‘If you fall down… you should get up again. If you continued to fall down, doing the same thing, should you not try and find a different way of doing things?’

-The Wisdom of Zug Twill

PLANET URRTH

‘It’s called the Bluewood, because of grey days like this, when clouds churn in the sky like curling serpents, and the smell of rain is in the air, and the fog forms down in the trees,’ Nell Sorrow said in the Human language, Fundamental, looking at the Maloom - a gorgeous, light blue Dog of impressive size. All blue ones like this, with those dark, dark brown eyes, were rare, and named Spirit Malooms.

Rarer still, Nell was sure, were the ones that glowed with a hue of light.

This place was special to him, a place he came to think, meditate… Recently the Maloom had started to show itself, tentatively getting closer and closer to him over time.

It was timid and gentle.

Now, it would sit beside him when he came here to sit near the stream and try and sort out his jumbled thoughts. She reminded him of his good old Dogs, Lucy and Stech… who were gone now. Often when he’d been sad, alone… he’d sit with them, and they would be there, looking off, as if guarding him, listening to him, and now and again turning to lick his tears away, or nudge him gently with their wet noses.

This Spirit Maloom did so remind him of them.

He missed them.

He looked up at the Maloom, who had turned to look at him with those deep brown eyes. Nell knew that the Spirit Maloom didn’t just glow, but was somewhat transparent… he knew that wasn’t normal, he knew it probably meant she was a ghost or something, but… he didn’t let it bother him.

It seemed like she needed someone to sit with like this, just as much as he did.

Nell had his family, to be sure, and Fingold was always there too, but… everyone always offered an opinion, Nell’s Maloom friend just listened and… encouraged… in her way.

‘For some reason, amongst all the green underbrush and the towering trees, and the flowing water of the twisting stream and the small waterfalls,’ Nell went on, motioning about him and the Maloom, ‘the woods always look blue.’

It was true. It was like the air itself had turned blue, a soft hue that was both calming and eerie.

‘But you probably know that,’ Nell smiled at the Maloom.

She nudged him gently with her nose.

She seemed solid enough, though he knew he could see through her… like a three-dimensional whisper-image projection or something.

Nell pet the Maloom’s snout, gently. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you started meeting me out here… I have to admit, when you first showed up… I was a little scared. Legends are spoken, both good and bad, of Bluewood, and while some avoid it like the plague - especially on days like this - for me it’s always been a sanctuary, a place of peace, a calming realm to think and sort my troubled thoughts. Though… of course, I’ve heard the ghost stories too.’

He held a hand up on one side of her snout and could see it vaguely as he looked through her.

His eyes slid to the Maloom’s and she just seemed to smile softly.

‘I don’t care if you are a Ghost,’ he said. ‘You’re the best Ghost I’ve ever met… the only Ghost, if I’m honest.’

The Maloom gently put a light blue paw on Nell’s knee. He was sitting on the ground, his back propped up against a mossy, grey stone.

‘Am I talking to much?’ he asked. ‘Ah,’ he sighed, looking out at the forest. ‘It happens… I’m still trying to sort everything out, even after it’s been so long. Pushing a year now, I suppose. Even after I’ve told Mum I’ve gotten over it… but still, I’m confused, and still… all I have is questions.’

He was quiet a moment.

‘I’m already three and a half decades old, Spirit,’ he said, using the name he’d decided to give her. ‘I know it’s still quite young by the measure of years, but… I’m well into manhood, by the reckoning of my people. I know,’ Nell grumbled bitterly, ‘what people say behind my back… that it’s high time found a Wife, settled down, and started a family of my own. And if it was completely and totally my choice, I would gladly have done so already!’

He sighed bitterly. ‘But, he grumbled on, ‘finding a Wife, I have learned, is much more difficult a task than I’d ever dreamed.’ He looked at Spirit with a humourless smirk. ‘As a young boy, I thought it was simple. All I had to do was like a girl of my choosing, and, by default, she would feel the same.’

Nell leaned his head back and looked up into the coiling clouds in the sky, listening to a distant rumble of thunder. ‘The innocence of a child, right? Anyway, continual rejection, through my life, has proved to me that I know absolutely nothing about the whole process…’ He turned to Spirit and she looked at him with tender eyes, like she was really listening. He turned more to her and stared into her eyes. ‘Do you understand me?’ he asked.

Spirit just nudged him with her nose.

Nell smiled. ‘Yeah,’ he chuckled, ‘but what does that mean?’

She nudged him again.

‘I’ve never told you, since we met, why I come out here and mope, have I?’ He leaned back against the boulder again and stared into the forest.

‘Every time I’ve ever tried, I get knocked down,’ he said distantly. He turned to Spirit. ‘I know… I know, I’m going on like I’m whining. But it’s true! And I have tried, Spirit… with everything in me. Once reckless, I’ve become more and more scared of risking my heart to more disappointment, rejection, and pain. Yet,’ he sighed miserably, ‘I always seemed to… and I’m repaid with that sharp stab of rejection and the dull ache that follows, leaving me gloomy for days, wondering what I could have done more, and lately… what’s the point?’

Spirit put a paw on Nell’s hand and he looked down at it. He looked up at the Maloom and smiled. Then the memories and the pain clouded his face and he looked to the flowing water of the stream ahead of him.

‘I gave my heart to a Princess of renown and power,’ he said, in little more than I whisper. ‘Someone who was destined for great things, a ward of the royal Emahra family, last of the Seraphs.’ He chuckled bitterly. ‘If you can believe it, I felt… guided to the Princess… as if from on high.’

He snorted, and leaned back, looking up at the gloomy sky again. ‘I gave my all to win her heart... I thought, by the things she’d said, by the way she acted when she was around me... by so much indeed that she felt the same for me as I felt for her.’ He sighed deeply, miserably. ‘In the end, everything I believed was thrown back in my face. She’d called me Brother and friend… but in the many months since she crushed my heart... she’s only contacted me a handful of times and, only after I reached out to her first. She told me she wanted to be friends… it’s been the better part of a year since I’ve heard from her.’

Nell reached up and wiped away tears that had formed in his eyes. Spirit moved closer to him and leaned against him… he could feel the warmth of her body. He smiled sadly at her.

‘After all rejections of the past,’ he sniffled, ‘I felt like I had enough in me for one one more try... Before Hart stepped into my life, I’d given up on my dreams. Then she arrived, shining like a new sunrise. It was as if the Divine Himself had brought her into my life. You should have seen me, how I prayed and worked, and fasted… This time it would be different.’

Nell gritted his teeth, feeling anger, frustration, and confusion swelling in his heart. He wiped at his eyes again. ‘The Holy Men say that if you ask the Divine for the things that you seek - that are good - and you do all you can to strive for them, the door will be opened to you… I believed that with all my heart, and worked for it with everything that was in me…’ He looked at Spirit, pleadingly, as if begging her to help him make sense of everything. ‘I feel betrayed, to my very centre. I have lost my hope, my trust… my faith… The whole ordeal, Spirit, it has broken me more than anything ever, and I feel like I don’t understand anything… Every day it is like more of me is chipped away. I feel like I’m shrivelling up, leaving only an empty husk.’

He gritted his teeth and looked down as tears flowed freely from his blue eyes. He groaned in frustration and ran his fingers through his brown hair.

‘Maybe it’s my fault,’ he growled. ‘That’s what people would say right? It’s something I did. I’m the common denominator in all of these rejections. Besides… what business do I have falling in love with a Princess... and a Seraph for that matter? What business do I have moping and crying, feeling shattered and lost… I should just suck it up, right? Be a man.’

Spirit whimpered, as if feeling Nell’s pain. She leaned against him a little more, and he leaned into her.

She felt so warm.

‘I look back to the fool I was,’ Nell growled, ‘devoting myself to her for those fifteen months of her training. I wrote to her, served how I could. She wasn’t allowed any romance while in her training, and I was totally okay with that. I respected it. I waited patiently, until I could tell her how he felt. I thought she knew, because of everything I did, how I tried to show forth my love…’

A dismayed, agonized look filled Nell’s face as he whispered, ‘She acted so shocked in the end. She couldn’t have not known could she? I gave all I could to her. How could she not know? Right from the beginning, when I screwed up my courage to ask if I could write to her… How could she not have guessed then? And then, with all my diligence... I can’t believe she’s that dense. She led me on, Spirit... to ruin.’

Nell wished, in the depths of his heart, that Princess Hart just could have simply told him she was not interested, in the beginning, rather than…

With a sigh, Nell Sorrow leaned his head back, against his mossy stone, and looked up through the trees at the sky again, letting tears leak from his eyes. Letting his heart go on aching as it had been for months now.

Some days were better than others.

Spirit licked Nell’s face, and he smiled, looking up at the Maloom. He stroked her nose gently. ‘I’m glad I met you,’ he offered with a small smile. ‘You listen good.’

He looked toward the winding stream he was on the edge of, as it wove in and around the thick woodland. The water flowed slowly and smoothly, and was the clearest he had ever seen. Polished stones lay at the bottom of the flow, and as Nell stared at them, he caught his reflection in the water, and saw his gloomy face.

‘I look horrible,’ he grumbled to himself. Then looked off into nothing for a long moment, just staring. ‘You’d think I’d be used to this sort of thing by now,’ he whispered sadly to himself. His face remained as depressing as ever, and he leaned back, staring.

He saw Princess Hart almost every day in his mind... In the beginning, mornings had been the worst for him. It had gotten a bit better, of course, over time. He was able to busy himself with other things. But none of it ever went away. The confusion he felt, the seeming betrayal of a Supreme Being he did truly believe in…

He used to wake up with hope, excitement, head out on an early walk. He would pray, pouring out his heart to the Divine, thinking he was walking this path with his Creator, toward the one thing he’d always wanted, but always been denied.

Now, he just had one more scar added to all the others.

‘I told my Mum I’m like a beat puppy,’ Nell said, looking up at Spirit. ‘I’ve been slapped around so much that I don’t feel safe putting himself out there… trying for love ever again.’

In Spirit’s eyes, Nell thought he could see understanding.

‘Are you the same?’ he asked.

Spirit didn’t respond… but of course, she couldn’t.

‘People always have wonderful advice for people like us, don’t they, Spirit?’ Nell snorted. ‘They’ve never experienced the same things we have, yet they think they know exactly what we’re supposed to do. Keep trying. Keep putting yourself out there. I always listened… and I did it one last time...’ He looked off into the forest again and said grimly, ‘But the puppy has been smacked again… even when he begged the very Being he worships that he be, this one time, kept from that repeated sorrow… I ran headlong into it… no warnings, no guidance, no help… and all I have left are questions… and when I call to the Divine it’s like talking to a stone wall.’

Nell sighed pitifully.

He was heartsick, as he had been so many times before. He hated feeling this way, and wanted his usual demeanour back.

‘You know, I used to be quite cheery and positive,’ he told Spirit forlornly.

There was a sudden sound in the forest, and Spirit looked up. Her soft blue ears perked and her muscles tightened. She watched the trees for a moment. Then, with a seeming look of sadness in her face she turned to Nell. She nudged him gently.

‘You have to go again, don’t you?’ Nell asked, petting the Maloom’s head. ‘It’s okay… you listened to me long enough for today. Go on… I’ll see you again sometime.’

Spirit turned, leapt over the stream, and ran into the woodland, leaving Nell alone.

If there was one thing that hurt him the most when he was feeling like he was now, it was being alone.

*

The Maloom that Nell called Spirit raced into the woods as fast as her body could carry her, and when she was out of sight of Nell, her form changed and she hurtled through the trees in the form of a glowing white orb that was tinged with blue.

She manoeuvred through the trees at blinding speeds and a moment later found herself in a forest clearing. Other glowing orbs were gathered, and in the middle of the beings of light, was an orb that was all white and seemed to glow brighter than all the rest.

Spirit, as Nell called her, moved straight to that orb.

‘Genesis,’ a voice echoed out from her.

The white orb glowed a little brighter, and she said, ‘Mother… did you see him again?’

‘Yes.’

‘We don’t have any more time… we have to begin,’ Genesis said urgently.

The orb with the bluish tinge to her, who Nell called Spirit, but who’s true name meant Great Thunder, was silent, floating in the air with her Daughter for a long moment, knowing what the girl’s plan meant for them all, but what it most of all meant for Genesis…

‘I’m afraid for you,’ Great Thunder said.

‘Tell me he’s ready, Mother… we must begin.’

‘He’s a broken, shattered man, Genesis… but… there is a strength in him that he doesn’t see. I believe you will bring that out in him.’

‘Then we begin?’ Genesis asked.

‘We begin,’ her Mother agreed.