The Shadow in the Kitchen

Journal of Rowana, daughter of Rowetha
5 / 04 / 2120 of the Fourth Age

There were chores to do. I disentangled myself from Azzie and checked the rain catch, fishing out some of the bugs and grass from the collector. In the cool of the morning, I ran the monomolecular scythe through the tall grasses I'd marked out for the pipe-weed plot. The rich volcanic soil needed to be cleared, then plowed, prepped, seeded...it reminded me of my last season on my family farm.

I'd cleared that field with a tractor, the first vehicle I'd learned to drive, because I didn't even have a neural port yet. Old soil. That earth had been farmed for a thousand years, and it was tired. This was different. The morning mist clung to the tall grasses. Insects sang. Now that I'd been out here a while, I knew there were hares out here, small birds, lizards. Bigger creatures too. Azzie and I had heard the wargs howl at night, sometimes closer than I liked.

The ring worried me. Magic rings were fact. History. They still told the story of fall of the second Dark Lord. After that, the elves had drifted West across the ocean, and magic had dwindled. They still told tales of Barrow-wights; bear-skins; smiths still whispered spells as they forged knives and bayonets; and I'd seen Elvish-blades that glowed blue near Orcs. They said some of the Orc shamans could see the Unseen, but they said a lot of things, ascribed all manner of powers to the cultists of the Shadow.

I had seen them all bleed and die when shot.

When the sun was well into the sky, I went back to the house to check on Azzie. As I untied my boots at the door, there was the sizzle of eggs and soylent steaks. She must have found a bird nest on her morning jog. Sometimes we exercised together, but when she was randy, getting sweaty together led to getting less work done.

I stepped into the house on stocking feet, and turned left into the kitchen.

May the Valar bless the Halflings of the Shire, but they had included an apron among the basic housegoods in the kitchen. I admired the bare green backside, her green cheeks absolutely swallowing the gas station panties I'd bought her. I would go to Harad and back if it meant returning home to the sight of a woman like that cooking me breakfast. Azzie's hair was piled up on her head so that the green back showed clearly, no shirt underneath, all the muscles bunched like hills along the spine...and there, at the very base above the cleft of her ass, that other little tattoo, the diamond-shaped scanmark.

I never had. I didn't know what it would open up. A link to a site on the Matrix? Some information that the people who made her had encoded on her body? There were things about her history I hadn't asked her, hadn't wanted to know until and unless she told me of her own volition. Maybe I just wanted to focus on the present and the future, not the past.

She scraped eggs and steaks onto a pair of plates and turned around. The ring gleamed in the deep green cleavage, but her smile lit the room brighter than the sun. So we sat and ate, and I did the washing-up, because I didn't want her to pour the grease down the sink. We had only just gotten the pipes laid down, I didn't want to clog them immediately.

Azzie pounced after I set the pan, a ceramic-surfaced all-purpose affair that had come with the kitchen, aside to dry. She hugged me from behind, squished her breasts against my back. Her cheek pressed against the middle of shoulderblades. I put my hands on her forearms, not sure if she was in the mood again or was just being playful...then I saw the gleam of the ring in her right hand.

"Give me your finger," she said. Her left hand caught my wrist. My right hand caught hers. I could have twisted out of this position. Old instincts caught me, all the training sessions where I'd been grabbed from behind. Elbows, heels, there were defenses from this position. But not if you wanted to get away without hurting the person who had grabbed you.

"Why?" I asked, and the muscles in my forearm bunched. Damn, she was strong.

"Because I want to show you," she said. "I want to...share it with you."

There was struggle in her voice. As if she had to fight to get the words out. Her fingers were stiff.

I didn't trust magic. So I asked myself if I trusted her.

The rest was easy. I relaxed into her grip. Helped guide her ring to my ring finger. The metal was warm as it slipped onto her ring finger, which had never worn a ring before. Had never expected to know what it felt like, for someone else to slip a ring on her finger. As if to claim her.

Last night, in the darkness, I had seen Azzie lose resolution. As if logging off from the world. Maybe that was what I expected it to feel like. Yet what happened was different. The resolution of the world around me seemed to increase. It was like stepping out of the grainy, monochrome analog television of my youth into a hi-definition color smartscreen version of reality. I could still feel Azzie's arms about me, but the colors were too bright, every surface had too much texture, too much detail. It was too much to take in, senses overwhelmed, even the silence deafening, the residual cooking smells clogged my nostrils. I felt scraped raw, exposed.

Then I saw it.

A small, dark thing that shouldn't be there. Like a shadow that rested on the windowsill, to stare out to the east, where I'd been clearing plants in the morning. A figure sketched in burning darkness, small and strange, like a mad composer's squiggle on a complicated orchestration.

It turned and looked at me. I think it smiled.

Then Azzie half-tore the ring off my finger, and I was back in that dull world, ears ringing, heart pounding, gasping at the air I could no longer taste.

"Did you see it?" Azzie whispered.

"I...I saw it," I told her. "What is it?"

"Something Unseen," she whispered, as she threaded the ring back through the shoe-lace. Weirdly, my mind thought of a spare D-clip I had in the Pathfinder, how it would be easier for her to take the ring on and off without untying and re-tying knots all the time.

It seems silly to say it, then, that Azzie and I put on our shoes and boots and went to gather in the grass I'd cut in the morning, and dug out the roots with my entrenching tool, and then cleared another row after that, until the sun began to dip and we headed in, for shower and food and sex and sleep, more or less in that order.

Yet for all that there was still a bit of magic left in this world, there was work to be done.