The Star Plume Read Online Free PDF

Wrangler Zav grabbed the Night
Prism’s edge with his hands, placed the cloud on the ground and sat
down square in its center. Seated, he reached out for each corner
and gathered them all over his head.
    From inside this life-size dumpling he said,
“Grab this here and hang on,” waggling the collected corners.
    Princess Cressida stepped forward and took
hold of the gathered corners, holding the edges of the Night Prism
together with her small hands. The Night Prism seemed to have a
mind of its own and it waved and flapped in every direction, pulled
by the call of other places and other names.
    In a moment, the cloud’s edges had seamed
together. Princess Cressida could no longer see Wrangler Zav
inside. The cloud changed color, first a dark red, then black as
night. It billowed from the inside as if wracked by an internal
storm.
    Princess Cressida held fast to the collected
corners. She heard a surprised “Ahhhhaa” from Wrangler Zav and then
nothing. The silver cloud expanded as if inhaling. The Princess
could barely hold fast to its edges as it stretched farther and
farther outward. Then it collapsed with a rapid exhale. The
material lay limp in Cressida’s hands. She shook it. It was empty.
Wrangler Zav was gone.
    Cressida stood alone on the plateau. What
light there had been was gone. She stood in the darkness. She took
one deep breath and then another, building up courage.
    Wrangler had said to do exactly the same. The
Princess stood in his footsteps, outlined in silver stardust, and
sat down on the Night Prism, wrapping herself in the wispy cloud.
She waited.
    *******
    Princess Cressida had been on a ship once, as
a child. It had been a long sea journey and she remembered most of
all the rolling movement of the sea, as massive waves passed under
the ship’s hull, shifting everything slowly to and fro. Each night,
the undulation had rocked her to sleep, the ebb and flow of the
ocean’s song.
    As she had sat wrapped in the Night Prism, at
first nothing had happened. She pulled the material closer. She
felt it faintly at first, a foreign pulsing in her body that grew
stronger with every passing second. Her heartbeat, that familiar
corporeal sound, faded in volume as this other beat grew
stronger.
    Princess Cressida tried to find the source of
the pulsing but realized it was everywhere she was. It was her skin
that was pulsing, as if it were the skin of a beating drum, not the
skin on her body. The sound grew louder still.
    Then, it was not only her skin that was
pulsing. It was her cells, sounding out a rhythmic beat. The cells
in her bones and muscles, her blood and lymph, every cell in her
body, polarized somehow by the Night Prism, the electrons shifting
back and forth, back and forth, a rhythmic music.
    Princess Cressida stopped fighting the
pulsating rhythm and gave her body over to the Night Prism.
    All of her that was living lifted through the
Night Prism, her muscles and bones broken down into the resonance
of ionic bonds, ever moving, electrons singing as they whirred in
an endless circle. She was transported to the realm of the Dark
Spectrum. No longer a Princess, but a song.

Chapter 6
    It moved in slow easy waves, like the sea,
rolling to the edges of the Confine. When it hit an edge of the
infinite wall, it would turn, without hesitation, in the other
direction, like a caged lion.
    “8675309-eee-ine…”
    “Why why, tell ‘em that it’s human nature,
why, why?”
    “Ninety-nine dreams I have had and everyone a
red balloon. It’s all over and I’m standing pretty…”
    A guard interrupted. “Your Excellency. Please
pardon my intrusion. You said to come as soon as there was news.
There has been a sighting of the Night Prism.”
    “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as
night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt,” came the Dark
Spectrum’s reply.
    “Sir, the Star Wrangler brought a woman, a
Princess, to the Igneous bar. She revealed the Night Prism in her
satchel.”
    “There