From Chapter 11
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Without the stopover in Time they had loosely planned upon, they journeyed toward where Noel wished to go – the Black Desert
“I don’t think we’re weak,” Mira complained as they followed a dry wash. It was lined with lush trees, signifying that they had not made it to the desert proper yet. There, all the trees would be thorny with thin, little leaves. A few scrubby trees began appearing the further in they walked and the broad-leafed ones thinned out. “For my part,” she continued, “I just know what I need and am strong enough now not to let anyone tell me differently.”
“All well and good,” Noel said, not really paying attention to his friend. “Watch this tree-root.”
“Where are we going, anyway? We’re just following the streambed.”
Noel turned and smiled at her. “It is a path. It will take us to… a place.”
“To the desert, hopefully,” Mira replied. “Some say this whole area used to be desert.”
“Yep.” Noel said, “It’s an interesting patchwork.”
Lazarus crunched some dry twigs and fallen leaves behind Mira, following her. “Wherever we go,” she said mysteriously, “I don’t want to end up in a place where people are seen as disease.”
“Huh?” Noel asked, almost yelping as he turned to her. Mira was known for saying strange things, but he had no idea what had brought this on.
“We were run out of Time,” she said. “I’d very much wished to purchase a pocket watch there – the clocks and watches there are famous. We weren’t even in the city long enough for me to do such a simple thing. The people there saw our Guardians and decided that we were weak people and could weaken others. In Resurrection, where people didn’t even see them, Xirtam explained to me that certain beliefs were seen as having the potential to be like a dangerous infection.”
Mira shook her head, remembering the beggar she and Xirtam had met on the street and Xirtam’s condescending tone about his relative harmlessness. “I don’t want to live like that again,” she sighed. “I don’t want to live and be seen as having a virus or as being some potential incubating disease. I don’t want to live where other people are handled like that, either.”
“Well,” Noel said with a strangely bright tone, “I suppose if some of the folk from Resurrection came to Rust, they’d be othered like that.”
“But I wouldn’t be. I would be home. I want to go back home… eventually.”
“How about to a place where there are no people? People do not despise or condescend to one another in places where no people exist.”
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A World of Rusted Dreams is my most recent completed novel. I've been re-reading/going back over another piece of mine, Malarkey and Belinda. That one is about a slave woman and the genetically-and-magically-engineered gryphon she is made to raise and the bond of mother/son like love that develops between them. M&B is something I wrote years ago and, while I don't think it's bad at all, it does show. My recent work has a much better "flow" to it. I'm not sure how to correct the "flow" in M&B. I'm thinking, once I give that piece another good edit, I might create a blog for it in hopes of getting some feedback. I don't know. *Shrug.*
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