UNABRIDGED
Before dew blanketed the plains and the cool morning winds came to make it disappear and before the sun rose warming the skies enough for Flint to make breakfast, Aspen dreamed.
She walked to the hill top and looked towards the army. She watched them sleep as she stood unblinking and unmoving. A chill went through her and she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. She closed her eyes.
On moonlit arms the night winds picked her up and carried her dream-like down the flat red baked Martian road. She was only dimly aware of the moment like the fleeting shadow across an eclipsed moon on a clouded day. Her companions slept blissfully.
She moved in slow motion and became acutely aware of every detail of the environment that surrounded her in the silent world. Then, she heard every thought, felt every emotion, and sensed every fear and frustration from all life and inanimate substance. She felt their loneliness, their hopes and dreams, and their pain.
The night was black and silent as light suddenly filled her and shined out from her with the brilliance of a fallen star into a dark expanse. The world was black, and she became its light. The darkness didn’t frighten her; it cowered before her radiance, before her power, before her determination.
She was neither cold nor warm as she glided several inches above the surface of the road; she was replete. She did not feel pain, sadness or despair; she felt only the overwhelming sensation of happiness and love for all of life like the blood pumping through her body. She felt unlimited compassion and power.
Her thoughts drifted from her mom and dad to her friends and former life on Earth. She smiled. Slowly her conscientiousness pulled her upward from Mars and outward like a telescope changing focus. She looked like a star returning to her place in the heavens.
She looked down and saw the failures, the happiness, the hopes and dreams of mankind. She saw them in their struggles, their loneliness, and their love and joy. She felt happy, sad, and hopeful all at the same time. She felt compassionate towards them in their struggles. Then she saw the cause of struggles and frustrations, it was darkness.
Anger washed over her in a way she never had felt before. It was an all consuming fire that grew beyond any measure she had ever experienced. It burned over her without hurting her. The more the anger grew in her over darkness the more the fire grew in intensity until she became a sun.
She became the sun in a jealous rage of injustice using its light to search out and destroy darkness wherever it hid. She moved to the center of the solar system and became one with the existing sun, burning in anger at the injustices and sins caused by darkness. She now not only saw Earth but Mars and all creatures great and small and the effects that darkness had upon them. Her anger became arms of solar flares reaching out across the void striking at the evils and injustices of darkness lurking across the universe scorching worlds in her solar system and beyond until she heard the cries of life, the cries of creatures and substance that made up the universe beg for mercy. She was hurting them too.
She paused, thinking. She blinked, and as she did the universe when dark and then light again when she opened her eyes. Again compassion and love overwhelmed her for all of life that made up the world and for the substances that held them all together in unity. She saw the connection that all things had in common, how all things were held together by the creator. She felt his love, his desire for his creation, and felt his frustration with evil.
In a single moment she completely understood his full range of emotions, his compassion, his love, and his need for order and justice and his desire to cleanse the world of darkness. She understood the purpose of darkness and felt his disgust for it at the same time. Then she did something that nearly no one could do, she understand the purpose and relationship of light and darkness. She understood why evil had to run its course, its purpose and reason for being and why faith was so important. She also saw the end, the demise of darkness, and a smile returned to her face.
As she witnessed the plight, the depravity, the effects of darkness upon the world her heart began to break. Tears formed in her eyes as she, the sun turned into solid blue ice. A solar wind blew across her in a gust causing her to shatter into countless blue crystals that flew across the universe in a violent explosion showering the stars, planets, and moons in a fine blue crystal snow.
As she fell back to Mars she became human, a mere child standing on a small cold hill in the darkness looking towards Jasper’s men. She saw him in the dark staring at her. She stood on the hill, he stood in his camp, both watching each other in silent resolve like an impending doom each knowing what was going to happen, yet destiny not allowing them to change their charted course.
Neither showed emotion, challenge, or insult. Both were resigned to a course of action set in destiny long before the worlds were created by god. He was the first to turn away and disappear into the folds of his tent. Aspen remained transfixed not sure how to feel about him. She should feel anger and disgust, or she could feel compassion, or she could simply feel nothing; in the end she felt committed to something that she just wanted to go away like a bad dream, to pass by her like the winds on the Martian plains at night under the howls of a lone coyote fleeting into the distant void.
She knelt and prayed for the whole thing to just go away. She wanted to go home to her mom and dad. She wanted everything the way it was before. Tears, silent like dragonfly whispers, dampened her cheeks.
