The air filtered through my skin and I did my best to inhale the beauty, as I stood tall above the ocean on a grassy cliff. Bathing on this cliffside, I didn't miss New York. For the last few years it had felt like a trap. Like every time I tried to find hope, it would laugh at me and show me how cruel people could be - how hopeless my dreams were.
The crystalline breeze of this life filled me so much, I had little room for pain inside of me. And with possibility and naive hope blowing across the ocean onto me, weary advice to think of the world as a battlefield or humanity as a plane in a nosedive shrank away from my thoughts.
The voice of my father came ringing, "Irene, can you come unpack these boxes?"
Reluctantly, I left the wind to blow sunlight onto the hills without me as I headed into the house.
It was two weeks in France before I started feeling uneasy. My vision got progressively worse as clouds crowded around me and an underlying impulse slowly began to rise in me until the wide open landscape and tumbling cliffs faded, and all I could hear was its hum.
I remember the night being purple and airy, and I remember not being able to sleep.
I could find nothing that might be worrying me. I had settled into life here easily, Father was under no unusual stress and the war seemed too far off to creep into my worries. But something was definitely wrong.
The darkness of the room felt like a cage, trapping me as a tidal wave rushed forward to drown me. I had to get out, but gravity pressed too heavily over my limbs to escape. Soon, the room began to shift and all I could see was dull shades of white lacing through the gloom as I struggled for freedom.
The sound of metal crashing against itself jolted me awake, and it took a moment to realize that I had been asleep worrying the whole time. And another moment to realize that I had to leave my house – now.
I clambered downstairs and out into the open air without a thought about where I should go. I just knew that if I stayed and let that tidal wave reach me, my whole family would drown.
My own senseless reasoning sent me running into the town and through neighborhoods, searching for a house I had never seen before. Addresses rushed past me like slide projections until one clicked. I stopped in front of a cottage squeezed in between two other cottages just as small. This must be it, I thought a moment before a rhythmic scratch of metal on concrete echoed through the streets. It was the sound of a gallop - and it was heading towards me.
Trying desperately to move quickly and silently, I slipped into the stranger's house and glided up the stairs to a small hallway with two doors. I had no idea who I was looking for but I opened the door on the left to the room anyway. Sprawled on the bed lay a red haired boy with the same sturdy face as the one I had caught two weeks before, stealing from us.
This must be a coincidence, I heard in my thoughts amidst drone of fear. I crept over to him and shook him, sending a look of genuine alarm to his face when he woke. "Hi, um" I panted.
"What are you doing here? Who are you?" The grace from two weeks ago had vanished in his questioning voice.
"I'm the one who caught you...stealing from me,"
"Oh yeah…What are you doing here?"
"I don't know, but something is wrong. I'm not sure what, but I just came here…for some reason." The strangeness of the situation suddenly caught up to me.
The color drained from his face and fear rung through him. "What do you mean?" he spoke cautiously.
"I don't know, but something's coming,"
"Come on. We have to go." With a seriousness I didn't think could posses him, he jumped out of bed, grabbed a long rod that looked like a walking stick from his closet and hurried downstairs. He paused in front of the door before heading outside and cautioned, "I'll explain everything when we get to some place safe. We might run into some strange things. But for now, just, stick close to me and…do as I say." Underneath a layer of stern confidence, he seemed as frightened as I was.
Opening the door and walking out a few steps, we met only silence and a gentle wind. The street stood long faced and quiet before us until the sound of splintering wood cut though the night from behind us. I barely turned around to see a creature like a lion with a beak and wings, constructed of metal, crouching on the roof just behind us, before it thundered into me like a train.
I smashed into the road. For a breath, I couldn't feel or move, only shock pulsated through me. Though, the crushing weight on my shoulders and the sight of a mechanical monster pinning me down flooded back to me a second later. This was the tidal wave I was running from. This was what was going to drown me if I didn't escape. But running from it was like trying to outrun the wind, it was too powerful for me to avoid.
It raised its massive beak over my neck, about to slice through me, when the clang of metal hitting metal rang out. The beast shuddered, hesitated for a second, but then plunged its beak down.
Everything, every fiber in my body contracted and shrunk away from the death I knew was shooting towards me. In this electric state of tension I felt a thread of hope escape from me like lightning. It must have been a final cry or a stupid hope that I could somehow escape this fate, but it was powerful. The beak touched my neck but nothing more. Before it could get any further, it exploded away from me, clattering on the street a few feet from where I lay.
The strength that had tensed my entire body was now sharp fatigue that bound my limbs to the concrete. I had no time to let the fatigue drain or confusion flood over me because the boy, who must have been the one that sent the shudder through the beast, grabbed me off the ground.
"Come on. We have to run, before it gets up." He dragged me down the street, trying to pull me into a run. Finally, I managed to break into a desperate sprint alongside him. "Okay, get ready. I'm going to try something." From behind, he dove into me in a sort of tackle, sending both of us into what I thought would be the concrete.
Instead, everything went dark for a fraction of a second and the whole world seemed to shift out from beneath me. A grassy field then emerged from the darkness and smacked into us.
The night was quiet again. The only thing that stalked us now was the sound of the ocean hundreds of feet below.
The boy was lying beside me, staring up at the sky in shock, but then burst into elation, laughing with disbelief, "It actually worked!" He turned to me, "Did you see that? I actually got us out of there!" He trembled with unrehearsed excitement as he bathed in the light of success.
A smile reflected onto my face as I couldn't help but feel his relief. "What do you mean? What did you do?"
"I transported us! And what a spot I picked. I bet camp is just over this hill." He got up and surveyed where we had landed, a grassy cliffside that resembled the ones surrounding our town. When I tried to push myself up, I immediately dropped back down as throbbing pain spread through my shoulders now that the adrenaline was fading. His elation drained as he remembered our situation and a sort of repressed panic filled him again. "Oh yeah," he looked down at me and dragged me up, "you can feel pain later, for right now, we have to get out here. We can't let that thing catch up to us."
Despite the questions that I wanted to ask him – and ask myself – I followed him over a grassy hill.
Before we reached the top he asked me, "By the way, how did you get that thing off of you? I thought it was going to kill you."
"Didn't you knock it off with your walking stick?" I sputtered through my fatigued efforts to keep running.
"Ha, yeah - Caduceus, and no. I tried to but it didn't even move when I hit it." We reached the crest of the hill only to see more grass, no camp like he had said. He looked exasperated, "It must be over that hill. Once we get there, we'll be safe. But we have to run faster, it might be right behind us."
"It can move that fast?"
"Let's hope not."
After several quiet minutes, we mounted the next hill. Below, the cliffs dropped into a valley that led to the sea. About one hundred yards before the valley met the beach, the grasses seemed to change. More vitality seemed to saturate the colors of the landscape. Everything was shaded more vibrantly past that point, even in the night.
Despite the danger we were in, I smiled at the thought of escaping from a beast behind a curtain of magic. Even though none of this made logical sense, I felt a twinge of familiarity, like the part of me that drove me to follow my impulses knew that mechanical monsters and teleporting was possible.
"There it is," he breathed in relief. "Once we get inside the barrier, that thing won't be able to attack us and-" he was cut off by cracking machinery ringing out through the night above us. "Run." The genuine panic returned to his voice and I broke into the fastest sprint my legs could carry me.
Thirty feet from where the grasses changed, the beast smashed into the ground behind us and began its crunching gallop in our direction. Ten feet away and I could feel the metal slicing through the air behind my back. At the last moment, the boy grabbed me and we both tumbled across the line.
I hit the ground harder than my shoulders would have liked, but when I sat up we seemed to be safe. A kind of electric silence hung in the air between the lion bird crouching, ready to pounce, just outside the barrier and the two of us watching it, desperately throwing our faith into the invisible barrier. "Let's go," the boy rose, exhausted, and headed for the shore.
I staggered to follow but the ring of crunching metal split through the silence, followed by white hot pain ripping down both my legs and a metal beast smashing into me. Again, I found myself pinned under the beast, but now I was face down and had no way to see what was coming. The machine had broken the barrier we thought would be our savior and, now, I would die.
It raked its claws across my back, forcing flames through my nerves and a scream from my lungs. Over the roar of blood in my ears, I heard a massive clang of metal and the beast rolled off of me.
The red haired boy had managed to throw himself into it and was now several yards away, both fighting to keep it from attacking me and fighting to keep himself alive. And he was losing both battles quickly.
I almost let terror seep into me, let it convince me to collapse - there was no escape and the boy I didn't even know was going to die only to delay my own slaughter. But instead, the night air flew through me, extinguishing the pain enough for me to roll myself over and stand. The beast must have felt this because as soon as I had risen, it knocked the boy's caduceus away from him, scooped up his body and hurled him into the ground. He lay crumpled and did not stir.
The same electric air charged the night as it turned to face me, but instead of binding my nerves, it empowered them. No thoughts could be heard in my mind, only the rush of the wind filling me with such bravery and strength I had never felt before. I had no plan but I continued to stare down the beast with the weight of the sky holding me steady.
The split second it hesitated before attacking was what saved my life. It crouched for a moment too long, feeling the electricity I hoped was burning through my gaze, but turned its face upward at the last second as a patch of burning light tore across the sky. Looking up at it myself, I realized I could feel the light, actually a falling star, as it shot towards us. It was a part of me, composed of determination, burning with the fire of my impulsive bravery.
Like an arrow it smashed into the beast, crunching the metal like tin foil and sending shudders through the earth.
Silence flooded back into the night and everything quieted. The gale that had been inflating my lungs and allowing me to stand vanished, replaced with splitting pain across my back, down my legs, and deep inside my chest. Burning fatigue filled my mind, pushing me away from my body. I was feeling so much, my nerves began to go numb. Understanding that I would soon slip away, I drank in every last piece of what lay around me - the silvery grasses, waves humming farther down the valley, stars puncturing the purple dome of sky - before my vision faded into white and I drifted into the wind.