Principal Components (Eleven, River, Action/Adventure) Interlude IV
Main Post and Chapter Index
**
The temperature had plummeted from mild to near freezing over a ten minute span. In twenty minutes more, the cold would be fatal to every living being in existence. But since they planned to be gone well before then, neither of those beings--the last two sentient life forms picking over a graveyard of TARDISes in the dregs of House's collapsing pocket universe--paid it much mind. The Doctor installed a salvaged time rotor into the console, and wondered aloud how this ship was ever going to fly. The energy matrix that inhabited what used to be Idris exhaled, and examined the cloud of fog that crystallized and vanished in the atmosphere--so new, so much to see-hear-smell-taste-touch--
Concentrate. Moments lived through these senses are quickly exhausted.
Her eleven dimensional mind was hobbled in this prison of flesh and linear time, but occasionally a true memory resonated in the right dimensions for the shell to process. It was difficult. Her matrix existed in the integral space of expectation and prediction, but here, time was nothing but a derivative. An unanchored rate of change. Idris blinked away her reverie and discovered that indeed, while she had been contemplating, four seconds had slipped away before she had even recognized them. They were just gone.
A physical response tore its way--sharp, stinging--across her prison, but she could not isolate the stimulus. The body was bleeding-time-dying, and every measure of its existence was pain. She resumed her search for a suitable switch to activate the temporal stabilizers, but her matrix was still crudely multi-tasking, snatching thoughts to interleave and interpret one by one by one by one by one, fast as it could.
Pebbles scooped from a riverbed. The water remembers their shapes but it cannot be touched.
This universe was dying but that wasn't the only urgency in her mind. Something was missing, manifesting as a persistent catch in her thoughts. Now. Now. Now. But her body was blind to its expectation. Expectation needed an anchor. Without a constant, fixed point, integration across the measure of events was meaningless. Her Pilot’s people could sometimes catch glimpses of fixed points and perceive local predictions but it was fumbling for stones in a stream.
No, not stones. Stones are too small. A submerged forest of trees and intricate branches. Stilled ponds remember everything at once.
But there were no ponds here. The only water in this forest was . . . was something else important as well. Something for later.
"Do you ever wonder why I chose you all those years ago?" she found herself asking. Thoughts percolated to the surface of her mind in that staccato beat: now now now now now.
"I chose you. You were unlocked." He looked up for a moment with his hilarious face, but to her it was all of his faces, so different in past and present and future. She had never looked with eyes at memories before, not even a mind's eye. Appearance was a zero-measure variation.
"Of course I was." She made her way back toward him with her contribution, a wire coat hanger selected from the detritus. "I wanted to see the universe, so I stole a Time Lord and I ran away. And you were the only one mad enough."
"See" wasn't the right word, naturally. It was his full potential she had noticed. The complexity of their manifold of expectations promised so much to experience across the continuum. Past, future, and now now now now now now. She watched with eyes now as he flitted and fiddled with the trappings of their cobbled machine, affixing buttons they would never press, searching for ropes and harnesses that would never need to catch them. In nine point seven five minutes, an eddy in the vortex would careen them straight into vaporization and oblivion unless his flailing hands could catch the pull-lever for the temporal stabilizers just exactly so. Idris eyed the wire hanger and now (now now now) adjusted its shape minutely to accommodate the space where his hand would catch.
His strays were so blind to what was fixed-strong-sure and what wasn't. Even he sometimes saw the strongest expected paths she predicted as precarious and fraught. As coincidence. It was the price of having only see-hear-taste-smell-touch with which to perceive derivative time. Contrary to what those limited perceptions would suggest, random chance was almost never risky. If it was applied across a large enough domain, expectations almost surely converged in the limit.
No, it was the anchor points they really needed to worry about. Those fixed points, carefully constructed, were what held or didn't hold any path. But they were impossible to spot at all in four dimensions without some pull of higher curvature as a guide, something to follow when extrapolating from local measure. Time seemed so strange and fleeting to this body, Idris had no idea what a fixed point would feel like--
now now now nownownow NOW NOW NOW!!!
"Oh," the mouth said, and the knees buckled. "It's now."
**
Five minutes and thirty six seconds to go.
The TARDIS remembered her anchor as a path integral, the approach to an infinite mass on an infinitesimal point whose division by zero loomed asymptotically large. By measure, it was a single spike, spindled around an collection of events that was constructed to always ever happen, just so. The Doctor, dropping his salvaged safety straps and springing to her side when she collapsed on the cold ground. Their point of contact. The helical path spinning and shoring to affix their two shells present to past: one disassociated and damaged and the other whole and strong. In the continuum it was--symmetry | reflection | mirror lens. In eleven dimensions, it was beautiful.
In the swift current of derivative time, tied only to a dying body's chemical receptors and reactions, it was chaos.
"What's wrong? Is it the other kidney?" The Doctor's face swam into view and blurred. His voice sounded far away.
"I--" She couldn't form words. Something jarred her, erupting pain, closing the throat. He was trying to help her up, but the pressure of his hands on her side sent sharp fire through the body. So much to see and she couldn't--why? Everything blurred and then cleared and then blurred again. Eyes malfunctioning, leaking saline. Ears hearing nothing but the pounding pulse of blood pumping through the body. Burn in the lungs, muscles seizing with the impact of an eleven dimensional brain hammering now-now-now at its prison of neurons. Pressure building like a cyclone in the chest cavity--
Breathe! A directive. She caught it and held on. You must remember to breathe.
"I almost missed it," she finally gasped. "We need to talk with mouths now and I almost missed it!"
"We need to talk? We've been talking." He looked at her skeptically, his words gaining speed and increasing pitch before smoothing out again. He was confused. And worried for her, but placating. "Now, we need to go. Come on--"
"No!" Her mind couldn't always slot see-hear-taste-smell-touch into the right order, but this was something else. A fixed point was beating at these moments, coursing stones through her thoughts, and all her Pilot could sense was the cold of a dying universe and the immediacy of a makeshift TARDIS whose predicted path would hardly budge under the flex of a few extra minutes! She brushed his hands away, as if the distance could give her a stronger hold on every thought-memory-word-impulse-feeling being torn away from her one by one before she could work them out of this puny chemical brain.
"Desert. Nevada. August, nineteen sixty nine. You've rung time like a bell, and I listened--am listening . . . will . . . Tenses! Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? How much history is at risk? How much I--missed you? And now is the time, and the only water in this forest is--is . . . how do you see anything like this? How can you see anything? Oh. Oh, no, no, no . . . I didn't understand. I didn't really know what they took from you, not until right now."
Because "see" wasn't the right word, but the idea behind it tore into her body like claws. The eyes were streaming constantly. She couldn't draw a breath without crying it out in a shudder, the words she wanted to say running away from her almost before they could form. And the poor echo of derivative time was no comfort. In her continuum, see-hear-smell-taste-touch were fundamentally unimportant. Measure and metaphor would never be enough to tell her what it would mean for a body like this to lose them. And how could this body become so debilitated just by thinking about that?
Hands were at her side again, strong, holding her up. It still felt like fire, but knowing it was his touch was a comfort she couldn't push away. The ears caught his voice over her noisy sobs. "Hey, it's all right. The Nevada desert was ages ago, but you are still very new to feeling emotions this way. It's okay, look." He held her at arm's length so the eyes could focus. "We got it back, remember? It all worked out--"
"Not yet." She sniffed and shook her head. "Those paths are still in flux. There are anchors to be set or everything breaks apart! Mine is now, and yours--you can't run from yours forever. You want to but you can't--"
"I know! I know." For a moment to her wavering view, his mouth turned down, eyes guarded and cross. But sight was so fickle. She blinked and it was gone, or softened, or it was just his breath fogging in the cold as he tried to lift her to her feet. "Please, I understand it's difficult but you have to focus. We only have a few minutes before this universe dies, and your matrix is destroying this body. Don't get emotional; you said it yourself. We don't have time--"
No, no, no. Idiot thief! She countered his pull with all of her strength, even though it was too much for the other kidney to bear, and she felt it fail. "What do you know about time? You can barely sense the surface as time drains out a plughole! This is the time we talked and I needed--I would have--I need to talk to you, with mouths, exactly now because exactly then, we have nothing else!"
And he stopped. Stilled like a pond on a windless day. The ears told her that the word she had just used, exactly, was spoken in his own people's tongue. Tenses were difficult, but sometimes they just needed a language with greater precision. She saw the realization take hold of his body. He relaxed his hold on her and looked at their surroundings as though seeing them for the first time.
"Wait. No. Hang on. Back then in the desert. I dreamed this."
**
Two minutes and fifty seconds to go.
It was like finding the eye of a storm. The frantic pounding of now, now, now slowed and smoothed in Idris' chemical brain, and her matrix finally recognized enough of the local temporal gradient to construct a fleeting prediction. The path was gaining momentum, and if she calmed the breathing and closed the eyes (now), she could almost feel it on her skin. The relief nearly sent her back to her knees. But there was still work to do.
"We crashed on the motorway. I must have lost consciousness. I had to be dreaming because I could see, and hear us talking." The Doctor had taken a step back and was speaking distractedly into the air. His brain was built for interleaving and interpreting thoughts in linear time, and when he looked back at her, she knew he was organizing many more than those he was speaking. "Only I didn't know who you were. Well, I could tell that I knew who you were in the dream, but then in the desert we nearly missed anyway because I didn't know you were--"
"No." She touched a finger to his lips. "Say no more than you must. The foregoing path is stabilizing but these events are not yet anchored. Can you see it? Now is when we nearly miss."
He closed his eyes, stretching his perception to the timescape around them. She knew what he was studying, even though this body had only the barest sense of it. Likelihood--derivative temporal probability--wasn't constrained by four-dimensional distance; it was a matter of potential and actions. There was always a steady background pull to any moment, radiating from present to future in the gradient like an outgoing tide. But sometimes, there was a resonance with nearby paths whose linear distance--spindle to branch to trunk to root and back--was much, much farther. And if those paths had been agitated, there was sometimes a tiny backtick in potential where they met, that flowed counter to the prevailing trend . . .
She knew when he felt it, because his tenses became as muddled as her own. "That's us. We are--were . . . in the desert. Now. But how did you . . . how are you doing this?"
"I'm not. That's you--superposition and aftershocks. I just wait for the right time to do no more than I must."
He frowned, eyes still closed. "I hate waiting; I'm terrible at it."
"I know." She had never understood why, before now. "It's much easier to do when time is a pond and not a--"
Something caught his attention and he cocked his head.
"River . . ." He reached out a hand as though he could hold it--the echo of the path that was orbiting their own, anchored in the distant, ancient desert. It is--it was: fury, rage and despair, distilled. Honed and sharpened until there was nearly nothing left of conscious thought, only decisions wrought from muscle memory and pure reaction. The likelihood was less a mind than it was the path of a weapon that had already been thrown. "Oh River, who did this to you? What--who are you . . . ?"
"The water in the forest. She can't see where her choices take her, not then. She's lost and blind."
He made a sound that could have been a laugh. "That makes two of us."
"But you're not." She took his outstretched hand, wondering how she could ever forget the intimacy of this sensation, skin on skin. It was inevitable, though. She would lose touch in the continuum, no matter how much she wanted to keep it.
"You just need something to hold on to," she told him. "One fixed point in all of the chaos. You need to know . . . "
His eyes opened, with all those thoughts behind them spinning so naturally one by one, and finally slotting into place. When he spoke, it resonated with the local measure as though the entire moment had been constructed to hold the exact words.
"That we're not moving."
**
Thirty seconds to go.
He blinked, and the moment was over. "That--all of that. That's what I said in the dream."
"Not a dream," she corrected. "A memory. But we won't be remembering it later, because it needs--it will need to have been remembered then. When you're not moving." She drew his hand up, placing his palm against her cheek. "When I need to know what this feels like."
"Remembered, then?" he echoed. "But this is still a linear path. You can't remember something that hasn't happened yet."
Her Pilot. Always adapting and innovating in the swift river of derivative time. Always so . . . alive. She smiled.
"You can't. Not even when you set the ripples in motion yourself to do it. Not without my help."
Three. She pressed her hand over his, releasing the temporal potential woven into her matrix, that she had painstakingly gathered ages ago in the Nevada desert. Two. The memory was polished and shored to their helical paths, set upon the last echo of the wave of superposition that was resounding present to past, and poised to let go. One. In the immediate future they would remember only her shell's slight stumble before their mad dash into the vortex to save their companions and themselves. But exactly now--
Zero. A golden glow lit from her fingertips, tracing their touching skin and transferring through to him in an instant. Then it was gone and they were running, hand in hand as always.
**
Part 10 | Part 11 This entry was originally posted at https://eve11.dreamwidth.org/1279871.html. Comment wherever you would like.
**
The temperature had plummeted from mild to near freezing over a ten minute span. In twenty minutes more, the cold would be fatal to every living being in existence. But since they planned to be gone well before then, neither of those beings--the last two sentient life forms picking over a graveyard of TARDISes in the dregs of House's collapsing pocket universe--paid it much mind. The Doctor installed a salvaged time rotor into the console, and wondered aloud how this ship was ever going to fly. The energy matrix that inhabited what used to be Idris exhaled, and examined the cloud of fog that crystallized and vanished in the atmosphere--so new, so much to see-hear-smell-taste-touch--
Concentrate. Moments lived through these senses are quickly exhausted.
Her eleven dimensional mind was hobbled in this prison of flesh and linear time, but occasionally a true memory resonated in the right dimensions for the shell to process. It was difficult. Her matrix existed in the integral space of expectation and prediction, but here, time was nothing but a derivative. An unanchored rate of change. Idris blinked away her reverie and discovered that indeed, while she had been contemplating, four seconds had slipped away before she had even recognized them. They were just gone.
A physical response tore its way--sharp, stinging--across her prison, but she could not isolate the stimulus. The body was bleeding-time-dying, and every measure of its existence was pain. She resumed her search for a suitable switch to activate the temporal stabilizers, but her matrix was still crudely multi-tasking, snatching thoughts to interleave and interpret one by one by one by one by one, fast as it could.
Pebbles scooped from a riverbed. The water remembers their shapes but it cannot be touched.
This universe was dying but that wasn't the only urgency in her mind. Something was missing, manifesting as a persistent catch in her thoughts. Now. Now. Now. But her body was blind to its expectation. Expectation needed an anchor. Without a constant, fixed point, integration across the measure of events was meaningless. Her Pilot’s people could sometimes catch glimpses of fixed points and perceive local predictions but it was fumbling for stones in a stream.
No, not stones. Stones are too small. A submerged forest of trees and intricate branches. Stilled ponds remember everything at once.
But there were no ponds here. The only water in this forest was . . . was something else important as well. Something for later.
"Do you ever wonder why I chose you all those years ago?" she found herself asking. Thoughts percolated to the surface of her mind in that staccato beat: now now now now now.
"I chose you. You were unlocked." He looked up for a moment with his hilarious face, but to her it was all of his faces, so different in past and present and future. She had never looked with eyes at memories before, not even a mind's eye. Appearance was a zero-measure variation.
"Of course I was." She made her way back toward him with her contribution, a wire coat hanger selected from the detritus. "I wanted to see the universe, so I stole a Time Lord and I ran away. And you were the only one mad enough."
"See" wasn't the right word, naturally. It was his full potential she had noticed. The complexity of their manifold of expectations promised so much to experience across the continuum. Past, future, and now now now now now now. She watched with eyes now as he flitted and fiddled with the trappings of their cobbled machine, affixing buttons they would never press, searching for ropes and harnesses that would never need to catch them. In nine point seven five minutes, an eddy in the vortex would careen them straight into vaporization and oblivion unless his flailing hands could catch the pull-lever for the temporal stabilizers just exactly so. Idris eyed the wire hanger and now (now now now) adjusted its shape minutely to accommodate the space where his hand would catch.
His strays were so blind to what was fixed-strong-sure and what wasn't. Even he sometimes saw the strongest expected paths she predicted as precarious and fraught. As coincidence. It was the price of having only see-hear-taste-smell-touch with which to perceive derivative time. Contrary to what those limited perceptions would suggest, random chance was almost never risky. If it was applied across a large enough domain, expectations almost surely converged in the limit.
No, it was the anchor points they really needed to worry about. Those fixed points, carefully constructed, were what held or didn't hold any path. But they were impossible to spot at all in four dimensions without some pull of higher curvature as a guide, something to follow when extrapolating from local measure. Time seemed so strange and fleeting to this body, Idris had no idea what a fixed point would feel like--
now now now nownownow NOW NOW NOW!!!
"Oh," the mouth said, and the knees buckled. "It's now."
**
Five minutes and thirty six seconds to go.
The TARDIS remembered her anchor as a path integral, the approach to an infinite mass on an infinitesimal point whose division by zero loomed asymptotically large. By measure, it was a single spike, spindled around an collection of events that was constructed to always ever happen, just so. The Doctor, dropping his salvaged safety straps and springing to her side when she collapsed on the cold ground. Their point of contact. The helical path spinning and shoring to affix their two shells present to past: one disassociated and damaged and the other whole and strong. In the continuum it was--symmetry | reflection | mirror lens. In eleven dimensions, it was beautiful.
In the swift current of derivative time, tied only to a dying body's chemical receptors and reactions, it was chaos.
"What's wrong? Is it the other kidney?" The Doctor's face swam into view and blurred. His voice sounded far away.
"I--" She couldn't form words. Something jarred her, erupting pain, closing the throat. He was trying to help her up, but the pressure of his hands on her side sent sharp fire through the body. So much to see and she couldn't--why? Everything blurred and then cleared and then blurred again. Eyes malfunctioning, leaking saline. Ears hearing nothing but the pounding pulse of blood pumping through the body. Burn in the lungs, muscles seizing with the impact of an eleven dimensional brain hammering now-now-now at its prison of neurons. Pressure building like a cyclone in the chest cavity--
Breathe! A directive. She caught it and held on. You must remember to breathe.
"I almost missed it," she finally gasped. "We need to talk with mouths now and I almost missed it!"
"We need to talk? We've been talking." He looked at her skeptically, his words gaining speed and increasing pitch before smoothing out again. He was confused. And worried for her, but placating. "Now, we need to go. Come on--"
"No!" Her mind couldn't always slot see-hear-taste-smell-touch into the right order, but this was something else. A fixed point was beating at these moments, coursing stones through her thoughts, and all her Pilot could sense was the cold of a dying universe and the immediacy of a makeshift TARDIS whose predicted path would hardly budge under the flex of a few extra minutes! She brushed his hands away, as if the distance could give her a stronger hold on every thought-memory-word-impulse-feeling being torn away from her one by one before she could work them out of this puny chemical brain.
"Desert. Nevada. August, nineteen sixty nine. You've rung time like a bell, and I listened--am listening . . . will . . . Tenses! Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? How much history is at risk? How much I--missed you? And now is the time, and the only water in this forest is--is . . . how do you see anything like this? How can you see anything? Oh. Oh, no, no, no . . . I didn't understand. I didn't really know what they took from you, not until right now."
Because "see" wasn't the right word, but the idea behind it tore into her body like claws. The eyes were streaming constantly. She couldn't draw a breath without crying it out in a shudder, the words she wanted to say running away from her almost before they could form. And the poor echo of derivative time was no comfort. In her continuum, see-hear-smell-taste-touch were fundamentally unimportant. Measure and metaphor would never be enough to tell her what it would mean for a body like this to lose them. And how could this body become so debilitated just by thinking about that?
Hands were at her side again, strong, holding her up. It still felt like fire, but knowing it was his touch was a comfort she couldn't push away. The ears caught his voice over her noisy sobs. "Hey, it's all right. The Nevada desert was ages ago, but you are still very new to feeling emotions this way. It's okay, look." He held her at arm's length so the eyes could focus. "We got it back, remember? It all worked out--"
"Not yet." She sniffed and shook her head. "Those paths are still in flux. There are anchors to be set or everything breaks apart! Mine is now, and yours--you can't run from yours forever. You want to but you can't--"
"I know! I know." For a moment to her wavering view, his mouth turned down, eyes guarded and cross. But sight was so fickle. She blinked and it was gone, or softened, or it was just his breath fogging in the cold as he tried to lift her to her feet. "Please, I understand it's difficult but you have to focus. We only have a few minutes before this universe dies, and your matrix is destroying this body. Don't get emotional; you said it yourself. We don't have time--"
No, no, no. Idiot thief! She countered his pull with all of her strength, even though it was too much for the other kidney to bear, and she felt it fail. "What do you know about time? You can barely sense the surface as time drains out a plughole! This is the time we talked and I needed--I would have--I need to talk to you, with mouths, exactly now because exactly then, we have nothing else!"
And he stopped. Stilled like a pond on a windless day. The ears told her that the word she had just used, exactly, was spoken in his own people's tongue. Tenses were difficult, but sometimes they just needed a language with greater precision. She saw the realization take hold of his body. He relaxed his hold on her and looked at their surroundings as though seeing them for the first time.
"Wait. No. Hang on. Back then in the desert. I dreamed this."
**
Two minutes and fifty seconds to go.
It was like finding the eye of a storm. The frantic pounding of now, now, now slowed and smoothed in Idris' chemical brain, and her matrix finally recognized enough of the local temporal gradient to construct a fleeting prediction. The path was gaining momentum, and if she calmed the breathing and closed the eyes (now), she could almost feel it on her skin. The relief nearly sent her back to her knees. But there was still work to do.
"We crashed on the motorway. I must have lost consciousness. I had to be dreaming because I could see, and hear us talking." The Doctor had taken a step back and was speaking distractedly into the air. His brain was built for interleaving and interpreting thoughts in linear time, and when he looked back at her, she knew he was organizing many more than those he was speaking. "Only I didn't know who you were. Well, I could tell that I knew who you were in the dream, but then in the desert we nearly missed anyway because I didn't know you were--"
"No." She touched a finger to his lips. "Say no more than you must. The foregoing path is stabilizing but these events are not yet anchored. Can you see it? Now is when we nearly miss."
He closed his eyes, stretching his perception to the timescape around them. She knew what he was studying, even though this body had only the barest sense of it. Likelihood--derivative temporal probability--wasn't constrained by four-dimensional distance; it was a matter of potential and actions. There was always a steady background pull to any moment, radiating from present to future in the gradient like an outgoing tide. But sometimes, there was a resonance with nearby paths whose linear distance--spindle to branch to trunk to root and back--was much, much farther. And if those paths had been agitated, there was sometimes a tiny backtick in potential where they met, that flowed counter to the prevailing trend . . .
She knew when he felt it, because his tenses became as muddled as her own. "That's us. We are--were . . . in the desert. Now. But how did you . . . how are you doing this?"
"I'm not. That's you--superposition and aftershocks. I just wait for the right time to do no more than I must."
He frowned, eyes still closed. "I hate waiting; I'm terrible at it."
"I know." She had never understood why, before now. "It's much easier to do when time is a pond and not a--"
Something caught his attention and he cocked his head.
"River . . ." He reached out a hand as though he could hold it--the echo of the path that was orbiting their own, anchored in the distant, ancient desert. It is--it was: fury, rage and despair, distilled. Honed and sharpened until there was nearly nothing left of conscious thought, only decisions wrought from muscle memory and pure reaction. The likelihood was less a mind than it was the path of a weapon that had already been thrown. "Oh River, who did this to you? What--who are you . . . ?"
"The water in the forest. She can't see where her choices take her, not then. She's lost and blind."
He made a sound that could have been a laugh. "That makes two of us."
"But you're not." She took his outstretched hand, wondering how she could ever forget the intimacy of this sensation, skin on skin. It was inevitable, though. She would lose touch in the continuum, no matter how much she wanted to keep it.
"You just need something to hold on to," she told him. "One fixed point in all of the chaos. You need to know . . . "
His eyes opened, with all those thoughts behind them spinning so naturally one by one, and finally slotting into place. When he spoke, it resonated with the local measure as though the entire moment had been constructed to hold the exact words.
"That we're not moving."
**
Thirty seconds to go.
He blinked, and the moment was over. "That--all of that. That's what I said in the dream."
"Not a dream," she corrected. "A memory. But we won't be remembering it later, because it needs--it will need to have been remembered then. When you're not moving." She drew his hand up, placing his palm against her cheek. "When I need to know what this feels like."
"Remembered, then?" he echoed. "But this is still a linear path. You can't remember something that hasn't happened yet."
Her Pilot. Always adapting and innovating in the swift river of derivative time. Always so . . . alive. She smiled.
"You can't. Not even when you set the ripples in motion yourself to do it. Not without my help."
Three. She pressed her hand over his, releasing the temporal potential woven into her matrix, that she had painstakingly gathered ages ago in the Nevada desert. Two. The memory was polished and shored to their helical paths, set upon the last echo of the wave of superposition that was resounding present to past, and poised to let go. One. In the immediate future they would remember only her shell's slight stumble before their mad dash into the vortex to save their companions and themselves. But exactly now--
Zero. A golden glow lit from her fingertips, tracing their touching skin and transferring through to him in an instant. Then it was gone and they were running, hand in hand as always.
**
Part 10 | Part 11 This entry was originally posted at https://eve11.dreamwidth.org/1279871.html. Comment wherever you would like.