Best intentions aside, another month’s flown by without a Saveet Saturday. Since I’d spent pieces of the past four evenings weeding, and Friday evening settled quietly around me, I channeled Saveet for freewriting. That means I sit my butt down and write without editing. It doesn’t mean the cats don’t sit on my hands, kick the keyboard from my lap, or skewer my toes after I haven’t realized Xanth has dropped the mouse there, begging me to play. Yeah, writing at home means distractions galore.
Last month, I’d left Saveet on the heels of a vision of the birth of the world as she knows it, the river in which her mother would have drowned her had an acolyte of the goddess Neeshnaet not drawn water. The beast who has asked for Saveet’s help has more of a story to tell, methinks. With Mother’s Day approaching, and me having named the great shooriista approaching her as the mother of the race, an idea took hold.
Enjoy.
As I reach for more—more understanding, more of the vision, more tears to understand why she chose me, the mother of all shooriistas steps away. My “lub” and “dub” drum on, still in her rhythm as steady as the river.
Understanding floods through me. “You cried alongside the Goddess, didn’t you.”
Purple eyes swirl. Norneepashaforena blinks, except she tries to hide that pain from me by keeping them closed. Her chin lowers to the ground, making it rumble with her heartbeat. But she nods, a thud eclipsing the lubs and dubs until that echo fades.
How could I not have seen her clearly before? Her wings shimmer under the stars. Black, those powerful wings sing with strands of the same silver scrawled along the top and bottom of the First Scroll that hangs above the alter. When she flaps them, another round of peace tickles at me, or maybe it’s the pelting sands and swarm of ganoraads flitting back and forth, disturbed at being raised from slumber.
I sneeze on the dozen that seek cover in my nose.
Norneepashaforena opens her eyes. A film of tears turns the purple into a lavender as enchanting as her wings. Although she could crush me with one of her toes, her power feels gentle and loving.
“I’m sorry for the children you’ve lost,” I say.
The eyes blink again. A tear splatters me from knees to toes, but this time, no pain follows. Not from the water, that is. The loss in her eyes cuts me harder than any whip I’ve bourn.
“I will help you,” I say. “Whatever you need, I will do it.”
“Save my children from the harbingers,” she says. “In Neeshnaet’s dreams, you are the one who might find the way to work between the harbingers and my children’s spirits, those who have not lost them to time, breaking their ghosting hold.”
Even if Avaareet whips me dawn and dusk, I’ll steal provisions and follow the mother of all shooriista’s. As she saved our world with the Goddess, I owe her my life. Perhaps then I can atone to my failure in the last one.