Vado Bujinka and her morphing plant friend, Tappandalli, cross a threshold, departing the Pyramids of Infinitude. As her eyes adjust from cavernous dank to brilliant light, a familiar feeling vibrates through her.
Free link to the story game: https://gamescreate.com/games/show/5023
“What joy!” exclaims Vado. “The Living Land! How did such pretty homeland rocks appear here, so strangely distant?”
“Hey, this is really rich soil!” cries Tappandalli. “I’m rooting for us to stay a while!”
Tinkling stones catch Vado’s ear. She saunters along, then sprints, as though guided by the sound of a water fall. What Tappandalli sees is a being form from the soil, much as he is a floral entity, himself.
There in the meadow, amid golden grasses, the Living Land sits up as one like themselves.
“Dear Bujinka!” exclaims the Living Land. “Pardon my dry mouth! Can you hear me speak now, beneath the wind?”
“Yes! Yes, dear friend,” she says. “Home is carried ever in the heart, and now so literally do I find a natural place, where I can be myself.”
“Yes, please relax a while,” says the Land. “Come! Be among my flowers, so they know they are beautiful!”
“I must have imagined I longed to see you so,” says Vado.
Tappandally giggles as bees search his crown for pollen.
“The longing to see someone so,” says the Living Land, thoughtfully. “Yes, that was my story, too. Those who last dwelt within my embrace sought wholeness.”
Tap feels an explanation arise, to state whence they came of late, together.
“There is said to be, in the world where the Pyramids are found, greatest abundance. Let’s travel to the stars! Said those people. Let us remember we have friends and fear not the cosmos. Some living thing, though, exists among that host, changed to devour the energy of motivation, as though bottomless with a need for love. So the paradise found has become obscure.”
“So is MY story, of those who did sit among my cool mosses and insectoid songs,” replied the Land.
“Am I again, through you, in the homeland? My travels took me from there, to a land I thought felt like the Future, for if it were the past, then it was an age undreamt of by my Silver Claw people of the Dome. I accepted there was only the present; perhaps all I knew and loved were now in my heart, but a world, passed. But the ultimate journey of a scout is ever to cross boundaries unknown in the daily life of one’s tribe.”
“I am of your land, and am here, too,” says the Living Land. “For now, you are simply Home.”
“Who were the last to set foot in you?” asks the plant person.
“In me sat a daughter, who answered her mother, her Queen of Dreams. Her sadness had been buried by a brook, which gurgled with stones smooth since childhood. The daughter came to me to escape those who want command, want authority her free spirit will not permit.”
“She sounds like me,” says Vado, nodding.
“There was a time she felt her mother did not love her so much as she had, when she was learning to first speak.”|
“Plant parents never really lose touch,” says Tappandally. “We know we’re connected!”
“Such is the world of minds,” says Vado Bujinka. “Take it from one who loved to master the languages of people near and far. There are words together that mean ‘loneliness.’”
“So were the words of this daughter,” says the Living Land. “But the words, as they came, were a victory, a way for little streams of the eyes to reach the greatness of the Sea. The feeling had arisen in her, beneath her many fanciful stories of angels and their plans to love and follow her. This Flame had sat on a smoldering ember, popped away from the hearth that kindled her.”
“She came to blame those who had tended the fire. One of the greatest logs for whom the Hearth burned had deserted her body. Now, with ashes by her side, the Hearth burned more dimly.”
When one of her five children had fallen in love one day with the water, the five went to play by the Lake. But that Joy left her body, to become one of the angels. Though she would never leave her mother, never leave her siblings, her breath did leave her. What remained was a body, swept in the current, left by its awareness to sleep and grow no more.
This mother, this Queen of Dreams, felt this was against the natural course of her love. Were they not laid upon her breast, to live as six who would burn brightly? Were not her children made to burnish long after the Hearth’s spark left in peace? How had she failed to illuminate and heat them, nurture them all to full adult Flames?
Now, Vado Bujinka and Tap envision these stories, differently. Tappandally, of the woods themselves, saw a tale of lumber and sparking bark.
Vado sees something in a long-past time. In that age, many were the people of the planet. They had learned to build machines to make distances more quickly, on ground sea and air. In that scene, this Queen of Dreams is but a maiden, herself, mother to children, only as she herself reached adulthood. She imagined herself a humble country girl- too humble to trust solely in her own will.
For this melancholy reason, she had consented to relinquish her dream of six children. After all, they could not faithfully see the means by which to take care of them each. How that fear led her to the surgical severance of the tunnels within her, burning away the receptors of her fertility. It was for the best, they told her. She was not so certain. It was the first time she’d relinquished a life long dream. Just as she came to accept the birth of her fifth child, another girl, in the fullness of time, she did not again give birth, but gave one of her sweet ones, unwillingly.
Her tender tears could not call back her little girl from the waters, for she was gone, instead, to the air, to the stars. And now, in the name of some religious scheme, she was told:
“Let your little ones go elsewhere to play. You must sit and pray, listen for your God to heal you.”
But this was not always her will. After all, were not her four remaining children her divine sparks?
“And this daughter was one of these sparks,” says Tappandally.
“Do fires make you fear?” asks Vado of her buddy.
“Why, not at all,” says Tap. “Fires help us plants uncomplicate our lives. We know when we burn, we fertilize the ground for what will come again. There is again space for something fresh and new!”
“So this daughter did not understand why her mother would not see her.”
“The children were told: go away! Your mother needs to spend time with God.”
“Sounds like an awful punishment!” said Tap.
“For mother and children,” says Vado. “If they never understood in their hearts, how their mother never stopped loving them, then surely, they went on to pain and loss with their own children.”
“So deep was the unthinking damage done,” says the Living Land, with a tremulous sigh. “The pain of the siblings who did have children was never healed. They grew to imagine a life where they were separated from their own children.”
“And all in the name of some misguided human advice,” spits Vado, “claiming to know better than She, where her Creator and Creations lay.”
“’I’m NOT happy with that part of my family,’ said this daughter to me. She sat upon my cool, staunch stones, like a throne of less comfort- bur resting. We lived with them for just a while, she told me- my dad was on furlough from the Air Force. They took control of her grieving. They made her feel like she failed as a Mom! But my Mama was never a failure!’
“Then she turned her head, to place it in the bosom of my limbs,” continues the Land. “She cried because she could not comfort her mother, who needed her children. That is where she found the Divine; in their needs, in her purpose, is where she found her name, victory. She cried because her mother loved her, but was asked not to focus on being their mother. And so, she lost that ability somewhat. Her instincts withered, as learning to punish herself further for the past would exonerate her soul of what ever lay beyond her control! But what could one so young do, in a time when mothers lost sovereignty in the face of lip service to God?
What God was theirs, more than I, a giving place of Life? What Men dared to usurp the Creator, from one who had created and lost but had creations a’thriving to attend? What Women dared judge her silently, what hard heart would say: be not a mother, be a better servant of our Master?
Love as she might, separation and loneliness and anxiety and guilt grew, where once her duties lay.”
A gentle rain descends. In the misty, hazel garden, Tap makes of itself a fragile Lilly.
“The daughter knows, now, though, does she not,” says Vado. “She knows her mother never loved her less.”
“Yes,” replies the living terrain. “For as you have so imagined it, so have the waters come, from the sky. Soon they will dry, upon the things that flowers have done.”
“And so are the mistakes forgiven, of those who lacked the awareness to see the consequences of their actions?” says Vado.
“That, you may have more difficulty, imagining,” says the Living Land. “But it is so.”
“There was a saying among Humanity, in the times where our friend Shamilal Asano lived among them,” offers Tap. “’Forgiveness is the fragrance of the rose, upon the foot that trampled it.’” And it’s true. We plants forgive the missteps of humanity. The essence that makes Life in us, we share without cost.”
“What is within us, comes out when squeezed,” says Vado.
“And that is why Love,” says the Living Land, hugging her, “ is within you- and without.”
Play
Sunstrike and Company: the Infinite Pyramid
Free link:
https://gamescreate.com/games/show/5023
