DRABBLE: Fleeting Impressions
1. Wraith Arrow had warned me that Pittsburgh was not Earth. I did not understand. It wasn’t until we had crossed over the border on the train did I start to know what he meant.
2. I had not expected to hate Earth. I had always thought I wanted to be free of my ability. To be like every other warrior of my Hand. Five fingers moving in unison, not four and one jerked about by some random force. We are all taught to fight blindfolded. On the train through the Pennsylvania farmland, for the first time, I knew what it was like to be truly blind. And I didn’t like it.
3. Earth was not what I expected it to be. I thought I knew what it would be like from Pittsburgh, but I did not know what being on stranded on Elfhome had done to the city. It was no longer a creature of Earth but grown to be a hybrid. A true human city is a screaming loud, dirty, crowded, strange beast. All the human toys that I thought I knew how to work had been changed in subtle ways; I didn’t understand how to use them anymore. I was angry with myself for having thought I could be useful without magic.
4. Humans have a fascination with the past that we elves do not understand. Is it because what came before was nothing but horror and enslavement? Because we have no golden age to harken back to? The American Museum of Natural History was like those houses of horrors that Pittsburghers like to stage at Halloween. Less bloody but equally surreal.
5. I was on a boat once in the Inner Sea when a sea dragon passed by. One moment there was only calm water and then something huge rose like a gleaming mountain and undulated past the boat. We were like ants on a leaf beside it. The wake nearly rolled us. Then it was gone. I put out my hands, felt paper under my fingertips and lifted up a cardboard box to find a child huddled underneath. Tears poured down her face; she’d been crying silently for long enough to wet her entire face. She gazed up at me in sheer horror. I’d never seen anyone so scared. And worse, I felt the echo that one dreamer has when they meet another that shares her world vision. She knew what was rising up before us. I felt like I was standing on the deck of the boat, watching the coils of something huge and deadly rise up. I knew—no, I knew nothing—I merely felt the sudden fracturing of the future, that at this moment death could come hard and fast, or slow as drowning, and that all I could do was not draw attention to the tiny vessel I stood on. So I lowered that impossible box of invisibility down over her again, and told her to flee.