Uxana Uxl is young, afraid, and cold.
She can do nothing about her age. She can do nothing about her fear. Unsuccessfully, she tries to make herself warmer by pulling her blue cloak even more tightly around her. The last large candle, blue as Uxana’s smaller candle had been blue, burns the darkness to provide flickering light but little warmth.
Uxana can get warmer by taking the long walk down the rocky corridor to the sunlight entering the narrow perpendicular mouth of the cave perched over the perilous drop-off, but she can’t spare the time. It’s her suspicion that too much time has already elapsed. She has to monitor closely this latest burn-down —that of her mentor Zila Bwl — and maybe others of The Sisterhood. She has to be there to do what she can do, if anything, in case something else goes wrong.
She should have known when she asked the apparition, “How long?”, and the girl obviously hadn’t a clue, that the time lapse was already too long. That is now verified by how, one after another, three of the all-important four larger candles have sloughed all their wax, with no results. All three have become merely lifeless colorful shiny splotches on the black basalt floor. The smaller candles still in the pile are possibly (fatally?) contaminated, too: burrowed by long-dead bugs, made brittle or crumbly from age, split and cracked from a natural temperature regulator malfunctioned (how long ago?).
Uxana is sorely afraid her candle, similar in color to the larger one of her mentor that now burns, might have been the only one, large or small, to survive as viable. Why else had her wick spontaneously combusted when she was fifth in the pre-planned revival sequence of large red, large yellow, large green, large blue, then Uxana’s smaller blue? Granted, one such anomaly of sequence occurred after the first flood, but never since.
She leans back against hard stone. She trembles but not just from the continuing chill. The energy pulses are genuinely electric all around her. They’re more powerful than any she’s ever known here. Another purging of them by flood water must surely be imminent. How can she, on her own, ever vacate the area and prepare for another soon-to-happen deluge?
She tries, again, for not the first time, to mind-contact the apparition. Although it had no answer, it can be an indication of people somewhere near, maybe even within the flood zone. Likely mortals drifted in; no warnings available since the last flood. Maybe some with psyches genetically attuned to the present massive power surges. Newbies with remnant DNAs from previous times before their ancestors chose mortality over magic?
Unfortunately, Uxana’s skills at summoning weren’t honed before having gone candle before the last flood. Even with the extra benefit, now, of magic-boosting emanations registering off-scale in intensity, no visions come. Meaning the girl of the apparition had revived before Uxana but left everyone else dormant? Who in The Sisterhood would have done such a wicked and perverse, not to mention dangerous, thing? Besides, Uxana didn’t recognize the girl who was such a pretty thing.
So, had magic merely reverted to mortals with everyone else suddenly out of the picture? If so, that wasn’t a pretty scenario, either. The magic of this place had never been something in which novices could safely dabble.
Her eyelids grow heavy. How strange that she should desire sleep, having already slept so long. She begins the mental exercises long-ago prescribed to keep those of The Sisterhood alert.
“Oooooooooooooooo,” comes a mournful moan from within the flickering darkness. The lit candle wick flares, briefly and brightly, and then, as if pinched by ghostly fingertips, goes out.
Copyright 2009 W. MALTESE
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