Simone was lost in a world of flashing lights and explosive sound. Red was the dominant color. Fire. Blood. Sparking swords. A massive serpentine dragon coiled around in the air and darted past her in a flash of shimmering blue scales, so pure it was as though the creature was a jet of crystal water. Battle cries gave a macabre overtone to the sound of battle drums, even though no such instrument was in sight.
She spun around to watch a pair of figures pass next, locked so tightly in mortal combat she couldn’t even see where one set of limbs and sword ended and the other began. They carried with them the scent of desperation and sweat engrained forever into chainmail armor. This same armor jingled as the ferocity of their battle carried them past, and then they were gone as though they had never been. Swept up in the throng of battle.
The teenage girl stood in the very middle of the war, where the fighting was the most intense. She wore no armor, nor weapons, nor had any magical skills that she was aware of. But she was not normal. Simone was not touched by a single particle of dust or drop of blood. The siege raged around her, flames in the distance licking at a castle wall, arrows flying lethally though the air, yet she stood here unharmed despite her apparent lack of mystical powers. She was the cause, heart and conductor of the battle, yet almost every person there stood taller than her, and the youngest of the warriors were at least a dozen years older than her.
She watched with intense concentration, yet was somehow lost, somewhere else. She was putting all of her attention on the proceedings, and somehow also none at all. Everything happened on her command. She was in control. This was not magic. This was not science. It was simply the way things were.
Abruptly, a car alarm went off outside and her head jerked up, looking away from her laptop and staring out the window as she ceased writing. The world dissolved as her hands left the keyboard. Her concentration was broken. The flow was gone.
