Chapter 6: Non-humanly realm

  Shiver was preparing for her birthday celebrations. She was to be seventeen and no-one else in the Gray household, only Anne-Marie, had remembered. Not Aryan not even Mist. She had dressed up for the occasion in her creamy-white, ce blouse and long, pleated, bck silk skirt, a midnight blue rose seated atop her fme-gold hair. The dining hall was filled with balloons and presents from Anne-Marie and Laurence who at any rate had remembered.

  “Happy birthday Shiver,” Anne-Marie said. ‘When Aryan gets back and Mist gets up, (guess he felt like sleeping in today) I’m sure they’ll join in.’ Shiver wasn’t so sure but smiled a sweet little smile of childlike beauty and hugged Anne-Marie.

  “I love you,” she said to the lovely French woman who reminded her physically and in other ways of a younger version of her own mother who she basically never got to see. Aryan had decided that cutting contact with family was best to focus better on the task at hand. Mist of course was more than pleased with this arrangement but Shiver who loved her parents in an odd sort of way ( one Emanuel considered might simply be a selfish and aggrandizing bask in their devotion to her and appreciation of her as their lovely, creative misunderstood daughter), not so much.

  On the dark oak table beside the wood-panelled walls was a love poem Pale little fledgling, an empty silver locket, and a beautiful, vintage white- ce wedding dress both of the two tter items very delicate to look at and touch.

  I send this with my love. Unto you my immortal Shiver-faie, now seventeen, a gift. Mere trinkets for her furred in another and wired to something else still, a "di-oeli maetaled inhumanly vair-flowerfile."

  I remember my old dismay yet finally your rosed and replicated from the pne. Afore re-given health and the hearted, my once dead and lost bud, were once to the dismal hedged: knowing eventually life’s fatal. Styx’s welling as we to it row. Saw the moldy river in the dying-aether of half-light: to hell sails all but my gilded-one: salvation from no orderly letter or under candlewood prayer, comes. Whence all the moral paths abydeth to forests frail.

  Snakingly, the st few unbridled blisses to brighten. Farewelled a fledgling infanta; by this hand but no intent, she become beauty-clouded. Darling id of a flesh that's faired by Sibyl Farling, once winter-wined then sadly furnaced. Beneath burning bush. Slid underneath soundless fells. Gone, the lightest sun-raying. Our crackling fires were long ones unheard. Only blindly-seen. My enetiled-inuliater("entitled lighter of the liar.” )

  We did this life enter "untitled" yet I became primed for aggrandized, amoral self-interest. Another individualist, self-important, satiater of ignoble bases whilst death and global warming, Lord’s harshly-fathering.

  Yet I selfishly-grieved for you more. Feelings most forlorn were sung as the bck and white bouquet, to the mournful grave I flung. Do know why you call yourself Shiver? To such name drawn? Where your pet name once, long ago, and fellow affection, love for it in thine head pnted.

  Gray’s softened to rest never, till his Shiver child forced unwittingly to task fulfill. His armistice only to then fall, desecrated. Yet rosy floweth from beyond the repelling fatum. He asks for sacrifice without mercy; leaving love bewildered. Riddled, gnarled and traverseless. A stumped tree hollow. This ferried forebode of yours is to predestined misery.

  To a begotten heart, that all sorrows held. May not vaunt those red-bows, such lips and hair no saviour to he, my sying filly, sly fawn.

  For myself, though not absent spiked tolls and a caterwauling might still own a mere sprig sprightly, of birded music and freedoms flighted. The wishes of my wishbone belled. With the help of half-starred irises.

  Want I, not earthly but otherworldly treasures, innovations that delight to honeyed unfold, with the preservation, creation and discovery of beauties untold. From the fey machinery and human heraldry of my Shiver faeytaled with twice helix, and a splicing to Monovalent. Want to make travelling Nano-eyes and breed newly-stonefly and redwood of the reef.

  The isoted rock hill with right chemical bonds may ste-blue spring. Granite in ribbed formation. I want justice and freeing wings for my poor beauteous ghoul. Nighted with some sad, delicate braise. Lament a soul worn to a bruised-glider. Yet retain she, a daintily-yellowed stripling of palest Trifoliata. One reddish-lightly as the daylily.

  Crestfallen, over any malicious intent to hinder your sleeping and to your fear mollify, toward his wretched soul I’ll lovelorn send a reaping. Made you but a hammer, trident and bde-cloaked in the winged nymphalidae. Since you instil love’s eversting sigh, betrayal his own death signify.”

  Then she noted what looked like illegible nonsense numbers and letters and bizarre symbols but soon recognised as a particur kind of code Monovalent sometimes used so that no other could interpret it.

  “please, you deserve greater than his handling. Perhaps as a loving creator therefore and thereby, it's my own sworn duty to wrikket the rosesong. Shut off the Monovalent connect and with the serenade of a death hymn, dreaded bloom, bring about the loom of an unsung echoing to put the fetalish out of immortal misery and gently smother you. Wilt die a trespassing flowerfile in my arms.” It said. It was signed E.M.R

  A matching veil was there too next to a neatly folded card with a graceful flowery script, perched there like an unusual centerpiece.

  “Wait who is this..."

  "His reference to killing for me is a figure of speech, right?” A for a second, bemused and bedazzled Shiver asked Anne-Marie ignoring the final words in a fring and with strength bring conscious, before realizing what E.M.R stood for and neglecting deliberately to tell the other.

  “E.M.R is one of your vast admirers, I suppose. They send letters, cards, virtualisers, and presents all the time for you, Mist and Aryan usually so tacky and sloppily composed I send polite, generic responses then toss them, but this was just so beautiful, well-written so heartfelt, wonderful I kept it. Ivy must be one of the author’s former sweethearts and you remind him of her. Doubt she was nearly as pretty as you of course.”

  Somewhere, Simon would have been fuming at anything that calcuting, predatory, sleazily opaque nguage-spouting maniputor wrote being call poetic or sincere.

  Shiver also smiled at Laurence who had come too upon Anne-Marie’s request and blew out the bck and white candles on her yered, moist, chocote fudge sponge cake with its whipped cream and rich dark, decedent icing. Monovalent of course had known about her birthday. Things like birthdays were stored in his memory and the Monovalent realms game she had been pying was his gift to her. She picked up Waterbaby now a full-grown fox and gave him the crumbs from her cake and he made an affectionate yipping noise and looked at her with dark, liquid eyes so full of love and devotion, she found she almost didn’t mind that Aryan wasn’t here… Almost.

  “The vices of drugs, excessive food and alcohol and squabbling amongst special interest groups (race, gender) over whose most disadvantaged, these kinds of subversive, divide and conquer methods are obfuscating those low on the socioeconomic scale from seeing deeper issues like poverty-stricken, living conditions tantamount to svery in a country where’s others can afford yachts serve politicians and pundits well.” Mist Gray

  The neighborhood they had just entered cked nano-eyes and was notorious for its near-exclusive lump and proletariat residency consisting rgely of drug addicts, petty criminals, immigrant and refugee poputions, and gangs.

  Shiver stood, with a very slightly shape-shifted appearance and purse brimming with gold, cards, and cash, skirt split, and delicate little leg extended. Each high, fine yet heavied breast much exposed and heaving. Under eyes blinking most sweetly and their overhanging, bck shes, made-up rather overly. Mist, vaguely altered, donned tight, girlish pants and a long, silver stock of worthily-effete hair. Together, the pair waltzed about, shouting at the top of their voices.

  “Hey darling, you hung horse, that sex st night was socking!!! Nearly bcked me out!!!” Shiver yelled.

  “Oh yeah my honey flower, punching-bag, it bulldozed me right over too.”

  Visibly aroused, one of the men from a group of seedy lookers outside the pub walked over.

  “You’re cute. Can anyone take a turn girly? How about some mischief. Tell me the truth. Good-looking thing like you likes sex hey?”

  “Thank-you for the compliment. Yet no. Well, I would,” Shiver said “Only… you don’t look very well,” she added concernedly.

  The other men all lean, dark-skinned were started to form a leering line. Making escape impossible.

  “How about that purse before we start?”

  One of them made to shove Mist.

  “You sexless little faggot, hair long enough for you?” Yet a wave of illness sent him to ground.

  “Maybe. Not now. You need a hospital all of you,” Shiver meanwhile replied as she shook a dainty head sadly.

  The men’s faces and lips had simultaneously paled, and their hands were greenish-tinged as one by one begun to colpse. Shiver and Mist went in and had root beer and pies while ambunces siren’d.

  Aryan found out and was furious he called Shiver and Mist home through Monovalent immediately.

  “Was this supposed to be humorous? You’re jeopardising so much with these little pranks,” he said grasping Shiver by her hair as she entered the manor.

  “Ow, you’re harassing me. I am a woman and don’t give you permission to touch me assaint, assaulter!!!!”

  “Hue and cry, hue and cry,” She continued.

  “Oh, cease this idiocy; you are no vulnerable human female, you’re a beast, a weapon and made as such.”

  “Gee monsters have feelings too Aryan,” she faux-snivelled indignantly.

  “You just assailed a woman.” Mist's eyes widened with a beauteous, false horror. “Nay a child.”

  “She’s practically a baby, Aryan; a lifetime in prison full of sodomizing for you. Also, she said hue and cry. She’s calling for your castration Aryan. Might not want to do that Shiv; w said the animals he owned were mutited too and even lost their poor, pretty little tails and you like animals.”

  “Poor babies, okay I retract,” Shiver said. “Geez so some stupid woman being harassed was worth maiming poor innocent creatures just with the assaint associated. What a bitch compining for anything but the life-threatening or disabling in the first pce if knew that outcome.”

  “You want to marry a castrated man you moronic girl?” Aryan asked dryly.

  “No” she admitted begrudgingly.

  “Jesting aside you’ll be punished next time heed my warning.”