Whispers of Pachamama Page 7

  He never did find the signs of the body that he searched for. But he did see something else, and that something brought him to his knees. His old knees landed on rough rock, and he didn’t even notice.

  A new kind of emotion trembled through him. If he had to name it, he would name it Elation, but he didn’t know if even that was it. Perhaps the word for what he felt hadn’t been coined yet.

  There, far below, his beloved had survived the furious pounding of giants.

  She had revealed that she was one of them.

  He laughed at how many times she had told him who she was—no, what she was—and how many routes he had taken to dismiss this truth.

  As incredible and impossible as it was, it was also undeniable. This truth she had tried to share with him before was indisputable now, reflected in everything that surrounded him. He could even feel it thumping with every beat of his heart, filling him when he thought nothing could ever fill him again.

  She hadn’t left him the way he thought she would, and it went far beyond her jumping into a waterfall when he thought she would walk away instead. She hadn’t left him at all, not really.

  He looked down at the plunging water, and there he found her smile. It radiated and shone from the white of the water, stronger than the sun. He heard her laughter echoing throughout the tree canopies, carried on the songs of birds. He saw her vitality reflected in the colors of the forest, and he discovered the rich brown of her eyes everywhere he looked for it.

  He found her love still in his heart, right where it used to be, but now it was his to keep—until the sunset at least, until the next life.

  She was everywhere. She was a part of all life.

  Finally, he understood.

  A fresh wave of tears was born from that understanding. So much went into those tears, not the least of which was regret for every tree he had cut down. Because now he saw that she was the tree. She was the singing bird and the slithering snake and the vibrant flower and the croaking frog with its suctioning feet. She was the jute and the snail and the ant, the worm and the moss and the water. She was the stone that lent him its strength. She was the air that lifted his spirits.

  She had said it all along. He was man. She was woman. She was mother. It just hadn’t occurred to him that she could be mother to it all.

  But he saw it now. He saw her reflected in every thing that lived around him. He felt her inside him more than he had ever been inside her.

  She did not die. She could not die. At least, she couldn’t die like that, not at the bottom of a waterfall. When the end came for her, it would be a death worthy of someone—something—like her. She would explode in a deafening, blinding, numbing vision of light and color and sound so loud that it would thunder across the universe.

  He could welcome death with open arms.

  In the face of the infinite, death was nothing.

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  Also by Lucía Ashta

  A Betrayal of Time

  The Prophecy of Arnaka

  The Secret of Namana

  Magic Awakens

  The Five-Petal Knot

  The Merqueen (early 2017)

  The Ginger Cat (mid 2017)

  The Scarlet Dragon (mid 2017)

  Planet Origins (early 2017)

  “Daughter of the Wind”

  About the Author

  Lucía Ashta, a former attorney and architect, is an Argentinian-American author who lives in Sedona with her husband and three daughters. She published her first story (about an unusual Cockatoo) at the age of eight, and she’s been at it ever since.

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  Lucía Ashta on the web:

  @LuciaAshta

  authorluciaashta

  LuciaAshta.com

  luciamashta@gmail.com