Robbin

24. We Meet Again

Terra was disoriented by the turn of events, but she listened. Running felt like dying.

She turned her head to the right and saw Jake. He glanced at her. She turned her head to the left and saw Robbin. Then they both left, and she was alone.

The panic which afflicted her was indescribable: her insides heaved with no reprieve; each breath came short of satisfaction to her air deprived lungs and was painfully sour. The physical symptoms of panic weren't as indescribable as the mental terror of being pursued.

She turned back once. The black wolf was momentarily gone as if run in the opposite direction.

She kept running and looked in vein for either Robbin or Jake's figures. How could he have left her?

Three wolves came upon her back. Two of them loped off in their own directions, but the wolf, Jesie, followed her.

A happy mishap prevented it from taking her: a fallen tree, half severed at the trunk by a lightning storm, teetering on the verge of collapse. It finally met its match when Robbin kicked it sternly toward the passing wolf from behind some trees. Come back, Terra thought. Teetering... teetering in the wind... and then wham.

The wolf howled in pain as a stray branch ripped its cheek and a hundred foot barrier stood between it and Terra, and Robbin disappeared once more, his own pursuit to worry about.

She ripped through the vegetation, hurt at her abandonment and relieved with every step which took her farther and farther from the howling beast.

She fully realized her isolation when she stopped an hour later finally from her running and collapsed before a tree, her back to the direction from which she had been running. She missed severely Robbin's hand from hers, not realizing that his absence was due to acting as a decoy for the wolves, and she clenched her lonely hand in a fist, hoping the wolf didn't come back, and wondering nostalgically if this was how it ended. That was when the vision came.

She loved Madiera like she loved the sun. Madiera was her warmth, her happiness, her means to wellness and fulfillment.

Terra came back to reality, still quaking from the warm feeling of adoration lingering into her own emotional tract like shakes after an earthquake. Not now, she thought, remembering the last time it had happened, with the wolves.

Madiera picked her up from a slip on the cobblestones at five and helped to wipe away her salty tears.

"You're okay, now. I'm here."

Terra shook her head violently to rid herself of the involuntary invasion of her mind. She grasped the necklace and it was burning as it had the last time, though the heat merely felt warm to her boiling hand.

"You okay there?" she heard a singsong male voice ask. Not the stranger, she thought, but then her vision was back, slipping her into another fit of emotion she wasn't prepared for.

She was bundled into a small ball of warmth.

She was disoriented by the change in environment.

She was floating in fluids, eyes closed to block any incoming light. She heard comprehensible sounds for the first time as she was very near her mother's cervix. Her sister preceded her in birth.

"It's a girl," she heard. "The name is Madiera."

The emotional uproar in her tiny limbic system was unprecedented. If something so small could sense her own inferiority in such a situation, she would have remembered it in life. Completely unexpectedly she came into the world after, nearly blinded by the flickering light of the birthing center and nearly deafened by the cruel silence. If such sound could be understood, she would have understood the meaning of her father's voice, heard for the first time in unencumbered volume.