Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Biography
Shadow and Light
K.R.R. Bridgstreet
Breathless Press
Calgary, Alberta
www.breathlesspress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Shadow and Light
Copyright © 2013 K.R.R. Bridgstreet
ISBN: 978-1-77101-140-2
Cover Artist: Victoria Miller
Editor: Leona Bushman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Breathless Press
www.breathlesspress.com
Dedication
For anyone who likes sex, drugs, mathematics, or music.
Chapter One
When the sun shone, it flooded the valley with a beam which struck and splashed between twin mountains. It danced outward, skittering through the mountain valley toward opposite civilizations advancing. The peoples moved each to the other, slowly, like seeds in the earth waiting for the right combination of warmth and moisture to coax their substance from the soil.
To the east, light meandered over green terraces that descended between rock-lined funnels, joining the streams that irrigated miles of pasture, and wound a slow and steady route to the geometric city of Meso. A solar system of paved streets orbited a central blinding compound of glass, stone, and steel. The people of this city reflected their own reverence for the aesthetic machinations of the universe they tried to emulate. Their lines were sharp. Their angles pristine. Their movements productive and efficient. Sunlight that did not succumb to the walls of glass enclosing the structure melted over the bodies of these people. The rest flowed over the sharp angles and refracted, fractioning crystalline and settling over the far eastern forest, where it disappeared into the maze of trees.
Light spared none in the west. The earth cracked beneath its weight, crushing moisture from rocks and opening the veins of plants, desiccating. It painted self-portraits on jagged sunset bluffs, gazing into the mirror of dominion. The light enveloped completely any river that once shaped the red and orange cliffs, leaving a dusty trail for rodents and lizards dashing in and out of shade. Men and women scratched hoes in the dirt, pulling free meager crops that seemed as if they sprouted old and worn. The men and women lived, and the children played and learned, among a vast cornucopia of poisons and potions.
They were hard, shaped by the same wind that aged the banks of empty riverbeds. The people’s hard-bought respect approached religious devotion to the dry land. Sobered by the relentless light, the people of the western border mercilessly clung together, commanding of the earth just enough to survive.
This is the light from which the young man traveled.
It happened at Two Mountains Standing, under the moon of the summer solstice. Presiding over the ceremony, the moon bathed the dancers in the pale white reflection of the sun. The dancers disappeared and reappeared in flickers of shadow and light, reflections of the red and yellow fire surrounding them and within them. Their bodies surged, throwing black shadows across the sacred fire circle and onto the two mountains framing them. The moon smiled down on the shadows looming giant on the mountainsides, mimicking their owners’ frenzied movements.
The shadows came together and parted, came together and parted, circled and leapt over the fire, leaping from mountain to mountain. Sweat ran down the dancers’ arms and legs and they pounded it into the packed earth. A turbulent, wordless harmony brought forth the incantations. Curved backs raised heaving breasts higher, spines rippled, and hot, slippery tits bounced in the bodies’ rhythmic undulating.
In the center of this frenetic circle a man lay, immobile. He was a stranger to this place. A solid short mound of earth covered each of his arms; his legs extended toward the sacred fire and also disappeared into the earth. When dancers leapt the fire, they sometimes landed on his submerged arms and legs, pounding them deeper into the ground. The man’s eyes stared unblinking up at the moon. No lines marred the man’s face, which was dark and unmoving. A braid ran down the back of his head, and the tail of it fanned out loose behind his shoulders where he lay. His eyes were fixed on the moon.
There was no telling how many dancers circled the fire. Sweat poured from their bodies, turning the packed earth to mud. The mud splashed with each pounding step, covering the dancers’ legs and the silent man with specks of reddish brown. Sweat turned the specks quickly to streaks, which ran down their bodies like tears. Harmonies rose in pure ecstatic emotion, and hands began to smear rivulets of mud over the arching and writhing bodies.
As the group of dancers called out, openly fondling their own breasts and slits, one dancer stepped out from among them and walked over to the man. He saw her dark outline approaching and snapped his eyes shut. Behind closed eyes appeared her unmistakable frame standing over him, with one leg on each side of his strong body. His strength was gone after having lain here for what seemed like days, while the dancers worked their slow humming into the tumult they had become. Inexplicably, the full moon had shined down on them the entire time.
The dancer’s shadow moved. He continued to see her blackness, even though he clenched his eyes shut. Rolling her back and stomach in rhythm with the dancers’ calls, the shadow woman lowered herself slowly over the man’s upright shaft. She called out love to him, her progressive movements pulling his manhood toward her in painful ecstasy. He tried to block it out, to force his erection to resist the pull of the writhing shadow he saw behind his eyelids. Unable to move, to defend against the onslaught of lust surrounding him, he surrendered and opened his eyes. His cock stood huge and tall in the moonlight, the sacred fire dancing over its smooth surface.
On the mountains, a shaft rose in the middle of the dancers’ shadows. It was the blackest of the shadows, unnaturally dark, and it seemed to drink the fire. The man’s desire became excruciating, and he cried out in fury. At that moment, the dancer above him swallowed the shaft inside of her and shouted up at the moon as she thrust her cunt hard against him.
A scream exploded from his lips as he struggled to move his hips to hers. Round, pert breasts bounced above him, and he saw the dancer’s mouth open in rapturous moans. Her back arched and her eyes fluttered upward, her pending climax ready to boil the blood in her body. He could not stop himself; he came in an explosion of seed and mud. It ran from between her legs in gushes, flowing out around them. He could feel her cunt squeezing and relaxing around his spasming dick, and he knew the power of her orgasm would destroy him.
Gazing up at the woman writhing on top of him, he felt the pulsing of his manhood beginning to slow. The cries of the dancers were a far away sound now, and his vision darkened. The last image he saw was that of the moon, staring silently back at him.
Chapter Two
The Conservatory grew like a crystal from the center of Meso City in concentric rings of alternating green and gray. Flagstones, glittering with mica quarried from the n
earby mountains, were cut and laid flush in miles of pathways that spiraled through alternating orchards, forests, and crops. Intermittent lampposts lined the paths, throwing soft light over the blue-flecked stones after the sun set. During the day, hexagonal panels lining the posts soaked up the sunlight. Hidden circuitry conducted the sun’s power to invisible pumps that moved water through irrigation channels that rose and fell and bubbled, carving artificial rivers through the shades of green.
The unseen conduction of energy flowed like a dance with the coursing water and meticulously cultivated vegetation along the flagstone pathways. Sunlight, where it once fell and was transformed, rose again along the sharp angles of Conservatory, meeting and mixing with more converted rays that melded and followed each other to distributing transformers. From there the electronic rays exploded, translated back into light, amplified sound, and computations that endlessly refracted off the glass walls enclosing hundreds of mathematicians and musicians.
The glass framing the building was cut to huge trapezoids and arranged in rising polygons to form a central dome. Emanating from the dome were twin spires of glass, more jagged than the mountains they reflected in the evening sun. The towers rose to slanted spires, a linear arrangement of the cut glass trapezoids which became lost in the blinding angles their mirror surfaces created. Here too, sunlight was collected and converted. Acolytes craning their necks from the base of the Conservatory might catch a flash of light from the height of one of the towers as it ricocheted between the spires to power their explorations.
The perfect symbiosis of glass, sunlight, water, stone, and robust verdancy only functioned in the service of the Conservatory’s discoveries. Here, men and women labored eagerly, eyes wide open to the light that flooded them, turning and resting on whatever caught them, and translating that glowing object into mathematics and music.
But the once reliable sun had withdrawn its light from the glass and panels and objects; it only showed itself now on the face of the huge, hovering full moon. The moon’s pale rays reflected a fraction of the sun’s light and sank into the smooth glass that devoured it. This wan reflection of the sun, a familiar calm light, had also transformed. It had become stubborn, unresponsive, and unwilling to complete its cycle with the rest of its celestial brothers and sisters.
It had been four turns and the moon still shone. Chancellor Kaliana grew ever more frantic as she collected measurements of the stars. “This is impossible,” she muttered. “Impossible.” Again she measured the angle of the Ludi constellation. It was thirty-eight degrees and rising. Once again it was rising, for the fourth time in one very long night. “What have they done,” she asked again of the sky, the question now a mantra against the fear inside her.
“Chancellor,” came a soft, firm voice. “It is time for you to rest. If we are to accomplish anything, you have to get some sleep.”
Kali turned briefly toward the man’s voice but did not meet his gaze. She looked down. “I must continue my observations. Do you realize what will happen if this continues? Our weather will...god knows what. All we know of astronomy and physics has been proven false today, and you ask me to sleep?” Anger ignited her eyes as she glanced up at him.
“You are making many presumptions, Chancellor, without acknowledging what you know to be true.” Ganshi paused. “Come down and join us in song and prayer, if you will not rest.”
“You speak like a child, Ganshi! Has our pale moon struck so much terror in you?” Kaliana paced her laboratory, picking up objects at random, glaring at them, then setting them down. She stopped in front of her logbook and began to write a long row of numbers, intermittently peering through the heavy scope pointed toward the rising Ludi.
Ganshi hesitated, then stepped into Kaliana’s observatory. “These numbers you write, what do they tell you?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said, sighing. “They fit no known equation.”
“And if they did,” said Ganshi, “would that tell you how to fix this disaster?”
She spun to face him, silent. His eyes met hers, soft as water. “I mean to run an experiment with them.” She looked down at her feet for a moment, before raising her eyes to his. She would not stop trying. “Some sort of experiment.”
“Kaliana, please come. I will see you to your bed. I have not seen you leave this room for over 70 hours.” At Kali’s raised eyebrow, he continued. “I’ve been watching, Chancellor.”
She cursed, shoulders sagging under the weight of her exhaustion. Kaliana had not slept since the oddities began four turns ago. The reality, she knew, was that terror gripped her, and she used her instruments to quell the suffocating panic. The Gods only knew how the people below were reacting. Security had discouraged her from venturing outside her quarters since the madness began.
Her mind catalogued a hundred possibilities for the moon’s continued presence and the sun’s strange absence. The constellations still turned, but she couldn’t grasp or hold on to any of them.
Madness.
She tried to remember the last time she prayed, before she had begun her studies at the Conservatory, but the memory slid away, like a paramecium under a microscope. In its place, where she once briefly held her faith, her mother’s face appeared as it had almost twenty years ago.
“What is music without the Gods?” her mother had asked her.
“Mathematics,” Kali replied, confident in her understanding even in seventh grade.
Numbers had enveloped her mind since she first became aware of herself and began to count her toes and fingers, as her mother used to tell anyone who would listen. “Then,” she would go on, “when she went outside to play, she counted the flower petals on my daisies and measured the veins in their leaves. Her brother was exasperated I didn’t give him a little brother to play with instead. Like she behaved that way because she was a girl! The other girls were boring to her, I suppose, because they spent all their time chasing after her brother. He had these adorable dimples...”
Kali rolled her eyes at the memory. Her mother was full of love for her children, but she saw them in idealized projections, never able to notice if they failed, and without the ability to discern if her children’s wants for themselves were different from her plans for them. But she did let her little girl carefully explore her flower garden, so long as she left the blooms intact. Always, Kali found consistencies, she recalled, and in these consistencies she realized the great beauty of science.
When Kali was five or six, she refused to listen to any more stories of the Gods when her older brother told her the story of “Beren and the Peering Dark.” In the story, the hero Beren won a war against the Demigod Rankar by summoning an army of shadows to fight Rankar’s massive fleet. According to her brother’s version, the shadows were completely under Beren’s power, and they were myriad. After they annihilated Rankar’s ships, the shadow army disappeared. Beren remained king of the Otherworld, raising three children whose lines ruled after him.
“Jerich,” asked Kali, her wide brown eyes meeting her brother’s. “If those shadows had so much power, why didn’t they kill Beren’s army too?”
Her brother, not often without an answer, could only tell her to “go play with your ruler.” As she walked off by herself, wooden ruler in hand, Kali knew that stories were just stories. They were for children who needed to learn how to behave. Numbers, though, they were real, and they were for her.
Kaliana had a habit of humming as she recorded and mused over her findings. Her humming was subconscious, like someone else might fidget with a pen. People took notice of Kali as she worked, but not because of her extraordinary ability to translate objects into numbers.
Instead, they listened to her voice. She had been admitted into the Music Conservatory before she knew her mother had requested her entrance. Although she enjoyed singing, she found it to be frivolous as stories when compared to her mathematical studies. She had learned that she could explain absolutely any object, as long as she had the right equation.
Kaliana sang as directed, and she studied any instrument presented to her. But while her peers threw themselves into attracting the opposite sex, she spent nearly all her free time on the equations she saw all around her. It was only natural that during one voice lesson, she recognized new equations emerging from the harmonies she created.
Her instructors marveled when Kali presented pages and pages of equations, explaining they were the songs they had assigned her to study. She corrected the musical compositions once she had balanced their equations. “Harmony,” she asserted to her voice instructor, “is an exact science.”
All the time, she observed. She watched and measured everything. Well—almost everything. As her roommate at the Conservatory discovered what it was to be explored by an eager young man, Kali sat outside on their balcony, shades drawn behind her, eyes toward the sky. The night Sardra lost her virginity was the night Kaliana watched a meteor streak through the atmosphere from one horizon to the other. Its tail left an after image that Kali stared at unblinking until it faded. In that fading light time stopped.
Kali relegated the sounds of her roommate and the young man to a distant corner of her mind, and only the light and the stars remained. The constellations traveled their paths all at once, with the meteor’s movement tracing their course. She knew it then; she had seen the stars as they are. She could hear them on their merry path. Their light reverberated through her body and she laughed, full-throated and wild.
Then, she sang. Her hands found the railing around the balcony, and she gripped it, straining upward to release the song within her. The music of the movement of the stars flowed out into the night sky, drowning the darkness around her. She was the movement of the stars; she was the night sky alight with diamonds. Her roommate and her partner had stumbled out onto the balcony, both naked, listening to Kaliana’s performance.
The young man wept on its conclusion, and no words came from Sardra for the rest of the night. Other witnesses contacted the Conservatory immediately, alerting them of a strange, beautiful song they had heard after seeing an especially bright meteor. The city of Meso was, after all, built on the music of the Conservatory. Soon, people began appearing at the Conservatory, requesting a performance of this otherworldly song. She found she was only able to gather it when she was outside, under the night sky.
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