East

"Will you sing again?" I asked quietly.

"Why do you fear me, ugly one?" he asked, amused. "Am I not tied and surrounded by … eleven guards?"

Ugh. How he knew how many remained, I didn't know or like it. Hesitating to tell him who I was, in case he wasn't at all moved or interested as Mahmood thought he would be, I hugged myself.

"I will sing if you remain here," the warrior offered, relaxing in place once more.

"I suppose," I murmured.

"A song of the water? Sky? Grass?"

"Um, sky."

One of the guards brought me a stool and set it a little too close to the warrior for comfort. But I sat. Sensing me with instincts sharp enough to scare me, the warrior began his strange throat song once more.

Puzzling over how a person could make such animalist sounds, I listened. The low drone like that which knocked me out on an airplane, combined with the higher pitched notes and rhythm, was hypnotic. I found myself relaxing despite the strangeness of his song, enough so that my eyes drifted closed.

I was more tired than I had thought. Adrenaline spurts were shorter than usual, and the sense of displacement, of detaching from the world, drifted over me once more. For a moment, I was back at the well in the eighteen forties, standing beside the place where Taylor had been …

… Right before he ceased to exist. Not dead, not gone. Uncreated. I still wasn't able to comprehend such a thing or believe Carter and I were the only people in all of space and time who remembered him, because we didn't exist fully as part of the time where we were.

You made a difference.

They were Taylor's final words to me. He knew what was happening to him. I didn't, until he was gone, and nothing but death lay around me. The memory was so sharp, it hurt, and I clutched my chest and bent over with a soft groan.

The song stopped, and I blinked back into my new reality, shaken and not fully present. Tears were on my cheeks, and my chest was so tense, I was breathing shallowly.

"Where did the song take you?" the warrior asked.

I glanced up. He was completely relaxed again, his hooded head facing my direction, as if we were having tea and he wasn't a prisoner in someone else's dungeon.

"I don't know. Too far," I whispered.

"The Eternal Blue Sky has no bounds. Its song might take you farther away than you wish." He was matter-of-fact. "Are you fully returned?"

"No." I was struggling. How he knew that, I had no idea.