Shea

"My name is Shea," she said to me. I could see through her pitch black eyes and it was like looking into all the potential of empty space.

She was tall and thin, her body like that of a predatory cat on the hunt. Her skin was flawlessly smooth and deep purple - a tribute to amethyst. Her hair was braided back in two thick plats that ran just above her ears and met together in the back. Long hypnotic lashes; graceful fingers; placid calm across her face...she continued.

"And I have come here to bring you home with me to meet my son. You were promised to him at your birth and are treasured by him for the honesty of your spirit and the singularity of your person."

Into Egypt

"Yes," I answered. Her gaze was unnerving, unnerving and entrancing at once. I fidgeted between meeting her gaze and retreating in to hide like a child among gods. "It's only," I fumbled for the words. "I understand. I am ready. But how will it happen and also, will you be there when I wake?"

She smiled the warmest, most disarming smile and placed her thin, crystalline hand on my shoulder. It seemed there was an answer in that smile that could settle any doubt.

"I will be with you from this moment until it is done. My people have for many millennia practiced the nurturing and harvesting of world-walkers. We have, each of us, been called from the stone. There is no sleep deeper than that from which to wake. Do not be afraid. I will not lose you." I nodded and then stood before her speechless and completely occupied by my own awareness that I had nothing by way of practiced social grace or life-learned comprehension to respond to her with.

She was beyond me.

Then there was that smile again that could not be translated at all.

"Soon, I will ask you for your spirit. It is your own to give and no other may offer it for you. In the journeys to come it will be your own faith and cunning that will toss your spirit into the unwritten future on uncharted worlds. But this time, I will ferry it across safely for you.

"You will give me your spirit and all that you are now will fade into the moment like so many half-hummed melodies. When you reach my world, your spirit will not understand. It will possess nothing which can relate to what it will first perceive. And so I will invest you in stone. You will never know solitude or peace as deep as the ordered, armored cradle I will set you into. That very night I will call to you, Ocean. I will coax you out, believe.

"Even before birth you will know life. We will share many things I can not convey here. But you will not know yourself. Even when, by your own courageous persistence and willingness to conceive, you have animated the inanimate and our eyes again meet, you will not know yourself. You will not know me, not as you do now. But trust, I will not forget you. Then, trust for trust, I will trade you back yourself and you will remember."

What reply could be contrived to answer that? I could only blink.

After a long full silence, which my young mind, awe-stuck, aloof, naïve, could not interpret, she laughed.

The tension was shattered.

What seeming casualness to lay down laughter so effortlessly and appropriately behind the terrible unmasking of destiny.

In that instant I knew she was a queen.

It was not her beauty, which she wore as a crown; nor her gentle, irreproachable poise, which was a fool's rant to dispute; nor the message she had brought to me so certainly and kindly across all of time and space. These were wonders no more or less magnificent to me than the many moments of my life up to now had been. Rather it was the grace with which she moved across this landscape of mysticism and wonder.

I loved her.

I would follow her anywhere.