Cloven Pine

Hi gyrfalcon! I'm returning the favor, like you asked of me.

I've actually read over this story before. I didn't critique it because I really do not find anything wrong with it, and I have never read the Tempest, though I know enough about it to assume that this is backstory. It's a great story in its own right, though, which I like. I like being able to pick up something and appreciate it, then go to what it connects to, see the connections, and be able to appreciate it even more.

But, like I said, this is a great story. Everything is woven together very well. I'm sorry I can't find anything to pick at, it makes me feel bad that you were able to help me so much and I can't give you that same aid.

Great job, and good luck.

-Conrad Rice

Hi, Gyr!

Her midsection bulged and she screamed, her dress torn, her face red, her pain radiating out like a tide as she continued to name me: “Ariel, Ariel, Ariel!”

Her hand darted out and grabbed my arm; I nearly fainted at the sensation of human touch, and then did faint at my first near-fainting experience.

Thinking it must be some sort of illness, I wrested my arm free and crouched between her spread legs, trying to see how the virus would emerge.

I was quite unprepared to have a tiny screaming person thrust into my arms, frightened and angry as a wounded cub and covered in some sort of fluid. Shocked, I dropped it to the sand, where it wailed horribly and beat its miniature fists against the air. A cord still ran from its body back into the woman’s, and, thinking this must be the source of her pain, I severed it quickly.

Apparently this worked, for she fell back, almost boneless, while the new person refused to close his small mouth.

Ah, I had observed this ritual among some of the island’s other temporary occupants.

“I am Sycorax,” she said. “And this,” she patted the baby’s back, “is Caliban.”

“Isn’t he beautiful?” she crooned, stroking his dark hair.
“No,” I told her. “He’s too small and wrinkled and loud. How could such a thing survive longer than a few hours?”

“Wanna fly!” screeched Caliban as he tottered along behind me.

“No,” I said automatically, scanning the beachhead for the particular seaweed Sycorax had sent me for.

The toddler charged towards the waves. “Wanna swim!”

I made sure that a particularly vehement wave bowled him over.

Once she actually tried to send me to scout out the scoundrels myself, but before I’d gotten two miles from the island my physical form began to dissolve and I dribbled back to my mistress over the course of several tides.

She turned on me with suddenly potent wrath, her arms spread, her fingers poised claw-like.

The warmth of her affection swamped me, filled me, drowned me, so that I barely understood her when she said, the wind of her words sweet on my skin, “Lie with me.”

“I am air and water!” I said, and the saying of it awoke me to the horror of her suggestion. “I am the music of the wind and the bending of the grass and the shifting of the sand!” My lip twisted as the fog of her glamour faded from my mind. My next words were sure and solid: “I am not a man of animated mud that you can use to slack your lusts.”

Instead, only the audible sobs told me that her pain equaled mine, only the plaintive cries of “Ariel! Oh, my Ariel…” touched me.