Of Phantasm and Fury

Of Butterflies and Black Amber

16 Of Butterflies and Black Amber

"...Beg your own forgiveness..." -E.H. Hanson

Flashback

After a stint in Melbourne, her suitcases traveled alongside her to Singapore's Jewel Changi Airport. Her once-questioning soul felt somehow at ease, despite the utter newness of her tropical surroundings. A cactus garden in Terminal 1, an LED-lit Terminal 2 enchanted garden, with upwards of seven hundred orchids(!), and finally, Terminal 3, where she currently sat, a positively glorious one thousand-butterfly natural habitat. Though, if she thought long and hard enough about her current situation, there was nothing natural nor normal about it at all.

Once upon a time—she mused, glancing at what the placard denoted were Blue Jay butterflies, or Graphium evemon eventus, fluttering mere inches away from her visage—once upon a time, I was—

I was—happy.

Even though she left of her own accord to flee a less-than-desirable home life (her parents' marital tension reaching a head), she sensed within herself a hint of effervescent, lingering joy, of what she imagined true love must have been—what it must have felt like—the endless possibilities of what could have been.

What was the opposite of survivor's guilt?

Perhaps it was this—the freedom to fly, escaping the cold confines of the hospital for good—she could only hope. But somehow, she understood it was far more than that, and she felt this to be true in the very marrow of her bones, recalling her time in the ICU, and how, more than once, she had heard a friendly voice calling to her—telling her she would survive—that this would not break her—

Who was it that had spoken, this specter who had kept her company all those late nights, long after her sisters had left?

Before she could ruminate upon this further, the boarding call announcement blared through, as she jumped, startled, racing for the terminal gate—

To Austria, anywhere from moments to hours upon hours later, hiding photos of her international travels though they were an occupational necessity, donning a face mask and shield, much as she had seen missmads do in the first or second vlog as of late. Gazing around her, (Wilkommen! a sign read to her left) everything seemed different—wrong, somehow—as if she were in an entirely alternate dimension of her very own, with no possible chance of escape.

And what on earth had Great-Aunt Laila meant by Charmed 'greatness?'

If nobody missed her, young Laila-the-newly-recovered, if there had been no guarantee she would have been such a Charmed one, given the imprecise nature of pronouncements and prophecies, was there even so much as a claim to greatness, as powerful as she and her two sisters could have one day been? A bioethical and metaphysical conundrum if ever there was one...

As time passed and she grew more situated with her surroundings, she found herself playing her trumpet outside the window of a nursing home, within the town square the next day, and in front of an empty town hall building after that. Perching a cheap secondhand phone tripod, she created YouTube videos of her work, to bring joy in dark times: perhaps greatness could mean many things.

All of a sudden, completing the last measure of a concerto, she felt moisture below her nostril—a tiny crimson smudge—a nosebleed. Memories colliding, folding, unfolding, catapulting atop, one after the other—as she collapsed into a wave of unyielding darkness.

Day 3

Command Center, SafeSpace, Seattle, Washington

"What do we do, Harry? How do we bring my sister home?"