It's Just a Game...

Jacob's Ladder: Part Three

2009-11-05T16:33:58Z

“Though the vicious can sometimes pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment certain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune!”

- Ann Radcliffe

We worked hard all morning, digging the earth and dragging out great handfuls of potatoes, it was a good harvest year for those at least. By lunchtime, after almost six hours of work, I was feeling faint and more than a little sick from digging in angry silence, a bitter taste at the back of my throat and a shameful shake to my knees. I was trembling and pale, sweat pouring down my back and making my buttocks itch but I was pleased to see that, in my anger, I’d dug out more potatoes than anyone else, though I’d left the field more than a little untidy in my wake.

Relief finally came in the unlikely form of Sarah and some of my other little vetters, carrying jugs of water ahead of mutter and my tantes, bringing bread, apples, cheese and a little broth to warm us up and feed us for the afternoon’s work. The icy atmosphere of the morning, both figurative and literal, melted away in the presence of the women and the children as the girls ran laughing and yelling around and around the barn playing some game that only they understood and the women served up our afternoon meal in the wintry air on plates and blankets in the shelter of the old fallen tree.

I wolfed down the bread, fresh made that morning and still a little warm, slathered with thick butter and the hard cheese tante Bethany made at her and onkel James’ farm. It was salty and tough but wonderful, making the roof of my mouth crinkle with its sharpness. The chicken broth warmed our hands and our bellies equally well, topped with a layer of fat that had been left on the stock, we didn’t like to waste anything in my family. The menfolk even began to thaw towards me, even if they did so with cruel jokes about how hungry I was and how I gobbled my food like one of onkel Matthew’s pigs. Vater even gave me a slap on the back of the head and told me to eat more slowly and to take more time over saying grace but it was such a relief to have him pay attention to me again that I didn’t care and crammed another piece of cheese into my mouth, whole, to the laughter of the family.

I did my best to relax while I knew that I could, we’d be back to work in no time at all and there was still, easily, half a field to be dug up in the light that remained to us today. There was a reason I wasn’t known for hard work and my aching muscles and deep boredom were reminding me of those reasons now I was no longer so fuelled by anger. I wasn’t looking forward to more work, anger and resentment could only take my tired body so far and right now, all I really wanted to do was curl up back in bed and go to sleep, preferably after gobbling down a few of these fresh potatoes. I hadn’t had a truly full stomach since the harvest celebrations, frequently missing breakfast or getting down from the table as early as I could to read the Bible.

My reverie was interrupted by a sudden, ear-splitting, shriek from Sarah, vater and I sat up immediately like watchful guard dogs pricking up their ears and got to our feet, Sarah might be a pain and a terror, but she was still my little sister and we had such a small family that we all cared about each other a great deal, too much perhaps. Mutter called out as vater and I shared a concerned glance, hoping it wasn’t the wolves back sniffing around the village again.

“Sarah? Are you alright?” Mutter’s voice carried a long way, the menfolk sometimes joked that she could out-bray a donkey, which was un-Christian but they had something of a point, she could be ear splitting when she really put effort into it. There was no answer but we could hear Sarah wailing and crying from near the barn and so vater and I hurried over, accompanied by a couple of onkels who lagged behind us, a little less ready than we were to deal with crying girls and preferring, if they were honest, to stay and finish the last of the food.

Sarah and two of my little vetters were standing by the barn, distraught, roughly circling the fluttering form of a pigeon that was twitching and jerking on the ground. Its beak was bloodied and its wing bent at a horrible angle, pieces of bone protruding through its skin. It almost looked like one of the cats had gotten to it; something which we often saw around the farm. That wasn’t it though, something different had happened here and it had shocked and surprised Sarah into this distress.

She ran, not to vater, but to me, throwing herself against me and smearing my woollen jacket with tears and snot. What could I do about such a thing? I put my arms around her and hugged her tight while the injured pigeon flopped around on the ground, smearing blood and feathers on the dirt and making a horrible wet clucking. I held her until she was ready to talk to us and to tell us what had happened .

“We were playing.” She explained, through fresh tears, her words distorted by her missing milk teeth and the contorted upset of her sobbing face. “Rachel ran into the bushes to get away and the pigeon flew out, bang, straight into the side of the barn and hurt itself.” She wiped her face with her arm, wiping stickiness along the sleeve of her dress, her bonnet all out of place from screwing her head into my stomach, her curly hair spilling free down her shoulder. “Can we make it better vater, please? We didn’t mean to hurt it, we were just playing. I don’t want it to die.”

Vater looked me in the eye and screwed his mouth up, making his beard stick out at a funny angle from his chin, I almost laughed it looked so funny and, if Sarah hadn’t been sobbing into my chest, shoulders heaving and so very, very upset, I probably would have laughed – and that would have meant a smack at the very least.

Vater looked back to his brothers but they were staying back, comforting their own children or walking back to explain to mutter and the other women. We were left to deal with the problem ourselves and we shared an exasperated and world weary glance.

Dutifully vater crouched over the pigeon and attempted to nudge it into position, to stop it flapping around even more so he could get a good look at it. I could see from where I was that the poor creature was very badly hurt. The wing was snapped and practically torn off and blood was still coming from its beak. It all but screamed – a very strange noise for a bird – when vater touched it and he drew his hands back in surprise at the noise, his eyebrows raised in horror.

“I’m sorry little Sarah, this one can’t be saved, the only Christian thing to do is to put it out of its misery.” Wearily, resigned to the task, he stood and picked up his fork again, treading gently on the bird’s tail to hold it still while he raised his fork high.

Sarah peeked, turning her head from my chest, red faced and dribbling from her sobs, her breath caught in her throat, horrified at what vater was about to do. I had to hold her tight by the shoulders to stop her from throwing herself in the way as the fork descended, hard and fast, and made a visceral ‘crunch’ as it brought the brief life of the injured pigeon to an abrupt and bloody end.

Sarah went a little limp in my grip and stared with absolute horror at what vater had done. Though I was old enough to know it was for the best Sarah was young and innocent and loved all the animals of the farm, even the ones we ate. Vater should have known better than to do that in front of her. He tried to explain himself to her…

“Sarah, it was in pain, there was nothing I could…”

“How could you?!” She yelled at him, yanking free of my grip, surprising me with the strength of her body as she wriggled out of my hand. The vehemence of the words she spat at him also surprised me, I had no idea she could be so hateful, mischievous yes, annoying certainly, but I had never heard her like this. “You wouldn’t do that to a person! You wouldn’t do that to Grossvater! How could you just kill it?! I hate you!” She bellowed the last at him with all the force her little body could muster, spitting and dribbling and then hiccoughed, choking on her own words, almost being sick.

Vater’s face clouded and darkened as she spat such hatred at him, his hands gripping the bloodied fork, white knuckled as he stuck out his chin again, beard bristles stabbing forward as he glowered at her. “You are not to talk to me like that Sarah! I am your vater and I know what is best, always. How dare you raise your voice to me in such a way?! Get home and pray about what you’ve done, when we finish in the field I will punish you and punish you severely as will mutter I am sure!”

This was not a good thing to say to a six-year-old. Sarah paid him absolutely no heed, which I knew from bitter experience infuriated him far more than anything we had actually done wrong, she threw back her arms and hissed at him like an angry little farm cat. “No!” She yelled at him and, fresh tears sprang from her eyes as she ran away from him as fast as her legs could carry her, into the woods, skirt catching and tearing on the thorns as she vanished into the trees, bonnet tumbling from her head and falling into the dirt.

“Sarah!” He hollered after her. “Get back here this instant!” It didn’t work and he started after her, a couple of steps, but then stopped. There was nowhere she could go after all, she would have to come back sometime and the fields still needed digging by the end of the day. I knew what he was thinking, I could read it on his face with sudden and perfect clarity as he turned back to me.

“Come Thomas, she’ll be back in her own time and will face her punishment. Me and mutter will deal with her then. We still have digging to do boy.”

I felt like I was outside my own body as I heard myself echo Sarah’s stand against him. “No.” I was tired and practically dreaming on my feet as it was, barely, really, aware of what I was doing or saying. This time when he stuck his chin out at me I could no longer stifle the giggle that rose in my throat, which became a full, almost hysterical, laugh when his eyes bulged out of his face at how we were both defying him.

He was such a different man to me when there were others around, nothing like he was in the barn at night. “I’m going to look for Sarah. She’s upset and the woods aren’t always safe, you told me that yourself.” While he spluttered and trembled with ineffectual rage as I turned away, before I lost my nerve, and followed after Sarah, calling her name, dropping the fork I’d been carrying down onto the dirt near to the broken and bloodied body of the pigeon.

Jacob's Ladder: Part Two

2009-11-05T14:32:14Z

"I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him."

- Saint Teresa of Avila

As night fell I joined my vater at the barn, bringing in the last of the stray cows against the cold as the darkness drew in and the night became truly freezing. Since I was very young vater and I would spend a little time together every night here, away from mutter – and later Mary – where we could just be boys together without work or chores, without the fussing attentions and bullying of mutter or the crying of Sarah. We would talk like men, play like boys or we would listen to the forest. Some nights, like tonight, we would look up at the night skies.

I clambered up the old wooden ladder, into the top of the barn where vater waited for me. Our breath misted in the flickering light of the lantern and vater was rubbing his hands together for warmth, stamping his feet on the creaking beams, shaking ancient sawdust and dirt down onto the backs of the cows below.

“Hurry up Thomas, it’s cold tonight, we’ll have to get home before too long.” I knew he loved me but he was always abrupt and gruff with me. I knew the criticisms of the other menfolk about me stung him deeply. I was not a hard worker like him, I spent all my spare time reading the bible, at my schoolwork – even though I had finished with being a scholar a year ago – or playing in the woods. The well meaning comments of the other men about my laziness and dreaming made him short tempered with my foibles, even more than he might otherwise be.

Carefully I stepped off the ladder and onto the straw-strewn planks, trying not to tread on any of the owl pellets that littered the ground, vater said it was good to have an owl in the barn but it made things more than a little disgusting if you trod on one of its leavings. He caught my hand and pulled me over to him, over the yawning gulf beneath that dropped to the milling cattle. His strong arm held me against his side as he leaned back to turn the lantern down to the merest ember.

We were plunged into darkness almost instantly and everything suddenly seemed to change. Noises became louder, the shuffling and lowing of the cows, the distant screech of our mouse-eating guest, singing in one of the other village houses, the creaking of the windmill. Smells became stronger, even though the cold numbed my nose. The earthy stink of the cattle rose up through the boards, the damp scent of the earth in the fields, vater’s honest sweat as I pressed into his side, seeking this little bit of affection and warmth that he would show me. He pressed a finger to my lips and raised it to the sky as I dimly began to see things again, the outlines of the trees, the shape of the buildings and, up above us, the clear black sky.

The stars were magnificent, a testament to the work of God who had placed them in the firmament, glittering jewels that came to me in dreams every night in my visions of heaven. We could see the faintly glowing band of the Milky Way clearly and, brighter and closer, the twinkling band of The Web. We were taught these names in school, though I often wondered where the stars and the constellations got their names and whether the people we were told lived elsewhere called them the same things.

“You see, there Thomas?” He stabbed his finger into the sky as a glittering streak shot briefly across the sky.

“Yes vater.” I answered, grinning as I saw the shooting star and his hand squeezed my shoulder.

“You don’t see those so very often any longer Thomas. When I was a child we saw them nearly every night. Sometimes they would light up the sky and we would hear them falling. Great roaring sounds away in the east. It was frightening and some nights you could almost see clear as day from the light. The winters were mild from the fire of their falling.” He shook his head as he reminisced and we stared up at the twinkling Web. “My grandfather told me he used to look up and see them moving around, not falling but flying, all around The Web, all around the sky. His grandfather used to tell him not to look, that it was the devil’s work, trying to make us look up, away from our work.”

“What do you think they are vater?”

“Stars can’t hurt us Thomas, the Devil fell from heaven, God wouldn’t let him back up there to tempt us with these sights I don’t think. Do you?”

I nodded, agreeing with his thought and looked up, hoping to see another falling star but none came. I almost imagined I could hear the crash off in the woods as the one we saw fell to Earth, but I knew I was imagining it. We stood in silence for a few more minutes gazing up at the lights in the sky and then he leaned back to turn the flame back up on the lantern.

“We’d best be going Thomas, mutter will be worrying that we’re taking so long and we don’t want her throwing out our evening meal now do we?” He nudged me towards the ladder with a gentle push and I took his cue as he took the lantern down, descending rung by rung into the velvety, warm, animal darkness of the barn and then out onto the cobbled path.

I glanced back as we walked, towards the woods where I imagined the shooting star had fallen, I daydreamed for a moment that I could see a glow there, despite the lantern, but it was simply the afterglow of the sun waiting beyond the horizon for another day. I dashed to catch up with vater and together we went home.

***

I lay in bed that night, my head full of shooting stars, and waited until I heard Sarah go to sleep, heralded by the change in her breathing. In my nightshirt I crept from my bed, pulling on my socks against the cold and dragging up my britches, holding them up with one hand to keep my nethers warm as I crept through the house.

Carefully, clumsily, I snuck downstairs to the kitchen and took out the old family Bible, leather bound and filled with rough, pulp paper, hand written – so the story went – by my great grandfather, painstakingly copied, word for word like most every other bible in the village save the one kept in the chapel which was at least two hundred years old and made of a strange yellowed paper we couldn’t match.

I carried the heavy old book over to the dying embers of the fire and I sat, spreading the pages and fetching the lantern from the back of the door, lighting the wick with an ember and turning up the flame until I could see well enough to read. There, in the dark, I scoured The Bible – and my memory – for every mention of stars that I could find. It made for strange reading and it was hard to discern the spirit of the text, stars were both good – and bad – they were a symbol of God’s power, he made them, fixed them and named them but they were also to be dashed down when the end came. They were signs and portents and that could be for both good and evil for us here on Earth.

I read and re-read all the passages I could find, reading around them to get the context and to refresh my memory, striving to understand until the lamp burned low and the sun began to rise. I had read all night without even realising it and would soon have to rise for the days chores. Hurriedly I put the book and the lantern back in their places and dashed upstairs, throwing off my socks and britches as I dived back into bed, breathless and panicked, knowing I would have been in such trouble had vater or mutter found me reading the good book at such an hour and worried that they would still, somehow, find out. As it was I’d likely feel the belt for being tired and inattentive all day, fifteen or not, rumspringa or not vater’s discipline was uncompromising on such things. You worked hard and you worked well if you knew what was good for you, we all depended on it.

The next thing I knew Sarah was shaking me, I had fallen asleep after all, the moment I lay my head down on the pillows I was so tired and now my eyes were sore and weeping in the morning light as she shook me, six years old and already almost as much of a bully as mutter could be.

“Bruder Thomas, wake up!” She all but screamed in my ear, giggling as she started to tickle me. I writhed and kicked and threw the covers off the bed as she ruthlessly attacked me. “Mutter says you’re too late for breakfast and vater says you’d better join him in the field double-quick or you’ll be in trouble.” She stuck out her tongue at me and pulled a face, always so happy to be the bearer of bad news for her older brother.

I picked up my pillow and swung it at her gap-toothed face, chasing her away grumpily as she sprinted, giggling and shrieking from the room, skirt and slip flaring as she hiked them up to run away all the quicker. Growling I threw the pillow after her, the thump drawing a bellow from mutter in the kitchen down below.

“Thomas! Leave your sister be, she’s only little!” A little terror, that was for certain.

Grumbling and grizzling to myself I heaved my bdy out of bed and dressed for the second time in the frigid air, grinding the sleep dust from my eyes and trying to ignore the yawing roll of my empty stomach. There’d be no breakfast for me today, penance for disobeying mutter and vater the night before and staying up so late. I trudged wearily down the stairs, dreading the day, and slipped out of the door, ignoring Sarah who was making faces at me and stuffing her face with bread and jam to mock me. Lights in the sky weren’t the devil’s work but little sisters almost certainly were.

It was misty this morning and it clung to the trees, thinning out over the fields. Vater was waiting for me, as were several of my onkels and vetters, John – one of my vetters – waved to me and got a smack around the ear for it. I was definitely in trouble, being friendly to me wasn’t allowed today. As I arrived they turned their backs on me and got to work, digging potatoes from the field by the barn. I had to grab a fork and dig by myself, in silence, scowling, tired and angry as they pointedly ignored me for no worse crime tan sleeping late. The stars seemed further away than ever as the sweat trickled down my back and, day by day, my calluses grew as thick as vaters.

Jacob's Ladder: Part One

2009-11-05T11:20:08Z

"What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!"

- William Shakespeare

The world turned as it had for over four-and-a-half billion years. A blue-green jewel in the fastness of space, garlanded by glittering trinkets mimicking the artistic rings of Saturn, swaddled in water, ice and the earthy greens and browns of life. Days and seasons passed as they always had, long before man even acknowledged that he was living on a spinning ball of rock but, imperceptibly, slower with each passing year as the solar system, the universe, wound down its clock.

The Earth turned, the moon circled, the sun burned and, above it all, watchful eyes gazed down upon it as it moved along it’s ancient clockwork, marking time, oblivious to everything that happened on it and above it. A humble rock, a mere speck in the universe, humbling in its insignificance, even though it might be the birthplace of wonders.

Around and above it swung The Perch, one of many glittering webs that encircled it, girdling it wither glittering gossamer, crawling with metallic and crystalline shapes, festooned with strange looking pods, pregnant with possibility. It shifted and waved in the invisible breeze, keeping its shape, its position, marching in perfect lock-step with its kin around the equator of the planet, humming with energy and voices, flowing with data, whole libraries of information – more than had ever been written on paper by mankind – every second. This was now, with The Perch dying, withering, winding down, ending its life in one last effort, fulfilling its ultimate and final purpose.

Between The Perch and the planet hung a smaller jewel, a crystal egg, studded with holes, lenses, prickled with spines, breaking apart into plates and contracting back together as it turned, great butterfly fields of magnetism projecting from it like wings, barely discernable aurora rippling across them in rainbow streams as energy coruscated through. Though mechanical the motions were hesitant, uncertain, random but not random, it fluttered, twitched, trembled like a leaf and then settled, momentarily, fixing itself upon the planet below.

Gregoria twitched her body around to catch the last light of the sun as it vanished behind the Earth, streaming particles captured by the scintillating fields of her wings and energising her, ready for her nightly vigil, the same as she had performed day after day, night after night for scores of years. She could have followed the sun, she could have filled the sky with sensors and retreated to the day side to bask and watch but she felt keeping to the days kept her in contact with the planet, with those she observed. She looked down as the Earth went dark her vision moving through the different spectra, picking up the heat dissipating from the land into the night sky, retained by the oceans, the wind changing direction along the coasts, whorls of wind and the dim, feeble light of the few remaining settlements on the surface as they grew warm and the world grew cool.

She blinked and the surface jumped instantly closer, the darkness cut through by her optics, grabbing what feeble light there was and boosting it until the land was almost as bright as day, the colours strange, artificial, software imposed but not quite a match, turning it dreamlike, Technicolor, like watching an archive.

The land slowly began to resolve itself, detail leaping into clarity as she concentrated. Forests covered so much of the land now and grew every year, an endless tide of fluffy green that blurred across so much of the continent, blending it into homogeny, so much so that even she lost her position for a moment and had to check the coordinates and correct herself from her internal records.

Her vision swung and centred on the village, her favourite, here at least the trees were clear and it lay alongside one of the old roads, now in disrepair but still cutting a thin ribbon through the dense forest. Her eye tracked across the orchards, the fields, the barns and the houses, picking out the little white glows of the people as they moved about their evening’s business, closing up the farms and the houses and settling in for the night by their hearths.

She felt a surge of emotion for these people as she watched them go about their simple lives, tending fields, raising children, chopping wood, lighting fires, all as the species had – somewhere on the world below – for longer than recorded history. They had come so far, so fast from these humble beginnings and looking down on these simple folk it was hard to believe it had ever been accomplished.

She clamped down on that emotion, hard. It was nostalgia for something she’d never experienced, unworthy, patronising. For all the charm they had, for all the curiosity that they engendered, for all the wonder that they held for her – obsessed as she was with the past – she couldn’t let herself be lost in this emotional attachment. After so many years things were about to change again, to become so very, very different, she didn’t want to be left behind as they had been, not for emotion, not for any reason.

As she pulled her vision back and turned herself towards the glittering structure of The Perch, Akamai coasted close to her, surfing the field lines until he came within a few hundred metres. Completely unnecessary to talk to her but he was respecting her peculiar obsessions, as he always did – making himself physically present before he spoke, it made her smile.

“Gregoria, are you watching your pets again?” He asked, flashing humour as he brought himself to a halt, mimicking her watchful, synchronous orbit over the world below.

“It still seems a shame to me…” She trailed off, her signal wavering with mild distress as images from her years of study welled up from her memory and overwhelmed her. She’d argued her case but she was, finally, after so many years, the only one that still even thought about staying. They’d been over this a million times.

“We’ve done everything we can for them, they’ll have a good start and a lot of help if they ever decide to follow us, but we can’t stay here any longer, so… confined.” He spread his wings for emphasis, her senses fluttering in the surge of magnetic power, gleaming in her senses like the shimmer of oil on water. He could be so dramatic and the solar system still seemed big enough to her, not confining, not in the least.

“We owe them more, we come from them, we were them, we still are them in some ways. We wouldn’t be here without them.” She knew the argument was feeble, that the race’s conscience had been salved by what they had done for their cousins already – and for the future – but even now, with most of their companions and The Children gone, she felt she had to argue, the last hold out, the last protesting voice.

“Even you can’t stay here forever Gregoria.” He said, softly, caressing her field lines with his own, feeding her power, soothing her, realising her tension and distress. “Sooner or later we have to let them go. We have to let them find their own way without us watching over them all the time, just as we’ll have to let The Children go eventually. You can’t be everybody’s mother. We have to trust them to take care of themselves now, if they can.”

She shrugged him away, pushing his drifting form back towards The Perch until he brought himself back to a halt with a pulse of energy, radiating frustration at her rebuff.

“They’ve been my field of study for over a century Akamai, it’s hard to let go. There’ll be plenty of stars for you to look at where we’re going. What will I do with the aeons to come? I need to say goodbye to them. I need something to sustain me while we travel. Can you understand that? That it’s hard for me to let go? That I don’t want to be bored for eternity? I don’t want to retrain or reprogram, they define who I am, they’re what I’m… for.” She finished, limply, drawing in on herself, coiled, a foetal ball in the dark, pulling back her fields, spinning blindly over the planet below, cutting out the chatter of the grid and leaving only a feeble line open to him. A lifetime of data and observations and it still wasn’t enough to light the gulf between the stars.

“I understand Gregoria, more than most of us, I think, I understand you. If you need to say goodbye then go and see them one last time, but they haven’t changed so long as we’ve been away from them and there’s less of them every generation. Whether you stay here or not, this story is probably over. We’ve done all we can, it’s time to look to ourselves, The Children and the universe. That’s where our real responsibility lies now. There are more, newer things to learn about, the past is exhausted, there’s nothing left there to mine. Go if you need to, see them, but come back to us and come with us, I don’t want to leave you behind.”

She listened to his speech and smiled again, cracking her shell just a little, widening the band to talk to him. “You said I, not we…” She mocked him, bringing her fields back up and entangling them with his, power sparking between them, shared back and forth with affection.

“You know I’m fond of you.” He was gruff now, irritated, always liking to project the image of the dispassionate scientist, the observer, the expert, emotion made him fretful, made him make mistakes in his speech, it was… ‘cute’

“Then wait for me, we’ll leave together, you can say goodbye to your sun and I will say goodbye to my ‘pets’. Deal?”

“Deal.” He answered grudgingly. “A few more days, but then you have to promise me that we can leave, together, with the last of The Children.”

“I promise.” She meant it.

He drew back again, leaving her with her thoughts, spreading his wings and surfing the lines to bring him up to speed, speeding away towards his precious sun, seeking the light on the other side of the spinning globe, leaving her in the dark, hanging above her own obsession.

She spun, slowly, taking in The Perch with her panoramic vision. It was mostly abandoned now but still shone with light along its lines. She could make out the last few of her contemporaries, the last numbers of The Children making what preparations remained before the exodus and she looked past them, beyond them, to the stars, their destination.

It was brave, perhaps foolish, but it made sense, it made more sense than anything else to leave, it was the only way they could all fulfil their potential. She wasn’t all about what made sense though. If you didn’t know where you had come from, you couldn’t understand where you were going and, so, she turned her back on the glittering heavens once more, slowly turning back to face the darkened land below. She began to fall.

Blissfully, she surrendered to gravity, letting the Earth pull at her, letting it draw her into its embrace. Slowly at first, then building up speed, faster and faster, her outer shell began to sense the atmosphere, one molecule at a time, then more and more, the sensation shifting to one of heat. She rolled and basked in it, glowing, burning as she hurtled down through the atmosphere, singing with joy as she fell. Finally she spread her wings to slow her descent, to prolong the moment, fiery plasma running along her wings, flaming wings like a phoenix of myth. The feeling of pressure, of warmth, of atmosphere was glorious and she allowed senses to awaken that had been long since dormant. Smell, taste, touch, she gaped her mouth to feel the burning air and to breathe it in, to sample it, bleeding away the heat through her spines as she burned down through the air. She was ecstatic, yet sad, remembering every sensation, every impact, every buffet, burning every single moment indelibly into her core to remember forever.

Her last visit to Earth.

Gregoria embraced the Earth and it welcomed her home.