Toward the storm

I wound my way upward, feeling out the dust and stone path one step at a time. Occasionally a sharp rock would surprise me; a sudden stab of pain into soft flesh. But it would take more than that to harm my skin. I have never gained a callous in this life, every inch of me is as smooth and pristine as it was when first I was born anew. I am protected in more ways than one, oh my kind and caring listeners… preserved and pickled in my own shape. Unblemishable and unchanging. I still feel the stings and scrapes of course… but after a millennia or two, you too might find that it becomes hard to distinguish between any burst of feeling. Pain and pleasure, both: They just hold their own thrill of briefly excited nerves.

The trees began to thin around me now, opening up to the wind and the vastness of the sky. Lights glimmered below, in streams and puddles all the way to the horizon. Less than there once had been, perhaps… but even a reduced humanity still felt the need to pour their vision into every patch of the unknown they could. That group of young men I had left sleeping: jobless, lost and so often unfulfilled… I wondered if they wandered further into the darkness to make their camp because they felt more kinship there? I who have shared the beds of both emperors and barbarians, still wonder which I could better recognise… without all the trappings and furniture to hinder judgement.

I carried on still higher, needing to be well away from that camp by sun up. Needing to be part of the darkness for them, too; enveloped by it without a trace. Once upon a time a famed hunter managed to track my wanderings for year after year, following me across continents as he continued to declare his undying love. It was beautiful, in its way… and so was he. Until I felt his eyes upon my back no more and for the first time ever, retraced my steps. I found him where he had succumbed, alone in a cave. Surrounded by a world of white, but with lips turned black. I sat with him… for a week or more. Mourning my cruelty. I could have granted him a lifetime, had I chosen… had it been left within my nature. There you know I am guilty, ears of my jury… It is good there are no hunters so skilled, anymore.

The wind whipped around me stronger still, running its icy fingers over my naked curves. Through my still-wet hair. Between the arch of my legs. The first few raindrops upon the back of my neck felt like needles straight to the spine… but when the torrent truly began I couldn't help but laugh aloud at the pure barrage of sensations it brought. Using all my supple skin as a drum while still I yet wore it. There is something utterly pure and cleansing in feeling the weight of a storm pressing down upon you. Something deeply grounding in looking up into the vastness of a boiling sky and suddenly knowing just how small you truly are. And all that is multiplied tenfold by being unburdened of clothing at the time, I can assure you kind readers… and only recommend that you find out for yourself, at least once in your life.

In me, it awakes memories both momentous and despairing. Depths of experience that in every flash of lightning I can still feel as if they only yesterday… yet which fade away just as quickly. With the knowledge that never will I reach such heights of pure, climactic sensation again. In my less-lucid decades I might chase after such squalls and rumbling clouds, to catch just one more echo of His might and memory! Yet I know in my heart of hearts that what I seek simply does not exist in this world anymore… That no-one left alive can give me what I truly crave. Instead I must make do with what myriad small subsidies I can scratch out amid the mud and puddles of these lower mounts.

Still… let it not be said that a girl did not get her rocks off. To sit upon a throne of stone at one of the world's many pinnacles. Blasted by the horizontal monsoon of all the sky's bluster and churning one's own fingers inside oneself… It brings a certain degree of tableau'd orgasmic satisfaction, to be sure. I gasped and moaned and screamed myself hoarse as my bedraggled hair flung itself across my face. Only hoping the wind might take those small prayers of pleasure up and out into the beyond, to find a ghost of a god who might recognise them.