Robert E. Vardeman
The ground shook so hard that Dorianya awoke from her slumber. Extending tiny hairlike tendrils, she sampled the sweet earth around her and cringed at the nitrate bitterness which had entered the soil. Pulling in her appendages and willing her body into a streamlined shape, she glided through the dirt around her, letting it flow and arouse her senses until she tingled with anticipation. She passed through the solid rock just under the surface but recoiled as she touched an outcropping of iron pyrite. It burned. Her usual chore would have been to remove it by encapsulating it with her body and slowly dissolving it, but today the quakes sending bitter nitrates into her domain had to be dealt with first.
Dorianya broke through the hard, crusty earth shell, coming to the surface and rising to her full seven-foot height, a column of amorphous mud and dripping stone. She turned slowly. Lacking ears did not keep her from “hearing” distant thunder. She remembered years earlier how this shrine had lit up with foxfire during a lightning storm. She had seen the outlines of the Daughters of the Air as they cast down their electrical discharges in some obscure celebration. But this lightning came not from the air but from a distance along the horizon. Flash after flash to the west was followed by the ground shaking. Moving carefully, her earthen appendages mimicking legs, Dorianya circled the standing stones worn by wind, rain and unthinkable eons. Her light touch left mud streaks. Even as part of her body vanished, she felt renewed through her feet so firmly in touch with the damp soil.
She considered the flashing lights and the quaking ground to be related, but she could not understand how until an artillery shell landed at the edge of the shrine. It blasted away a marble plinth and caused the column below to shatter into a thousand pieces. One bit of shrapnel cut through her body, an even more unpleasant sensation than passing through the iron pyrite beneath the shrine. Dorianya shrank, absorbing the rocky projectile. As she did, movement caught her attention. Two similarly dressed men dived for cover at the far side of the shrine and pointed their weapons westward, toward the flashing lights.
Dorianya sank into the earth, keeping only her head above the surface. One man jerked and fell forward. The other began firing his rifle until it broke, then he picked up his fallen comrade’s and used it until it, too, broke. In the distance Dorianya saw a dozen men, dressed differently than the one taking cover behind the earth shrine. They advanced methodically on the single man. This must be a battle. Part of the war raging across the land.
“You won’t take this land, this shrine! You killed my mate but you won’t kill me. You won’t!”
The man’s words came to her muffled by the earth, but Dorianya understood. This man defended the shrine. Dorianya sank deeper and moved close to him, rising a few inches immediately behind him. He bled from a dozen wounds but still he refused to give way.
She slipped back into the welcoming earth but did not return to the depths.
“Earth Mother, what should I do?” Her question sank deep into the ground and was answered almost immediately.
“Do not permit yourself to feel for this human.”
“He is so brave. He fights for our shrine, his friend’s life, his honor.”
“Do you find him handsome?”
The stern question caused Dorianya to quake. To answer was to betray her innermost emotions.
“You are young, Dorianya, hardly more than a hundred years old. You have much to learn about our world—and the surface.”
“I can help him, and he will never know.” She flowed up, becoming a mound in front of him.
She winced as lead pellets drove through her. Rising, adding more mud beneath her body, she enlarged the mound and caused the soldier to roll away. It worked, but too slowly, so she began digging a cavity in front of the soldier and adding that to the rising wave of dirt. Mimicking her sisters in the sea, she rose and sank, rose and sank, moving the soldier constantly away from the shrine as if caught on a wave. The muddy terrain turned rocky, causing her to slow. When she hit a patch too hard to lift, she sank down and let the man struggle about.
“Whippet,” he grated out. “Whippets! Rescue him. Get him.”
She had no idea what he meant, but his excitement was contagious. He sat up and waved. Dorianya followed his gaze and saw mechanical devices with big rifles mounted on top clanking along at a breakneck pace. They bypassed the shrine. A shower of dirt rose into the air and fell down on the soldier.
“There’s one. Fetch him, mates.”
Dorianya flowed around the rock to stand guard over the soldier as another vehicle with a cross painted on its side drove up. Two men with identical crosses on their helmets jumped down and hurried to the soldier’s side. They didn’t seem aggressive so she let them pass.
“You’re in good hands, me lad. You with the First Canadian Division?”
“Under General Sir Arthur Currie.”
“You with him at Passchendale?”
“Missed the gas attack. I arrived from Halifax a week after. Got an instant promotion, Lieutenant Campbell, Alvin Campbell. That’s me.” He let out a low moan of anguish as an artillery shell rocked the world twenty yards away.
“Bloody awful business, that phosgene. Ought to be outlawed. We have to avoid the Bosch’s artillery right now, and that’ll kill us dead. Ready? Up you go, Lieutenant Campbell.”
The soldier groaned as the two men hoisted him. They started for the vehicle, Campbell bumping along between them. Dorianya shivered as the toes of his boots dragged over her subterranean body. The sensation combined horror and sensuality in a way she failed to understand. She sank lower into the earth, watching as the soldier’s comrades wrestled him into the back of the truck.
“There’s another man, back there in the woods, by the shrine.” Campbell tried to turn and point.
“Sergeant Guthrie checked. He’s a goner, Lieutenant.”
“Guthrie?”
“He’s our driver. He’s a crackerjack man behind the wheel, as crazy as Barney Oldfield.”
Alvin Campbell let out another squawk and almost tumbled from the rear of the ambulance as it shot away, kicking up a spray of mud and stone. Dorianya rose to her full height and reveled in the dirty storm from the ambulance’s tires. The soil felt good splashing against her, and it reminded her of the soldier.
Alvin Campbell. And he was not simply a soldier but a lieutenant. Whatever that meant, it had to be something special.
She sank back into the ground, her thoughts chaotic. Somehow, they had become more ordered when she slipped past an ore deposit and came to where the Earth Mother spread out over an immense portion of land ruptured by the human fighting, doing her best to heal it.
“You are not here to aid me, are you, Daughter?” the Earth Mother confronted Dorianya.
“I have seen nobility unlike others in the above world,” Dorianya said. She expelled a long gout of mud and slid after it. “He needs me. I should go to him.”
“There is more, isn’t there, sister? You have fallen in love with him.”
“That is not… true.” Dorianya considered what that meant, compared what she had experienced with Alvin Campbell and how she anguished with him and rejoiced in his safe escape. “No, that is true. You see clearly, Earth Mother.”
The ground shook as the elder daughter of the earth sighed.
“You are young and have not truly experienced life underground. Your sisters show nobility.”
“Not like Alvin Campbell!”
“Such passion,” the Earth Mother said sadly. “You would join him?”
“I have heard of such a thing. Is it true? Can I become human and… and human?”
“You mean experience love in all its human manifestations?” Again the ground shook with the sigh, this time less of sadness and more of resignation. “It is true, but you must know the penalties.”
“Anything! I helped him once already but I can do so much more for him.”
“You speak of helping him, but there is a selfishness to your wish, isn’t there, Dorianya?”
“What if there is? Can life on the surface be so bad? They can see our sisters in the air and sea, as well as we who are under their feet. And Alvin Campbell…”
“If you turn away from your sisters of the earth, you can never return.”
“I’ll have him.”
“And,” the Earth Mother continued, “your love must be pure.”
“It is!”
“And his for you must be shown.”
“I am sure he will love me as I do him.”
“Youth,” Earth Mother said. “So be it. At the shrine you will be reborn as a woman. You are permitted one wish.”
“To be the most beautiful human woman ever! How can he not love me then?”
“So it will be, but you can never speak of your love for him until he speaks of his for you first. Do so and you will die a terrible death.”
Dorianya agreed. Alvin Campbell would see her love, even without words, and return it a hundredfold. How could he not if she were truly the most beautiful woman in the world?
“There is another condition. If he does not love you—”
“He will, he will! I know it!”
The Earth Mother enfolded her youngest daughter and compressed until Dorianya cried in pain at the transition. Even after she was taken to the surface, to the shrine, and left there naked but for a thick blanket of mud, the pain did not subside.
“But I am human,” Dorianya said, running long, slender fingers over her new body, experiencing thrills of sensation and marveling at all she had missed as an earth elemental. The world flooded her with fierce colors, sounds of distant fighting hammered her ears and the pungent scents of life and death made her nostrils flare. She threw her arms wide and tried to take it all in at once.
Then she looked down and saw the dead soldier, the one her Alvin Campbell had tried to rescue. Kneeling, she rolled him over. The ambulance driver had not been wrong. This unknown soldier had died long since. Humans buried their dead. She had come across many of their cemeteries, more since their war had begun, as she cruised about underground.
Using her fingers to dig out a grave in the sacred shrine proved impossible. Where once she’d burrowed and excavated with ease, this body permitted none of that. Giving up, she lifted the curiously light body, slung it over her shoulder, and began walking back toward the human city where Alvin Campbell’s comrades had assembled for this fight.
Through the night and into the next day she walked, getting to know her body and learning to ignore the constant pain it gave her. At sunset the next day, naked and covered in mud, she was hailed by a sentry for the First Canadian Division.
Lieutenant Alvin Campbell’s unit!
***
“He will be here, won’t he?” Dorianya flicked ash off her cigarette and looked anxiously toward the door. The ballroom was so crowded with revelers that her view often disappeared. She ran her free hand over her curvaceous body. The pale beige dress clung to her every contour, reminding her of the way the earth had once pressed into her elemental body, but this dress gave different sensations, so many different ones! It caressed and flowed, cooled and added to her enjoyment of being among the humans. They all watched her move across the ballroom floor—the men hardly holding their desires in check and the women uniformly hating her. Dorianya reveled in the reactions. Among the elementals, all had been equal physically and clothing such as this gown, the beguiling pearls dangling around her swanlike throat or the flashing diamond earrings in perfect shell-like ears were superfluous.
She half turned when she realized the hand on her posterior belonged to the man edging closer to her by the minute.
In the month since she had become human, she had learned so much. A step as graceful as any ballet dancer moved her away so that the man seeking her attention found his hand groping emptiness rather than her waist. She thrust out her cigarette in such a way that if he approached her again, she would burn a hole in his tuxedo. He got the message. She enjoyed the movement of exotic smoke through her lungs, the surge of energy it gave her, but in this social setting the cigarette served primarily to keep the unwanted at a distance.
“What does Lieutenant Campbell have that I don’t? You haven’t even met him—he only got out of the hospital this morning.” The man’s pleading turned into a whine that displeased her. If she hadn’t been so intent on meeting this gala’s guest of honor again, she would have been wroth. Even that thought amused her. Anger was not an earth elemental emotion.
Nor was love.
“He’s quite dashing,” she said, looking down her nose with a combination of disdain and amused disinterest. “And heroic.”
A murmur passed through the room. She caught her breath when the man she had come to love made a grand entrance. She took in his full height, his strength, the sharp, clean lines of his face only marred here and there with small bandages that reminded her of his battlefield condition— small imperfections that enhanced his appeal.
Her would-be beau moved to block her view of Alvin Campbell. With a fluid move, she sidestepped to keep Lieutenant Campbell in sight as he crossed the ballroom to great deserved acclaim.
“I’ve heard that you are something of a heroine, yourself,” persisted the man she could not brush off. “Something about carrying a body back to his command post.”
She had created quite the sensation as she dropped Corporal Yarrow’s corpse at the sentry’s feet. Realizing the truth would never be believed she had feigned shell shock, something those along the Allied salient understood, and slowly added to her story as she learned what gained her the most approbation. Alvin Campbell had been taken to a better equipped hospital in Paris, and her new heart hammered with emotion when she wheedled her way onto a train going to the capital a few days later.
The train had been a revelation to her. The huge engine stood thirty feet tall, was streamlined gleaming steel and blasted along spewing diesel fumes and shuddering with barely suppressed power. She had wanted to explore it, but it had been crowded with soldiers from a half dozen different countries she had never heard of on their way back to the Allied headquarters.
Instead, she had listened and soon fit in with the men. Her physical beauty was a boon, as much as the constant pain she felt in every joint of her body. The doctors and corpsmen fussed over her because of the honest and obvious agony she experienced, but only the most dedicated remained once it became obvious her pain was nothing they could ease.
The train station was a huge cavern of steel girders, filled with a dozen trains bringing troops back from the front lines. The war was winding down and the time had come to wait for armistice and celebration. In no time the urban swirl caught her up but her notoriety kept her in the public eye. She adapted quickly and within a week might have been mistaken as a Parisienne by birth though more than once she had eyed the gardens and patches of bare earth, yearning for the life she had left behind beneath the paved streets bustling with powerful machines. Then the thought of the man she had rescued on the battlefield rose and convinced her this human life had been the right choice.
Even if her joints threatened to collapse at any moment.
“That’s a jaunty tune,” the man before her said above the party’s din. He reached out, waiting.
Dorianya hesitated, flicked away her cigarette, put the holder in her beaded clutch purse, and then slipped into his arms, her body stiff. They spun about onto the floor in a quick foxtrot. The man was a decent dancer, and she fell into the rhythm, letting it possess her. Music was another thing that the subterranean world lacked. Oh, there were sounds of the earth moving, continents grinding together and sliding apart and the occasional roar as a volcano erupted, but nothing rhythmic like this. Her new body responded well and as she danced with increasing grace and fluidity, the pain wracking her disappeared. Without seeming to do so, she guided them to the center of the floor amid the other couples losing themselves in the music.
“See? I knew you’d—” The man grabbed for her as she seemed to stumble.
Dorianya’s grace was put to the test with her deliberate move. One toe of her slipper touched the heel of the other. Arms windmilling, she twisted around. For a heart stopping moment, she thought her ploy had failed.
Alvin Campbell moved with all the speed she expected. His arms circled her waist and pulled her upright, letting her put her arms around his neck for support. For an instant their faces were inches apart. Dorianya resisted the urge to move closer and kiss him, but oh, how she loved every wrinkle and imperfection of his strong face!
They hung frozen in the moment, then she straightened, unsure if so boldly kissing him would violate the precept of declaring her love for him before he spoke of it to her.
“You are so strong, and I am so clumsy. Pardon me.” She spoke softly. She should have averted her eyes, playing coy as she had seen so many other women do, but taking her eyes off him proved impossible. Not only was he handsome, but she worried he might vanish like a will-o’-the-wisp if she looked away for even an instant.
“I’m glad I had the strength to catch you.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Dorianya moved to block her former dance partner from annoying her with questions about her condition. To forestall any more interruption, she stepped up and pressed against Alvin Campbell’s body, the warmth erasing any return of aches from her condition as a human. A quick whirl and they melted into the crowd of dancers, leaving the lieutenant’s partner with Dorianya’s discarded one.
“I was released from the hospital today,” he said. “I hardly recognized myself when I looked in the mirror.”
She lifted a laced glove to touch the scar on his face. “It makes you look distinguished and distinctive. You’re just not another pretty face.” She saw a tiny smile creeping onto his lips at her words. Humor won his heart!
“You dance divinely,” Alvin Campbell said, spinning Dorianya around as the music begged for a lively two-step. “I apologize about how clumsy I am.”
Dorianya kept from wincing as her joints creaked. She worried they drowned out the music.
“It is easier with a partner so handsome,” she said. Though the other couples tended to dance a sedate hands width apart Dorianya pressed closer. She couldn’t help herself. She had forsaken a life underground for this moment.
“You’re too kind.”
He stopped suddenly and looked at her, as if for the first time.
“I know you!”
Her heart skipped a beat. He remembered who had saved him out in the battlefield.
“And I know you, too.”
“You’re the woman who brought back the corporal’s body. I tried to save him but couldn’t. Then…”
“Then?” she prompted.
“Then someone saved me. I don’t know who, but you succeeded where I failed. They gave me a medal. Did you get one, also?” Alvin Campbell touched the gold medal dangling from the varicolored ribbon on his chest.
“The corporal wasn’t the only one I saved. I—” Before Dorianya said any more, she worried that she would blurt out her love for him which would mean disaster. The Earth Mother had warned her and losing Alvin Campbell now, when he was so close, would devastate her.
“I have been so lucky,” he went on, not hearing her. “I was rescued from the Bosch and found the love of my life.”
Dorianya started to speak, but the words jumbled in her throat. He had spoken of his love for her first. It was now permitted that she speak of it to him. That made the transition from immortality in the underworld to upper world mortality worthwhile.
“There she is.”
“What?” Dorianya blinked in confusion. “What do you mean? I’m right here.”
“My nurse. The one who brought me back to health. Excuse me.” Alvin Campbell bowed slightly. Then Dorianya found herself alone on the dance floor, surrounded by whirling, loving couples as Alvin Campbell nimbly crossed the room to a woman dressed, not in a ball gown or other finery, but a plain nurses’ uniform. He circled her waist with his arm and drew her close for a kiss.
“No,” Dorianya gasped. Tears welled and she dabbed at them.
Alvin Campbell had found his love and it was not her. It was a nurse who had bewitched him. When he had awakened, she must have been hovering over him, an angel of mercy, healing him and giving him what Dorianya could not. Not then.
But she could now. She could win him away from the nurse and get Alvin Campbell to proclaim his love, unleashing the torrential outpouring of emotion she felt for him.
From the way they pressed against each other, Dorianya had no time to waste. She went after Alvin Campbell, but the dancers caused her to bounce about and by the time she reached the far side of the ballroom, Alvin Campbell had climbed atop a chair and held up his hand to get everyone’s attention. The band discordantly slowed and stopped, further focusing the attention on the soldier.
“I have an announcement!”
Cheers went up, cries from many of his comrades about Alvin Campbell’s heroism. That her love was so well thought of by his men warmed Dorianya, but his next words chilled her to her new bones. Her new aching bones. The ones she had accepted because she loved him so.
“I have asked the lovely Bertha Benedict for her hand in marriage and she accepted! Nurse Benedict and I are to be married tomorrow evening!”
A cheer went up. Dorianya’s legs buckled under her, and she sagged into a pile on the floor. Again came the tears. This time she made no effort to stop them. Someone helped her to her feet, and then even he rushed away to congratulate Alvin and Bertha.
Dorianya had never felt so alone.
***
Dorianya knelt in the garden, her knees touching bare earth. After fleeing the soiree and Alvin Campbell’s chilling news, she had wandered aimlessly, her face to the setting sun until she found this small contact with her old life. Soil. Damp and fragrant, though as an elemental she had never thought of it as anything more than a highway for her subterranean movements. How different she saw the world through human senses!
She bent forward, placed her palms on the dirt and closed her eyes. She felt distant tremors and knew the Earth Mother came for her. She bowed her head, and after a few minutes, felt filled with a presence. A Presence.
“I want to return to the earth,” Dorianya said in a choked voice. “I was wrong to think I could win his love.”
“You cannot return. That is not allowed.”
Dorianya sensed more in the Earth Morher’s words. Somehow, being human allowed her to better understand emotions, even as she endured constant pain in her new, mortal, body. Along with the heightened senses, the smells and vivid colors and wondrous music that filled the human world, she felt a deeper understanding.
“The mortals live short lives, but full ones crowded with sensory onslaughts we cannot share.”
“And emotions,” Dorianya said. “Never have I experienced such swings of joy and sadness.”
“You have learned, Daughter.”
“Let me return. Never again will I make such a mistake,” she begged, though she already knew what the Earth Mother would say. Youthful foolishness had betrayed her.
“You cannot return. And there is more.” Softly, an earth’s whisper, “You will die.”
“I never said to him that I loved him. There is a chance I can win his love. I need to—”
“If he marries another, you will die at that exact instant.”
“Then I must stop him!”
“You can never return to the earth…”
“Wait, I need to know more,” Dorianya protested, but fell silent as the Presence faded away. And for her, in that moment, she realized what had been was irretrievably past. Only her actions now would win Alvin Campbell’s love and prevent her own sorrowful death.
***
All else had failed. Every time she had tried to speak with Alvin Campbell, he rebuffed her, he ignored her, he even had the soldiers with him remove her as they enjoyed his bachelor’s party.
If Alvin Campbell married, she died.
She had to tell him of her love, what she had done for him, but if she did, she died.
Any way she turned, she died.
She wandered the brightly lit Paris streets, aimlessly. A soft rain left mist on her face and turned her hair into a sparkling net of diamonds which shone as she moved through the lights from nightclubs and stores. The roar of powerful engines sent mighty automobiles past her, some throwing up sheets of water and mud from puddles. She closed her eyes to the indignity and walked on, lost in her sorrow for what she had given up as an elemental.
“Self-pity,” she whispered into the night. “I know it. What shall I do?” Dorianya considered rushing up to Alvin Campbell as he entered the church and proclaiming her love. How dramatic it would be to die in his arms, slain by her love. Even as she imagined the scene, she knew she could never do it. She loved him. Blighting his marriage with death at the altar proved nothing of her love for him, only her love for herself.
But she loved him with her heart and soul. He could love her, too, if only circumstances had been different. Saving him won his love—only Bertha Benedict had been the one he had seen as his eyes first opened after leaving the battlefield. If it had been her smiling face, her perfectly lovely face radiant with love for him, she would be the bride and not the nurse.
Above in the cloudy sky roared a new aeroplane, one outfitted with twin propellers and a tail-mounted jet that left its flaming scar against the night. It headed westward, taking soldiers home to Canada. She had heard Alvin Campbell’s friends talking. Alvin Campbell and his new wife would be aboard such a conveyance after their honeymoon. But what did Dorianya care? She would be dead.
The mist hardened into battering cold raindrops. She walked with her head down, only stopping when a half dozen women in nurses’ uniforms went past her, chattering. Dorianya almost screamed. They were gossiping about their companion, about her catch, about Alvin and Bertha’s wedding. In a daze, she followed them to a three-story building decorated with steel gargoyles on the cornices. Staring at the hideous creatures hardened something within her. She took the steps to the front door slowly, then hurried to trail the nurses past a sleeping sentry just inside the lobby door.
She let the nurses lead her to the third floor, where she fell behind, letting them vanish into rooms lining a corridor.
She crept through the quiet dormitories where the nurses slept. Dorianya picked up a sharp-edged letter opener from a desk at the door and slowly walked down the rows of bunks. One or two nurses stirred, but none awakened. She came to the last cot where Bertha Benedict tossed and turned.
“Do you dream of your wedding tomorrow?” Dorianya asked softly.
The nurse rolled onto her back, as if responding. A gentle smile came to her lips. No doubt she was dreaming precious dreams of life with Alvin Campbell and all Dorianya had were nightmares. Dorianya would die even as Alvin Campbell and the nurse started their new life. She stepped to the side of the bunk and held the letter opener in a shaking hand.
She lifted the blade and held it poised over the sleeping woman’s breast. It had to be this way. If the nurse married, Dorianya died. She deserved to die. All she had done was nurse Alvin Campbell back to health. She hadn’t saved him out on the battlefield.
Dorianya lifted the weapon higher for a solid stroke. Her hand cramped. Her elbow snapped. Her joint pain fed her resolution.
At the top of the stroke, she stopped and stared at Bertha. A chance reflection of light off the silvered blade bathed her face, her sleeping, content, happy face. Dorianya grasped the knife in both hands. She closed her eyes, tensed and… and turned away.
Tears filled her eyes, those damnable human tears driven by damned human emotion. She hurried from the dormitory into the cold night. Wind whipped off the Seine and created new tears, but these were of a different sort. Dorianya endured these as she made her way to Sainte-Genevieve hill. Several times she had passed by the hill crested with the Pantheon. Making her way past the church, she went to the base of the dome and stared upward. The massive colonnaded dome beckoned to her. She took the stairs steadily, her joints protesting. She ignored the agony. What clutched at her heart was worse.
She reached the top and stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the city. All of Paris beckoned to her.
A storm rose in the north, lightning too far away to be seen clearly lit the clouds from behind. The recently built Eiffel Tower filtered the lightning, giving it a surreal appearance. Away from it she saw Notre Dame. Was this where Alvin Campbell would marry? He was a war hero and deserving of such ceremony but she didn’t know. She had never heard the location of the wedding.
She took a deep breath and appreciated her human senses one last time. She could wait for her death the instant Alvin Campbell said “I do” or she would pass on now, at her own hand, on her own time, choosing how to go.
This place seemed appropriate. So much of what made humanity great was visible. She even imagined she saw the quarters where Alvin Campbell stayed this final night as a bachelor. She lifted the letter opener she still carried and stared at it, then cast it aside. It spun over and over before clattering on the pavement below. A knife was not a fitting way to die, but she knew one that was. She stepped forward into emptiness and began the stories-long fall. The wind clutched at her, buoyed her—and held her gently.
Dorianya fought for a moment and then stopped struggling, trying instead to understand why she no longer plummeted to her death.
“Do you truly wish to exist no more, Daughter?” A softness touched her, entered her and made her new form quiver in a sensual resonance. Wind interacted with wind, and she responded instinctively.
“Earth Mother?” Her heart rebelled. “I thought—”
“I am a daughter of the air. You did not think there were only elementals of the earth and water and fire?”
“Why are you keeping me from death as a human?”
“We have watched you and wondered why you chose to leave the earth.” A soft airy sigh. “You chose to preserve human life rather than take it, though it meant your own nonexistence.”
“I was foolish.”
“Young and foolish and you made bad decisions, but your reluctance to take life and your choice to save lives, drew our attention. Do you wish to perish?”
“No.” Dorianya felt herself choked with human emotion. “But I have no other choice.”
“You can neither return to the earth nor remain a human, but you can join us in the air. We would welcome your kindness and empathy. Come, soar with us, free on the winds, rising to the sun and sinking to the valleys to whip along the earth and live in the sky!”
Her decision came quickly. Her human body fell as her airy spirit soared upward, joining the other elemental, twisting through the storm she had seen and rising even higher to touch the moon and wait for the warming sun.
***
Writing is a lonely profession, as Robert E. Vardeman knows well after more than 40 years at it. The sense of otherness and pain and rejection in “The Little Mermaid” speaks volumes to him. But his crazy optimism offsets even such sorrow. There should be hope in the world, and his current short short story takes that tale a little farther to soar into a realm above loss and the guns of The Great War.