excerpt from

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this is an excerpt from a story i'm wrintg. Enjoi!

My mother touched the sore bones hidden just beneath my skin, slight spikes of pain jumping up at every tender space. “Mina ili, tdak?” she asked. I smiled, comforted at hearing some words of the language I had indulged in so much as a child. She touched another of the tender bruises, a sweet pain arose with it. I turned my head against the rough fabric of the pillow to gaze out of the dingy window into what was left of the world.

“Soon, Ma’a, it’ll be over soon.” Her face broadened into a smile at this. Lying there in that bed staring up at my mother I could not tell if those were tears of relief or of fear. True enough, it would be over soon, one way or the other. My bruises would spread and slowly and hungrily consume my body, my health, my chances at getting home. I would be given up to the disease, a sacrifice in this foreign land. “What was it like, ma’a? Tell me about Tiran…”

Her head lifted up and her eyes fled off into the distance as if they could touch the home world itself. This was the way she became when she talked about Tiran, be one of the few to have “seen” it repeatedly in images, dreams, and in the eyes of many innocent children, as she had told me. I had always loved her for seeing and knowing this place that I could not see. I reveled in the time when she would become my eyes and cause me to travel to the world of seas, the crystal-sapphire home of angel women and ethereal men, a world that could only exist in dreams, but did, indeed, exist. Her eyes still looked away, out of the window, as if to find some vestige of that world sitting right before her.

“la’a tarade’,” she began, with a dreamy sequence of words that only had meaning to the poor creatures exiled here on this world consumed by darkness. She spoke the words again, this time in English. He lips parted and her tongue moved as if to taste the syllables. “There was light..."