A Heart's Crucible
The Shade

Joq confronted no detours or delays on entering the Soothsayer’s demesne. She faced no choices in the chamber of torches. The floor descended as her weight immobilised as static as her heart.

Joq felt the gloom in her soul as she adjusted to hell. The pit bulls growled their welcome or displeasure hidden behind the heavy black drapes. The lad slumped unmoved on his ebony chair, from which he spewed the cost of the Peri quest.

Joq steeled herself. Come what may look him in the eyes. Try not to lower them at the point of repugnant contact.

For a second time, everything boded wrong. Mirroring the Peri’s earlier meeting, the shade and shadows refused to hide the boy’s disfigurement.

The lad’s face denied Joq’s focus—her heedful prerequisite and the necessity to read the capricious youth’s frame of mind — whether his mood held positive, neutral or antagonistic towards her. Joq tried a soothing mantra in her psyche-say the lad’s name- repeat his name-Orestes- for the sake of the boy’s soul. She willed her conscience never to think of the word blaggard again. Her ego resisted a request beyond the realm of the possible. The scarification and disease on his face travelled to his subterranean core. Impossible for Joq’s eyes or ears to ignore.

“I’ll dispense with a welcome. Your glaze informs me you don’t want to be here.”

He spat words as speckles of spittle. They landed on the Peri’s cheeks, stinging. Joq chose not to deny the pointless. God, she tried not to screw up her nose.

“Your downcast eyes state a telltale preference for the forfeit. Though my dog’s lust for your flesh, they crunch old bones tonight.”

The sod’s laugh menaced nastily and boded the perverse. Then loomed cruder as the seer twisted through his fingers and unwound the gold strands of the Celtic torc. The one Joq flattened in their hasty quest exit. Fleetingly wringing her hands, she scoured her brains. She feared her soul stretched beyond her recognition on the seer’s mental torture rack.

“Oh, don’t be sad.”

He guffawed.

The dark refused to hide the welling trepidation in her eyes.

The seer stabbed with brutal sarcasm.

“Would you prefer your bones scattered to the night sky to join Orion?.”

Memories of the hunter made Joq’s eyes struggle to stow tears. Fate emerges beyond control. She steeled herself to endure the cost for the Peri. Here lay her consolation.

If she could project her friends daily, she might endure the insufferable with the deformed rogue.

Tagged again, thought Joq, the undeserved label; the boy didn’t choose his looks, diseased into him. So accept the boy named Orestes -at least try! Her wings folded limp behind her.

Joq pondered: self-worth craves a mirror spirit.

“Enough maudlin Peri. A ritual will seal our bond. So let the one-way nuptials begin.”

He snapped his fingers. The seer’s manic laugh reminded Joq of Ahriman.

Damn the universe; the cosmos played unfairly, mulled the dismayed Peri.

Her hands dropped; her posture sagged.

The boy’s snap at least allowed Joq’s eyes to focus beyond his face. A hooded servant with eye slits appeared, bearing a plain wooden platter with unleavened bread trickled with a pinkish sauce.

“I’m impatient, sprite; let’s reduce the traditional matrimonial rites from three days to three minutes.”

The lad tore off a chunk of bread and scoffed the wedge in his mouth slit. The retainer gestured to Joq. She broke a piece and nibbled a crust saturated with honey and rosebuds.

The vassal disappeared behind the curtains.

A rapid clicking of the boy’s finger, “and eat the pita quick, airy-fairy, we are getting behind schedule here.”

Five cowled heads and lowered eye vassals scattered hasty-made decorations. Daphe, olive and myrtle garnishes covered the pocked mark floor where pit bulls destroyed life. Wedding garlands! Funeral wreaths to Joq. The seer remained dressed in black. Joq, in her koylek, wished for the steppe. No sooner than they appeared, the vassals hid behind the drapes.

“Whoopee, step two, complete, now a binding sacrifice, my bride!”

The boy clapped fast, and a vassal sidled forward, wearing a veil. They swung a black cage imprisoning two white doves and held a silver jambiya.

Joq said, “spare the doves,” clasping her hands, then wringing them.

“What, destroy our binding troth! I can’t see you declaring or pledging love!”

His pitched guffaw agitated the doves, rattling the cage.

“I will offer affection with a kiss!”

Joq surprised herself, committed to saving the birds.

Her ego urged a lie, one last flippant Peri promise. Darker thoughts swirled, the jambiya in the seer’s heart when he slept. Her conscience fortified her resolve to leave behind forever moral ambivalence.

The veiled peon sidled without leaving; they stood yet swung the cage and flicked the knife. The boy without eyelids rubbed his marred chin with his knobby fingers.

“Kiss with your eyes open. If you deceive me, my dogs will chew off your wings, and unlike Ahriman, I will rip out your facking heart.”

No malice, a promise from the disfigured Soothsayer.

The distance between Joq and the seated lad amounted to several paces.

Joq undertook her fatal walk. She knew from Peri love games the true glint. Unlike a myriad of feelings capable of equivocation. Love’s urgent message between two sets of eyes lies beyond deception.

To calm herself, she hummed the Peri chant.

“Love is the softest of wet kisses, the mystery of skin’s touch. Love is the rapture of lips twined, the openness of a heart’s saturation complete.”

Words sung in the past as a glib saucy refrain to seduce humans in Peri play. The melody now trilled loves forfeit, cost and quest. To hold eye contact with the boy emerged as a life-defining soul-searching quest inside the crucible of Joq’s heart. Equal in self-definition as a tear of true repentance.

The forfeit of love to concede ego. Could the seer do the same?

The cost of love is commitment. Dare she hope for mutual adhesion from the lad?

The quest for love is fulfilment. Self-actualization inhabited the seer’s soul, awaiting release.

And Joq uttered no desperate prayer to heaven because she sought to embrace the values of heaven. Instead, she puckered her lips and moistened them. She drew upon humble warmth. The Peri of the steppe leaned in; the seer didn’t move.

Dry lips were an understatement. Joq attempted to adjust to chapped, bruised lips plus the icy boy within the black clothes. Yet an impossible alchemy occurred as quicksilver and butterscotch eyes melded. Joq thought Orestes and comprehended his volatile silvery orbs lost their capriciousness.

She knew with heaven’s grace her caramel-toffee eyes radiated love liquor to his soul. Joq touched the élan vital of the boy. An essence buried since his physical desecration. Joq felt coarse hair and grooved through blotched scars without pity or disgust. She kissed him in mutual acceptance as they closed their eyes, soldering souls.

Expressive kisses as a salve. Joq felt Orestes’s desiccated lips tenderise and then embrace hers, feather soft. She harnessed a conscious, spreading grace and folded her wings over his shoulders, accepting her discovered beloved. Love is a heart’s saturation complete.

Downy tips touched Orestes’s unkempt hair and wizened cheeks. As her fingers tracked her wings caress, her lover’s hair resembled silky sable and tracing to his cheeks, flawless porcelain.

Orestes — the name overflowed in her heart. A different Joq might have accepted a whim, luck or magic. Instead, with a modest soul, she acknowledged heaven’s role. However, she baulked at attempting to understand the ways of heaven.

Pairs of eyes met in wonder. Silver eyes released affection for the first time since eighteen.

“I don’t understand,” an entranced Joq, ’But I thank heaven.”

Now under the sway of a miracle. A transformed Orestes.

“You have dispersed my bitterness. My spoken prophecy by the hag seer of Gomorrah in the days before the city of the plains obliteration. That my hideous features and augury remained mine unless I encountered unfeigned love. If that was ever going to happen!”

Joq laughed and slid a finger along a classic nose.

“As if a Peri could ever enter Heaven!”

The man chuckled.

Orestes, dressed in shimmery silver, took her hand. He patted twelve affectionate, gentle dogs as they exited through gold curtains and a cedar door into a sun-drenched olive grove. Joq only paused for the mangled torc. She decided to fashion the gold into matching wedding rings. Releasing the two doves first, Joq lifted her soul mate, Orestes. The couple flew to the wonderland of the steppe.

∗ ∗ ∗

A concluding snippet in their lives — the couple visited a favourite Peri grove near the Celtic village three years later. Their friends Zel and Perdy flitted off at the sound of young singles laughing because fun and love ploys urged them. Whilst Orestes and Joq stayed, linking daisy chains and garlanding each other.

Joq heard two young Celtic mothers struggling with twins at a well. Her partner and the Peri rose and spied on the women behind a stand of birches. Joq remembered the pair. The freckled lass and the Roman nose.

Joq overheard.

“I need a break,” said Kitty as young girls tugged at her orange dress.

“My mites keep me busy, too,” as Fran stopped two boys tossing pebbles in the well.

Then their conversation stalled. The Peri with buttery wings, whom they recalled, fluttered beside them. Also, a man with calm quicksilver eyes. With violet flowers tucked behind gorgeous ears. The women squealed in surprise!

“Work and relax; collect your twins later; we will watch them in the grove,” proposed Joq.

She guided the boys while Orestes escorted the girls. First, they let the children tease and play chasings. Later, run after butterflies.

And in a budding grove, paired, Joq and Orestes observed the future play. Innocent childish skylarking expanded within her a heightened awareness—the insight into her existence as an imperfect soul—another psyche wandering the earth, striving to join the humble, those who grappled with their flaws as learning hearts within the shade of Heaven.

The End.