Another not completely brand new chapter. Pieces from previous chapters rearranged and edited for story flow and continuity. Again.
As noted previously, I’ve learned to live with such things. Hope you can, too.
Enjoy.
Thorne let the Lady Eglesia‘s systems bring it into the harbor while she dozed on the deck, barely moving from where she slept through the night. She headed out to deep water after hallucinating being back home and visited by the Wergaia mythical water being, the Bunyip, and assumed overwork and stress.
But her hallucinations were becoming more frequent. She’d been visited by Galaru Snakes and Wadjinas, Rain People, several times since then, and it didn’t matter how much work or play or sex she’d had, they persisted.
She wondered. Maybe they weren’t hallucinations after all? Usually a quick trip home cured such things. She’d take SkyHook’s corporate jet and be there and back in four day’s time. One day to get there, two days with her people, one day to get back.
But her last trip home she visited the Mandjilwa, a traditional Sickness Dreaming place, despite warnings from her father’s people.
That trip took a week. She left Shaul in charge, not her next-in-command but capable never-the-less.
The Eglesia‘s alarms sounded. A shoreside distress signal. Somebody breaking into SkyHook HQ and caught in her team’s latest tech gadgets?
She sighed and her eyes fluttered open to the Boston skyline, the morning sun at her back.
A man bobbed in front of her boat about fifty yards out. Like her, he focused on the Boston skyline.
The man turned towards the Eglesia as if suddenly realizing it was there. The sunlight shone off the water making him difficult to see.
Thorne shaded her eyes then opened them wide. “What the – ”
It wasn’t a man. Same shape, same outline, but not human.
Her mobile alarmed.
The thing in the water dove and was gone.
Thorne read the message on her mobile. She shaded her eyes and looked towards SkyHook HQ.
A cloud of gray smoke climbed the thirty story Innovation Square tower. Swirls of denser smoke pulled and pushed the cloud up the side of the building like some Ngolngol King Kong, a Cyclone Wind Spirit larger than she’d ever seen before, waving its arms and legs.