Wind, Sky, & Stone — A Fable: Part Five

Day Fourteen of Thirty Days of Writing

Shawn McDaniel
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read
Photo taken by Shawn McDaniel

Landed. The stream may be a pathway to an unknown world, but isn’t every step a new journey into mystery? Even familiar places see a new day through bright eyes; a room in which one awakes and breathes is the first morning of that life. Everything that came before all of the happenings, all the fateful endeavors and mistaken identities, all the tossing and tearing and forgotten words, culminate into a being quite naïve of its surroundings, unable to contain such a plethora of knowledge, unable to exist without it. Nothing remains the same, yet everything persists. The source does not abandon its children, despite big heads and loathing, despite flight and space gathered like great bags of sand to wall the flooding in, to dam one from the beginning and to keep dry the escape artist, the well versed traveler, the explorer whose destiny is to know every squalid hole until all is discovered.

There was a cartographer who made his life to map a planet with a weak atmosphere, a planet vulnerable to any wandering space stone. Meteors shower the surface rampant as rain and he documents each landing, the diameter, circumference and depth of the impact crater, the longitude and latitude of the location, the date and time of each drop. This map, he determines, will track the geological surface for future generations. There is hardly a moment in his life where he isn’t pursuing another impact.

Stone wonders what its life has amounted to. There was a time when it felt a part of something larger. A great land mass towering above all creation, raising up to Sky and basking in Sun, clouds draped upon their shoulders like a long scarf and Wind whirling harmlessly around. The Mountain. Stone gazed up but the all was cloaked in darkness.

Lost in a dense wood, Stone noticed a distant flickering light and set off in that direction.

A soft rain had begun to nourish the earth and pattered upon Stone’s tough skin. Odd rain, slick and oily, like rain from another land entirely. The forest floor writhed and decomposed, meshing into a thick mud. Long insects with numerous legs scurried blindly across Stone’s path. Strange creatures with enormous eyes peered down from the branches of tall pines. It was eerily quiet in the forest. No croaks of toads and frogs, nor bouncing of echoing bats, not even a breeze through the needles. Stone had a strong notion of impending, as if something were falling through the atmosphere, gaining immense speed, something enormous about to strike the valley.

Finally, Stone reached the source of light, a weak flame curling out of a hole surrounded by a circle of stones. The flame was struggling to breathe. Who had made this fire? There didn’t appear to be anyone around. One does not need men to be poking their noses these parts. Humans are unpredictable.

With a little courage, Stone approached the lowly fire, “Are you alone flame? Where are the ones who built you?”

“Oh them, they tore out of here on account of the storm, left me to my own failing light.”

“The storm? It seems rather still tonight.”

“A little too still. Haven’t you any dry tinder, friend, to feed a hungry flame? If you do, I can tell you what the men confided in me before they fled.”


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