They
sat in the middle of the floor with a large metal burn bowl heaped with twigs
and brush flaming cheerfully between them.
It made their shadows dance on the walls.
Leo’s
gaze was filled with Carli. His wife, as
tiny and perfect as a doll, looked into the fire. The flames reflected in her bright blue
eyes. She was, as ever, his heart and
soul. He’d loved her long before he’d
ever set eyes on her.
Even
when arguing with her, he did so without any heat. “My visions are full of symbolism and hard to
interpret most of the time. Yours are
much more literal.”
She
continued to stare morosely at the crackling fire. “We’ve gotten nowhere with my taking the lead
these last few weeks. Come on, Leo. At least with you in control, we’ll get something. Even a hint of what we’re getting ourselves
into is better than nothing.”
He
knew when to let an issue go. Carli did
have a point with her difficulty seeing beyond the here and now these
days. “All right. Just don’t turn into a tree, okay?”
They
shared a laugh about that. Leo and Carli
had first met through visions when they were hundreds of miles apart. Leo had a tendency to see symbols that
demanded interpretation. His visions had
made Carli into a weeping willow tree, denoting her ability to bend without
breaking. Those initial telepathic
meetings had tested Leo's deciphering capabilities to his limits. It had made their communications halting, at
best. It was also the reason Carli
usually took the lead when it came to vision quests. Her precognitive talent showed things exactly
as they were.
“Let’s
get started. Time’s a-wasting,” she
chided him gently.
“Maybe
if we get done fast, we can give ourselves a little bon voyage send off?” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
“Why
do you think I’m trying to get you moving, big man?”
Leo
grinned at her heated gaze. Now it would
take real effort to settle down. Closing
his eyes so he wasn’t looking at his beloved and taking a few cleansing breaths
helped. When he opened his eyes again,
he stared into the burn bowl.
“Concentrate on the flames. Feel
yourself going into the fire, emptying your mind of everything. We’re going to our special place, the place
where our souls walk, the place where past, present, and future come together
as one.”
His
deep voice flowed over the room, carefully modulated to help draw Carli into a
quiet state of mind. After a few moments
the flames before him blurred. The room
around them was lost in the darkness. Show us.
Show us. Help us see, he
thought.
The
fire burnt brighter even as it faded away.
Leo blinked, and squinted against the sudden onslaught of daylight. Carli’s gasp reached his ears, and he saw her
on her feet, turning around in surprise.
They stood in the middle of Freetown's stretch of Main Street,
surrounded by boarded-up storefronts.
“Okay. Well this is something at least,” she said,
her brows pinched together. "It's
farther than we've gotten under my influence."
“Not
Gander’s Gulch though. I’m losing my
touch.” Leo scowled.
Carli
looked over his shoulder towards the west, and her eyes widened. “I don’t think so. Look at that.”
Leo
turned and gaped. A monstrous wall of
whipping sand churned down the street, barreling towards them. Its hiss was as if a million snakes had been
set loose on the town.
“Trouble
from the west,” he called to Carli as the hissing sound grew louder. “Maybe it’s already on its way from Gander’s
Gulch.”
They
backed away from the coming storm, a purely instinctive reaction given there
was no way they’d outrun the churning sand.
Leo had never been harmed by a vision before, but this one made him more
than a little nervous.
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