Friday Snippets 23

My snippet this week is probably the earliest of my fiction pieces of which any manuscript drafts survived. I wrote this in the early eighties. All my world-building notes for this Sci-Fi Fantasy were lost when we abandoned our Medford apartment in 87. I was in my early twenties when I conceived of and began work on this story. I set it aside when I went back to school in 85.

I started thinking of returning to it after being introduced to Holly Lisle's clinics. I won her Plot Clinic in a 70 days drawing last summer. I hope to get ahold of her World and Language Clinics and apply her techniques to this story. I had planned a trilogy and had written some of their myths and legends and even some poetry for their sacred texts. Less than five pages of one chapter remains of all that.

The Wailing Womb

I. The Mourning Mother

by Joy Renee

Warm is his body and alive. Secure in my arms, next to my heart. My son. Soft and supple his skin, deep and dazzling his eyes. Blue eyes that gaze into mine. Soul to soul a bond of love is forged. Stronger than the strongest steel. More enduring than diamonds.

To hold him, to touch him, to kiss his rosy cheeks, to caress the smooth skin, to lay my finger gently on his throat and feel the pulsing of his tiny veins and know that life is in him and that life from me. Passionately possessive I feel, ferociously protective. No harm shall come to him. I will prevent it with my life.

He is mine and only mine, I think, and yet know that he is his own and the Womb’s above all. And sooner than I wish he will break free into the private world of his own soul. He will assert his independence, leave my arms empty and yearning once more, declaring his dominion over the earth as all men have since the Advent. But for now he belongs only to me and the union of our souls is more passionate, more galvanic than that between a man and a woman, more profound than that between a soul and its Augmentor.

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Mourna awoke. Tears washed out from beneath her lashes as she blinked her eyes open. Dreaming again. Such strange dreams. Thoughts so foreign to her that even the images and words used to form them had a strange feel to her as the dregs of the dream floated in her mind. Augmentor. She formed the strange word silently with her tongue. The word did not belong to her. But she still felt the emotion it conjured up. Awe and utter trust. And beneath that was the straining of energies harnessed and directed….

The images were fading. She could never hang onto them for more than the moments it took her to come fully awake. All that was left was the feel of an infant’s supple skin and blue eyes gazing into hers. And with these a feeling of desolation washed over her. She came fully awake then, crying out, “My baby. Oh my son, I want my son.”

And with the sound of her own cry she remembered, and knew she would never see him again. A wave of desolation inundated her. Even now Jamyl could be dead. But no, somehow Mourna was sure that she would know when Jamyl no longer lived. There was a bond between them, indefinable but indestructible. It had been there almost from the moment she became aware that life was growing within her. Jamyl had been torn from her arms, had been banished from the Body. But only death could truly separate them.

That death would come soon for Jamyl. A matter of hours. And with his death total desolation of soul for Mourna. Her soul wailed within her and instinctively she put her hands to her belly where so recently he had lain curled. A slight swelling still remained to testify to the truth of his existence. There was an ache in her womb and an emptiness. She felt the emptiness consuming her. Could she survive the death of Jamyl? Did she want to? NO! the answer screamed within her heart like the cold winds of the Season of the Far Suns. She must hold her son in her arms again or die! With that thought she sprang to a sitting position on her sleep-couch, every muscle tense, every sense alert. She must rescue Jamyl!