ut this is all I have." Raulo moaned as he knelt on the stones, staring at the feet of his beloved. The loss in his voice tore me.

"As if that makes a difference?" Elaine screamed at his bowed head, slapping him across the cheek again.

Raulo's face snapped to the side, more out of reflex than the actual force of Elaine's blow. Her strength was legend, but Raulo was mighty beyond strength. Even on his knees, back, shoulders, and head bowed forward in the shame and pain of his failure, he was nearly as tall as Elaine.

I tightened my grip on one of the few untoppled stone pillars as the echoes of her screaming and the slap died amid the marble slabs and moss and rotten furniture.

"What you have," Elaine continued at last, addressing the tortured Raulo and clearly enjoying her fury, "Doesn't matter in the least. You have not done as you were required."

Raulo remained motionless and silent.

Elaine looked away from him for a moment as she lifted that which Raulo had given her to eye level. I strained to see, almost able to make out the substance of the gift amid its sparkles and iridescence. Almost.

Closing her hands over the gift, Elaine made a forbidden gesture, and with a small "pop", the gift vanished. Sent elsewhere. Somewhere. Unknown. At least to me. And to Raulo as well, I suspected. Though he remained motionless, I had no doubt that he had heard the distinctive pop of the sending, and knew what it meant.

Without a further word, Elaine took a step backwards, turned, and stalked away. An impressive feat, given the very uneven ground a century of minor earthquakes and neglect had turned the once perfectly flat marble floor into.

As her footsteps faded down the long hallway that led back towards the surface, Raulo remained motionless. I began to move down the pillar, carefully picking my grips on the pitted surface. I had observed the scene from high overhead, perched atop one of the few pillars still standing.  I would have liked a better view, but needed to be high enough to be completely lost in the shadows and out of Elaine's sight, if not her reach. No tower was high enough to escape her reach, or the reach of that which she might summon. And I would have been a very unwelcome witness.

I reached the floor safely, and scurried across the cracked slabs, dreading a sudden reappearance of Elaine, though I knew she was long gone by now. Raulo was motionless as ever, not having moved a muscle in the twenty minutes since Elaine's slap.

This mysterious fragment of my fiction was posted here March 19, 2003. It was written years ago, but I have no memory of writing it, or reading it previously, or what it's inspired by, or about.  There is no more of it, unfortunately.

I have lots of fragments of old stories, ideas, and other such things littering my hard drive, most of them copied over from other machines, most of them not read or thought of in more than eight years.

This is one of them.  Sorry there isn't any more of it; it seems like it might have been interesting. I fixed a couple of typos and changed a word or two, but other than that it's just as it was from whenever I first wrote it, many years ago.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.