aesmael

Black and white fell away to faded yellow and chestnut hair. She dropped the name Magpie. She drifted here, and there, but never to her island. She was lost.

She did not dare speak to any one. She did not dare visit any familiar space. The sickly falling sensation she felt in her belly would not vanish

But she could not maintain her listlessness indefinitely. Inevitably she found herself drifting the way of things which might have held her interest. Inevitably she found her eyes watching with curiosity, idle first, but growing in attention. She could not divorce herself from the world no matter how she tried, or stop herself from considering it.

One of those things which caught her interest was a recreation of a rather famous story, made available for others to tour and explore. It had been built in great detail and, had she still been a magpie, she would have been thrilled to see so many ideas she could use.

Instead she explored, with little heart, a frozen moment in which the hero watches light flash upon a hill he will soon occupy. She walked around the characters' camp to look from all angles she could imagine, every thing so still it may as well be dead. In this place she could as easily step across to that hill, many miles away, as walk in the usual fashion and it seemed oh-so-briefly amusing to very deliberaely not do so.

A stick cracked under her shoe. She smiled. Such attention to detail. It had been so long, so long since she had touched. Since anything had felt real to her hands. But they were not real either, so why should it? She stared at her palms, marvelling at their ephemeral substance and longing for... something.

Such attention to detail, yet they had forgotten that when time stops, so should the ability to interact. Perhaps she should not have that power at all, not being a part of this story. She knelt beside the protagonist and her smile grew sadder. 'I could take it from you,' she thought. 'It would do no good, of course, because this is not real, but I am sure it would be very symbolic. I wonder what of?' She paused and followed his gaze to the hilltop, the light.

“You thought you were nearly done, didn't you?” Despite being alone, her voice was a whisper. “You thought you could carry it so far and be done. Leave it to others who would know better what to do. You had no idea how large it would grow or what it would take.” Jayde – for that had been her name, and would be again – hugged the figure quickly. “I am sorry. I never particularly empathised with you before. Not cool enough. Even the best of us can be blind and that is not I. Thank you. Haha.”

She thought it appropriate that she fly now, so that is how she left. Her island was not yet done.

Whenever she visited the place she had made she did her best to add detail and impart a sense of life to it. Here, a depression; there, a hillock; now a meandering groove which might have been meant as a dried riverbed. The solid was made brown and just earthlike enough to be clear it was not. Much of it she turned green, so that now it did not look like grass rather than not like dirt. This was variety.

There still was no sky or any thing beyond her island. To look anywhere beyond this patch of solid was to be confronted by the raw absence of anything. This bothered her, more and more as time passed until finally it was like daggers stabbing into her brain and she could not bear to look up. So she fenced herself in with blue and dotted it with cotton-puff clouds, above and below.

Clouds below, they fascinated her enough that she wished to spend hours watching them, if only they were not so crude. She did her best to make them fluffy, to make them change and drift like clouds should. They came not a bit perfect, but far better than before, so she fixed up the clouds above too.

She lay on the brown solid, head down over the edge to admire her handiwork and found her perception abruptly shifted. All at once it was not the clouds moving but her island, carrying her along with it to unknown destinations. The unexpected sense of motion made her feel suddenly nauseous and afraid to fall. She had to scramble quickly inland and focus on something still to keep her lunch – though she had none to lose.

After a short while she recovered and began to felt quite proud of her work, and a little silly. “You have had this canvas with which you might have made anything,” she said to herself (for she was very much the sort of person who spoke to herself), “and all you have done is build for yourself your own little corner of mundanity. What a small mind you have! At least this bit of whimsy will go some way to make up for it.”

So for hours after she watched her island plow through the clouds and made herself a captain's hat to wear, which fluttered in the breeze when she remembered that it ought to.

Before the beginning there was not. After the beginning there was nothing and there was potential. Not even the status of formless chaos had been attained.

Time passed, of a brief and insignificant duration.

Into this nothing faded the form of a girl with chestnut hair and green-gold eyes. She wore a dress of yellow and a floppy hat that spoke of summer. Looking about as if direction actually meant something, she smiled. There was much for her to do, none of it questioning the wisdom of how she might be visible without illumination.

The first shaping is easiest to gloss over, yet it took her long and hard study before she was able to realise even the most basic of forms. Impatience pushed her to quit many times, tempting retreat back into herself where at least her imagination had no waiting period, but of course she did not give up with finality and learned at last to give shape to the nothing.

It took the size and the form, more or less, of an island. A very crude island of mostly flat solid rising to a vague peak in the middle and bordered not by water or indeed anything at all, just nothing. The underside was a rough mirror image of the overside, so that from a distance it might seem as though a great spindle of land had uprooted itself to go adrifting wherever the wind might take it.

The girl examined what she had made. She saw it was the best she could manage for now, so it would have to do. She landed herself near the edge – it could not honestly be called a shore – and announced to no one in particular “I shall call it 'This Land'”. And then she laughed, because she was precisely the sort of person who would laugh at her own jokes.