Flame, Blackheath, and an unnamed child find their lives in limbo.
Thaw
Fear, Grief, and Hatred freeze a person's experience of life. But life is in a constant state of flux. It cannot be frozen. If you cannot change, you do not live.
A human child, found alone deep in Soul territory, no identifying possessions, no voice, no name, like she had appeared out of thin air. And it seems no one is looking for her. Where is her father? What is she afraid of?
A world away, another father is absent.
Ayasha sits with Alex, waiting for him to wake up, while Flame follows memories to find him.
Will father and daughter be reunited?
Central to the resolution of both situations, Blackheath is trapped in the wrong place, with both time and the law against him.
Prologue
***
Though his eyes were closed, he knew that she was there. He could feel her rubbing her thumb over his arm, both lightly and firmly, her motion smooth and continuous, delineating the muscles, pushing a wedge of touch up to his shoulder along the furrow between the muscle and bone, running her forefinger around his shoulder bones and along the slight shelf of his collarbone. Blackheath lay still, enjoying her touch more than he could say, but resting immobile, head on his forearms, in case he broke her spell and she disapperared.
When she pressed her cheek to his naked back, he woke. And like every time he woke since he had lost her, he felt her absence like a knife in his throat.
Thanks to:
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. Susan Sontag
This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived
As freezing persons recollect the snow
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go
Emily Dickinson
Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason that the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. Michel de Montaigne
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. James Joyce
Water cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it Song of Solomon
Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream. Michel de Montaigne
