slaughtered, butchered by selfless people who have misconceptions and wrong ideas about who and what we are.

All these years growing up mom kept reminding me that no one is better than me. That I will be looked at otherwise but I should know that I am human too just as the next person. I’m not weird, abnormal or in any way deformed.

It is I who is you and you who is me and in us we are, nothing but the same because I am you and we are both human. No one is better than me. I told myself. I am just the same and no one needs to make me feel bad for being the person I was born to be.

Penny’s brutal death instilled fear in me for quite some time. I stayed home from school for at least two weeks and a few days. The police didn’t do much because through bribery is how they don’t do the same work they once said they were passionate about. Tshepo and Joseph made means to come and see me. Their visit was somewhat therapeutic on its own. They told me that I shouldn’t live in fear and for the bold person I am I need to be tough and come back to school. That there’s no one better than myself and that just because the killings have been ongoing it doesn’t mean that the cycle should be left to continue.

No one is better in thinking anything about the next person worse if ending their lives is their priority.

Even though my friends don’t have my condition but we’ve been friends since we were little children during the days of the old Cartoon Network when George Of The Jungle and Ed Edd and Eddy used to be the thing so they understand me and my condition as well as my struggles in depth. So we joint forces and started a campaign. Our campaign is no one is better than you and we aimed at creating awareness to say to people that being an albino is merely a genetic condition and it ends there. We worked with local radio stations as well as schools educating people about albinism. We even made little leaflets to give to people around. The campaign was a good working idea and success. It saved a lot of people too. My runaway dad made a U-turn and came back one day. The ancestors had beaten him to a pulp and he had to accept me and be a good and better father to me going forward. An ancestral ceremony was made for me.

#don't let anything bring you down you're worthy you are loved

1 note · View note

justbeingnamaste · 6 years

Photo

Newly Discovered 1964 MLK Speech on Civil Rights, Segregation & Apartheid South Africa !

youtube

REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: I want to talk with you mainly about our struggle in the United States and, before taking my seat, talk about some of the larger struggles in the whole world and some of the more difficult struggles in places like South Africa. But there is a desperate, poignant question on the lips of people all over our country and all over the world. I get it almost everywhere I go and almost every press conference. It is a question of whether we are making any real progress in the struggle to make racial justice a reality in the United States of America. And whenever I seek to answer that question, on the one hand, I seek to avoid an undue pessimism; on the other hand, I seek to avoid a superficial optimism. And I try to incorporate or develop what I consider a realistic position, by admitting on the one hand that we have made many significant strides over the last few years in the struggle for racial justice, but by admitting that before the problem is solved we still have numerous things to do and many challenges to meet. And it is this realistic position that I would like to use as a basis for our thinking together tonight as we think about the problem in the United States. We have come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go before the problem is solved.

Now let us notice first that we’ve come a long, long way. And I would like to say at this point that the Negro himself has come a long, long way in re-evaluating his own intrinsic worth. Now, in order to illustrate this, a little history is necessary. It was in the year 1619 when the first Negro slaves landed on the shores of America. And they were brought there from the soils of Africa. Unlike the pilgrim fathers who landed at Plymouth a year later, they were brought there against their wills. And throughout slavery, the Negro was treated in a very inhuman fashion. He was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. The United States Supreme Court rendered a decision in 1857 known as the Dred Scott decision, which well illustrated this whole idea and which well illustrated what existed at that time, for in this decision the Supreme Court of the United States said, in substance, that the Negro is not a citizen of the United States, he is merely property subject to the dictates of his owner. And it went on to say that the Negro has no rights that the white man is bound to respect. This was the idea that prevailed during the days of slavery.

With the growth of slavery, it became necessary to give some justification for it. You know, it seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some thin rationalization to clothe an obvious wrong in the beautiful garments of righteousness. And this is exactly what happened during the days of slavery. There were those who even misused the Bible and religion to give some justification for slavery and to crystallize the patterns of the status quo. And so it was argued from some pulpits that the Negro was inferior by nature because of Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham. Then, the apostle Paul’s dictum became a watchword: “Servants be obedient to your master.” And one brother had probably read the logic of the great philosopher Aristotle. You know, Aristotle did a great deal to bring into being what we now know as formal logic in philosophy. And in formal logic, there is a big word known as the syllogism, which has a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. And so, this brother decided to put his argument for the inferiority of the Negro in the framework of an Aristotelian syllogism. He could say all men are made in the image of God—this was a major premise. Then came the minor premise: God, as everybody knows, is not a Negro, therefore the Negro is not a man. This was the kind of reasoning that prevailed.

While living with the conditions of slavery and then, later, segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. Many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. Many came to feel that they were inferior. This, it seems to me, is the greatest tragedy of slavery, the greatest tragedy of segregation, not merely what it does to the individual physically, but what it does to one psychologically. It scars the soul of the segregated as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, while leaving the segregated with a false sense of inferiority. And this is exactly what happened.

Then something happened to the Negro, and circumstances made it possible and necessary for him to travel more—the coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, the Great Depression. And so his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His economic life was gradually rising through the growth of industry, the development of organized labor and expanded educational opportunities. And even his cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. All of these forces conjoined to cause the Negro in America to take a new look at himself. Negro masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves.

And then something else happened, along with all of this: The Negro in the United States turned his eyes and his mind to Africa, and he noticed the magnificent drama of independence taking place on the stage of African history. And noticing the developments and noticing what was happening and noticing what was being done on the part of his black brothers and sisters in Africa gave him a new sense of dignity in the United States and a new sense of self-respect. The Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all of his children and that all men are made in his image, and that the basic thing about a man is not his specificity, but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin, but his eternal dignity and worth.

And so the Negro in America could now cry out unconsciously with the eloquent poet, “Fleecy locks, and black complexion cannot forfeit nature’s claim; Skin may differ, but affection dwells in black and white the same,” and, “Were I so tall as to reach the pole, or to grasp the ocean at a span, I must be measured by my soul; the mind is the standard of the man.” And with this new sense of dignity and this new sense of self-respect, a new Negro came into being with a new determination to suffer, to struggle, to sacrifice, and even to die, if necessary, in order to be free. And this reveals that we have come a long, long way since 1619.

But if we are to be true to the facts, it is necessary to say that not only has the Negro re-evaluated his own intrinsic worth, the whole nation has come a long, long way in extending the frontiers of civil rights. I would like to mention just a few things that have happened in our country which reveal this. Fifty years ago, or even 25 years ago, a year hardly passed when numerous Negroes were not brutally lynched by some vicious mob. Fortunately, lynchings have about ceased today. If one would go back to the turn of the century, you would find that in the Southern part of the United States you had very few Negroes registered to vote. By 1948, that number had leaped to about 750,000; 1960, it had leaped to 1,200,000. And when we went into the presidential election just a few weeks ago, that number had leaped to more than two million. We went into that election with more than two million Negroes registered to vote in the South, which meant that we in the civil rights movement, by working hard, have been able to add more than 800,000 new Negroes as registered voters in the last three years. This reveals that we have made strides.

Then, when we look at the question of economic justice, there’s much to do, but we can at least say that some strides have been made. The average Negro wage earner who is employed today in the United States earns 10 times more than the average Negro wage earner of 12 years ago. And the national income of the Negro is now at a little better than $28 billion a year, which is all—more than all of the exports of the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. This reveals that we have made some strides in this area.

But probably more than anything else—and you’ve read about it so much here and all over the world, I’m sure—we have noticed a gradual decline, and even demise, of the system of racial segregation. Now, the legal history of racial segregation had its beginning in 1896. Many people feel that racial segregation has been a reality in the United States a long, long time, but the fact is that this was a rather recent phenomenon in our country, just a little better than 60 years old. And it had its legal beginning with a decision known as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which said, in substance, that separate but equal facilities could exist, and it made the doctrine of separate but equal the law of the land. We all know what happened as a result of the old Plessy doctrine: There was always the strict enforcement of the separate, without the slightest intention to abide by the equal. And the Negro ended up being plunged into the abyss of exploitation, where he experienced the bleakness of nagging injustice.

And then something marvelous happened. The Supreme Court of our nation in 1954 examined the legal body of segregation, and on May 17th of that year pronounced it constitutionally dead. It said, in substance, that the old Plessy doctrine must go, that separate facilities are inherently unequal, and that the segregated child on the basis of his race is to deny that child equal protection of the law. And so, we’ve seen many changes since that momentous decision was rendered in 1954, that came as a great beacon light of hope into millions of disinherited people all over our nation.

Then something else happened, which brought joy to all of our hearts. It happened this year. It was last year, after the struggle in Birmingham, Alabama, that the late President Kennedy came to realize that there was a basic issue that our country had to grapple with. With a sense of concern and a sense of immediacy, he made a great speech, a few days before—rather, it was really on the same day that the University of Alabama was to be integrated, and Governor Wallace stood in the door and tried to block that integration. Mr. Kennedy had to have the National Guard federalized. He stood before the nation and said in eloquent terms the problem which we face in the area of civil rights is not merely a political issue, it is not merely an economic issue, it is, at bottom, a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as modern as the Constitution. It is a question of whether we will treat our Negro brothers as we ourselves would like to be treated.

And on the heels of that great speech, he went in, recommended to the Congress of our nation the most comprehensive civil rights bill ever recommended by any president of our great nation. Unfortunately, after many months of battle, and for a period we got a little tired of that—you know, there are some men in our country who like to talk a lot. Maybe you read about the filibuster. And you know they get bogged down in the paralysis of analysis, and they will just go on and on and on. And they wanted to talk that bill to death.

But President Lyndon Johnson got to work. He started calling congressmen and senators in and started meeting day in and day out with influential people in the country and making it clear that that bill had to pass, as a tribute to the late President Kennedy, but also as a tribute to the greatness of the country and as an expression of its dedication to the American dream. And it was that great day last summer that that bill came into being, and it was on July 2nd that Mr. Johnson signed that bill and it became the law of the land.

And so, in America now, we have a civil rights bill. And I’m happy to report to you that, by and large, that bill is being implemented in communities all across the South. We have seen some surprising levels of compliance, even in some communities in the state of Mississippi. And whenever you can find anything right in Mississippi, things are getting better.

Source ~ Gratitude Amy Goodman ~ Democracy Now !

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/1/15/newly_discovered_1964_mlk_speech_on?utm_content=bufferffa83&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer

#Martin Luther King Jr #Gratitude Democracy Now #Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!

26 notes · View notes

unsettlingshortstories · 4 years

Text

The Willows

Algernon Blackwood (1907)

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their underside turns to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river's life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.

Racing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters—sure sign of flood—sent us aground on many a shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszony) showed against the sky; and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brucke ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp-land beyond—the land of the willows.

The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilization within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering character of the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.

"What a river!" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements—water, wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun—thinking of the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered.

Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the Black Sea, within seeming distance almost of other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be followed.

"If you take a side channel," said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop while buying provisions, "you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase."

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious, and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest, the officer's prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly gale.

It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex up stream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me; it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous; many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to do with the power of the driving wind—this shouting hurricane that might almost carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with it too—a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.

With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not wanted or invited to remain—where we ran grave risks perhaps!

The feeling, however, though it refused to yield its meaning entirely to analysis, did not at the time trouble me by passing into menace. Yet it never left me quite, even during the very practical business of putting up the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a fire for the stew-pot. It remained, just enough to bother and perplex, and to rob a most delightful camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my companion, however, I said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid of imagination. In the first place, I could never have explained to him what I meant, and in the second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if I had.

There was a slight depression in the center of the island, and here we pitched the tent. The surrounding willows broke the wind a bit.

"A poor camp," observed the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent stood upright, "no stones and precious little firewood. I'm for moving on early tomorrow—eh? This sand won't hold anything."

But the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many devices, and we made the cozy gipsy house as safe as possible, and then set about collecting a store of wood to last till bed-time. Willow bushes drop no branches, and driftwood was our only source of supply. We hunted the shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks were crumbling as the rising flood tore at them and carried away great portions with a splash and a gurgle.

"The island's much smaller than when we landed," said the accurate Swede. "It won't last long at this rate. We'd better drag the canoe close to the tent, and be ready to start at a moment's notice. I shall sleep in my clothes."

He was a little distance off, climbing along the bank, and I heard his rather jolly laugh as he spoke.

"By Jove!" I heard him call, a moment later, and turned to see what had caused his exclamation. But for the moment he was hidden by the willows, and I could not find him.

"What in the world's this?" I heard him cry again, and this time his voice had become serious.

I ran up quickly and joined him on the bank. He was looking over the river, pointing at something in the water.

"Good heavens, it's a man's body!" he cried excitedly. "Look!"

A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was about twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where we stood it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes reflecting the sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned over. Then it gave a swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a flash.

"An otter, by gad!" we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.

It was an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like the body of a drowned man turning helplessly in the current. Far below it came to the surface once again, and we saw its black skin, wet and shining in the sunlight.

Then, too, just as we turned back, our arms full of driftwood, another thing happened to recall us to the river bank. This time it really was a man, and what was more, a man in a boat. Now a small boat on the Danube was an unusual sight at any time, but here in this deserted region, and at flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute a real event. We stood and stared.

Whether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me that he was gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the water to us shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no single word was audible. There was something curious about the whole appearance—man, boat, signs, voice—that made an impression on me out of all proportion to its cause.

"He's crossing himself!" I cried. "Look, he's making the sign of the Cross!"

"I believe you're right," the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment, melting away down there into the sea of willows where the sun caught them in the bend of the river and turned them into a great crimson wall of beauty. Mist, too, had begun to ruse, so that the air was hazy.

"But what in the world is he doing at nightfall on this flooded river?" I said, half to myself. "Where is he going at such a time, and what did he mean by his signs and shouting? D'you think he wished to warn us about something?"

"He saw our smoke, and thought we were spirits probably," laughed my companion. "These Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish; you remember the shopwoman at Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed here because it belonged to some sort of beings outside man's world! I suppose they believe in fairies and elementals, possibly demons, too. That peasant in the boat saw people on the islands for the first time in his life," he added, after a slight pause, "and it scared him, that's all."

The Swede's tone of voice was not convincing, and his manner lacked something that was usually there. I noted the change instantly while he talked, though without being able to label it precisely.

"If they had enough imagination," I laughed loudly—I remember trying to make as much noise as I could—"they might well people a place like this with the old gods of antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all this region more or less with their shrines and sacred groves and elemental deities."

The subject dropped and we returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was not given to imaginative conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I remember feeling distinctly glad that he was not imaginative; his stolid, practical nature suddenly seemed to me welcome and comforting. It was an admirable temperament, I felt; he could steer down rapids like a red Indian, shoot dangerous bridges and whirlpools better than any white man I ever saw in a canoe. He was a grand fellow for an adventurous trip, a tower of strength when untoward things happened. I looked at his strong face and light curly hair as he staggered along under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief. Yes, I was distinctly glad just then that the Swede was—what he was, and that he never made remarks that suggested more than they said.

"The river's still rising, though," he added, as if following out some thoughts of his own, and dropping his load with a gasp. "This island will be under water in two days if it goes on."

"I wish the wind would go down," I said. "I don't care a fig for the river."

The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten minutes' notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an increasing current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe.

Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting willows with a light like the day.

We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the noises of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had already made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of the tent, but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we lowered the curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was enough to smoke and see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and hissed, and from time to time a heavy splash announced the falling away of further portions of the bank.

Our talk, I noticed, had to do with the faraway scenes and incidents of our first camps in the Black Forest, or of other subjects altogether remote from the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the actual moment more than was necessary—almost as though we had agreed tacitly to avoid discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor the boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention, though ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater part of the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a place.

The scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going, for the wind, that drove the smoke in our faces wherever we sat, helped at the same time to make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make some foraging expeditions into the darkness, and the quantity the Swede brought back always made me feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for the fact was I did not care much about being left alone, and yet it always seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or scramble along the slippery banks in the moonlight. The long day's battle with wind and water—such wind and such water!—had tired us both, and an early bed was the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for the tent. We lay there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion, peering about us into the dense willow bushes, and listening to the thunder of wind and river. The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the stars. For the last time I rose to get firewood.

"When this has burnt up," I said firmly, "I shall turn in," and my companion watched me lazily as I moved off into the surrounding shadows.

For an unimaginative man I thought he seemed unusually receptive that night, unusually open to suggestion of things other than sensory. He too was touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I was not altogether pleased, I remember, to recognize this slight change in him, and instead of immediately collecting sticks, I made my way to the far point of the island where the moonlight on plain and river could be seen to better advantage. The desire to be alone had come suddenly upon me; my former dread returned in force; there was a vague feeling in me I wished to face and probe to the bottom.

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere "scenery" could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.

There they stood in the moonlight, like a vast army surrounding our camp, shaking their innumerable silver spears defiantly, formed all ready for an attack.

The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps have their "note" either of welcome or rejection. At first it may not always be apparent, because the busy preparations of tent and cooking prevent, but with the first pause—after supper usually—it comes and announces itself. And the note of this willow-camp now became unmistakably plain to me; we were interlopers, trespassers; we were not welcomed. The sense of unfamiliarity grew upon me as I stood there watching. We touched the frontier of a region where our presence was resented. For a night's lodging we might perhaps be tolerated; but for a prolonged and inquisitive stay—No! by all the gods of the trees and wilderness, no! We were the first human influences upon this island, and we were not wanted. The willows were against us.

Strange thoughts like these, bizarre fancies, borne I know not whence, found lodgment in my mind as I stood listening. What, I thought, if, after all, these crouching willows proved to be alive; if suddenly they should rise up, like a swarm of living creatures, marshaled by the gods whose territory we had invaded, sweep towards us off the vast swamps, booming overhead in the night—and then settle down! As I looked it was so easy to imagine they actually moved, crept nearer, retreated a little, huddled together in masses, hostile, waiting for the great wind that should finally start them a-running. I could have sworn their aspect changed a little, and their ranks deepened and pressed more closely together.

The melancholy shrill cry of a night-bird sounded overhead, and suddenly I nearly lost my balance as the piece of bank I stood upon fell with a great splash into the river, undermined by the flood. I stepped back just in time, and went on hunting for firewood again, half laughing at the odd fancies that crowded so thickly into my mind and cast their spell upon me. I recalled the Swede's remark about moving on next day, and I was just thinking that I fully agreed with him, when I turned with a start and saw the subject of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me. He was quite close. The roar of the elements had covered his approach.

"You've been gone so long," he shouted above the wind, "I thought something must have happened to you."

But there was that in his tone, and a certain look in his face as well, that conveyed to me more than his usual words, and in a flash I understood the real reason for his coming. It was because the spell of the place had entered his soul too, and he did not like being alone.

"River still rising," he cried, pointing to the flood in the moonlight, "and the wind's simply awful."

He always said the same things, but it was the cry for companionship that gave the real importance to his words.

"Lucky," I cried back, "our tent's in the hollow. I think it'll hold all right." I added something about the difficulty of finding wood, in order to explain my absence, but the wind caught my words and flung them across the river, so that he did not hear, but just looked at me through the branches, nodding his head.

"Lucky if we get away without disaster!" he shouted, or words to that effect; and I remember feeling half angry with him for putting the thought into words, for it was exactly what I felt myself. There was disaster impending somewhere, and the sense of presentiment lay unpleasantly upon me.

We went back to the fire and made a final blaze, poking it up with our feet. We took a last look round. But for the wind the heat would have been unpleasant. I put this thought into words, and I remember my friend's reply struck me oddly: that he would rather have the heat, the ordinary July weather, than this "diabolical wind."

Everything was snug for the night; the canoe lying turned over beside the tent, with both yellow paddles beneath her; the provision sack hanging from a willow-stem, and the washed-up dishes removed to a safe distance from the fire, all ready for the morning meal.

We smothered the embers of the fire with sand, and then turned in. The flap of the tent door was up, and I saw the branches and the stars and the white moonlight. The shaking willows and the heavy buffetings of the wind against our taut little house were the last things I remembered as sleep came down and covered all with its soft and delicious forgetfulness.

Suddenly I found myself lying awake, peering from my sandy mattress through the door of the tent. I looked at my watch pinned against the canvas, and saw by the bright moonlight that it was past twelve o'clock—the threshold of a new day—and I had therefore slept a couple of hours. The Swede was asleep still beside me; the wind howled as before; something plucked at my heart and made me feel afraid. There was a sense of disturbance in my immediate neighborhood.

I sat up quickly and looked out. The trees were swaying violently to and fro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay snugly safe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting enough resistance to make it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not pass, however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our belongings were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion. A curious excitement was on me.

I was half-way out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in that the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, made shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.

My first instinct was to waken my companion, that he too might see them, but something made me hesitate—the sudden realization, probably, that I should not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring in amazement with smarting eyes. I was wide awake. I remember saying to myself that I was not dreaming.

They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes—immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost—rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins.

I stared, trying to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long time I thought they must every moment disappear and resolve themselves into the movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion. I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon.

Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history. But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship—absolutely worship.

Perhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind swept against me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly stumbled and fell. It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me. At least it gave me another point of view somehow. The figures still remained, still ascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but my reason at last began to assert itself. It must be a subjective experience, I argued—none the less real for that, but still subjective. The moonlight and the branches combined to work out these pictures upon the mirror of my imagination, and for some reason I projected them outwards and made them appear objective. I knew this must be the case, of course. I took courage, and began to move forward across the open patches of sand. By Jove, though, was it all hallucination? Was it merely subjective? Did not my reason argue in the old futile way from the little standard of the known?

I only know that great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky for what seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete measure of reality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality. Then suddenly they were gone!

And, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great presence had passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush. The esoteric meaning of this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up within me, and I began to tremble dreadfully. I took a quick look round—a look of horror that came near to panic—calculating vainly ways of escape; and then, realizing how helpless I was to achieve anything really effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the sound of the terrifying wind.

As though further to convince me that I had not been dreaming, I remember that it was a long time before I fell again into a troubled and restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and underneath there was something that never quite lost consciousness, but lay alert and on the watch.

But this second time I jumped up with a genuine start of terror. It was neither the wind nor the river that woke me, but the slow approach of something that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow smaller and smaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found myself sitting bolt upright—listening.

Outside there was a sound of multitudinous little patterings. They had been coming, I was aware, for a long time, and in my sleep they had first become audible. I sat there nervously wide awake as though I had not slept at all. It seemed to me that my breathing came with difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely was pressing steadily against the sides of the tent and weighing down upon it from above. Was it the body of the wind? Was this the pattering rain, the dripping of the leaves? The spray blown from the river by the wind and gathering in big drops? I thought quickly of a dozen things.

Then suddenly the explanation leaped into my mind: a bough from the poplar, the only large tree on the island, had fallen with the wind. Still half caught by the other branches, it would fall with the next gust and crush us, and meanwhile its leaves brushed and tapped upon the tight canvas surface of the tent. I raised a loose flap and rushed out, calling to the Swede to follow.

But when I got out and stood upright I saw that the tent was free. There was no hanging bough; there was no rain or spray; nothing approached.

A cold, grey light filtered down through the bushes and lay on the faintly gleaming sand. Stars still crowded the sky directly overhead, and the wind howled magnificently, but the fire no longer gave out any glow, and I saw the east reddening in streaks through the trees. Several hours must have passed since I stood there before watching the ascending figures, and the memory of it now came back to me horribly, like an evil dream. Oh, how tired it made me feel, that ceaseless raging wind! Yet, though the deep lassitude of a sleepless night was on me, my nerves were tingling with the activity of an equally tireless apprehension, and all idea of repose was out of the question. The river I saw had risen further. Its thunder filled the air, and a fine spray made itself felt through my thin sleeping shirt.

Yet nowhere did I discover the slightest evidence of anything to cause alarm. This deep, prolonged disturbance in my heart remained wholly unaccounted for.

My companion had not stirred when I called him, and there was no need to waken him now. I looked about me carefully, noting everything; the turned-over canoe; the yellow paddles—two of them, I'm certain; the provision sack and the extra lantern hanging together from the tree; and, crowding everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows, those endless, shaking willows. A bird uttered its morning cry, and a string of duck passed with whirring flight overhead in the twilight. The sand whirled, dry and stinging, about my bare feet in the wind.

I walked round the tent and then went out a little way into the bush, so that I could see across the river to the farther landscape, and the same profound yet indefinable emotion of distress seized upon me again as I saw the interminable sea of bushes stretching to the horizon, looking ghostly and unreal in the wan light of dawn. I walked softly here and there, still puzzling over that odd sound of infinite pattering, and of that pressure upon the tent that had wakened me. It must have been the wind, I reflected—the wind bearing upon the loose, hot sand, driving the dry particles smartly against the taut canvas—the wind dropping heavily upon our fragile roof.

Yet all the time my nervousness and malaise increased appreciably.

I crossed over to the farther shore and noted how the coast-line had altered in the night, and what masses of sand the river had torn away. I dipped my hands and feet into the cool current, and bathed my forehead. Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the exquisite freshness of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath the very bushes where I had seen the column of figures rising into the air, and midway among the clumps I suddenly found myself overtaken by a sense of vast terror. From the shadows a large figure went swiftly by. Someone passed me, as sure as ever man did….

It was a great staggering blow from the wind that helped me forward again, and once out in the more open space, the sense of terror diminished strangely. The winds were about and walking, I remember saying to myself, for the winds often move like great presences under the trees. And altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an unknown and immense kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt before, that it woke a sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to counteract its worst effects; and when I reached a high point in the middle of the island from which I could see the wide stretch of river, crimson in the sunrise, the whole magical beauty of it all was so overpowering that a sort of wild yearning woke in me and almost brought a cry up into the throat.

But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.

For a change, I thought, had somehow come about in the arrangement of the landscape. It was not that my point of vantage gave me a different view, but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the relation of the tent to the willows, and of the willows to the tent. Surely the bushes now crowded much closer—unnecessarily, unpleasantly close. They had moved nearer.

Creeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during the night. But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves? I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror. I swayed for a moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep my upright position on the sandy hillock. There was a suggestion here of personal agency, of deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it terrified me into a sort of rigidity.

Then the reaction followed quickly. The idea was so bizarre, so absurd, that I felt inclined to laugh. But the laughter came no more readily than the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous imaginings brought the additional terror that it was through our minds and not through our physical bodies that the attack would come, and was coming.

The wind buffeted me about, and, very quickly it seemed, the sun came up over the horizon, for it was after four o'clock, and I must have stood on that little pinnacle of sand longer than I knew, afraid to come down to close quarters with the willows. I returned quietly, creepily, to the tent, first taking another exhaustive look round and—yes, I confess it—making a few measurements. I paced out on the warm sand the distances between the willows and the tent, making a note of the shortest distance particularly.

I crawled stealthily into my blankets. My companion, to all appearances, still slept soundly, and I was glad that this was so. Provided my experiences were not corroborated, I could find strength somehow to deny them, perhaps. With the daylight I could persuade myself that it was all a subjective hallucination, a fantasy of the night, a projection of the excited imagination.

Nothing further came in to disturb me, and I fell asleep almost at once, utterly exhausted, yet still in dread of hearing again that weird sound of multitudinous pattering, or of feeling the pressure upon my heart that had made it difficult to breathe.

The sun was high in the heavens when my companion woke me from a heavy sleep and announced that the porridge was cooked and there was just time to bathe. The grateful smell of frizzling bacon entered the tent door.

"River still rising," he said, "and several islands out in mid-stream have disappeared altogether. Our own island's much smaller."

"Any wood left?" I asked sleepily.

"The wood and the island will finish tomorrow in a dead heat," he laughed, "but there's enough to last us till then."

I plunged in from the point of the island, which had indeed altered a lot in size and shape during the night, and was swept down in a moment to the landing-place opposite the tent. The water was icy, and the banks flew by like the country from an express train. Bathing under such conditions was an exhilarating operation, and the terror of the night seemed cleansed out of me by a process of evaporation in the brain. The sun was blazing hot; not a cloud showed itself anywhere; the wind, however, had not abated one little jot.

Quite suddenly then the implied meaning of the Swede's words flashed across me, showing that he no longer wished to leave post-haste, and had changed his mind. "Enough to last till tomorrow"—he assumed we should stay on the island another night. It struck me as odd. The night before he was so positive the other way. How had the change come about?

Great crumblings of the banks occurred at breakfast, with heavy splashings and clouds of spray which the wind brought into our frying-pan, and my fellow-traveler talked incessantly about the difficulty the Vienna-Pesth steamers must have to find the channel in flood. But the state of his mind interested and impressed me far more than the state of the river or the difficulties of the steamers. He had changed somehow since the evening before. His manner was different—a trifle excited, a trifle shy, with a sort of suspicion about his voice and gestures. I hardly know how to describe it now in cold blood, but at the time I remember being quite certain of one thing—that he had become frightened?

He ate very little breakfast, and for once omitted to smoke his pipe. He had the map spread open beside him, and kept studying its markings.

"We'd better get off sharp in an hour," I said presently, feeling for an opening that must bring him indirectly to a partial confession at any rate. And his answer puzzled me uncomfortably: "Rather! If they'll let us."

"Who'll let us? The elements?" I asked quickly, with affected indifference.

"The powers of this awful place, whoever they are," he replied, keeping his eyes on the map. "The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world."

"The elements are always the true immortals," I replied, laughing as naturally as I could manage, yet knowing quite well that my face reflected my true feelings when he looked up gravely at me and spoke across the smoke:

"We shall be fortunate if we get away without further disaster."

This was exactly what I had dreaded, and I screwed myself up to the point of the direct question. It was like agreeing to allow the dentist to extract the tooth; it had to come anyhow in the long run, and the rest was all pretence.

"Further disaster! Why, what's happened?"

"For one thing—the steering paddle's gone," he said quietly.

"The steering paddle gone!" I repeated, greatly excited, for this was our rudder, and the Danube in flood without a rudder was suicide. "But what—"

"And there's a tear in the bottom of the canoe," he added, with a genuine little tremor in his voice.

I continued staring at him, able only to repeat the words in his face somewhat foolishly. There, in the heat of the sun, and on this burning sand, I was aware of a freezing atmosphere descending round us. I got up to follow him, for he merely nodded his head gravely and led the way towards the tent a few yards on the other side of the fireplace. The canoe still lay there as I had last seen her in the night, ribs uppermost, the paddles, or rather, the paddle, on the sand beside her.

"There's only one," he said, stooping to pick it up. "And here's the rent in the base-board."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I had clearly noticed two paddles a few hours before, but a second impulse made me think better of it, and I said nothing. I approached to see.

There was a long, finely made tear in the bottom of the canoe where a little slither of wood had been neatly taken clean out; it looked as if the tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten down her length, and investigation showed that the hole went through. Had we launched out in her without observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At first the water would have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but once out in mid-stream the water must have poured in, and the canoe, never more than two inches above the surface, would have filled and sunk very rapidly.

"There, you see an attempt to prepare a victim for the sacrifice," I heard him saying, more to himself than to me, "two victims rather," he added as he bent over and ran his fingers along the slit.

I began to whistle—a thing I always do unconsciously when utterly nonplussed—and purposely paid no attention to his words. I was determined to consider them foolish.

"It wasn't there last night," he said presently, straightening up from his examination and looking anywhere but at me.

"We must have scratched her in landing, of course," I stopped whistling to say. "The stones are very sharp."

I stopped abruptly, for at that moment he turned round and met my eye squarely. I knew just as well as he did how impossible my explanation was. There were no stones, to begin with.

"And then there's this to explain too," he added quietly, handing me the paddle and pointing to the blade.

A new and curious emotion spread freezingly over me as I took and examined it. The blade was scraped down all over, beautifully scraped, as though someone had sand-papered it with care, making it so thin that the first vigorous stroke must have snapped it off at the elbow.

"One of us walked in his sleep and did this thing," I said feebly, "or—or it has been filed by the constant stream of sand particles blown against it by the wind, perhaps."

"Ah," said the Swede, turning away, laughing a little, "you can explain everything."

"The same wind that caught the steering paddle and flung it so near the bank that it fell in with the next lump that crumbled," I called out after him, absolutely determined to find an explanation for everything he showed me.

"I see," he shouted back, turning his head to look at me before disappearing among the willow bushes.

Once alone with these perplexing evidences of personal agency, I think my first thoughts took the form of "One of us must have done this thing, and it certainly was not I." But my second thought decided how impossible it was to suppose, under all the circumstances, that either of us had done it. That my companion, the trusted friend of a dozen similar expeditions, could have knowingly had a hand in it, was a suggestion not to be entertained for a moment. Equally absurd seemed the explanation that this imperturbable and densely practical nature had suddenly become insane and was busied with insane purposes.

Yet the fact remained that what disturbed me most, and kept my fear actively alive even in this blaze of sunshine and wild beauty, was the clear certainty that some curious alteration had come about in his mind—that he was nervous, timid, suspicious, aware of goings on he did not speak about, watching a series of secret and hitherto unmentionable events—waiting, in a word, for a climax that he expected, and, I thought, expected very soon. This grew up in my mind intuitively—I hardly knew how.

I made a hurried examination of the tent and its surroundings, but the measurements of the night remained the same. There were deep hollows formed in the sand I now noticed for the first time, basin-shaped and of various depths and sizes, varying from that of a tea-cup to a large bowl. The wind, no doubt, was responsible for these miniature craters, just as it was for lifting the paddle and tossing it towards the water. The rent in the canoe was the only thing that seemed quite inexplicable; and, after all, it was conceivable that a sharp point had caught it when we landed. The examination I made of the shore did not assist this theory, but all the same I clung to it with that diminishing portion of my intelligence which I called my "reason." An explanation of some kind was an absolute necessity, just as some working explanation of the universe is necessary—however absurd—to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do his duty in the world and face the problems of life. The simile seemed to me at the time an exact parallel.

I at once set the pitch melting, and presently the Swede joined me at the work, though under the best conditions in the world the canoe could not be safe for traveling till the following day. I drew his attention casually to the hollows in the sand.

"Yes," he said, "I know. They're all over the island. But you can explain them, no doubt!"

"Wind, of course," I answered without hesitation. "Have you never watched those little whirlwinds in the street that twist and twirl everything into a circle? This sand's loose enough to yield, that's all."

He made no reply, and we worked on in silence for a bit. I watched him surreptitiously all the time, and I had an idea he was watching me. He seemed, too, to be always listening attentively to something I could not hear, or perhaps for something that he expected to hear, for he kept turning about and staring into the bushes, and up into the sky, and out across the water where it was visible through the openings among the willows. Sometimes he even put his hand to his ear and held it there for several minutes. He said nothing to me, however, about it, and I asked no questions. And meanwhile, as he mended that torn canoe with the skill and address of a red Indian, I was glad to notice his absorption in the work, for there was a vague dread in my heart that he would speak of the changed aspect of the willows. And, if he had noticed that, my imagination could no longer be held a sufficient explanation of it.

III

At length, after a long pause, he began to talk.

"Queer thing," he added in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted to say something and get it over. "Queer thing. I mean, about that otter last night."

I had expected something so totally different that he caught me with surprise, and I looked up sharply.

"Shows how lonely this place is. Otters are awfully shy things—"

"I don't mean that, of course," he interrupted. "I mean—do you think—did you think it really was an otter?"

"What else, in the name of Heaven, what else?"

"You know, I saw it before you did, and at first it seemed—so much bigger than an otter."

"The sunset as you looked up-stream magnified it, or something," I replied.

He looked at me absently a moment, as though his mind were busy with other thoughts.

"It had such extraordinary yellow eyes," he went on half to himself.

"That was the sun too," I laughed, a trifle boisterously. "I suppose you'll wonder next if that fellow in the boat—"

I suddenly decided not to finish the sentence. He was in the act again of listening, turning his head to the wind, and something in the expression of his face made me halt. The subject dropped, and we went on with our caulking. Apparently he had not noticed my unfinished sentence. Five minutes later, however, he looked at me across the canoe, the smoking pitch in his hand, his face exceedingly grave.

"I did rather wonder, if you want to know," he said slowly, "what that thing in the boat was. I remember thinking at the time it was not a man. The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water."

I laughed again boisterously in his face, but this time there was impatience, and a strain of anger too, in my feeling.

"Look here now," I cried, "this place is quite queer enough without going out of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast as they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the fool about it!"

He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in the least annoyed. I took courage from his silence.

"And, for Heaven's sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hear things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but the river and this cursed old thundering wind."

"You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it."

My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to a certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think I felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorant all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the very beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselves were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward, but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.

"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens."

That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood of rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes, and we fished for them with long willow branches. The island grew perceptibly smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and splashes. The weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and then for the first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds began to gather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.

This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the silence that came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a manner quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in its own way then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the wind noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes, rising, falling always beating out some sort of great elemental tune; whereas the river's song lay between three notes at most—dull pedal notes, that held a lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed to me, in my then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.

It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlight took everything out of the landscape that made for cheerfulness; and since this particular landscape had already managed to convey the suggestion of something sinister, the change of course was all the more unwelcome and noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening outlook became distinctly more alarming, and I found myself more than once calculating how soon after sunset the full moon would get up in the east, and whether the gathering clouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the little island.

With this general hush of the wind—though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts—the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us. The forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of night. They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon ourselves. For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my really indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present themselves.

I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing spell of the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as absurd and childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet, in spite of every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I dreaded the night as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of darkness.

The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the day, and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to the base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From five o'clock onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations for dinner, it being my turn to cook that night. We had potatoes, onions, bits of bacon fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue from former stews at the bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it the result was most excellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with sugar and a brew of strong tea with dried milk. A good pile of wood lay close at hand, and the absence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily watching me, dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving useless advice—an admitted privilege of the off-duty man. He had been very quiet all the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tent ropes, and fishing for driftwood while I slept. No more talk about undesirable things had passed between us, and I think his only remarks had to do with the gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was not fully a third smaller than when we first landed.

The pot had just begun to bubble when I heard his voice calling to me from the bank, where he had wandered away without my noticing. I ran up.

"Come and listen," he said, "and see what you make of it." He held his hand cupwise to his ear, as so often before.

"Now do you hear anything?" he asked, watching me curiously.

We stood there, listening attentively together. At first I heard only the deep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent surface. The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound began to reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound—something like the humming of a distant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the darkness from the waste of swamps and willows opposite. It was repeated at regular intervals, but it was certainly neither the sound of a bell nor the hooting of a distant steamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to the sound of an immense gong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating incessantly its muffled metallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly struck. My heart quickened as I listened.

"I've heard it all day," said my companion. "While you slept this afternoon it came all round the island. I hunted it down, but could never get near enough to see—to localize it correctly. Sometimes it was overhead, and sometimes it seemed under the water. Once or twice, too, I could have sworn it was not outside at all, but within myself—you know—the way a sound in the fourth dimension is supposed to come."

I was too much puzzled to pay much attention to his words. I listened carefully, striving to associate it with any known familiar sound I could think of, but without success. It changed in the direction, too, coming nearer, and then sinking utterly away into remote distance. I cannot say that it was ominous in quality, because to me it seemed distinctly musical, yet I must admit it set going a distressing feeling that made me wish I had never heard it.

"The wind blowing in those sand-funnels," I said determined to find an explanation, "or the bushes rubbing together after the storm perhaps."

"It comes off the whole swamp," my friend answered. "It comes from everywhere at once." He ignored my explanations. "It comes from the willow bushes somehow—"

"But now the wind has dropped," I objected. "The willows can hardly make a noise by themselves, can they?"

His answer frightened me, first because I had dreaded it, and secondly, because I knew intuitively it was true.

"It is because the wind has dropped we now hear it. It was drowned before. It is the cry, I believe, of the—"

I dashed back to my fire, warned by the sound of bubbling that the stew was in danger, but determined at the same time to escape further conversation. I was resolute, if possible, to avoid the exchanging of views. I dreaded, too, that he would begin about the gods, or the elemental forces, or something else disquieting, and I wanted to keep myself well in hand for what might happen later. There was another night to be faced before we escaped from this distressing place, and there was no knowing yet what it might bring forth.

"Come and cut up bread for the pot," I called to him, vigorously stirring the appetizing mixture. That stew-pot held sanity for us both, and the thought made me laugh.

He came over slowly and took the provision sack from the tree, fumbling in its mysterious depths, and then emptying the entire contents upon the ground-sheet at his feet.

"Hurry up!" I cried; "it's boiling."

The Swede burst out into a roar of laughter that startled me. It was forced laughter, not artificial exactly, but mirthless.

"There's nothing here!" he shouted, holding his sides.

"Bread, I mean."

"It's gone. There is no bread. They've taken it!"

I dropped the long spoon and ran up. Everything the sack had contained lay upon the ground-sheet, but there was no loaf.

The whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my laughter also made me understand his. The stain of psychical pressure caused it—this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve. And with both of us it ceased quite suddenly.

"How criminally stupid of me!" I cried, still determined to be consistent and find an explanation. "I clean forgot to buy a loaf at Pressburg. That chattering woman put everything out of my head, and I must have left it lying on the counter or—"

"The oatmeal, too, is much less than it was this morning," the Swede interrupted.

Why in the world need he draw attention to it? I thought angrily.

"There's enough for tomorrow," I said, stirring vigorously, "and we can get lots more at Komorn or Gran. In twenty-four hours we shall be miles from here."

"I hope so—to God," he muttered, putting the things back into the sack, "unless we're claimed first as victims for the sacrifice," he added with a foolish laugh. He dragged the sack into the tent, for safety's sake, I suppose, and I heard him mumbling to himself, but so indistinctly that it seemed quite natural for me to ignore his words.

Our meal was beyond question a gloomy one, and we ate it almost in silence, avoiding one another's eyes, and keeping the fire bright. Then we washed up and prepared for the night, and, once smoking, our minds unoccupied with any definite duties, the apprehension I had felt all day long became more and more acute. It was not then active fear, I think, but the very vagueness of its origin distressed me far more that if I had been able to ticket and face it squarely. The curious sound I have likened to the note of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of the night with a faint, continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct notes. At one time it was behind and at another time in front of us. Sometimes I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again from the clumps on our right. More often it hovered directly overhead like the whirring of wings. It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front, at our sides and over our heads, completely surrounding us. The sound really defies description. But nothing within my knowledge is like that ceaseless muffled humming rising off the deserted world of swamps and willows.

We sat smoking in comparative silence, the strain growing every minute greater. The worst feature of the situation seemed to me that we did not know what to expect, and could therefore make no sort of preparation by way of defense. We could anticipate nothing. My explanations made in the sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to us that some kind of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked it or not. After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the same tent side by side. I saw that I could not get along much longer without the support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative. As long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.

Some of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me, coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration, too—which made it so much more convincing—from a totally different point of view. He composed such curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved him. It was like being sick.

"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."

And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking to himself:

"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard."

I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.

"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."

Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time, but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.

The solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul, as the saying is, for the "feel" of those Bavarian villages we had passed through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces; peasants drinking beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a ruined castle on the rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the tourists would have been welcome.

Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of. We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we called "our lives," yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure—a sacrifice.

It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell.

At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world.

Small things testified to the amazing influence of the place, and now in the silence round the fire they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind. The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect—as it existed across the border to that other region. And this changed aspect I felt was now not merely to me, but to the race. The whole experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly.

"It's the deliberate, calculating purpose that reduces one's courage to zero," the Swede said suddenly, as if he had been actually following my thoughts. "Otherwise imagination might count for much. But the paddle, the canoe, the lessening food—"

"Haven't I explained all that once?" I interrupted viciously.

"You have," he answered dryly; "you have indeed."

He made other remarks too, as usual, about what he called the "plain determination to provide a victim"; but, having now arranged my thoughts better, I recognized that this was simply the cry of his frightened soul against the knowledge that he was being attacked in a vital part, and that he would be somehow taken or destroyed. The situation called for a courage and calmness of reasoning that neither of us could compass, and I have never before been so clearly conscious of two persons in me—the one that explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish explanations, yet was horribly afraid.

Meanwhile, in the pitchy night the fire died down and the wood pile grew small. Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness consequently came up very close to our faces. A few feet beyond the circle of firelight it was inky black. Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the willows shivering about us, but apart from this not very welcome sound a deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the river and the humming in the air overhead.

We both missed, I think, the shouting company of the winds.

At length, at a moment when a stray puff prolonged itself as though the wind were about to rise again, I reached the point for me of saturation, the point where it was absolutely necessary to find relief in plain speech, or else to betray myself by some hysterical extravagance that must have been far worse in its effect upon both of us. I kicked the fire into a blaze, and turned to my companion abruptly. He looked up with a start.

"I can't disguise it any longer," I said; "I don't like this place, and the darkness, and the noises, and the awful feelings I get. There's something here that beats me utterly. I'm in a blue funk, and that's the plain truth. If the other shore was—different, I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!"

The Swede's face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge excitement by its unnatural calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was the strong man of the two. He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.

"It's not a physical condition we can escape from by running away," he replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; "we must sit tight and wait. There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us."

I put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words. It was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose symptoms had puzzled me.

"I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have not found us—not 'located' us, as the Americans say," he went on. "They're blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe and provisions prove that. I think they feel us, but cannot actually see us. We must keep our minds quiet—it's our minds they feel. We must control our thoughts, or it's all up with us."

"Death, you mean?" I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.

"Worse—by far," he said. "Death, according to one's belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has worn thin"—horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words—"so that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood."

"But who are aware?" I asked.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can possibly explain.

He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and look down upon the ground.

"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with more expressions of the soul—"

"I suggest just now—" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his torrent that had to come.

"You think," he said, "it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is—neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own."

The mere conception, which his words somehow made so convincing, as I listened to them there in the dark stillness of that lonely island, set me shaking a little all over. I found it impossible to control my movements.

"And what do you propose?" I began again.

"A sacrifice, a victim, might save us by distracting them until we could get away," he went on, "just as the wolves stop to devour the dogs and give the sleigh another start. But—I see no chance of any other victim now."

I stared blankly at him. The gleam in his eye was dreadful. Presently he continued.

"It's the willows, of course. The willows mask the others, but the others are feeling about for us. If we let our minds betray our fear, we're lost, lost utterly." He looked at me with an expression so calm, so determined, so sincere, that I no longer had any doubts as to his sanity. He was as sane as any man ever was. "If we can hold out through the night," he added, "we may get off in the daylight unnoticed, or rather, undiscovered."

"But you really think a sacrifice would—"

That gong-like humming came down very close over our heads as I spoke, but it was my friend's scared face that really stopped my mouth.

"Hush!" he whispered, holding up his hand. "Do not mention them more than you can help. Do not refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the inevitable clue, and our only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that they may ignore us."

"Even in thought?" He was extraordinarily agitated.

"Especially in thought. Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible."

I raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own way. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night.

"Were you awake all last night?" he went on suddenly.

"I slept badly a little after dawn," I replied evasively, trying to follow his instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, "but the wind, of course—"

"I know. But the wind won't account for all the noises."

"Then you heard it too?"

"The multiplying countless little footsteps I heard," he said, adding, after a moment's hesitation, "and that other sound—"

"You mean above the tent, and the pressing down upon us of something tremendous, gigantic?"

He nodded significantly.

"It was like the beginning of a sort of inner suffocation?" I said.

"Partly, yes. It seemed to me that the weight of the atmosphere had been altered—had increased enormously, so that we should have been crushed."

"And that," I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and falling like wind. "What do you make of that?"

"It's their sound," he whispered gravely. "It's the sound of their world, the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's not above so much as around us. It's in the willows. It's the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us."

I could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and idea in my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his. I realized what he realized, only with less power of analysis than his. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination of the ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust his face again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak in a very earnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparent control of the situation. This man I had for years deemed unimaginative, stolid!

"Now listen," he said. "The only thing for us to do is to go on as though nothing had happened, follow our usual habits, go to bed, and so forth; pretend we feel nothing and notice nothing. It is a question wholly of the mind, and the less we think about them the better our chance of escape. Above all, don't think, for what you think happens!"

"All right," I managed to reply, simply breathless with his words and the strangeness of it all; "all right, I'll try, but tell me one more thing first. Tell me what you make of those hollows in the ground all about us, those sand-funnels?"

"No!" he cried, forgetting to whisper in his excitement. "I dare not, simply dare not, put the thought into words. If you have not guessed I am glad. Don't try to. They have put it into my mind; try your hardest to prevent their putting it into yours."

He sank his voice again to a whisper before he finished, and I did not press him to explain. There was already just about as much horror in me as I could hold. The conversation came to an end, and we smoked our pipes busily in silence.

Then something happened, something unimportant apparently, as the way is when the nerves are in a very great state of tension, and this small thing for a brief space gave me an entirely different point of view. I chanced to look down at my sand-shoe—the sort we used for the canoe—and something to do with the hole at the toe suddenly recalled to me the London shop where I had bought them, the difficulty the man had in fitting me, and other details of the uninteresting but practical operation. At once, in its train, followed a wholesome view of the modern skeptical world I was accustomed to move in at home. I thought of roast beef, and ale, motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things that proclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediate and astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply a sudden and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere of things that to the normal consciousness must seem impossible and incredible. But, whatever the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell from my heart, and left me for the short space of a minute feeling free and utterly unafraid. I looked up at my friend opposite.

"You damned old pagan!" I cried, laughing aloud in his face. "You imaginative idiot! You superstitious idolater! You—"

I stopped in the middle, seized anew by the old horror. I tried to smother the sound of my voice as something sacrilegious. The Swede, of course, heard it too—the strange cry overhead in the darkness—and that sudden drop in the air as though something had come nearer.

He had turned ashen white under the tan. He stood bolt upright in front of the fire, stiff as a rod, staring at me.

"After that," he said in a sort of helpless, frantic way, "we must go! We can't stay now; we must strike camp this very instant and go on—down the river."

He was talking, I saw, quite wildly, his words dictated by abject terror—the terror he had resisted so long, but which had caught him at last.

"In the dark?" I exclaimed, shaking with fear after my hysterical outburst, but still realizing our position better than he did. "Sheer madness! The river's in flood, and we've only got a single paddle. Besides, we only go deeper into their country! There's nothing ahead for fifty miles but willows, willows, willows!"

He sat down again in a state of semi-collapse. The positions, by one of those kaleidoscopic changes nature loves, were suddenly reversed, and the control of our forces passed over into my hands. His mind at last had reached the point where it was beginning to weaken.

"What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?" he whispered with the awe of genuine terror in his voice and face.

I crossed round to his side of the fire. I took both his hands in mine, kneeling down beside him and looking straight into his frightened eyes.

"We'll make one more blaze," I said firmly, "and then turn in for the night. At sunrise we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourself together a bit, and remember your own advice about not thinking fear!"

He said no more, and I saw that he would agree and obey. In some measure, too, it was a sort of relief to get up and make an excursion into the darkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost touching, groping among the bushes and along the bank. The humming overhead never ceased, but seemed to me to grow louder as we increased our distance from the fire. It was shivery work!

We were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows where some driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches, when my body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand. It was the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for support. I heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.

"Look! By my soul!" he whispered, and for the first time in my experience I knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing to the fire, some fifty feet away. I followed the direction of his finger, and I swear my heart missed a beat.

There, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater—hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface—"coiling upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look, by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"—he gave a kind of whistling cry. "They've found us."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding, extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was losing it altogether, and about to die.

An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he caught at me in falling.

But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what saved him.

I only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches, and saw my companion standing in front of me holding out a hand to assist me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the arm he had twisted for me. Nothing came to me to say, somehow.

"I lost consciousness for a moment or two," I heard him say. "That's what saved me. It made me stop thinking about them."

"You nearly broke my arm in two," I said, uttering my only connected thought at the moment. A numbness came over me.

"That's what saved you!" he replied. "Between us, we've managed to set them off on a false tack somewhere. The humming has ceased. It's gone—for the moment at any rate!"

A wave of hysterical laughter seized me again, and this time spread to my friend too—great healing gusts of shaking laughter that brought a tremendous sense of relief in their train. We made our way back to the fire and put the wood on so that it blazed at once. Then we saw that the tent had fallen over and lay in a tangled heap upon the ground.

We picked it up, and during the process tripped more than once and caught our feet in sand.

"It's those sand-funnels," exclaimed the Swede, when the tent was up again and the firelight lit up the ground for several yards about us. "And look at the size of them!"

All round the tent and about the fireplace where we had seen the moving shadows there were deep funnel-shaped hollows in the sand, exactly similar to the ones we had already found over the island, only far bigger and deeper, beautifully formed, and wide enough in some instances to admit the whole of my foot and leg.

Neither of us said a word. We both knew that sleep was the safest thing we could do, and to bed we went accordingly without further delay, having first thrown sand on the fire and taken the provision sack and the paddle inside the tent with us. The canoe, too, we propped in such a way at the end of the tent that our feet touched it, and the least motion would disturb and wake us.

In case of emergency, too, we again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a sudden start.

It was my firm intention to lie awake all night and watch, but the exhaustion of nerves and body decreed otherwise, and sleep after a while came over me with a welcome blanket of oblivion. The fact that my companion also slept quickened its approach. At first he fidgeted and constantly sat up, asking me if I "heard this" or "heard that." He tossed about on his cork mattress, and said the tent was moving and the river had risen over the point of the island, but each time I went out to look I returned with the report that all was well, and finally he grew calmer and lay still. Then at length his breathing became regular and I heard unmistakable sounds of snoring—the first and only time in my life when snoring has been a welcome and calming influence.

This, I remember, was the last thought in my mind before dozing off.

A difficulty in breathing woke me, and I found the blanket over my face. But something else besides the blanket was pressing upon me, and my first thought was that my companion had rolled off his mattress on to my own in his sleep. I called to him and sat up, and at the same moment it came to me that the tent was surrounded. That sound of multitudinous soft pattering was again audible outside, filling the night with horror.

I called again to him, louder than before. He did not answer, but I missed the sound of his snoring, and also noticed that the flap of the tent was down. This was the unpardonable sin. I crawled out in the darkness to hook it back securely, and it was then for the first time I realized positively that the Swede was not here. He had gone.

I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation, and the moment I was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming that surrounded me completely and came out of every quarter of the heavens at once. It was that same familiar humming—gone mad! A swarm of great invisible bees might have been about me in the air. The sound seemed to thicken the very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty.

But my friend was in danger, and I could not hesitate.

The dawn was just about to break, and a faint whitish light spread upwards over the clouds from a thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I could just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the pale sandy patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and fro about the island, calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the first words that came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the humming muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. I plunged among the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots, and scraping my face as I tore this way and that among the preventing branches.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I came out upon the island's point and saw a dark figure outlined between the water and the sky. It was the Swede. And already he had one foot in the river! A moment more and he would have taken the plunge.

I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him shorewards with all my strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most outlandish phrases in his anger about "going inside to Them," and "taking the way of the water and the wind," and God only knows what more besides, that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with horror and amazement as I listened. But in the end I managed to get him into the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him breathless and cursing upon the mattress where I held him until the fit had passed.

I think the suddenness with which it all went and he grew calm, coinciding as it did with the equally abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering outside—I think this was almost the strangest part of the whole business perhaps. For he had just opened his eyes and turned his tired face up to me so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway, and said, for all the world just like a frightened child:

"My life, old man—it's my life I owe you. But it's all over now anyhow. They've found a victim in our place!"

Then he dropped back upon his blankets and went to sleep literally under my eyes. He simply collapsed, and began to snore again as healthily as though nothing had happened and he had never tried to offer his own life as a sacrifice by drowning. And when the sunlight woke him three hours later—hours of ceaseless vigil for me—it became so clear to me that he remembered absolutely nothing of what he had attempted to do, that I deemed it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.

He woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when the sun was already high in a windless hot sky, and he at once got up and set about the preparation of the fire for breakfast. I followed him anxiously at bathing, but he did not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping his head and making some remark about the extra coldness of the water.

"River's falling at last," he said, "and I'm glad of it."

"The humming has stopped too," I said.

He looked up at me quietly with his normal expression. Evidently he remembered everything except his own attempt at suicide.

"Everything has stopped," he said, "because—"

He hesitated. But I knew some reference to that remark he had made just before he fainted was in his mind, and I was determined to know it.

"Because 'They've found another victim'?" I said, forcing a little laugh.

"Exactly," he answered, "exactly! I feel as positive of it as though—as though—I feel quite safe again, I mean," he finished.

He began to look curiously about him. The sunlight lay in hot patches on the sand. There was no wind. The willows were motionless. He slowly rose to feet.

"Come," he said; "I think if we look, we shall find it."

He started off on a run, and I followed him. He kept to the banks, poking with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself always close on his heels.

"Ah!" he exclaimed presently, "ah!"

The tone of his voice somehow brought back to me a vivid sense of the horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He was pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in the water and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some twisted willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away. A few hours before the spot must have been under water.

"See," he said quietly, "the victim that made our escape possible!"

And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant, and the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned, but a few hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our island somewhere about the hour of the dawn—at the very time the fit had passed.

"We must give it a decent burial, you know."

"I suppose so," I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that turned me cold.

The Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable expression on his face, and began clambering down the bank. I followed him more leisurely. The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing from the body, so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.

Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his hand in warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and sent him forward with a sort of leap to save himself. We tumbled together on to the hard sand so that our feet splashed into the water. And, before anything could be done, we had collided a little heavily against the corpse.

The Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back as if I had been shot.

At the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud sound of humming—the sound of several hummings—which passed with a vast commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some living yet invisible creatures at work.

My companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either of us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw that a movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it became released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment later it had turned completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the sky. It lay on the edge of the main stream. In another moment it would be swept away.

The Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch about a "proper burial"—and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was beside him in an instant.

I saw what he had seen.

For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island.

"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful mark!"

And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into mid-stream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like an otter.

1 note · View note

vancouverautistics · 7 years

Text

Statement on ABA in Schools

Read Canadian Autistics United's full statement below on the Ontario human rights tribunal regarding ABA support in the classroom, as quoted in the Toronto Star.

Our stance on ABA as a therapy is not a favourable one. We support therapies that work with unique autistic strengths, instead of ones that fight against them and force normalization.

ABA may make us look normal, but that is an illusion. The outward appearance of improvement comes with internal, emotional harm and increased anxiety. With newer scientific studies on the negative effects of "camouflaging" and "masking" autistic traits, one may be able to see why this is the case. "Passing" as neurotypical has high emotional costs for an autistic child or adult. Many adults with autism who have gone through ABA as children or youth have spoken up against ABA because of the lasting trauma that intensive behavoural training has caused. We believe the survivors of ABA; we believe our fellow autistic people.

Michelle Dawson, in her seminal paper, "The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists," writes:

As an intensive intervention, ABA is agreed to be a powerful therapy. In autism it has the specific benefit of forcing an autistic's adult entourage to behave consistently, rather than emotionally and arbitrarily, towards the child. And certainly there is evidence that autistic children can with time and effort learn skills this way.

Where ABA needs scrutiny is when its power is used to remove odd behaviours which may be useful and necessary to the autistic (such as rocking, flapping, and analytical, rather than social or "imaginative" play); and when typical, expected behaviours which may be stressful, painful, or useless to the autistic (such as pointing, joint attention, appropriate gaze, and eye contact) are imposed.

In a situation where a powerful behaviour therapy is applied to clients unable to consent, the ethical question of which behaviours should be treated should have been asked. Instead, the stated goal of autism-ABA is a "recovered" child indistinguishable from his typical peers.

Lovaas the creator of ABA, in his 1981 book, claims that, “With responsibility, the developmentally disabled individual takes on dignity and ‘acquires’ certain basic rights as a person. No one has the right to be taken care of, no matter how retarded he is. So, put your child to work; his work is to learn.” It is important to recognize the history of ABA, and how it originated from a man who believed we autistic people are subhuman until we perform to neurotypical standards and specifications. While ABA advocates may argue that the current practice is past these dubious ethical origins, the recent release of a Cards Against Humanity set by ABA practitioners last December show that an insidious culture of disrespect and dehumanization still exists.

We applaud parents Mike and Beth Skrt for advocating for better school supports. It is tough and valuable work, and we are heartened to see parents fight for their son's rights. We believe that people with disabilities have a human right for accommodations and support, so that they may achieve their fullest potential. However, we are concerned that only ABA is being considered as a valid support for a student on the spectrum.

We urge families, experts, and policy makers to listen to the voices of actually autistic people who are speaking loudly against ABA. ABA and any other type of therapy affects autistic people first and foremost, and it is important that we are included in these conversations that affect our lives so deeply.

ABA is not the only therapy that supports children on the spectrum; indeed we do not believe it is the best one, given the stories of survivors that span the decades of ABA's existence.

If additional funding should be directed to autism support services in Ontario schools, alternative supports other than ABA should also be explored. Therapies that do not train compliance and obedience through conditioning, but focus on building healthy relationships, boundaries and autonomy, and communication skills. These may include occupational therapy, speech therapy, and psychotherapy for co-morbid issues such as dyspraxia, sensory processing disorder, and social anxiety. Supports can also include mentorship programs where autistic adults and older youth mentor younger students on the spectrum, education about AAC usage, and anti-discrimination and anti-bullying training for students and staff focused on autism acceptance and neurodiversity.

Edited 11/10/17: Typo correction for title “Misbehaviour of Behaviourists”

#aba #autism #disability rights #cdnpoli #actuallyautistic #applied behaviour analysis #ontario #canada

10 notes · View notes

diplomatstime · 4 years

Text

United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) Antonio Guterres visit Pakistan

ISLAMABAD—United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Sunday commended Pakistan for its immense contributions in strengthening the United Nations charter and objectives across the globe, terming Pakistan as a reliable partner and committed member of the world body.

Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres are chairing the high-level delegation talk at foreign office, Islamabad on February16, 2020. In a joint press stakeout along with Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the UN secretary-general said Pakistan had been playing a leadership role in the region with its peaceful efforts especially in facilitating the Afghan peace and reconciliation process.

Islamabad: February 16, 2020: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is planting a tree in Foreign Office in commemoration of plant for Pakistan campaign. He said Pakistan and its people had been showing generosity by hosting millions of Afghan refugees on its soil for decades despite limited international aid. Guterres said he always found Pakistan’s commitment and support to the UN charter and objective very impressive and permanent. He urged the world community to look towards Pakistan with a new perspective as it had been progressive and developing under the principles of its founder Quaid e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the ideals of Allama Muhammad Iqbal.

Meet and greet by Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres at Foreign office Islamabad on February 16, 2020. Pakistan was a rich country with big names like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abdul Sattar Edhi, Sharmeen Obaid Chennai, and Malala Yousafzai, he added. Mentioning the purpose of his visit, the UN chief said it was aimed at acknowledging the great generosity and hospitality that Pakistan extended to Afghan refugees for years.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi are addressing the joint press briefing at Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Islamabad on February 16, 2020. About his meeting with Pakistan foreign minister, he said they had discussed a number of issues, including the regional security and Afghan peace process. The UN secretary-general also appreciated Pakistan’s peacekeeping role under the banner of the UN around the world, noting that its peacekeeping missions were serving with commitment under the UN charter.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is being received by Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi at Foreign office, Islamabad on February 16, 2020. He also acknowledged Pakistan’s efforts in eradication terrorism saying that the country was now fully safe and secure. About Kashmir dispute and ceasefire violations by India, he reiterated the need to de-escalate the tensions and stressed that dialogue and diplomacy should be the tools for resolution of issues.

Foreign Secretary Sohail Mehmood is welcoming UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres at Foreign office, Islamabad on February 16, 2020. He also urged for ensuring respect to the human rights of Kashmiri people in the Indian Occupied valley. About the Afghanistan peace process, he maintained that a peaceful well-negotiated political solution and effective permanent ceasefire were crucial for securing durable peace in Afghanistan which would further the repatriation of Afghan refugees with dignity.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is being received by Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi upon arrival at Foreign Office, Islamabad on February 16, 2020. Guterres further said the United Nations Military Observers Group (UNMOG) in India and Pakistan were monitoring the ceasefire violations along the Line of Control. He also appreciated the opening of Kartarpur Corridor and said it was a symbol of interfaith harmony, peace and tolerance and the manifestation of Pakistan’s efforts towards regional peace. Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that he had a very intensive and fruitful meeting with the visiting UN Secretary-General. The foreign minister said they had agreed on a time-bound roadmap for repatriation of Afghan refugees, in assistance with the international community. Reaffirming Pakistan’s support for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan, he said it was committed to its efforts as peace in the neighboring country was vital for regional stability. He said now Pakistan was looked upon as part of the solution parting ways with its perception of the past as being a part of the problem. He also reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to the objectives and charter of the UN, saying that multilateralism was a forum for fostering cooperation and interfaith among the world community instead of unilateralism as manifested by India in her illegal act of August 5 last year over the internationally recognized Kashmir dispute. The minister said he had also conveyed Pakistan’s concerns over the evolving situation arising out of that unilateral act by the Indian government. He said all shades of Kashmiri people, its leadership and even Indian people had rejected that move. Even against the controversial citizenship acts, chaos erupted across Indian in which so far 25 people were shot dead by the Indian security forces, he added. Shah Mahmood Qureshi said more than 200 days had passed since the siege and lockdown were clamped on the Indian Occupied Kashmir, where people had been deprived of their basic human rights and subjected to worst inhuman conditions. He maintained that the UN Secretary-General was the custodian of the UN charter and they had certain expectations from him to be fulfilled. He urged the UN Secretary-General to reaffirm the UNSC resolutions on the Kashmir issue, besides highlighting the restoration of fundamental rights and freedom of movement, calling upon India to respect the 2003 ceasefire violations agreement. In reply to a question, both observed that Islamophobia was a threat to global interfaith harmony and the negative impacts from the hate speeches were the main cause of this menace now spreading in the West. They renewed their pledge to fight this threat at all fora. Qureshi said the Kartarpur corridor was a symbol of interfaith harmony and tolerance when compared with the demolition of the Babri Mosque in India. The minister said he had also shared with the UN chief certain development initiatives of the government over social security net including the Ehsaas program, Sehat Sahulat cards and other steps in line with the sustainable development goals.

Guterres for colossal global efforts to reverse climate impacts

United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) Antonio Guterres on Sunday while linking the need to merge the local initiatives with the global efforts to ward off the climate degradation, appreciated Pakistan and its people for taking some of the vital steps to reverse back global warming affects. Addressing as a key speaker in a ceremony on ‘Sustainable Development and Climate Change’ the visiting chief the global body, said that though the climate change posed grave and urgent challenges to the world community, he was convinced ‘they can tackle them through unity which will make difference’.

UN SECRETARY GENERAL ANTONIO GUTERRES ADDRESSING A CONFERENCE ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN ISLAMABAD ON FEBRUARY 16, 2020. He said though Pakistan had been facing adverse climatic effects, it was not the only country battered with the negative effects, as no country on earth was immune to such chaotic changes, citing Australia and the US. Guterres said that he firmly believed that going through these challenges would not be an easy task as there were multiple and unpredictable changes in the chaotic world. He also noted with regret the growing gap among the nations due to various national policies and stressed upon bringing them in cohesion for generating global momentum against global impacts. “I am convinced that we can tackle the challenges through unity which will make a difference,” he added. The UN secretary-general further said that global warming was linked to the global warming affecting economies of the world. About global impacts upon Pakistan, he observed that about 80 percent of water in the country was being utilized for irrigation purposes which had put this natural resource under huge stress, besides glaciers were melting which could pose a challenge for national food security. “Pakistan is not alone as the same story is mirrored across the world,” he said, adding that the planet was burning and some were adding to fuel the fire. He also stressed the need for taking drastic efforts to mitigate the hazardous effects of lethal gas and smoke emissions. The UN secretary-general underlined that they required ‘to move from grey economy to green economy’ and look towards the year 2030 with optimism and determination. Guterres also congratulated Pakistan for the successful launch of Ten billion tsunami trees and Green Pakistan movements. He said that he was extremely pleased that the use of plastic bags had been banished in Islamabad and observed that the dumping of plastic bags across the globe ended up in seas. The UN chief also noted that the achievement of sustainable development goals as agreed upon by all the members of the UN was also imperative to overcome issues of poverty, gender imbalances, unemployment, food security, and human rights.

UN SECRETARY GENERAL ANTONIO GUTERRES MEETING WITH CHINESE AMBASSADOR TO PAKISTAN MR. YAO JING IN ISLAMABAD ON FEBRUARY 16, 2020. He also linked the achievement of the development goals with the peace and prosperity and realization of human rights which were critical for the future of the coming generations. He urged the global members to come forward and cooperate beyond borders and sectors. He called upon the world community for more cooperation in eradicating issues like money laundering and tax evasion. Guterres also noted with satisfaction that Pakistan had been the first country that had embraced the SDGs, which was incorporated in its national development goals. He also lauded the government’s efforts for enhancing the social protection and safety net with initiatives like the Kamyab Naujawan program and others. He said Pakistan had been grappling with the major challenges. The UN secretary-general also appreciated Pakistan for hosting the largest number of refugees over the years which had affected its economy and security. Declaring his relations with the country as something ‘love affair’ he said it was totally unfair in which Pakistan had been portrayed in the past. He also recalled his past visits to Pakistan as commissioner for the Afghan refugees and his interaction with ‘the noble and generous people of Pakistan’.

UN secretary-general calls upon India to honor Kashmiris’ human rights

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Sunday reiterated that there was an absolute need for the protection of human rights in the Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJ&K).

UN SECRETARY GENERAL ANTONIO GUTERRES AND ADVISOR TO PM ON CLIMATE CHANGE MALIK AMIN ASLAM ATTENDING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE IN ISLAMABAD ON FEBRUARY 16, 2020. During a question and answer session in a talk on ‘Sustainable Development and Climate Change’ the UN global body chief responded that he was expressing clearly that there was an absolute need for protection of the human rights in the disputed Kashmir valley and elsewhere in the world. He said the UN had expressed its strong commitment that human rights must be respected everywhere in the world.

UN SECRETARY GENERAL ANTONIO GUTERRES BEING RECEIVED BY ADVISOR TO PM ON CLIMATE CHANGE MALIK AMIN ASLAM AT THE CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE IN ISLAMABAD ON FEBRUARY 16, 2020. Guterres once again extended his willingness to facilitate dialogue between Pakistan and India over the Kashmir dispute. He said that he had already made these offers in the past as he was strongly advocating for dialogue between the two neighbors. The UN secretary-general also referred to the UN human rights commission’s role in this regard. The Indian government had clamped an indefinite curfew in the occupied valley by blocking communication means and free movement after stripping its special status through controversial, illegal and unilateral legislation. To another question about the water dispute between India and Pakistan, Guterres maintained that the World Bank was involved in the case. He said both the countries had a water agreement and through effective cooperation and dialogue issues could be overcome. He said water must be an instrument for peace and development.

UN Secretary-General arrives Islamabad on a four-day visit

United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) Antonio Guterres on Sunday arrived here on his first trip to Pakistan as the world body’s chief to participate in the two-day international conference on 40 years of hosting Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

UN Secretary-General, Mr. António Guterres, being received by Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Munir Akram and Mr. Farrukh Iqbal, Director General United Nations, MoFA, on his arrival in Islamabad on 16 February 2020. At the airport, the UN secretary-general was warmly received by Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Munir Akram and other high officials. Prior to his departure to Pakistan, Antonio Guterres on his twitter account appreciated Pakistan’s contributions towards global peace. He said, “Pakistan is one of the most consistent and reliable contributors to UN peacekeeping efforts around the world.”

UN Secretary-General, Mr. António Guterres, with Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Munir Akram after his arrival in Islamabad on 16 February 2020. “I am traveling to Pakistan, where I plan to express my gratitude to the people “ServingForPeace,” he further added. During his four-day visit, the secretary-general will also call on President Dr. Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Imran Khan. He will also hold a meeting with Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

UN Secretary-General, Mr. António Guterres, with Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Munir Akram after the former’s arrival in Islamabad on 16 February 2020. His other engagements included interactions with parliamentarians, media, and the youth. He will also deliver special talks on themes of sustainable development, climate change, and peacekeeping. The secretary-general will pay a visit to Lahore and travel to the holy Gurdwara Kartarpur Saheb.

UN Secretary-General, Mr. António Guterres, with Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Munir Akram after his arrival in Islamabad on 16 February 2020.

Traveling to Pakistan to express gratitude for consistent peacekeeping efforts

Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres Sunday while lauding Pakistan’s contribution to worldwide peacekeeping efforts said he was visiting the country to express his gratitude to the people.

SG Anthony Guetaras official portrait On his way to Pakistan on a four-day visit from February 16 to 19, the UN chief took to Twitter and said, “Pakistan is one of the most consistent and reliable contributors to the United Nation’s peacekeeping efforts around the world.” “I am traveling to Pakistan, where I plan to express my gratitude to the people #ServingForPeace,” he remarked. The UN chief has arrived here on a four-day visit mainly to attend an international conference on “International Conference on 40 Years of Hosting Afghan Refugees in Pakistan: A New Partnership for Solidarity” wherein he would also deliver a keynote address. Besides meeting the prime minister, president, and foreign minister, Antonio Guterres would also pay a visit to Lahore and travel to holy Gurdwara Kartarpur Saheb.—APP Read the full article

0 notes

kanjaree-sripen-blog · 4 years

Text

Online hate speech is a crime or free speech?

Have you ever experienced a harmful hate speech on social media or ever be a part of a conversation with people who spread hatred to others? Around 59% of US adolescents experienced bullying or persecuting by social media, resulting in 90% of them believe that this is a majority issue that should concern about. The issue must be given since it is the way to see less value of other human and did not respect human rights. The debate has been going on since the era where there is no Internet. As time passed by, today's world is driven by the Internet. Tradition hate speech transfers to the online hate speech. Although the platforms have changed, the results that it can cause rigorousness still existed the same. As it still affects receivers negatively and there is no benefit to society, indeed, I agree that online hate speech should be considered as a crime since many suffered from hate speech on the Internet. Besides, this essay will provide the remarkable evidence of online hate speech that can result in a myriad of negative effects on society and describe why it can also be considered as a crime.

Ultimately, freedom of expression will cause society to acquire polarity. When people are free to share their ideas in public, some will agree and some will not. It is a simple and predictable way that no one thinks in the same way. Each person will have their own thoughts. It must be different due to the fact that we are human. There is no right or wrong, but it’s just like or dislike. However, according to Pew research, it found out that more than 90 percent of politicians are seen the opposite party as a threat to the wellbeing of the country. Apart from that, when there is political free speech, the myriads of questions will pop up to our minds, is this a threat? The president calls trustworthy journalism as fake news and calls reporters as enemies of the people. Then, that speech is speculated as a threat, which makes several believed that speech was a hate speech. As a consequence, he constantly received pressure that criticizes him on social media a lot

While it could be argued that perhaps online hate speech should not be banned since all speech should be free. It is a way of people to express ideas in public. People should have freedom of speech. It encourages to have more debate in any topic and encourage the liberal democracies. One of the main problems with banning hate speech is restricting sharing opinion which might give a chance to the authority or government to use it in the wrong way). Absolutely, in political views, it can be also connected to the notions of politics. In a democratic society, citizens should be free to denounce the government’s working. To restrict hate speech, it required the government to be apart of the judge who decides whether it is a hate speech or not. Then, they can restrict any speech that they don’t want citizens to know. In addition to that, the government should not be able to access ideas and have the power to make a decision that which ideas people can express or hear.

Looking back to the past, hate speech has appeared for centuries because its definition refers to any content that intends to express hatred and promote brutality towards certain people in society. To spread hatred can point out to encourage severance and break the unity. Additionally, most public figures frequently are the victim of online hate speech. In this cruel digital world, the majority of public figures have to confront with online defamation. Those kinds of negative social behavior have more power than we thought. It becomes more severe since the majority of social media allows anonymous users to send brutal messages or included make rumors to destroy someone’s reputation. Abuses are more likely to happen due to the fact that the bully does not understand the following consequences of informing brutal words on the internet. Hence, making hate speech as a crime will lead to a peaceful society and a better morally healthy environment. It has two main purposes to legislate the law regarding online hate speech. It is public security and protecting human dignity

To recapitulate, personally, online hate speech is not the right to freedom of expression, I have arrived at the position to advocate that it must be considered as a crime but it doesn't have to end up with banning it. Hate speech is an unacceptable thing and it has no benefit to society. Besides, the essay can be answered by informing the harmful actions that come from online hate speech. As long as there is violence from hate speech, I still believed that we should consider it as a crime. But maybe it is time to at least try to take a serious action to find a way out of solving the problems of cyberbullying or online hate speech, except banning. Perhaps, just deleting the post or article may not be the exact solution, in fact, it depends on the morals of people. Then, we have to fix the real problems, which are understanding the effects of hate speech, educating people regarding, and make a campaign to reduce cyberbullying. We can have a conflict or have different thoughts, but would it be better if we communicate politely and respect each other?

0 notes

awkwardtimezone · 7 years

Text

Paging Dr. Bujare (Odolys/Laz’ab)

((Ooooooooooold log from last year I meant to upload forever ago. Following his recovery from exile, Laz’ab seeks out renowned doctor and cyberneticist, Dr. Bujare, on Nar Shaddaa. Image by @artofdel))

Lower District C, or as it was more commonly referred to: the Market Sector, was one of Nar Shaddaa’s most prominent and popular trade hubs. Buildings piled high on top of each other, piercing through the smog in several distinct layers of activity all built around a power core that serviced whole sections of the city-moon. Like a beehive constantly swarming with activity, this hive boasted everything from illegal fights and dodgy clubs, to the more mundane--speeder vendors, droid mechanics, shophouses and kiosks, butchers, a florist, a herbalist, tailors, general stores, even Jawa peddlers attempting to hawk their junk on street corners.

It had also become a popular haunt for bounty hunters and wannabe-hardasses thanks to the BBA office and firearms vendors nearby. So it was perhaps for that reason that the doctor’s clinic had been established on the upper levels.

As night fell and the relative safety and comfort of sunlight gave way to bruised skies of purple and red, the denizens of the streets flocked back into the safety of their houses. Some shops closed with dignity, others had long been left in states of disarray, home now to spice dealers and junkies passed out in their own piss and vomit. Despite these difficulties two neon signs remained resolute in the dark--one a glaring, cyan-coloured syringe that flickered frantically but stubbornly refused to go out. The other a noodle bar.

This was the landscape Chief Sorvik stepped into, broken gravel and shards of glass crunching underfoot. Behind him a cloaked figure followed, hood pulled up over his head and one hand never straying far from the lightsaber at his side. Despite the shadows cast across the poorly illuminated streets and over his face, the Sith Lord’s corrupted eyes seemed to glow in the dark.

“You’re sure this is the place?” the figure croaked as they rounded another corner and disrupted several homeless junkies attempting to sleep. They grunted and hollered some insults but neither paid them any mind. “Sure looks like a piss-poor place to find a doctor, especially one supposedly so well regarded.”

There was more sarcasm in his voice than malice, but Sorvik would rather keep his Lord in an agreeable mood. “She’s one of the best in the business for what you’re looking for, my Lord Laz’ab,” he assured him. “Nar Shaddaa has never been much to look at, but it’s good business for the medical profession.”

If anyone could understand that sentiment it was Laz. His previous doctor had owned a clinic on the Hutt moon as well. Now he was back, after so many years, and in critical condition. As well as missing his right arm at the shoulder, the twi’lek walked with a bad limp and complained constantly of shooting pains in his back. He had spent the better part of the last five years fighting for survival in the tombs of Korriban, defending himself from creatures on a good night, and against the ghosts in his head on the bad. It was only by some miracle he had escaped with his sanity at all, he thought, though there were days when Laz’ab wasn’t entirely sure he was all there.

Sorvik seemed aware of what the pregnant silent meant, and quickly filled it with more chatter. “She’s one of the pioneers of medical engineering, specializing in cybernetics and prosthesis. If anyone can synthesize your design it’s Dr. Bujare. Her clinic should be just around the corner.”

As if on cue the pair topped the path to the upper levels and a brilliant cyan syringe cut through the night, it’s point aimed at the door beneath as if in invitation. Unlike the rest of the squalid streets this one seemed better maintained, and the pair didn’t encounter another homeless alien or spot another mound of rubble or garbage on their way to the door. A moment later they had left the silence and suffering of Nar Shaddaa behind them and set foot inside the clinic.

The room was illuminated briefly by a red light as a security droid flickered to life, scanning them from head to toe. With its partially faded green-yellow paint and scratched surface, it appeared to have seen its fair share of action, but managed to greet them formally despite the damage. He stood guard before the door to the clinic proper, his optics trained on the two strangers. Glitched, digitized speech crackled through his voice modulator.

"Welcome to-to Clinic Buja-A-are. Please dispose of your-r-r weaponry to the se-se-secure lockers, for the safety of clinic staff and sensitive m-m-medical equipment inside, a-and to a-a-avoid any accidents. Thank y-y-you for your cooperation." He pointed to a set of lockers on the wall.

Laz’ab turned and shot Sorvik a dry look, tattoos stretching as he raised a brow, hardly impressed. His remaining hand grasping the saber at his waist, the twi’lek turned back with an irritated thrash of his lekku.

“I don’t think so,” he grated in an unpleasant voice. “The lightsaber stays with me. Now stop wasting my time and let me through to see the doctor.”

Behind him Creden Sorvik paused in the middle of unholstering his blaster, blinking owlishly before discreetly clipping it back to his hip. He lapsed into silence instead, shooting the droid an apologetic look. As though this defective model was still capable of facial recognition.

The droid, who went by B7, paused for a moment as though calculating the odds. Meanwhile his scanners cast another red wave over the two.

"I am a-a-afraid I must insist, Sir," the droid repeated. "The clinic stands as a sanctuary for-r-r those in need. Doctor Buja-A-are is very specific on her rules. No weapons a-a-and no discriminations," B7 stated, then added as though aware of Sorvik's actions:

"If you wish you are free-e-e to scan and secure the pa-pa-parameters. Your company seems mo-o-ore than ca-a-apable enough to ha-andle the locals, according to my cal-cal-calculations, but this u-u-unit cannot allow you inside without coopera-a-ation."

Sorvik held the droids optics. “We intend to co-operate fully, but ah …” he glanced at his Lord’s vice grip on his saber hilt; he wasn’t letting go of that any time soon. “Perhaps I could speak to Doctor Bujare over a holocall? We spoke before, perhaps she could diffuse the situation. My name is Creden Sorvik, she should remember me.”

He bowed slightly at the hip. Laz’ab’s eyes were still fixed on the droid in a deadpan glare, but otherwise he made no attempt to decapitate it. Fortunate, really, since he had become rather the expert during Caspira’s small stint at the compound.

"A moment, p-p-please." B7's red lights flickered again as he processed data. "A-a-appointment confirmed. This u-u-unit urges you to be mindful of your-r-r bearings. This u-u-unit will not hesitate to use necessary force to protect the clinic staff if the ne-ne-need arises."

His statement concluded, he turned and switched a panel on the wall. The doors didn’t budge. He jammed it repeatedly but apart from a static blip there was no sign of life from the other side. A noise, almost like a grunt, emitted from his voice modulator as he attempted to wedge his fingers between the closed doors, pulling them open with the sound of exertion. Eventually he managed to slip between the crack, pushing with his full body.

"Clinic Buja-A-are is currently experiencing a shortage of power-r-r," he stated with some difficulty, barely managing to hold the door open for one person at a time. "We a-a-apologize for the inconvenience. Re-re-rest assured the back-up genera-a-ators a-are perfectly capable of providing n-n-necessary power f-for services inside the clinic. P-p-please proceed."

Laz’ab was unimpressed before, but this just cemented his low opinion of the place.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” he spat, jabbing a bony finger at Sorvik. “You promised a genius surgeon and synthetic engineer, not some quack doctor in some shit corner of Nar Shaddaa.”

His security chief managed to restrain the Sith from marching straight back out the door, laying a gentle hand on his arm. He was one of the few people in existence who could touch the twi’lek and walk away unscathed.

“My Lord, I understand this may not be what you were expecting, but if you leave now you will be turning your back on one of the best experts out there. Power surges happen all the time, we even had a few of them back on Dromund Kaas. It shouldn’t affect your opinion on the doctor at all.” He was thinking on his feet, but that was what he was best at, and why he had survived so long in Laz’ab’s company.

The twi’lek gnawed his lip, glaring first at his consort and then back at the droid, still wedged in the door and struggling keep it open. Finally he released his grip on his weapon to the sound of a relieved sigh. “Fine. But if this doctor turns out to be some nutjob working with rusted tools in a back alley, I’m out of here.”

“Of course not, my Lord. It’s you who works with rusted tools.”

That actually earned a dry laugh as the twi’lek snaked his way towards the droid. With a wave of his remaining hand the doors rolled open with a heavy crunching noise, temporarily relieving the stress on the poor B7 unit with the Force. He sauntered on by with a look on his face like ‘you’re welcome’, followed closely behind by Sorvik with a look of ‘I’m so sorry’.

"A-a-appreciated, Sir," B7 responded, and stepped inside before the door slammed shut behind him.

Inside the clinic was barely lit. A few industrial lanterns emitted warm, dim light from several points throughout the room, but they were hardly effective. They could hardly make out the furniture until their eyes adjusted to the gloom, and the smell of sterilized equipment and kolto permeated the air. It was mixed with something sweet, fruity almost, like a baked cake or pie. An odd scent to be found in a clinic, for sure. Somewhere in the back of the room heavy equipment chattered to themselves in a low hum.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t seek out a professional for that?” A woman’s voice abruptly cut through the gloom from the far corner, and a twi’lek stepped into view. She held one of those industrial lanterns in her hand as she bent to examine something.

“I am a professional,” another voice replied from somewhere, chuckling. Her Basic carried a hint of a Coruscanti accent.

“You are a doctor, Doctor,” the twi’lek replied in a farceur tone. “That’s an entirely different profession.”

“You can’t deny I am good with machines,” the Coruscanti continued, “and I’ve lived here long enough to pick up a few tricks along the way.” Following her words the power in the clinic fluctuated, buzzing briefly and flooding the room with light before going dark again. The assistant glimpsed their visitors in that second, raising her lantern to survey them up and down.

“You got visitors, Doc,” she called.

“Just a moment!” The doctor sounded cheery. “Almost done here!”

With another surge of electricity the clinic’s power hummed back on, and this time it stayed on. The room was small, stocked with kolto barrels piled along the walls and a simple set of sofas and chairs in the centre of the room. There was an old crate she used as a coffee table, and two doors on either wall. One read ‘Office / Lab & Workshop’, the other ‘Operation Room’.

The tolian twi’lek looked fairly young, though she moved with a cane. She appeared neither slave nor servant, crossing the room to put out the lanterns.There was a commotion from below the floorboards, and a moment later a bundle of white lab coat and wild, frizzy brown hair pulled itself out from an opened panel.

A stout Mirialan woman got to her feet, dusting herself off. Her right sleeve pulled back to reveal a crude cybernetic prosthesis, hardly the most elegant design, and it ran the risk of doing her work a disservice. But she had her reasons for using it. Dr. Odolys pulled her welding goggles up onto her forehead and smiled warmly to the visitors as she rolled her sleeves back down.

“Creden Sorvik, I presume?” she inquired, stepping forward and holding out her left hand--her biological one--for a shake. “I am Doctor Bujare.”

Sorvik nodded and extended a hand to shake hers. “It’s wonderful to make your acquaintance at last,” he said. “Sorry to see you’ve been having some electrical issues, I hope that doesn’t happen too often around here.” He laughed nervously, turning to introduce the Sith that had fallen in behind him. Laz’ab prefered lurking in the shadows, and the sudden flash of light saw him twitching visibly. He didn’t even attempt to force a smile, red eyes staring down the Mirialan from a distance.

“May I introduce Darth Arachis, my Lord who we discussed over holo. As you can see, we suffered tremendous injury at the hands of the Eternal Empire. I’m told you can help us with that.”

Even with his long cloak bunched around his shoulders, the severed stump where Laz’ab’s right arm used to be was clear as day. His sleeve was pinned awkwardly so it wouldn’t flap about, and the stump wiggled pathetically: ‘Hello.’

“Unfortunately, Mr. Sorvik, we have been experiencing them fairly often as of late.” She chuckled softly. “Pest infestation of the lower levels, it’s making it hard on the rest of the sector.

Odolys’s green eyes surveyed the Sith from a distance, stepping back to a control panel and dimming the lights accordingly. Perhaps that would ease his discomfort. “Better, I hope?” she asked kindly with a polite nod to acknowledge him. She stayed where she was out of respect for her patient’s personal space rather than from fear of him .... yet.

“This way, please.” She gestured towards the door at her right, the one labeled ‘Office’. “I believe you mentioned a design?”

They followed her into the room. It was a little cramped but very well organized and clean. It was divided by a large workbench for cybernetics and paravans that separated office from workshop and laboratuvar. She waved her hands towards the workshop and ushered them inside. “I’ll be with you in a second. Aola, can you--”

“Already on it, Doctor,” the tolian twi’lek replied, handing Odolys a sterilized white suit. The Mirialan stepped out of sight while she changed and washed her arms after her stint with the repair panel. Aola turned to Sorvik and the Sith.

“Would you like something to drink? Tea? Caff? Water maybe?”

The two took the opportunity to observe their surroundings as the doctor fussed with her clothes. At the very least the subject of their weapons seemed to be dropped, and the presence of his sabre at his hip seemed to relax the Sith enough. He straightened up to his full height as he began wandering around the room, taking in the equipment with a critical eye.

“Tea for him,” he muttered with a sharp jab of his chin in Sorvik’s direction. “Just water for me. I have the designs with me,” he added. “I hear you’re the best in the sector and can handle more than basic, rudimentary replacements.”

He had wandered around to behind the workbench and there was a pronounced clanking as he idly toyed with some metallic objects on a tray. Behind him Creden Sorvik produced his holocommunicator and projected the prototype into the centre of the room. It deconstructed into several parts so the doctors could see the hydraulics within.

Beginning at the shoulders, a prosthetic for a full-arm reconstruction rotated slowly on its axis. At the top protruded several moveable spikes, with the intention of raising or lowering them for dramatic effect, etched with an elaborate design. This motif snaked down and continued on the lower arm, no doubt a design that had some meaning to the Sith. The complicated hydraulics of the hand and fingers were protected by synthetic mesh from the wrist down, with pads on the fingertips providing some semblance of grip. The fingernails extended into fine, lethal claws that couldn’t be intended for anything good.

What Odolys didn’t know was that Laz’ab never intended to share the full design with her. His original schematics included additional components for even more nefarious deeds. He had separate files for the inner workings of the lower arm, which he intended to house needles, knives, drills, and spikes to rival the arsenal of any good interrogation droid. But the doctor didn’t need to know his true intentions; once he had a proper prosthetic his engineers could handle the rest.

Aola nodded and left to fetch their drinks as the Mirialan stepped out from behind the panel in fresh robes. Her welding goggles were gone, face cleansed of dust, and her curly, unruly hair was pulled back in a loose bun.

“I do hope I can live up to those rumours,” she chuckled.

The hologram caught her eye, and she put on a pair of reading glasses to examine it in more detail. Meanwhile her assistant returned with a tray between hand and hip, somehow not spilling a drop despite her cane: two cups of tea and a glass of water, for Sorvik, the doctor, and the Sith Lord respectively.

She glanced at the design, then shot a wary look towards Odolys, who took in a deep breath. She flicked through the holo, taking mental notes

“Are those retractable?” she asked, pointing to the fingers on the design with her own claw-like cybernetic. “If not, such a design would run the risk of causing harm to yourself or others during casual use. Even things like grabbing or holding objects might prove troublesome.” Her eyes flicked between them both, cheery demeanor replaced by a professional seriousness.

Laz’ab left the tools alone with an abrupt clatter and slithered closer to the projection, following the doctor’s gaze. The diagram had enhanced the area so the intricacies of the hydraulics were clear, the outer casing of the hand falling away to reveal structures beneath. It resembled regular tarsals in most respects, but the nails were admittedly much too sharp and long.

“A little bit,” the twi’lek confirmed. He failed to mention his intention of installing additional blades later, that would swap out for torture or maiming. Laz’ab was nothing if not an unfair fighter. “Down to what would be perhaps more acceptable, but still prominent.”

Sorvik pointed at the flexible outer cover of the palm, and then at little pads fastened to the bottom of each finger. “These will be constructed from a flexible mesh, and provide grip when grasping or climbing on the pads of the fingers. It should mitigate the length of the nails when they are retracted.”

“Hmm.”

Odolys reached over her desk and pulled out a cable, plugging the holo into one of her terminals. Sorvik followed the doctor to her desk, offering the holocommunicator should she want to download the design. Meanwhile the Sith trailing close behind to peer curiously at the data flashing on the terminal.

“It should be sufficient then, considering twi’lek anatomy and the potential for sharp claws already.” She looked straight at the Darth. “But it might take some time to get used to it, you’ll need practice or else risk injuring yourself.”

She entered some notes onto her keypad, watching the Sith with a soft smile on her face. When she explained her procedures her tone took on a gentle, soothing voice, trying not to scare him off but at the same time informing him quite matter-of-factly.

“I would like to run a few scans on you to build a detailed map of your musculature and bone structure. It will help me determine if your body is ready for the strain of this design, and which materials would be favorable for your needs. We may need to make a few alternations, within reason and with your permission, of course.” She gestured to the medical seat behind her. “And a routine blood test to see if you should require any supplements before we proceed with necessary operations. Do you have any questions, my Lord?”

He hesitated only a moment before following through with her offer, climbing into the seat as though he’d done it a dozen times before and smoothed out the folds of his robes delicately. He did not seem relaxed, however, back stiff and eyes flitting from person to person around the room.

“I am aware how these procedures work,” he explained tersely, picking up on her gentle--but wary--tone. “I’ve had my fair share of experience with physicians and surgeons in the past; we have some medical files on hand if they will help.” It seemed he was less apprehensive of the procedure so much as just being in unfamiliar territory.

“From another clinic on Nar Shaddaa, where he was treated for his wounds,” Sorvik explained, giving Odolys access to that data also. “We are prepared to cooperate with anything you may need.”

“Thank you, it is most appreciated. If you would lean back, I will arrange the system for scanning.” She slipped into the next room while Aola approached to prepare him.

“I will take these,” she said, accepting the holocommunicator and datafiles from the Sith’s assistant. She leaned her cane against the wall and took a chair to work on the computer. “Uploading files now, Doctor.”

Odolys returned carrying a clean tray and an injector with an empty tube. She nodded approvingly at the back of her assistant’s head, setting down the equipment beside the patient. “May I?”

She indicated the Sith Lord’s arm, asking permission before touching him for the blood test. The action came naturally to her, as though she treated all patients with the same respect, but despite her effort’s Laz’ab’s lips remained pursed in a thin, purple line. At his side his stump wiggled.

“Sorry,” his teeth flashed through a disingenuous smile. “I’d roll up my sleeve, but …”

Sorvik had wandered away towards the back of the room, giving his Lord and the doctor some time to themselves. Now he leaned against the far wall and crossed his arms over his chest.

It had been several weeks since his Lord’s major surgery, but Laz’ab still hadn’t acclimatized to his missing limb. He snapped at his subordinates frequently, flew into rages followed by breakdowns, and was easily more frustrated by the simplest tasks. If anyone could understand him in this moment, it was Dr. Odolys. The agent had read her confidential files, knew about her past and her own accident resulting in her rudimentary cybernetics. He only hoped finally realizing his design would set the twi’lek back on track.

“Perhaps when the prototype is ready you will be able to,” the doctor responded brightly, rolling up his sleeve for him.

She brushed her fingers lightly over his arm. It didn’t take any effort at all to find his veins, prominent as they were over almost his entire body. She turned back to her tray, pulled on a glove, and prepared a piece of cotton soaked in sterilizer. “This might be a little cold,” she warned before rubbing the area, then took the small syringe with its empty tube.

“Your design looks very peculiar.” She continued to speak as though they were just having a casual chat, distracting him from the task at hand. “It has a ferocious appeal, feels like more than just an arm.” She smiled and shook the vial in her hands, mixing the components with the blood now. “Perhaps you’re sending a message?” She pressed a plaster into his arm and placed the blood sampling away for testing.

The distraction worked like a charm and Laz’ab hardly paid any mind until she was shaking the contents of his blood in front of her. Then again, compared to the abuse he received at the hands of his former Master, or his struggle to survive the last few years, needles were the least of his concerns anymore.

“It’s not meant to be pleasant,” he replied flatly, watching with sharp eyes as she pressed the swab to his arm. “An unpleasant arm for an unpleasant man.” He lapsed into silence again, choosing not to answer her prying questions and instead demonstrated a keen interest in watching her work. He’d spent a lot of time with doctors, one in particular, and always found it equal parts fascinating and familiar to study them.

Odolys caught herself staring at her own crude arm at his words, the claw-like fingers clicking over the metal surface. Her mind flashed to the past, the incident leading up to her loss … her own cybernetics were not the most state of the art, worn down over the years, repaired many times, and slowly improved. But it worked. And it meant something more to her.

She returned to the Sith’s side, the biosample processor humming quietly in the background, and flicked a few buttons and switches as blue lights scanned his body. Laz’ab stiffened slightly but lay still. She replaced her surgical gloves with a new pair, but these were made of thin fabric and not latex, with pads on the fingertips and strings and cables attached to a microchip.

“Everything’s been uploaded, Doc,” Aola called from the desk.

“Initiate sequence with ThoBu,” Odolys called, now attaching something to her own cybernetic limb and some sort of tech-monocle over her left eye.

Aola had a short debate with her keyboard. “This thing is … in Cheun again.”

“Ah, right. Mirri uploaded a new patch, send it to my screen.”

In moments a hologram of Laz’ab’s body flickered in front of them. The muscles were visible beneath a thin film of skin, the bones beneath that, and maps of various other systems showed the full extent of the damage to his body. With her enhanced glove the Mirialan was able to interact with the hologram and split the layers apart. Her expression changed, visibly upset by what she was seeing. Flesh and bone would heal over time, but scars would always remain. And as an experienced doctor, it wasn’t hard for her to spot every deformation left over from a lifetime of abuse.

Odolys took a deep breath. Feeling sorry wasn’t going to build the cybernetic arm, nor would it benefit anyone here tonight. With a wave of her hand she uploaded the design to the holographic sequence and attached it to the model. Various signals and alerts immediately began flashing across the board, indicating the spine, shoulder blades, shoulder, and torso muscles. She picked through these carefully, editing information, trying new materials, and swapping out components.

Laz’ab had risen silently from his seat and taken up position lurking behind her. His eyes tracked upward to the image of himself, projected in three-dimensions and interactive. It was strange to see himself in this way. He knew doctors had of course taken full scans of him before, but as each layer was peeled back he could see every story his body had ever told. The broken bones, healed after so long, deep gashes that deformed the muscles beneath, the thin slivers where he had been whipped as a slave, and then cut again as an Apprentice.

Though he stood in complete silence, his breath hitched with each new reveal and his eyes twitched as memories flooded back. His fresh wounds were clearer, outlined in a bright blue so his surgeons could address the most severe. These were still healing, and would incapacitate his ability to carry heavy mechanics.

He startled the doctor when she turned around, and she only barely managed to hold back a yelp. It took her a few moments to pull herself back together, hand on her chest to calm her rushing heart, before she smirked at how the situation must look. This time when she turned back to the holoterminal she kept a mindful eye on where Laz’ab decided to stand.

“I’m sure you are well aware your body isn’t exactly …” she paused, searching for a more delicate term, “in the best shape. Regardless of the materials we choose, you will need enchanters here, and here.” She pointed at the twi’lek’s skeletal model, marking spots along the spine and shoulders, “and in these muscle groups.” She pulled up the second model and placed them side-by-side, tapping and indicating new areas.

“But first we need you to recover fully from your previous surgeries,” she added, turning to him. “In the meantime I will prepare a prototype and vest to stimulate these points, so you can adapt to carrying the extra and weight and get used to the design. This way we can test its efficiency before the final cybernetics are built.”

Laz’ab’s lips pursed but there was no protest, he was all too aware of his emaciated condition. Even before his ordeal it had been a problem. “I understand,” he nodded, though there was no mistaking his disappointment. He had hoped to have his arms back much sooner. “I imagine you’ll need time to construct the prototype in the meantime. How long do you think it will be until I’ve recovered enough to wear a proper replacement?”

His hand, previously crossed across his chest, absently traced the spots she’d indicated on the diagram, or as close as he could. Without the glove his fingers waved right through his ribs, and he imagined the sensation of reinforcements beneath his skin. What must it feel like?

“I can wear a vest while training,” he mused, voice still a mile away and his eyes glued to the projection. “It may help me get my strength back.”

“It will only take a couple of months, if everything goes well,” Dr. Odolys said, but her hesitation suggested she didn’t have complete faith in her prediction. “Looking at the condition of your body, all told … we may require multiple surgeries. Those are my initial thoughts, looking at your scans now.”

She tapped on the model and some parts lit up red. “These are the primary muscle groups I will be enhancing with rybcoarse-based materials. This will provide additional support and allow you to lift your arm will less effort.” She continued to colour-code different areas accompanied by explanations.

“Every operation will target a new area, bones, muscles, nerves. You will need rest and recovery between each, and will have to keep up an exercise regime to get used to them. I will give you an upgraded prototype with each. While you can use the vest with daily activities and training, don’t forget it is not the final result. It will have its limitations, and I don’t recommend wearing it more than five hours a day.”

That news was met with a more grievous expression and the twi’lek took a step forward to properly observe. The doctor stepped back and allowed the Sith to examine the models, Sorvik also ventured closer to watch his master warily.

“That long.” This time he sounded downright forlorn. “When I was--” He hesitated a moment, jagged teeth gnawing on his bottom lip, then shrugged. If he was going to get any results from this doctor he could at least trust her with some basic information. “When I was trapped in the tombs where I lost my arm, I fashioned makeshift replacements from debris and animal parts. I had no mechanics so I manipulated it using the Force alone. It was tiring, but ...” he gestured with his remaining arm at the hologram, “I may not require as many reinforcements as you think.”

“We don’t want you tiring yourself out,” Sorvik cautioned, carefully choosing his own words. “The galaxy has become a much more unpredictable place, it would be beneficial to avoid over-exerting yourself in a fight.”

“That is an impressive feat, I admit,” Odolys echoed. “But while I am not gifted with the Force, as a doctor allow me to ask: would you prefer an arm that is functional and does not run the risk of wearing down your body in the long run, and will only require maintenance once a year or so …” She paused, letting her words sink in before adding carefully, “or would you prefer a hunk of junk that requires constant attention and willpower just to keep functional, tiring out not just the limb, but your entire body, both physically and mentally?”

Laz’ab’s gaze became steel for a moment, peering through her with those dead, red eyes. He held the uncomfortable silence for a long, tense moment, before finally muttering through tight lips.

“Hopefully yours will not be a hunk of junk, as you put it.” His gaze averted, he straightened up but never lost the steely edge to his voice. “I can wait. Make it as functional as possible with minimum strain.”

“I will order the materials as soon as possible, and begin building the prototype the minute they arrive,” she announced, turning to the hologram and ending the sequence. “In the meantime I will prescribe supplements for you. Aola, do we still have those blue boxes?”

“Yes, Doc. They’re in the med-cabinet at the other door, top shelf. The one with the purple stains.”

“Excuse me.” The doctor excused herself and left the room.

The twi’lek watched her go, pose unmoving, every inch coiled like a spring. A tense silence settled in the room, broken only by the Sith’s now laboured breathing. Finally his head snapped towards Sorvik, and he mouthed the word ‘stains?’ incredulously.

Sorvik let out a little sigh as he crossed the room. “Do be careful, my Lord. She is one of the best, otherwise I would not have brought you here. Your designs were quite specific and very detailed, but I’m sure she can pull it off entirely with your co-operation.”

When Dr. Odolys returned she was carrying a square shaped plasti-glass blue box, and wrote some notes for its use. She handed it to Sorvik instead, a pair of small purple stickers in the shape of spots on it.

“Orange ones twice a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. The blue one is before sleep. Box contains enough for now,” she said. “I will inform you when the materials arrive and I start my work. Is there anything else you would like to discuss?”

Sorvik took them after a moment’s hesitation, feeling the Sith’s malevolent eyes boring a hole in the back of his head. “Just supplements, correct? No side effects, drowsiness, anything that might compromise the effects of … other medication?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “Just supplements. I picked them according to the patient’s current medication to avoid any unwanted effects.” She smiled softly.

Laz’ab looked unconvinced, but then maybe that was just his default expression. An awkward moment ticked by during which time he begrudgingly took the box from his aide.

“And what else doctor?” He finally asked, doing quite possibly the worst impression of polite. “Any exercises routines I should do between now and our next little visit?” There was a slight mocking lilt to his tone, but the question posed was serious. He was not going to be stuck in this position forever.

“Here,” Aola responded from the desk, snatching up her cane and limping towards them with a data chip. “I uploaded some basic exercise routines and nourishment suggestions, but don’t over-exert yourself until you’ve fully recovered. Feel free to contact this office if you have any additional questions.”

The twi’lek took it from her with less spite this time. “I’ve been through a lot already, nothing I can’t handle.” It was hard to tell if he was trying to convince himself, or just stating the facts. Whatever the case he stored the chip in the same blue box for now, using the Force to manipulate the vehicles in lieu of his second hand. He tucked it under his arm.

“If that is all, we will take our leave. Until next time, Doctor Odolys.” Laz’ab offered only a small inclination of his head, while behind him Creden Sorvik bid a polite goodbye, his flourish visibly practised.

Both Odolys and Aola walked them through the clinic and sent them off, B7 returning to his post behind the closed doors as the two women stood side by side. Only once the Sith and his aide were safely out of earshot did they dare utter a sound.

“Wow.” The twi’lek let out an unimpressed huff. “I thought he was going to crumble to pieces.”

“I’ve seen worse,” the doctor replied thoughtfully. Her mind was already running over the details of future operations. “Aola … did you say stains instead of spots?” she suddenly asked.

“I … might have? I have been thinking of the kitchen upstairs all day.”

“Why is that?”

“Have you forgot who cooked last night?”

“Oh no …”

“Oh, yes.”

“Oh noooo!” Odolys covered her forehead with her hand.

“Let that sink in nicely, Doctor Bujare,” Aola snickered, and started to limp away. At that moment the lights inside flickered and the generator made a most pathetic noise, before burying the clinic in darkness once again.

“Oh, come on!” the doctor groaned.

15 notes · View notes