IF: Gods and Monsters by Clayton Smith

Author:Clayton Smith [Smith, Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Dapper Press
Published: 2019-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8:

“Let’s Make Like the Ozone Layer and Disappear”

Miss Twist sighed. “Gaia. Please come down from there.”

“This is where I belong!” Gaia screeched from her perch in the tree high overhead. “This is where we all belong!”

“Yes, and I would love to have a conversation about that, inside,” Miss Twist said, rubbing her forehead with her palm. “I hate humidity,” she added, mostly to herself.

“You would cage Mother Nature?!” Gaia demanded, crouching low on her branch and eyeing Miss Twist suspiciously.

“No, I would not cage Mother Nature,” Miss Twist protested. “But I would ask Mother Nature to step inside, where we can have a calm, quiet, cool, and secretive discussion about the fact that if you don’t come back inside near the portal, your tie with Etherie might deteriorate, and she could be lost in the Boundarylands forever.”

But Gaia clicked her tongue and leapt to another branch higher up in the tree. “I am bonded to Etherie the same way I am bonded to all creatures of Earth!” she said. “Would you have me abandon all for the sake of one? When that one is in the good company of children who are likewise bonded and tethered to their own imaginary Anchors?”

“It’s too hot out here for me to try to unravel that question,” Miss Twist admitted. She wiped a drip of sweat from her cheek. She took another step deeper into the woods, and the mud on the ground sucked at her shoe. Her foot came right out of that shoe. “Oh, great,” she muttered.

“I’m sorry, I cannot be held within man’s walls,” Gaia explained, sounding genuinely apologetic. “Etherie will be safe, I know she will, for she is a good and kind spirit, and in strong harmony with the vibrations of the universe.”

Miss Twist sighed. She wriggled her foot back into her shoe and pulled her feet backward, out of the mud. “I know you think that—”

Gaia shattered Miss Twist’s words with a scream. “My hand! My hand!” she shrieked. She held out her left hand, inspecting it with wild, fearful eyes. “Look at my hand!”

Miss Twist squinted up into the tree, and she realized that she couldn’t look at Gaia’s hand. She couldn’t see it because it was evaporating into thin air.

“Oh dear,” she said, deeply troubled.

“What is happening to my hand?!” Gaia wailed. She stuck out her right hand and tried to touch the disappearing left hand, but it was so far gone that her right fingers pushed straight through the fading ghost of her left palm.

“Out of the tree! Now!” Miss Twist commanded. “We have to get back to the others!”

“What is happening to me?” Gaia asked again, sniffling in shock. She gazed down at Miss Twist, her face pale as a sheet and her eyes brimming over with terror.

“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Miss Twist said, turning and heading back toward the school. “Something has happened to the children. You’re disappearing because they’re about to cease to exist.”

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