Stories About the Rain by Aaron Redfern (superbooks4u TXT) 📕

try it will not be the same then.

On the final evening, in the aftermath of my last moments with her, Will took me to see the thing that had been moved into my quarters. A gift from the people of Papho, he told me. It was so big that it barely fit into the room, but he said it didn’t seem right to put it anywhere else. Even disregarding its incredible personal importance to me, it would have been mine to study out of necessity. Who else could understand?

So it came to pass that one of the only three existing copies of Oqar Amarhatta

, Stories About the Rain, became my nearly constant companion for the long journey across the stars.

She must have convinced them. They had relin- quished it to us, I imagine, because they might already be gone by the time another person came to Papho. They wanted to be remembered. And they wanted other people to understand why they had made the choices they had. But over all of that it was for me, from her, one last sense of nearness, as though we can almost touch or speak through the rapidly passing years.

Will knows what I am feeling, if only because he could have felt it instead. Things have been better between us since I left her behind, and I feel a terrible, mar- velous mixture of betrayal and longing and love.

She will be twenty years older already than the last time I saw her. I wonder often whether, to her, the time strode in slow measure through long decades, or whether all those years seemed to wink by in the space of a few months, as they have for me. She must have wandered far, miles and miles through the mists and the rain, the way revealed anew each time she moved aside the heavy draping of a leaf cluster, or came over the crest of a ridge. In my mind she has found the cousins of Orakku, tread the floors of canyons where only she and the water have gone, crossed the inland seas. She walks without looking behind her, and somewhere ahead of her is an edge, a place where all is revealed. Perhaps the old ones are there.

She is a brightness, and belief is enough. I can speak it to you, but do not ask me to explain.

Text: Aaron Redfern March 2012
Images: Cover Art: Rebecca Bowslaugh
Publication Date: 03-10-2012

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