Broken Song

Intended to be a love story written about a forest nymph's (tree-spirit's) love for a human girl.

Day 1

 

 

            I am called Tsulark and this is where my story begins. It begins with her. When we were both very much younger. It ends with her, so many years later.

There was a time when it was simple. When I first saw her and she saw me. Tiny hands that touched my sides and reached into my soul to draw out a part of me that I had not known existed. It was pure and untested, something the fragile crystalline breaths of dreams are made of.

Her eyes were like those dreams, brilliant and blue like the sky that spread over my head unto miles I would never see. Wide and bright and watery as they looked at me, at all I was and all I would ever be. Her hair was wild and free, spindles of gold thread that blew in the same wind that rustled through my to chill the corners of my waking heart. She was small, a captive mind of sterling wonders encompassed in the body of a child with plump cheeks brushed in pink, skin like smooth milk, and tiny bare feet that touched that same earth that connected us.

I could not have hoped that we would be met as anything equal. Equality is fickle and fleeting, like the sands of time that eroded my world while I stood in watch, my brothers around me silent and swaying and listening to the world as it spun and rubbed with the other celestial spheres. We are a part of it, a part of the cycle that keeps this time together, our fingers and toes knitted together to hold it in place. That is the song we sang, the one I sang to her before she changed the words. Before she rewrote that melody that my spirit cried out to the unyielding days that unfolded like petals of burning rose on the horizon each morning.

It was on that day, when her family first came and she first touched her tiny hands to my sides, along the rough contours of my spine, that my song changed. It was subtle at first. So subtle that not even I noticed. She came out across the fields of grass that ran from the back of her home made of brick and stone and the flesh of our elders, with her feet bare to the earth and her hair wild in the wind. I was placed on the threshold of her family’s property with my arms stretched over the yard where she stood for a long time to look across at my brothers and me. The sun put streaks of gold light through her big blue eyes. It made her pale skin glow. I felt myself stir as she grew near. I had never seen someone so clearly before. Felt them so clearly as she ran her small fingers across my surface. But she reached inside me and restrung the chords of my soul to sing only for her until the end of my days.

She walked around me in circles, touching and feeling, humming while her golden curls danced in the air. She tiptoed around my feet and toes, stopping to tilt her head back and look up into my arms. I shivered in the wake of her stare and she smiled, dimples coming to her cheeks.

“Hello.” She spoke with a tone like the gentle tweeting of a songbird perched upon my arms.

Hello. I knew she would not hear. But I was shocked to find that she moved, reacted, as though she could.

“My name is Ashlyn Marie Corningway.” She continued tiptoeing around me, stooping to pick up leaves and hold them up into the sun.

I am Tsulark. I hesitated, watching her in my own private moment of bewilderment, Can you hear me?

She began wandering away. No, she couldn’t. Despair was swift and I watched as she began collecting leaves and putting them in her pockets. Sticks, acorns, little rocks, all in the pockets of her little pink dress while she toddled away back towards her house. Ashlyn Marie Corningway didn’t stop to look back until she saw her mother’s face through the window of the house, smiling and calling her back towards the door to come inside. Then she paused, looking back at me from top to bottom and smiled once more. She turned and was gone.

That was the first time I saw her and a very morbid fear was realized in me. A fear that would drive me from my eternal place in the world that she might not come back. That her sky-colored eyes would never smile at me again. I stood and watched her disappear behind the walls of stone and glass and wood. I watched the sunlight stretch shadows across the grass as it had ever night. I heard the night songs begin, resounding through the world like a timeless lullaby sang to the heavens since they had first been written, when the heavens had first been painted there. I was a part of that. Of that separate entity and enduring song that would sung until the world faded like a star in the morning. But that night, I sang a new song for her. I watched the stars spin in the sky and the moon’s sterling shadows glitter on the dew-covered grass. I watched the place where I had seen her disappear and hoped, prayed, sang that she might come again.

 

Author's Note

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