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Action, Romance, Bad Weather & Broken Crayons!
** Elemental beings struggle over the fate & heart of a 2-souled artist as she fights to survive all in their world that would devour her, body and souls. **
🥇 1st Snowflake A...
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Stripped down to nothing, with a burst of speed I leapt from the cliff. I plunged headfirst through the misty dark, the sudden wind of it whistling around my body.
My entrance was soundless, as it always was, for just before I hit the water's surface I shed my physical form with only a thought. I was flesh and bone, the stuff of solid matter one second, then fluid the next, so all that remained of me were soul and instinct and thought bound together by spirit. Such was key to my elemental form—any devvi's second form for that matter. We were directly descended from the land, from mother earth, and the earth was capable of two forms: physical and ethereal. Thus, we were dual natured, had two ways of being.
I was above, separate from the river, and then one with it in an instant, the essence of me traveling beneath the surface as a flash of speed. I wasn't as fast as light, but it would be a close race.
In liquid form I was aware of everything that the river was, knew where it was flowing from and going to. I knew where the streams entered, and where those streams led to, to a certain extent. In five heartbeats, I had traveled three miles down the river. The stream I wanted was just up ahead.
Blue gill, a tremendous school of fish, went scattering in all directions as I rushed through the deep trench they had occupied. I sensed them as a brushing multitude of sleek tails attached to rounded bodies. To them I would have been a sudden blast of warm water.
I came upon the stream that led to our home, our valley. It spilled down the hillside to the river. I turned shoreward for it without slowing down. My exit from the river was more dramatic than my entrance, an upward thrust of water, like a large rock being hurled skyward, and then, still in my elemental form, I made for the stream through the very runoff that cascaded down the rocky face of a sheer drop off as a multitude of small waterfalls. It was a freeing thing, a state of both incredible grace and power, to effortlessly leap from rock to rock in the spraying mist, going straight up the side of an eighty-foot cliff. Then into the stream that bubbled over rounded pebbles and smelled of crushed ferns and tree roots. The water level here was mere inches, but this did not matter.
Up the cliff, traveling the stream in an instant, I headed for the valley that I lorded over. It was one valley among hundreds that were tucked between thickly forested slopes, hills that grew increasingly in grandeur as they rolled eastward to rise as the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern U.S. My valley, Petroleum Valley, was ideal in its creek that flowed through the middle and its abundance of natural springs.
Within seconds, this stream would take me to the creek. The springs would then take me to the uppermost slope in the region, where my estate perched on high.
I arrived at the mouth of the creek. I became aware of its presence before that as a metallic taste. The iron content was elevated. If I'd had teeth, they would have hurt when it hit me. While Petroleum Valley was a place of streams and springs, it was also home to factories. They occupied twelve miles worth of valley floor.
