Page 140 of Seer Prophet

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There are moreand thens…

More and more, faster than the spinning blades.

More and faster than he can count.

Some are sharp, clear, like that beautiful, sickening but mesmerizing play of sunlight and shadow over the bright pink of a sunset-kissed sky, its blue and purple clouds bleeding stars at the corners. Some are vague. Faces and sounds, hands on him, groping, hurting him, but with care, with caring, with wanting to help.

The light of their owners warm him, encase him in protection…

…in love.

Some of what he sees feels fanciful, half-imagined.

Sunlight shimmers through pink cherry blossoms, golden oceans sparkling with diamond stars. A rock like the rock of Gibraltar, sticking out of the sand, covered in trees and birds. It looks like one of the gods dropped it.

They dropped it onto the shore from high, reddish-orange cliffs.

That ocean teems, filled with presence, with light, more love than his heart can hold. He feels presences of its creatures in every part of his body. They hum with life and light. They sing to him in the further reaches of his mind.

He knows it must be fanciful.

He knows it can’t be real.

He watches more of thoseand thenscome and go, until eventually, somewhere in that primordial soup between consciousness and oblivion…

He lets oblivion take him.

Chapter28

I Know But I Don’t Know

The next time Loki woke, he had a better sense of who he was.

He had a better sense of being alive.

The thudding of the blades had stopped.

He still felt as though he was moving, as if the ground shifted somewhere distantly beneath his back, head, and legs, but the feeling lulled him now, rather than disturbed him. He stared up at a ceiling decorated in rust stains. The rust moved out in sprawling patterns from metal brackets over white-painted panels.

After a few moments of fighting to focus his eyes, feeling his nausea return in increasing waves, he realized he could smell brine.

He heard the distant cry of gulls.

Of course, his mind might have invented the latter part.

He’d been dreaming of that golden ocean, so it made sense his mind might put him back there. The image came close enough to the conscious areas of his mind that the transition felt seamless, despite the dullness of the light here, the ordinariness of the white-painted ceiling in comparison to what he’d witnessed on those golden shores.

He remembered black birds.

Green and black, with iridescent wings.

Cormorants, they were called.

“What, no pelicans?” a familiar voice asked.

Loki turned his head. He squinted into an instantly brighter light. It struck him that maybe he’d spoken aloud, that he’d been caught by the human soldiers who shot him… then the light’s brightness began to roll backwards to a more manageable glow.

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