Songs of Long Ago

Cicley Mary Barker 

The air was so light and warm you could almost feel the angels in its surrounding ethers.

Charley was possibly in the most perfect state of bliss that she had ever felt. Although alone and in an unfamiliar place, her heart was glad, and she was not frightened - she was at peace….

There was an exceedingly small orchestra standing around her head where it lay, playing music from their very tiny instruments, that scratched out their notes, barely audible. Charley recognised this little band from her childhood, when her father would summon them to entertain her to sleep. They looked like little men wearing fur pants - with the tallest being but three inches high. It cheered her to see the fairy fauns and hear their tunes once again - she was happy to lie back on the grass listening to their songs from so long ago.

- Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

A Hill of Soft Sweet Grass

One minute Charley was trapped in a sack in a shed in the middle of a park, and the very next she had found herself in the most beautiful of surroundings imaginable. She was free of her constraints and nesting on a hill of soft sweet grass, lilacs and chamomile.

It was a lot like the very hill in the park she had been seated on before being taken, but this place was brightly lit and warm, and there was no city to be seen below - just paddocks with a stream, and trees that looked like over-large pineapples.

Dragonflies as big as sparrows glittered in the air about; and birds as small as the hairy-chest moths clustered the branches above.

There was a tray of fruits beside her, and a picnic hamper beside that; on the top of which slumped a long leather skinned book. It bore no title and was bound by a single red ribbon. There were two letters deeply embossed in gold - M.E. - and she half wondered who the author might be. A mobile phone at her feet started to ring ‘Good Vibrations’ and she sat up from her repose to answer it.

She unflipped the handset gingerly and said tentatively: “Hello?”.


 -Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

The Experience of Beauty

 

They say that the experience of beauty, and that of feeling loved, and in love, is one of the same: and that the gods have made it thus.

From the wild to the woodland, Nature herself is both - beauteous and loveable - and both its grandeur and serenity lie embedded in the soul of this truth.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

Mind-blurring Effect

“Wot’s with the noise?” came a voice not far from her.

She had thought she was left there alone, but now realized there had been someone, or more, nearby her all along.

Charley had not a chance to catch sight of her captor, but if she had, she might have been a little scared by his size and demeanour.

Trolls are unappealingly brutish in nature and form - they perspire onions, and from their noses leaks green snot.

And yet, their ancient torsos still house a beating heart within, which one day shall appeal their lot, and refine to the ways to compassion and love. This troll however, had a long way to go.

Rombardo was a merchant of sorts. His thinking was plain.

Charley sneezed. “There must be pollens in here” she thought to herself ordinarily.

And with that her sense of calmness returned. Yes! the sneeze had cleared her head. All she needed to do was think of the very next thing to bubble, she said to herself. To bubble? No, that can’t be quite right. Fumble.

No, not fumble. What was it she was trying to think of?

Rombardo had sprayed her through the weave of the bag, with an opiate that he carried, which in itself was no more than a breath freshener to his breed, yet had the overwhelming, pacifying, mind-blurring effect on humans. He used it constantly.

- Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

Long Memories

Marc Potts 

Trolls, like most of the Fay, have very long memories, and do not forget or adapt, or change their minds very easily.

The brief had been to kidnap Marley - Charlotte’s mother - some decades before - from that place in the park, on that very seat, where Charley had been sitting.

A few decades in worldly time, feels like yesterday to the enchanted beings, and the woman’s names and features were so very similar.

She had been sorting through her thoughts, trying to get close to the mother she never knew, when he had come across her. Now she found herself surrounded by hessian, literally captive in a sack with a knot tied on top, in the dark in the gardener’s shed with the overwhelming dusts of grass and fertilizer.

Charley literally had no idea of what to expect next.

She felt the top of her head for a small cut that was sticky with blood and to her disgust something crawled over her hand from a fold in the sack and down onto her neck. It had many legs.

She let out a scream.


- Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

Psychic Connection Dropped

A moment later his own phone lit up - it was Black. 

"Ah er, let me look it up ... I think it was the Hotel Babylon ... or is that a TV show? No, no it was the Trafalgar - I thought I would check with you before calling them. So you aren't with her yourself?” he said, realizing at the same time the stupidity of his words.

There was a difficult silence. Calvin kept the conversation going.

“Where are you positioned right now? Are you far from London yourself?”

“Enchanted forest”, was the gruff reply, which Calvin took to be sarcasm.

“Give me an hour and I will phone you back .... I feel sure she will be in touch really soon, nothing to worry about.”

Puck was not so sure.

He and Charley never lost touch with one another. It was as though their psychic connection had dropped out - and this could only mean one of two things, or both.

His memories of yesterday swept over him. Puck had to remind himself that this was not that time, and that Charley was not her mother ... and surely things would be different this time…


- Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

A Conundrum

In point of fact Calvin did not project well - his mind was neatly balanced in the present, and he rarely indulged in imaginations of any kind, to relieve him from the mundane.

The only time he left his ‘here and now’, was to contemplate some scientific possibility ... and even then he was rooted firmly in what he knew.

When the call came to say that Charley was missing, he had been working on the seventh aspect of his tissue repair - its shelf life.

People underestimate this conundrum. Often the longer any material is kept its components break down, and whatever the matter is, it will change. If you change its aspects, its very life will devolve.

Corruption, contamination and corrosion - the three 'C's Calvin wryly wrestled in production, and there wasn’t a chemist in the world who could beat them.

An anxious Robyn kept repeating words to the effect that she simply did not know. Calvin thought she was on some kind of loop with this thinking. 

“Well, how long ago was it that you last spoke with her?" he said, staring at his phone.

"It's only been a day, but that's not the point - she missed a meeting at the London office yesterday afternoon" she sighed impatiently.

“We talked in the morning and she was intending on going then.” She waited for him to say something, but he did not.

“Have you phoned her father?” he asked reluctantly.

“Perhaps he has heard from her, or better still is with her?”

“No, that was going to be my next question ... do you know how to contact him?”

“Sure - I’ll message it to you now. No, wait - I will phone him myself. Is there anything else? Give me five, and I will get back to you.”

For some reason his creeping anxiety had taken hold. He did not want to phone Mr Black, but it was the only thing he could do, and chances were Charley was with him anyway.


- Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances