Reveries of the Tainted

Chapter Ten

After their rest, June was still expressing her good mood through hops and skips from side to side. She followed shortly behind Skor, flitting to either direction of the wide path in excited exploration of a colorful fog rising from the ground in a faint dust.

"What is this?" She asked him, standing over the edge of their accented path and pointing eagerly to the swirling colors. Though colliding with one another, they remained separated in their individual glory.

It felt of a soft texture, but more so presenting itself to endocrine glands rather than the limitation of flesh contact. Her head was blessed with hints of melodic laughter and the feel of rejuvenating wind gusts through tree branches and ecosystems destined within its bark.

She could only stand and observe this internal feeling of distant life.

"That would be the essence of borrowed fairies and butterflies. Those who roam the deepest depths your spectrum of Earth has to offer." He began, also stepping forward to allow a sweet and joyful condensation pool around his feet. "This is where we would sit for enjoyment. To feel the mortal joy only your plane can provide through these valleys was our ale."

"They are not here, but they are? These are fairies and butterflies?" June dropped to her hands and knees for a better look at this joy Skor spoke of. She felt the beginnings of a bubbling sensation tingle in her biceps. Though remaining dominant in the meat and muscle of her limbs, it expanded both toward her fingertips, but also to her chest.

Though a feel she encouraged, the fuzzy warmth did not touch her heart. It travelled the circulatory system, looping through arteries rather than veins. She felt this to be wrong, it drew farther from her when the natural order called for them to become one.

"Why?" She asked shortly, unsure of what it was she was questioning.  How was she to explain the withdrawal that tore through coronary arteries, leaving a seething trail in their wake.

"That is the burn of tainted spirit. It reeks, doesn't it?" Came a distracted response as Skor rubbed his own chilled flesh and sniffed the charred scent of their weakened brothers and sisters. He knew the exact interference she spoke of.

"Yes, it does." She confirmed, standing back to her feet and brushing bits of ground from her skin. She looked to the fog for a second longer before turning to him once more, "But I do not understand...tainted spirit?"

He too shifted his eyes, directing reality back to his assigned vessel.

"Yes, tainted spirit." His words dimmed further as his filter lowered. It gave way for what he was to explain next, to narrow the complexities more so readily available before his eyes than hers, "Your Earth's surface is undergoing an invasion that creates many rips and tears. It softens your resistance, separating your ego from Mother. These...these parasites attach themselves to mortal hosts and eat away the connection that fuses you to your ground. They merge with the soul in youth and you become lost, a prisoner to the eternal emptiness that they both contain and are contained by. The tears they've been pulling at are growing larger as they feed, it's not of an authentic genesis." He continued with a clamped jaw, digging through webs of anxieties in his mind.

"They were forced by man who thought prematurely touching worlds in the beyond was something they could achieve. Only upon the great revolution would evolution occur, and that is when your kind would be destined to join us. Energy is limited to manipulation and expansion can only occur with the careful farming of spirit. Your kind was created to learn, nurture, and encourage growth to an aspect of life that Mother spent eternities cultivating. She knew the risk and knew it to go a way of the wicked or a way of innovation. She knew of the universe more than any overseer of our galaxies, but she did not know your brethren to go the path they did. They began to destroy her, belittle her to land and crop, and rip their brothers apart over pieces of her that were not respected as they should have been. She was stripped of her power and influence over the 44. Your very counsel teach and celebrate a day the ignorant slaughtered those of whom were most native to lands of sacred power; the only ones who could teach the ways of Mother.  They were our children, a flesh that had reached beyond the conscious and touched our mind through an unconscious that links us all...the only tribe to have ever coexisted with elementals in their realm. They fought bravely for the protection of one another as did Mother, but evil had spread like disease. It is disease, one that had many of our families taken, experimented on, and vowed to keep hidden within the depths of a society crafted of lies, false religion, and violence. Now you are all lost." His words were obvious expressions of frustration, even to June's confused receptors.

She could only bear guilt with his words as she recalled her praise for the man he spoke of. She would celebrate alongside, grateful for the wrongful settling of her country. To dedicate entire days for a slaughter no one seemed to inform their young of.

No one cared to seek meaning behind the festivities held in honor of their history. Perhaps she could have asked more questions, and the fact that she had not became a bother.

He saw the deflations, and was quick to regret his lengthy explanation, "I'm sorry, there was much more spoken than necessary."

He did not mean to make the child feel negatively with his words as she did not perform any evil he spoke of. Her reality was priorly one of a grave misleading, and wickedly manifested misinformations were no longer existing. Her spirit was one of strong resonation, and it presented traits far from any of the representations existing in the race that seemed to cause nothing but conflict.

"I'm sorry we are a problematic body." Her voice was small, and she looked to her feet in thought of what he had said to her. "They teach of the victories, but they do not teach of the bad you speak of. Though, I do I feel them. I feel the fairies who were trapped."

She stood in humbled silence, troubled by the ghosts of lost mystics.

"And I feel the poison forced upon them." She rubbed her wrists, lacerations of restraints etching her memories with a burning darkness through her sinuses.

Her next thought was an overwhelming realization. They had not been physically tortured; they had been ripped apart and reassembled with both ancient and artificially created evils.

They had been cut open and rearranged out of sickening curiosity and amusement.

It was but atrocity after atrocity performed upon other living creatures for entertainment.

June could not stomach it.

She could not handle the lack of humility and empathy. The lack of understanding.

That was the root of this evil. These humans did not understand, and that misunderstanding was taken advantage of by the pests that waited for these moments of opportunity.

"No." She said firmly, "No more of that."

Her anger was not led by the barriers of ego, it was felt from a spiritual outrage.

How could they possibly think they had a right to any life that was not theirs? Not even their own existence was theirs.

They not only thought it okay to touch spirits that were given a role to teach and love, but they beat them and cut them and starved them and stole the very organs vital to survival as a means of science.

Pain was not science, manipulating other forms of life was not science, and killing in cold blood was not science.

The inhumane procedures was not science and the cells of fetuses was not science.

How could anyone think otherwise?

"Human perspective and imagination is one of the few things in this universe that is not limited. That perspective can carry someone to the deepest depths of hell or the holy ground you stand upon. They think themselves to be a higher form of life, but they are not. They are merely told they are by the parasites that weaken them." A voice of soft femininity caught Junes train of thought and lied out more track for it to travel.

Both she and Skor jumped at the unfelt presence and were quick to locate the source of a familiar energy pattern. Upon anchoring her eyes upon the most inviting of scenes before her, the fragile girl almost lost bodily control and collapsed as a result.

Instead, her eyes fluttered in surprise and she lurched forward with no hesitation.

"Mama." The relief in that single word brought the woman to tears. She resembled her daughter—both hair and eyes brown in color paired with soft features and kind smiles; both with trails of many tales running down pale cheekbones.

"My baby." Her hushed response was almost a cry, but she lowered, pulled her daughter close and allowed herself just a moment of this affection.

"I've missed you." June did not hold her tears, allowing every moment they spent apart to project through the reflective surfaces of the drops.

"I've missed you too, my darling girl." She whispered, cupping her daughters cheeks and assuring sturdy eye contact for her next words, "But you must listen closely." Her shaky hands smoothed June's hair and urgent gaze focused behind and upon her companion, "I've come to warn both of you."