Enlightened (Love and Light Series) by Melissa Lummis

Author:Melissa Lummis [Lummis, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-10-27T05:00:00+00:00

Loti woke up to hard granite on her cheek and a wind that howled and whined between the rocks. Her body shivered in the cold mountain air. Experimenting, she wiggled her fingers and then her toes, blowing a harsh breath out her mouth at the burning pain. The sun was in the west. Grabbing the leg of a heavy, wooden sign, she heaved herself up onto unwilling legs. She clung to the large sign, flopping onto her stomach. Running clawed hands over the placard, she squinted, pulled back and tried to read the carved words. With a quiet dawning, a different world greeted her. She lay on the sign, listening to the wind, to her breath, to her beating heart, and to the sound of stillness. But the world was as it had always been, she realized. It was she who had changed. A shapeless stillness perched inside her mind, devoid of color or texture.

A breathtakingly beautiful sky teased her with hints of color. They ran and hid whenever she thought she had them. On impulse, she unfocused her eyes, sinking into that newly discovered stillness. Her breath hitched. Lines of color and a subtle, throbbing glimmer—clearer still if she peeked at it out of the corners of her eyes—pervaded everything. She looked down at the large letters carved on the sign. Katahdin. That couldn’t be right. The only Katahdin she knew was in central Maine at the far end of the Hundred-Mile Wilderness. She twirled around, her legs buckling. She slid down the sign, looking for what she knew would be there, but still couldn’t quite believe—a cairn had been built not too far from the sign, piled higher than she was tall.

“The top of that cairn is about one mile high,” she said to the lights in the sky.

How could that be? She walked for a few days at most, maybe three. Four. It had been four days since Wolf had disappeared into the dark. The western sky blazed in a drift of shifting pinks and purples. Sharp needles bristled through her throbbing hands, and she gasped as she lifted them. She gaped at the delicate glow. Subtle patterns of light played just under the surface of the skin. Curious, she glanced around at the rocks, and they shimmered with a barely discernible web of light. Finding a little more strength than before—not much though—she pushed herself back up to standing. A black raven barrel-rolled across the kaleidoscope sunset; its throaty caw flooding her with an icy fear.

She tested her unwilling legs and caught herself, half-crawling, half-shuffling her way through the rocks. It took a long, trembling time to reach the drop off. Over the edge, the rocks turned to boulders, and her traitorous legs forced her to slide on her butt, her neck aching with the tension of holding back. As she climbed down, she thought that up had been easier, less treacherous. As she scuttled down the mountain, the gnarled, stunted trees David called krummolz, untwisted and stood up straighter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.