for an improved version of Prince Charming. Willing to barter.”
“Oh, Leigh Ann,” she whispered back. “Good night.”
“Good night,” I answered, and lay awake for a short while, trying not to think, until sleep claimed me and I dreamed.
It seemed so real—my first inkling that mortal reality did not consist only of wakefulness, sleep, and the dream state. Both Mother and I knew that dreams could include past as well as present life memories, subconscious symbols skewered together with surprisingly strong and recognizable images. But neither of us knew that we could relive a memory, as clearly as if we were experiencing it for the first time.
Since then, neurologic science has found that an area of the brain, when externally stimulated in surgery, will cause this virtual memory to be relived mentally, as if it were happening physically.
But that night, I knew nothing of this potential to go back in time and feel things as if my mortal life was the dream, and I, the dreamer, fully awake. It was not a cognizant dream; I was not aware that I was dreaming. Later on, I trained myself to dream cognizantly, for there came, into my dream world, times of danger when the ability to wake myself became imperative.
But that night I dreamed I was in Eliom, and knew it was a different dimension from Earth, and that Earth was a youthful planet that we, my people and I, were still forbidden from visiting and exploring.
We looked human, but we were not human. If you were to gauge time as we did, and the manner in which we grew and changed, you would call us immortals. We were also the beings Earthly religions would one day call angels, although the correct name, if translated from our language, would be “angelfolk” or “people of the light.”
Bael was one of the angelfolk, and I watched him approach my thachka, our word for the cottage-like dwellings we lived in, from a small window near my pallet in the loft. His father walked beside him, and I became excited, knowing Bael would keep his promise, made after a hasty stolen kiss last evening on our way back from working in the Garden.
I say stolen because we were not supposed to embrace before Bael formally declared for me and my father Michael formally received and approved my acceptance. A kiss or two was generally tolerated before betrothal during the courtship ritual of initial mating, but not more than that. When you came of age in Eliom, you were watched over by your elders, even more so than when you were a child. Whether male or female, you were taught that sexuality was one of the Creator’s greatest gifts, to be treated as sacred.
I watched until Bael and his father passed beneath the door lintel, out of my range of sight. They were wearing the traditional short, white, sleeveless robes of summer, but adorned them with soft purple sashes worn loosely around their waists. The sashes ended in a tassel of gold.
I moved away from the window and sat down in my curtained alcove. The curtains enclosing the three alcoves could be swept back and away to make a dayroom filled with sunlight. But this morning I wanted privacy, nervous, knowing my father would soon call me downstairs.
The curtains hid a painful reminder that love could be destroyed by acts of rashness. My father now slept upon a single pallet. He had long ago detached the twin pallet once belonging to my mother.
I was five when she and her brother had disobeyed our Creator’s edict. She and Adam had trespassed on Earth, leaving the protective dimensional winds on a mutual dare.
Like willful children bent on peeking at a forbidden object, they had planned to look and leave and, believing they had done no harm, expected to be forgiven, should the Creator spy them.
It was folly. The Creator knew and saw all. Eve and Adam knew this. They truly believed the Creator, out of love, would absolve them, but the first great tragedy they brought upon themselves.
The unstable atomic structure composing the mortal dimension of Earth—unstable to the molecular structure of the angelfolk—instantly altered Mother and Uncle Adam into a hybrid of angel and human, with the angelic DNA dominant. They became half-mortal, their bodies metamorphosing within seconds into temporal flesh . . . trapped on Earth, unable to leave that world, except through a process foreign and incomprehensible to us until the Creator described it.
Death.
We were told all this, and still my father believed my mother would be returned to Eliom and him.
Celestial time, we were told, differed from mortal time; a span of minutes, hours, years on Earth lasted three times longer in Eliom. It was also carefully explained to us that life in the mortal world was challenging and cyclic, a learning ground for its natives. The transition called death, which ended one cycle and began another, was triggered by both environmental and biological factors. For mortals, it was followed by rebirth. Mother and Adam, however, would be released from mortality’s cycle, once they underwent this death. The Creator would then correct the imbalance in Earth’s atomic structure to prevent such hybridization from recurring.
My father waited fervently for five of our years. Then one day, without explanation to me, he went up to the sleeping loft and dismantled Mother’s half of their pallet. I asked him why he did this. “They are lost to us,” he said. “They may be lost to us forever.” All of my later questions brought two consistent replies: “Only time and the Creator can answer that,” or “You’re far too young to understand.”
From that day forward, he no longer believed, and I knew with a child’s instinct that Mother and Adam had in some way further angered the Creator.
Father would not explain. He became loving but quiet, seldom smiling. When he did, a wistfulness played at the corners of his mouth, as if he could not be happy without also acknowledging his sadness, and his light melodic laughter seemed gone forever.
I became my father’s helpmate, keeping house for him as I grew older, protecting his need for peace and silence, and loving him dearly despite his grief and reticence.
The rest of the angelfolk in Eliom were solicitous and watched over us, none more so than the family of Lucifer. His wife Affaeteres often had me visit their thachka, slightly larger than ours, for it sheltered them and their three boys: Ashtoreth, Bael, and Azmodeus. Ashtoreth, three years my senior, was gentle and kind to me. Bael treated me warily, as if a girl one year younger than him acting so sedately and modestly proved an unfathomable mystery. Azmodeus, a year younger than I was, paid me little attention until we grew older, and then attempted to shock me with teasing and mischief. His older brothers pounced on him for that; it only fueled his rebellion further. He found me too quiet, too ladylike, and labeled me “Miss Perfect.”
Notwithstanding Az’s behavior, I was always welcomed in their house, and Affaeteres often visited my father and me with food and other gifts, mothering me in a fussing affectionate way.
It seemed natural now to me, as I listened to the men below, that Bael and I, despite our initial shyness toward one another, should fall in love.
The careful mutual wariness had been put to rest last summer. The sun had shone pleasantly hot as we completed our tasks in the Garden, and a group of us, teenagers and younger children, had rushed off to the lake to cool down with a swim. As we splashed about, Bael’s thick black hair became wet and stuck to his head. His tall, elven-shaped ears, usually covered, were exposed. Some of the children began snickering, laughing and calling out. “Pointy ears! Pointy ears!” they cried, and their own fingers mimicked the object of their mirth.
Bael’s face flamed as hotly as the sun. His hands rose to cover his pointed ears—an uncommon genetic trait among the angelfolk,
