Nirvana - Chapter One

It wasn’t as though she could help it, sitting there on some hard
slab of rock that someone had the nerve to call a bench with the
drawling voice of the preacher assaulting her ears. Juno’s mother was
the one who decided to sit by the window, and the sunlight felt so warm
and welcoming, like the first day of spring as it melts the eternal
frost. It was very nearly comfortable. Whose eyes wouldn’t drift lazily
closed in an attempt to block out such a sermon? Everyone did it from
time to time. It was simply that she’d always had the misfortune of
having very loud, very obnoxious snores.

And so it was Juniper
Blackburn who caught the preacher’s attention (and that of everyone
else within a ten mile radius, Amaris would tell her later).    Juniper
was the one who had the joy of experiencing a crotchety old man yowling
at me, like some underfed cat in heat. Apparently, Juniper was the one
going to hell.

Then there had been all the disapproving
mutterings as the congregation dispersed.  She’d had half a mind to
audibly mutter back. Unfortunately, half a mind doesn’t make a body
move, and so the young girl just strode by, head down, eyes to the
floor, humiliated family hurrying her along. Religious old coots, every last one of them, she found herself accusing bitterly, without a hint of such words on her face. Just another wonderful day.

All
that she reflected on, sprawled on the grass in the little clearing no
more than two hundred paces from the front door of the family’s
cottage. The grass was tall in that field, well over two feet high. It
was her protection, her shield from the rest of the world whenever she
felt the need to escape, whenever the injustice of the world reared its
ugly head. 

The wind ruffled Juno’s skirts, ugly, heavily woven
things that they were. The night was starless, as so many of them were
these days. People said it foretold of chaos and destruction steadily
approaching. She thought that it was just trying to tell all this chaos
and destruction was already happening, and they were too blind to see
it. 

She sighed,
absentmindedly pulling up grass and twisting it around her finger,
around and around until Juniper discarded it and took yet another
blade. Life, she wondered casually.  Is it really so fragile?

Then came footsteps. Yes, the approach of someone to interrupt her meanderings. Wasn’t that always how it seemed to go?

Her
hand froze at the sound of the intrusion. Only two people knew about
that place – her sister, Amaris, and her dear friend, Peter. Either one
was welcome, but if it was anyone else from the village…well, Juno
simply didn’t feel like dealing with them at the moment. Letting her
hand drop to the ground as naturally as she could manage, Juno shut my
eyes and feigned sleep as best she could. Mouth open slightly, head
turned to the sides, yes, that was it.

She couldn’t be certain
why she tried to keep up the illusion of sleep, mind positive that it
was Peter looking for her. He always thought that things like the
incident at church that morning got to her more than they really
did. Juno didn’t exactly want to invite the priest over for a picnic,
but wasn’t devastated by his remarks, either. Peter was the one who
would be torn to pieces by someone yelling at him. Perhaps he projected
those feelings on to her. Then again, who was she to judge the feelings
of another? She, who felt one thing and said another. 

The
crickets chirped and the grass swayed as she lay there, the world empty
of all other sounds – aside from those cursed footsteps. They would
gradually fade in volume, just till Juniper believed herself to be
safe, and then there they were. A few moments longer, and her illusion
of sleep might have become reality.

 Someone stood over her
then, their faint breathing her only hint at their existence. Maybe she
would fool them, maybe she wouldn’t. 

The stranger wasn’t
fooled. A boot nudged her in the side, none too gently. Grudgingly,
Juno opened her eyes to see who had interrupted her haven, but the
figure’s face was cloaked in shadows.

“Juniper Blackburn…any
fool in the village could tell you weren’t asleep. Courtesy of this
morning, naturally.” Surprised, she sat up. It was obvious that this
boy, whoever he was, wasn’t Peter. Peter had a much more casual way of
speaking, and was much too insecure to joke about a matter he found so
serious. There was also the fact that ever since they were young, he
had called her Juno. Nearly everyone did. So who was this mysterious
person come to intrude upon her thoughts?

“Can I help you with
something?” Juno inquired, searching my memory for any reference to the
person standing before me. When she began to rise from her seat on the
ground, he motioned with his hand for her to stop.

Instead, he
sat down, facing me. No longer at an angle, it was much easier to
observe his face. What little moonlight there was cast a shadowy pall
over his features, lending a certain ominous quality to his
appearance. No, not ominous…that wasn’t the right word. Ethereal was
better suited, for there was no other earthly word to describe it. His
nose was sharp, but not unattractively so. His eyes were dark, dull and
dark and nearly dead, two unpolished garnets inlaid in his ivory
perfection.

Oh yes, the boy in front of her was beautiful and
unreal, and so captivating. She wanted nothing to do with him, and yet
he was captivating all the same. Her eyes refused to wander from his as
they both sat there, moments stretching into hours.

Finally, he
broke the silence. “Can you help me? Now that is the question, is it
not? No doubt you know better than I do,” he spoke, and it was as if
the breeze carried his voice to her ears from some ancient tomb. Even
as his lips moved there was no sound in the air, but suddenly it would
reach her mind and there it was. “You, girl…you are the answer and you
are the question, and you are everything else in between.”

His
silent riddles wound their way through her head and still she was
puzzled by his words. Eyes narrowing, Juno began to worry that this man
was somehow dangerous. A criminal? Murderer? “Tell me who you are,” she
demanded, voice falling far short of the authority she hoped it would
possess. It came out sounding more like a request than an order.

“You
and all your questions. Why do you people feel the need to know
everything?” Feeling more petrified by the second, Juno gave no
response. Sighing, he continued. “Oh, very well, my little bird, I
shall tell you who I am. Call me Lucifer, Lord of Light and
Darkness. Destroyer and Creator. I build walls and two thousand years
later I tear them down. I am the most powerful being ever to come in to
existence. With a single word I could destroy all that is, but only if
I am bid to speak the word. Tell me girl, do you bid me speak? No? Tis
a shame, then. They certainly picked a pretty bird, but they should
have chosen one that can sing as well.”

Did this…this Lucifer character think he was being poetic?    Did he think he was being funny? Juno
didn’t want to hear another word of it. She would get up, go home, and
find a very large stick in the event that she needed protection. She
would, really. As soon as his gaze released her, away she would go. 

Yet there she sat, feeling that as long as she could stare into those eyes her troubles would be kept at bay.

It
was in that moment that Juniper noticed the crickets had stopped
chirping. The wind stopped blowing and therefore the sea of grass
stopped bowing to it.   The clouds above were frozen in time, no longer
wearily drifting along, as if they had tired of their endless journey
across the dark expanse of eternity. 

It wasn’t just her that
this beautiful young man had paralyzed with his presence. He held
everything enthralled with the fact that such a creature lived and
breathed and walked among those unfortunate enough to not be him. This
was not some whim, some sudden though, but an innate knowledge that
Juno simply felt with every fiber of her being. The young man sitting
in front of her was not crazy, or even young at all.

Her
eyes widened as this realization bubbled to the surface, and even in
the darkness the god noticed. “Ah, looks like the little bird has
finally seen! Been pecking at the ground so long that you did not
recognize the sky when first you saw it. Worry not. I imagine you will
still find a way to fly when you must, little bird,” he assured her,
but it was far from encouraging. These were no longer the words of a
raving lunatic, being said just to hear the echo of his voice and
remind himself that he was real.

They were prophetic,
surely. They were immortal! They were not the words of a silly old man
bent on tending his ignorant flock. The gods had ruled from their
kingdom amongst the stars since the beginning of time, and even before
that. From time to time they took pity on some mortal king or hero and
descended unto them, guided them. Fixed the wrongdoings of mankind. Yet
it was always on some grand scale, in a far off kingdom involved in
full-scale war.

Gods did not take it upon themselves to be
troubled by the comings and goings of a small farming village. They did
not bother with the lives of mere peasants. And yet…yet there he sat,
plain as day. If she had been speechless before, Juno feared that now
she had been permanently struck dumb. How was it possible for one to
encounter a being so utterly bereft of flaws and walk away unaltered?  
At the time, Juno had no notion of how true this would prove to be.

No,
she simply sat, rendered immobile by that steady, piercing gaze. Had it
been hours, days, years since their eyes first met? Or had not a moment
passed? Juno had been rendered in that impassable flash of time so long
that she was no longer certain if everything had been frozen or if
everything had been thrown into fast forward, nothing constant except
for him and her and the darkness that surrounded them. 

Was
this what it felt like to be immortal? To have all the time in the
world? That there was no need to hurry or heed the passage of time, for
there would always be the morrow and the next, even after humanity was
all but destroyed? “Such a lonely fate,” Juno sensed, rather than
heard, herself murmur. 

The next thing she knew, the entire
world was…shifting. It wasn’t turning - everything seemed as though it
was trying to stretch past it’s normal bounds, as though it had been
held still for too long. The bonds of reality were struggling to retie
themselves as the trees quivered and tried to meld into one. The wind
returned once more, howling like a beast running rampant, caged since
before man was crafted in the likeness of the gods. Endless stretches
of grass turned to endless stretches of ocean, waves rising and
falling, raging against the yielding trees. It was too much! The seams
of the universe could no longer hold, Juniper knew it. Her breath,
which had come in short gasps, now failed her entirely. Everywhere, the
essence of everything strained to escape from the lines between which
they were trapped. Even hers, she could feel it, begged to leave her
body behind. Juno was almost tempted to let it go, let everything go,
let the world fall behind her and fall into oblivion, for all she cared
it could, it could rot and decay for eons and what would she care, but
then the world careened into a halt.

Everything was thrown forwards before settling back into it’s rightful place.

Clutching
at the ground, at her body, at Lucifer, at anything she could dig into,
Juno trembled, eyes wide. Her mind was cluttered with emptiness, with
so many memories and sounds and futures flashing past that they were no
longer separate thoughts, they were no longer anything except blurs of
pretty color fading into nothingness. She wanted it to stop.

           
Then, in that glimpse of the whirling chaos that threatened to swallow
her, Lucifer appeared. The only steadiness in her insecure
world. Reaching out, he placed his hand upon her forehead and for the
briefest instant Juno felt that she would be flattened by some unknown
pressure, pounding at her head and her body. No sooner than she felt
the sensation it was gone, and her life came back into focus. 

           
She hoped it had been a dream, a figment of the imagination and nothing
more. But there was that god, looking down at her, something flickering
in his eyes. Was it envy? Malice? He turned his head away before
Juniper before she had a chance to decipher it.

           
Still paralyzed, she made not a move as Lucifer stepped around the
silent figure, pausing behind her. Juno started at the feel of his
fingers lightly stroking her dark blond curls. “You, little bird,” he
breathed into her ear, voice resonating with bitterness. “You are truly
blessed.” Then he was gone.

by attackduckiez