331. Colours of earth, 8

(Rose)

The weather was turning nice again.

Bleue was feeling stronger and better than ever. She was overflowing with happiness and confidence now.

She had made most of her dreams come true over time.

Even the wildest ones that I was utterly unable to envision.

As time gradually soften the blows, I learn to feel better about them.

We keep our days full with activities.

Building our land to sustain us. Building our house. Building the small things that help travelling in our environment.

By that I mean throwing rope bridges over the many rifts and canals that are all over the urban land. Pathways and stairs are made to join the uneven and separated levels.

We're crafting paths to travel around easier, further and further.

With Arianne's lines to find our way back if we happen to stray away too far or have to return at night.

It takes us a prodigious amount of time per day to travel to abandoned gardens and harvest their remaining wild crops and winter fruits.

Bleue spends some time trying to improve her light beams from the mirrors on the roof. She hopes to achieve something able to boil water or combust wood. It's unsuccessful so far. She's looking for what could be used as giant optical lenses in town for that end.

I'm looking for more soft metals I would be able to work at cold temperature like the decorative blades I found before. I have gathered enough tools near the presses and cutting blades, with makeshift hammers, pliers and scissors. We don't have a working furnace yet so I can only work the softer metals or thin sheets.

We found a set of circular saw blades, but the blades themselves only, not the engine able to spin them. If we could find one working, we would be able to work trees into lumber and maybe even planks.

We have a lot of options already nonetheless. We don't miss much things to increase our potential of building and creation tenfold.

I was already able painfully and slowly but successfully to make metallic fences for a specific purpose.

A few metres long and high. We set them on the special places and parts of the halfway sunken buildings of the bay, locking the basin away from the sea for big enough fishes. Thus we created our aquarium for breeding fishes.

Ana tends to think it's hers only, but we're doing alright. We find and catch enough so we can share.

Ana herself has grown a little bigger, and is probably fully adult now.

We live together like a family, but Ana doesn't spend her full day with us or trailing behind us any longer.

Ana does what Ana wants. During the day she lives her life as she wants, and usually returns home on evenings or mornings to eat alongside us, and spend some peaceful time in our company.

One time she brought us a small deer, the size of a goat, with the typical horns for them already well grown.

She might be able to lift Bleue if she wanted to I think.

Ana can be cold and cawing or cuddly and speaking depending on her mood.

One time she told us she saw other humans beyond the forest, travelling away along the greek steppes. We never saw them.

As time went, many of our crops in the field we're looking after have become odd hybrids.

It's I believe partially because of the weird power left inside of me, but also from the leftovers of the fairy dust polluting this ground still to this day.

Far too much of it created a beast. A little too much made the various life forms there crossbreed and create hybrids, chimeras of plants. They remained plants though, they didn't transform into something else entirely.

A reasonable amount of fairy dust only helps the plants grow faster. I'm learning.

That means however our current crops this year are a chaotic jungle of vine trees and roots growing across each other, mixed into surreal and random species.

We have some grapes growing in the earth like turnips, potatoes growing like strawberries and strawberries growing like mushrooms. Grapes grow as lone fruits in the ground here and there. Carrots grow on trees, usually in pairs. So they grow above ground like the potatoes now, but they still have hair, now more wild, that spreads into filaments that reach the ground below. To harvest them, we cut these threads that link them to the ground, they begin to wilt and detach quickly after.

A plant that is between buttercup and tomatoes in shape and taste are growing like giant blackberries on thorny vines that climb around the carrot trees.

It's a huge mess, and an insult to many old gods. But everything so far is edible to us, so we don't complain. Who cares? It works. I still feel a little concerned at how easily and how bad we can corrupt the biology that surrounds us.

These wish stones are really dangerous. If they can turn a barren field into that over the course of a few weeks, what else could they do between the wrong hands?

What we have of them we keep well hidden, just for precautions.

Luckily or oddly, some species weren't really affected by the mess, they grew faster but unchanged. Oranges, pears, olives.

All of them are growing from sprouts to full harvest into just months though, instead of years.

Somewhat similarly, the thick hair and feathers growing onto Bleue's back are developing. It's like the neck of a bird now, covering the skin of her back with soft feathers entirely, over a few layers. It's hard to find her white skin below all the feathers now. They're in fully grown feather shapes now, like you'd see on geese or swan, if only darker in colours. It goes from the back of her shoulders to her butt cheeks.

B - Keeps me warm.

She says, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have feathers grow on your back in winter.

~

We enjoy the sunsets together from the remaining towers of the city. The landscapes are really nice. It's hard to describe.

It feels a little as if the landscapes over England were just as pictures and prints, with just colourless shades, faded and dull, along with everything else northern from here.

The light around here feels warmer, brighter. Everything feels more vivid.

We're happy to be here, to say the least.

It's every day a feast for the eyes at the very bare least.

And perhaps we will be able to create a life on our own here as Bleue tends to say.

I'm beginning to imagine a possible future with this idea. It's still difficult, all blank and blurry, but I'm beginning to see it... A future upon this idea.

It's all foggy, but I begin to discern the small silhouette of a child that could be. A kid that would be mine...

I'm gradually opening to consider this future as a possibility to come. Bleue helps me imagining the best that could be.

It's not unpleasant. It can be sweet reveries.

I... My heart tightens at the thought of seeing someday a child going through a field in summer as I recall doing myself in the past. Walking through it, toward her surreal home just a little further away...

Seeing myself from oldest memories, anew, with a different meaning to come.

It puzzles me. My heart aches with something bittersweet when I think like that.

Feelings I had once upon a time, how I was and felt back then... Good and bad.

Considering now that another kid in the future, another person, could repeat them, unbeknownst of how that would make me feel...

It's weird.

If I were to recognise something of myself, or my childhood, in the behaviour of a child before me...

It worries me.

Because some of me still doesn't feel... Human enough?

I'll be honest. Before Bleue sold me on the idea, never ever, ever have I considered that I, i! Could have a child, and become a mother.

That never, in all my lives, been in the realm of the possible or desirable.

I've never felt suitable, or just human enough for that.

~