The Will [on hold]

5000s - Episode 2

5000

She rose with the sun. There were few sights more beautiful than sunrise on the shores of Glorion, and the sun seemed to rise on this day with new vigor and hope. The sea yawned before her, a bold and bright blue that in this hour appeared a gilded indigo. The full clouds, an iridescent white by day, were now steeped in the coral and lavender dyes of dawn.

It was a new year, a new millennium, an entirely new age. Then again all the same, it was just a new day.

“Leara.”

She turned and smiled brightly at her mother, who approached and knelt beside her on the pale gold sands. Anorrah mirrored her daughter’s smile, just as the two of them had always mirrored one another’s night-hued hair and sea-blue eyes. Leara’s eyes had perhaps not yet been dimmed with age nor deepened with its wisdom, but in every other way, she was very much and very visibly her mother’s daughter.

“Leara,” Anorrah repeated, laying a gentle hand upon her daughter’s knee. She saw so much of herself in Leara, but also so much more. “You so remind me of your father, when you sit like this and look out on the sea.”

“Because he is always looking outward, and away?”

Anorrah’s lips lifted into a halfhearted smile. “Because he is a man of vision. And his visions have always been far-reaching, crossing worlds and oceans, always hungering after the horizon. After that which lies beyond it.”

“Well, I don’t hunger after much. The worlds beyond the sea may well be beautiful, but so is our own. And I am happy here,” Leara avowed. “I’ve the greatest mother in all the world, after all.”

Anorrah laughed as she returned her daughter’s embrace. “And the greatest father!”

“Of course,” Leara hollowly agreed. “He is doing very great and very important things on his faraway island, for the good of the world.”

“He is, though,” Anorrah insisted. “Truly.”

“I wouldn’t know! He never speaks to us about them.”

“It is not our place to know. Not yet, at least,” Anorrah professed. She held her daughter close; there was so much that Leara did not know, so much Anorrah hoped she’d never have to know, about her father and about the world. But her daughter was hardly a child any longer, and hardly needed a mother’s arms to keep her from that wide, dark world of knowledge.

After a wordless while, spent together watching the sun crest the rim of the sea, Leara gently disengaged herself from her mother’s arms. “Caliphria had asked me to wake her, while it was still early. Said she wanted to see as much as possible of this bright new day,” she spoke, leaning down to kiss Anorrah’s forehead as she rose. “Happy new millennium, Mother.”

“And to you, love,” Anorrah’s warm blue gaze returned her daughter’s kiss. “Your father promised that he would be here today, to join us celebrating the new age.”

“I know he did.”

“There is still hope that he’ll arrive! The day is young yet.”

“It won’t be young much longer,” Leara replied, her soft voice lowering to a murmur with the words that she next spoke. “And neither will I.”

She then turned inland, heading home.

Anorrah remained on the shore awhile afterward. The sun had since crested the sea, but no ship yet crested that distant horizon, as she continued waiting, hoping that it would. It was not so much for her sake; she had long since resigned herself to Crion’s ways, and years ago had come to peace with it. But her daughter had reached no such resignation, no such peace—Leara would have still welcomed his love, were he here now to give it. She did not need it or demand it, and indeed had grown into a strong, happy woman without it. But surely she would welcome it.