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Morgan gazed at the scene before him curiously without realising what he was seeing. From somewhere seemingly far away he heard the women talking.

“Why is it that colour?” he asked instinctively.

Close by but unseen both women laughed heartily.

“Why is what that colour?” Tibby said.

“The snow!” he cried “The snow is pink!”

“Oh it is often like that!” Thea chortled “You will get used to it!”

“But pink?” he questioned.

“It’s not snow anyway!” they told him gaily. “Why don’t you look again?”

He turned to stare as the pinkness faded and saw in its place an unending curtain of shimmering starlight.

“Where……?” he began.

“No!” The women chimed together. “There is no answer to that question……!”

“Can you see the stars?” they asked “They’re very bright, most of them, aren’t they?”



He turned his head toward the voices. Glittering points of light silhouetted the figures which, side by side curved over him like an enormous bridge. From what he could see of them in the starlight it seemed their bodies reached from horizon to horizon.

The goddesses arch across the night sky, he thought. They soar, they leap, they…… yes they encompass!

He gazed at them for a long time before he realised that the pinkness of the snow was merely a reflection of the starlight on their bodies.

“Are you really goddesses?” he asked stupidly

“Sometimes……sometimes we are!” they said.

“Can you see the forest?” one voice enquired. “It is not so very far away……”

“The ……forest……?”

“Yes!” they sang together.

The colours shifted, paling into greys and softer, subtler skin hues.

“Look……!”

Starlight brightened, outlining their ponderous roundness.

“Look……!”

It glittered on nipple and navel and the smooth, comforting curve of belly and hip.

“Look……!”

It blinked enticingly between their fingers, their toes and their legs.

“You are…… bewitching me……!”

The figures laughed lightly, their breath as warm on his face as a soft summer breeze.

“And you us!” they said “Would you want it any other way?”

He caught his breath, unable to speak as the starlight blinked into blackness. Blind and disorientated he screamed out in terror, frozen immobile until they grabbed him and ran wildly, breathlessly bursting through a veil of tall waving grasses into a meadow with sun warmed greensward under their feet.

He smelled blood but ignored its warning while they held his hands and leapt madly, intoxicated by the joy of being with one another. He tasted blood when they kissed him but, neither touching the earth nor disturbing a single living thing upon it, his joy became their joy, their excitement his. There were no words to speak, for none were necessary, he thought, their needs, their intentions surely unquestioned.

Not words to speak as yet at least.

Long green grass and a sky so deep a blue that it hurt his eyes to look at it. Cloudless and complete it lent colour to the slow, aimless convoluted meanders of a singing stream, lent light to the hollow places where banks of spearmint, wild sage and meadowsweet added their scents of excitement to the air.

They laughed wildly, tumbling, crumbling, crushing, scattered grass seeds accentuated the gleam of sweat on their limbs as the earth accepted them, cushioning them when they collapsed giggling uncontrollably into one-another’s embrace.

“Do you love me?” he asked, his question hardly affecting the minutest part of the tiniest ripple in the smallest quivering fragment of the sounds that they made.

“Do you love me? Do you? Tell me, oh tell me!

It was more like a prayer than a plea.

Wide eyed Thea tossed her hair back, shoulders heaving with merriment and the stream by which she knelt burbled and bubbled and giggled their names.

A simple answer to a simple question. Yes or No……… but they could give neither word to him.

“Do you love me?” he asked again, his voice pitiful to hear.

“Why do you ask?” they asked together “When you know we have no answer to give!”

“Then why do you taunt me?” desperation drove him.

“But you are taunting us also……”

“When we are ready we will show you” Tibby pronounced, carefully “What we know of love”

“In a little while,” Thea told him “we will show you……”

“But I must know now” he wanted to say.

“Yes, maybe you must” They said as one.

“So be it!” Thea said.

She lay back and the shimmering stream seized her hair while he ran to her side, the sun, beating upon him, etched his shadow deeply across her belly and breasts.

Hands caressed him, fingers feather like, stroking him unnecessarily while the stream flickered and flashed through long streamers of hair.

“But do you love me?” he asked them again.

“Of course we love you!” they told him “Both of us, you know we do…...”

“Then……”

“Morg!”

They touched him, hands moist and unmistakably scented, fingers pressing his lips firmly together.

They smiled at him, showing even, sharply pointed little teeth disconcertingly.

“No more questions! No more answers!”

Meekly, mutely, he shook his head.

The women turned together, sunlight stretching their hair into sand coloured ribbons tinted by all the pale new hues that summertime might bring. They took his hand and together their bodies unravelled, elongated, dissolving into the irresistible surging strength of the stream.

They sighed and their exhalations patterned the mirrored surface of the water, interrupting only momentarily the smooth symmetry of it. He might have screamed, cried out in fear, in exultation, but for the touch of their fingertips on his lips which had sealed them, but for the sudden completeness he felt in his head and his heart.

They writhed, mingling together his substance, his essence, his existence and theirs swirling together in the blood in the stream which carried them, diluting them, rearranging them, disseminating them until they were little more than an abstract idea.

He became aware of their thoughts and what he learned terrified him, petrified him with a frightening clarity, goading him to ask himself if women really thought like that. His own hopes and dreams dismayed and amused them, confirming some suppositions, leaving unanswered some others. They recognised the dark places in which each of them hid, their deep places, their shadowy secrets, then shrugged and shook their heads and agreed to ignore them. They were women after all, while he was still only a boy, even if, even before they could tell for sure, an especially delicious and tasty one.

They grinned at each other reassuringly. At least there was nothing really very new or different about him, was there? He was just a boy. He was innocent.

His thoughts raced, new ideas and possibilities blundering clumsily, experimentally, while the streams current carried them, sunlight dappled and tipped with silver through a rabble of rapids, unerringly to a shallow, sand fringed part of the stream on the bend. Soon he would ask them, no tell them, compel them, take what he wanted and give what they needed in return.

Or so he thought.

Formlessly they floated, turning slowly as the current teased them, nothingness save for the vibration of their thoughts perfectly matching, etching a pattern of ripples into the iron fluidity of the water.

Shapelessly they shifted, invisible and without substance, creatures of vibration, inspiration and thought loosely sharing one single mind. Sunlight dappled they drifted, far beyond the reach of avaricious man. Where the stream broadened and grew shallow they dissolved into root rippled gloomy shadows, loud with the voices of moss covered boulders, scarred by trailing twigs arching untidily overhead.

“How is this happening?” he wondered desperately, “and how is it that all my senses work with such clarity?”

“It’s because we love you, silly!” a chorus of female voices sang in his head. Their love was his love and his love was theirs. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

The stream’s current slowed in those shallows, pausing at the place where a necklace of debris turned slowly on the brink of a miniature whirlpool, where the captured detritus of passed years twisted inexorably and endlessly round and round.

Times wasted and times ill spent.

Then an eddy summoned them, riding them, guiding them, until they found the beach and were cast, their forms formless, their shapes shapeless, onto the sand.

With one mind they rose and rode the air, seeing all, knowing everything, every secret of the turning seasons. They rose through a scale of soundless harmonics, essences undetectable, mere thought forms and nothing more, expanding effortlessly into every element, like soaring cumulus clouds climbing higher and higher until they spilled and broke and dissipated waves of moisture, against the edges of the sky.

The void became them, their memories snowflakes, their knowledge, crystallising, reforming, intricately patterned in an uncountable variety of forms and shapes.

Their presence stilled the earth, hindering the movements of all that walked in the valleys and the gloom of the forests. It lightened and darkened, bringing endings and new beginnings, hope and despair. Where boughs broke beneath their weight they made themselves lighter, interlocking and linking, twisting together. Where the winds caught them they allowed themselves to be taken, fluttering and fleeing, head over heels like silken petticoats shivering with their excited breath.

They turned and tumbled, conjoined utterly, catching themselves unawares, laughing, screaming, howling with glee, delightfully whole in their formlessness, their nothingness and with their love for each other.

“Did you think there was less or more to nothingness than this?” they asked.

With his lips still sealed Morgan could do little more than nod his head numbly. He smelled blood again, rich blood, red blood, his own, naturally.

And he knew suddenly, with an awful finality the reason why they had such sharp little teeth. When they were ready, instead of making love to him in bed, they were going to eat him.

© Aahlu 2010. (1988 – 1990. left over from a much longer story)

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