Young Writers Society

Preface

This is the wrought iron gate where they enter the Chapel from the Alcove; this is the first sunlight I see when my eyes open from the darkness; and this is the first ground, sprinkled with leaves of summer, on that first dawn, on that very first morning, where my new, light feet palely trod.

1. Vision

“Alexa? Alexa!”

I seemed to hear someone shouting my name from somewhere in the distance. I glanced up from my tattered sketchbook and gazed into the forest, searching for a face amongst the glossy green ivy which seemed to wrap around every bare branch in the thick weave of poplar trees. Populus tremula (Aspen), I noted down in pencil beside my quick illustration, after quickly flicking to the index of a helpful tree species dictionary I received for my sixteenth birthday the previous spring from my parents.

“Alexa!”

The voice called again and only this time did I seem to fully register the three syllables that echoed between the broad leaves.

“Yes?” I said loudly, trying to project my voice into the woods. There was a momentary delay, then –

“Have you seen the hammer anywhere? Do you remember where I put it?”

I sighed. It could only mean my eighteen year old brother and his typical sort of mindless behaviour. Ryan was back in our woodland home on a three week break from his pharmaceutical studies in Nottingham. How tiring, I thought absently. I took in a deep lungful of air, in vain hopes that my voice would reach where he was working on a “secret project”, as a sort of homecoming present, except that he was the one coming home, not me. I held vague doubts about his little “project”.

“Oh,” I heard Ryan say to himself. “It’s meant to be secret...” His voice trailed off into the gentle rustling of leaves and soft cooing of the wood pigeons.

I pressed my lips together and grimaced towards the sky, exhaling through my nose like how you were supposed to for those calming down exercises. Since I felt my feet numbing and the prickling sensation beginning to climb up into my calves, I gathered up the patchwork quilt and bundled up my sketchbook, tree finder dictionary and pencil. I hung the bundle on the end of my long, smooth and sturdy branch on which I had specially chipped and sanded off all the rough bits to make a sort of natural pole. I then slung and took the weight of the branch on my right shoulder, adjusting until I felt the downward force of the bundle balancing perfectly.

I trotted off into the woods, particularly aware of the tickling brushes of overgrown grass and buttercups against the bare skin of the top of my feet and the soft bumps and bounces of the branch against my collarbone in time with my footfalls.

I calmly sauntered into the familiar clearing not too deep in the forest - the smallest of the three clearings, since the middle sized one was the location of Ryan’s secret project – and slowed my pace to take in the overgrown, wildness and unpredictability, but above all, the sheer beauty of my home, which I called Earth, and of which I owned a small part of. This smallest clearing was the cosiest, the quietest and perhaps my favourite, probably because of the wild bluebells, vivid in their dusty cornflower hue; crocuses, soft yellow accompanied by warm mauve and pure white; and daffodils, bright and vibrant heads of orange, gold and butter which opened and smiled at me like melted sunshine.

I breathed in, savouring the fresh air. Air was always much clearer when you were surrounded by trees; I figured it was the oxygen that all green plants released. I liked forest air a lot. I placed my bundle and stick at the thick roots of a beech tree. I slowly lowered myself down, leaning back, and rested my head on the padded seat of the swinging garden chair, feeling comfortable. I brought my knees up slightly towards myself, so I could also rest my feet on the padding after kicking off my light bamboo sandals. They flipped over and landed on a large pad of ivy. I stared up at the emerald canopy, sunlight breaking jade and lime patterns through the delicate veins on the undersides of the wide leaves, and began to dream.

I was surrounded by sparkling mist, the diffracting light shattering ruby, topaz, gold, emerald, sapphire and amethyst onto the fine white sand which felt somewhat firm underneath my feet; I wasn’t wearing any sandals. The air was as warm as the sun-baked sand, with a cool breeze which ruffled its fingers lovingly through my long hair which - I realised with a shock – was lustrous, shining and glimmering with fragments of russet, gold and ochre. My eyes pierced in and focussed on immense detail in a fraction of a second, like a telescope searches for the stars, and watched strange honey bees with large butterfly wings of translucent filigree prancing to and fro from the headily scented flowers. I then realised – with yet another shock – that the shards of rainbow weren’t beaming down from the sun; somehow, my vision seemed to revert upon itself and now, I was staring at myself: the gleaming sparkles were emanating from my very own eyes!

Unwillingly, I began to wake. I closed my eyes to the jade leaf canopy above, which seemed so dull in comparison to the vivid images of my subconscious mind, in a vain struggle to fall back into that beautiful dream, where the sand was so soft, unlike the grainy pebbles at Mablethorpe, the air so warm but yet so clear and above all, how that world was alive and dancing with colours like crystal.

I sighed and righted myself slowly to ensure that the blood did not all drain from my head at once. I sat on the padded swinging chair, hands twiddling with bits of the fabric of my skirt, stretching it out this way and that, watching the patterns twisting in correspondence with the cotton waves.

I stood up, picked up my bundle and began to leisurely walk back to the edge of the woodland, to the brightness of the open lawn where the sights of real butterflies from this world and perceivable smells of freshly cut grass would greet me. But before I could even see the visible afternoon daylight out in the open, something at the edge of the enclosure glinted like my dream. It was warm, scented like a hot sunset, with tints of pink. My instinctive response, being a realist in some ways, was to simply dismiss it as an illusion, a hallucination after my gratifying dream, or to simply accept it as a shard of sunlight which diffracted in a drop of dew. Except that the dream seemed real, it was the afternoon and so there couldn’t have been morning dew and my mind didn’t want to accept those rational explanations. It also hadn’t rained for the past few days, since I was currently living through a rare few warm and dry days of March.

I decided to investigate further. However, a small part of my mind still closed its door to the fantasies of my default brain, the part of the brain which supposedly switches on brightly like a filament lamp when the conscious brain lapses in concentration. The brilliant flash of phosphorescence had beamed and glittered from somewhere over there, by the tall grass where the poplars began to thicken again, diffractions flickering once more in correspondence with my thoughts. I approached cautiously. I then stopped. Silly, I thought, to think that I could some how transpose my fancies of numbing sleep into the real world. I laughed out loud - quietly though, as to not to wake or stir any unknown beastie which might have been watching me – and then prickled up. Not only my ears sharpened, listening to every little rustle of the leaves, every little gasp of the breeze and every little whisper of the trees, but the hair on my head and arms rose, as if attracted by some force of invisible static electricity.

The light! I followed its shine, down on the warm brown tree bark, sliding in between the swaying grasses, up the thin trunk of a young poplar, then snaking back down again, only for it to curl up my leg and rest on the centre of my chest, upon where my frozen ribs seemed to meet in the middle. I wasn’t breathing. My senses seemed alert, ears extending outwards, tops of my feet feeling every tendril of grass, nose detecting every particle of woodland sweetness, the freshness of pine mingled with clear honey.

And then it happened so fast. The pink shine, like one single laser beam, somehow pierced into both of my eyes simultaneously. I saw several images at once, but only for less than even a second; a large hall, not unlike the sort one saw in Austen films, but coated in drapes of silken weave like rivers of gold and spring green; a grand table, wooden and round, made of worn, aged oak from a tree which must have lived well over three-hundred years, lay in the centre of a smaller room, but no less luxurious than the large hall, with petite figures clad in the smooth, pure hues of snowdrops, buttercups, marigolds, daffodils, who circled the ancient table, sitting with their delicate, slender hands resting either in their small laps or upon that fragile oak – and above all, the one image, so breathlessly dazzling, yet so inconceivably devious, that stamped into the very centre of my mind - was a face.

Yet this was no ordinary face. This was a face, beautiful beyond comparison, so much that it made my heart ache behind my ribs; his soft yet static windswept hair, dark golden in tint with darker bronzed and burnished tones beneath it; his gloriously smooth ruby lips, which laughed sweetly yet sorrowfully to reveal a small neat row of pearly pointed teeth; his chiselled yet graceful brow, nose and jaw would have made Bernini’s angels beside Castel Sant Angelo appear pitiful. I could see by the development of his features that he was about eighteen or nineteen. The wind swept the hair back and I saw that the ears were pointed slightly, arching into a smooth tip around which loose curls of spun gold contoured. However, I saved the most stunning part of this boy for last, and a term as ordinary as a boy was something I could not possibly believe he was; his eyes, in comparison to any jewel, orb or crystal, or even the depths of the sea, easily outshined these natural wonders. They were a natural wonder in themselves; his magnificent eyes were of liquid bronze, irises glistening and undulating with sparkling dew and flecked with rosy petals of jade, topaz and amethyst which were buried deep within the freely flowing rivers of bronze.

And just as I began to consciously memorise his beautifully smouldering visage, he was ripped away from me. It was sudden. Too sudden, and I wanted more time to be with him. I remembered abruptly – the light! I rushed into the direction of his face, imprinted every time I blinked onto the insides of my eyelids in the blackness, and the light hit me once more, harder. The grandeur of the large hall flashed into my pupils, but I wanted to see his face, not the swirling fabrics of the hall. The beam faded and let me reopen my eyes to the oncoming sunlight; I was near the edge of the woodland. I looked down at my feet, leaning hands on my knees for support as I relaxed the tension in the muscles surrounding my shoulder blades.

And then I saw it; a sun-shattering, faceted, cherry tinted crystal with darker tones of crimson deeper within that lay quietly, the size and general roundness of a child’s clenched hand, in the swathes of long grass, resting gently on the cool ground. I marvelled at the crystalline orb, surveying its clean-cut facets, glancing away and then glancing back to check that it hadn’t disappeared in a puff of ruby smoke. It didn’t disappear, and so I stepped one foot closer; the crystal was two inches away from my toes. I kneeled down to pick it up. I hesitated. What if this crystal, or rock, or perhaps even glass, was dangerous, some sort of explosive? I considered that for a fraction of a moment before blushing at my silly conjectures. Something which looked as solid as that crystal couldn’t be a bomb, I thought. Unless it was a hard, transparent shell with burgundy liquid inside, I added, worrying slightly. I blushed yet again, pushed the doubts into the back of my frequently insecure mind, and after placing my bundle lightly on the forest floor, with a shaky hand which seemed almost attracted to the crystal despite the repulsion my mind seemed to advocate, my fingers wrapped securely around the surprisingly hot crystal.

I gasped in surprise when my skin touched its calm surface. My palms instantly felt the spreading of warmth through to the blood. Slightly foolishly, perhaps, I pressed my mouth to the rock. I sighed again as I sensed the warmness flushing into my lips as well as the smoothness, like the untouched, undisturbed surface of a lake.

I threw my bundle onto my shoulder and ran out into the glaring sunlight towards the house, the ruby rock tightly encumbered within my burning fingers.