I Hid My Heart In Fire

“No, no, please—” she stammered, drawing back. “Please—!”
But he was too fast for her, and she had nowhere to run. “Please, what?” he growled through clenched teeth. With a single swift dart he had her hand in his, crushing it most cruelly. “Please, what, mewling human worm?"
Adamantine
My time recently has been divided between a number of different things: working on posts for the blog party (which has been lots of fun, let me tell you!), writing Plenilune (which is going well, hurrah! hurrah!), reading The Mind of the Maker, The Problem of Pain and, somewhat incongruously, A Girl of the Limberlost.  I may steal Freckles from Abigail before we go to the beach and take that with me, but goodness knows I don't read fast and I might not finish A Girl of the Limberlost before I get back...  (Speaking of which, I will be away to the beach on the 12th and won't be back until the 19th, but I'll probably take my laptop with me and do an A-Z post for Adamantine, or some such, so I won't be totally disconnected from my work.  It does pile up so if you ignore it.

Well, my attention took a little turn today, having already spent the morning in the Plenilune 'verse, to the sphere of Gingerune.  I've been doing little more than poking at the idea of it from time to time, as I'm not nearly ready to devote a lot of serious attention to what I mean by it, but when I poked this afternoon the following passage is what came back out at me.

from the nebulous dream that is gingerune 
 The world was sky-fire, like a cloudless day at the height of summer when all is metallic sunlight and there is a despair of life and a sweetness in the thought of death.  I felt numb to fear—beyond it in some quiet, desperate, determined place that reckoned neither of victory or loss.  The beautiful, terrible fire—more like to pure light than fire could ever be—prickled over my skin and burned along the billowing strands of my hair…and calmly, not thinking very clearly about what I did, I began to gather the fire into my hands.It burned at first, and then grew cool, coloured like white iron and saffron and flecked as with cyclamen petals.  I condensed it between my hands: as it grew denser the saffron colour grew darker and the faint pink veining that was like cyclamen flushed an angry red.  And when the whole thing, brazen and bloody, was as small as my face and as bright as honour, I pressed it into my eyes.I do not know how long that light was all I could see.  Somewhere beyond the light I heard a scream, but that did not seem to have anything to do with me.  The light flooded my mind.  I felt—I did not see—someone else’s sense of rage: a huge rage; someone else’s sense of blindness: a bottomless, disoriented blindness.  I followed them and understood them, and stripped them away from the light.  And at the end of them, when the light and its rich power were all that was left and had probed and shot all through me like bars of light around a swimmer in clear water, I saw a glimpse of something wholly other: a clear, pastoral image that called to me in a voice of light and beauty and anguish, and my heart longed suddenly, twisting powerfully within me, to step into the wave of light and break into that scene.A tear tracked down my face.I came back slowly.  Reluctantly I put the scene away and looked out of my own eyes again with his own light howling in them, and I saw him at last as he was: still magnificent, knit out of pure power, bloodless, veined with light, winged and scarred and stripped for war, and smelling overwhelmingly with the stench of murder.