Welcome to Valerian Night, where the story comes to you in snippets and snatches, snapshots and slivers of 300 words every week. Your input is valued and needed, for what you say may drive the story into a totally different direction. Follow the meandering coils of story that take Alyxa Fairchild onto a direct collision course with Nightmares, Dreams, Old Deities and New Heroes as her world collides with that of Réveille, the land of Waking Dreams and Dead Gods. Trail after Morpheus as he discovers the foibles and confusions of the human world and finds himself strangely enamoured thereof all the while trying to keep his Dreamer safe and ensure the continued peace of the Real World. Let the young Jazzy open your eyes and show you that the world you see is not necessarily the world you know...

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

LII: Coordination

Michael helped Jazzy move around her apartment. She had lived here since the death of her parents. It had been hard at first, being mostly alone, and so young; a fourteen-year-old girl by herself with a largely absentee guardian sometimes had it rough, but Jazzy got along fine, somehow she always did. Unfortunately, for all that she was in familiar territory she was having trouble remembering where everything was and what the layout of the room was.

“You’re trying too hard,” Michael pointed out when she nearly tripped over a footstool, “your body knows where everything is, just trust it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jessica mumbled sourly, “you keep saying that. I never really had any eye-hand coordination, now it seems like I don’t have any coordination whatsoever.”

“It’ll come back, honey girl,” he said, trying to reassure her, “just give it time.”

“Hey, do you think that I can get out of phys. ed. now?”

“I hadn’t thought of it.”

“I guess I’ll have to try to explain it to them, somehow. Being a liberated teen is kinda hard,” she said and her blind eyes went wide with sudden shock.

“What? Jazz?”

“I can’t read anymore…” she whispered, blinding reaching her hand for his.

Michael took it and squeezed it gently.

“Guess you’re going to have to learn how read Braille?”

“I guess,” she murmured despondently, “if I’d known that it would’ve – ”

She had gone still, Seeing; a living room, a cat asleep on a brown sofa, a child playing on the floor. The child was surrounded by a strange green-blue light. The view changed, and Jessica started. The woman was tall, taller than any woman she had ever seen before, surrounded by darkness that was steeped in blood. So much power there.

“The Witch Queen,” she whispered, knowing instantly.

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