Thursday 21 August 2014

Breach'd; The Unexplored Tales

She had almost walked by, almost but not quite. There was something about the way he sat on that low stone wall that made her pause, as if he had captured a moment, and held it within his vision.

Abruptly, he held up a finger. It was almost as if he could sense her presence but couldn't risk taking his eyes off the moment for fear of losing it.

She sat down on the wall, next to this strange person that had managed to stop time and peered intently along the narrow street where his gaze lingered. Perhaps she too could enter this mysterious world.

He still held up his finger, but slowly it curled back towards the rest and his hand lowered. She could feel his tension, though. A palpable excitement that exuded off of him and raised the hairs along her neck in anticipation. It felt like she was standing on the edge of a cliff and slowly, so slowly, the rock was giving way beneath her.

A minute or perhaps ten passed, she really couldn't tell. It was the middle of the day and they sat outside a pub, but nothing moved that she could see, and her hearing had narrowed to a fine pinpoint, almost like a tendril, that strained across the path in front of her.

A leaf wafted across the road in the distance and she watched its path with lazy indulgence. Perhaps there was nothing after all, she thought, blinking away the haze.

Just then, she heard it. A soft, though sharp, intake of breath from beside her, and she turned to see his hands clutching his knees so hard the knuckles had whitened. She lifted her gaze back along the street, her eyes seeming to catch on the crevices and cracks between the paving stones and wanting to settle, not continue.

She was breathless and sweating by the time she had caught up to the end. The exertion of fighting against the force had all but bested her, but she was stubborn and hardheaded and no ephemeral barrier would stand in her way. The leaf flowed across the path again.

And then it stopped.

Her eyes went wide, and unbidden she found her hand being clutched tightly by someone. It was warm and comforting - a lifeline in a turbulent world, a hurricane, a tornado, a tidal wave, and she grasped it just as hard as it held her.

For the world had just been shattered.

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