Liya Ends

[knivesout]

Here is a little tale, basically a mood piece, I wrote for a friendly writing challenge elsewhere. Take a look, tell me what you think. Thanks!

Liya Ends

She is a Light Painter, scrawling shimmering arcs of light across the void, creating sublime beauty from the stuff of reality. Her works are not insubstantial fancies – they are real, and far more enduring than you would imagine.

Liya moves through the night sky, tracing great shining curlicues through the dark expanses that stretch around her. She transforms these wastelands of darkness into spaces of glowing, glorious beauty and light. She strews galaxies and nebulae across the cosmic reach.

She shapes matter into the forms it must take to shed light, to adhere to the intricate, never-duplicated configurations that her refined aesthetic sense demands. She is older than all the stars and gas clouds that dot the heavens, and she is nothing that you or I would call human. But it amuses her to assume this humble if beguiling form, to appear to mortal eyes in the aspect of a young, dark-haired woman with full, sensual lips and heavy-lidded eyes, clad in swirling robes of white edged in black.

This frail, mundane form is vastly misleading. For Liya is ancient beyond human reckoning, the last of a forgotten race of star-dwellers who attained the peak of their civilization countless aeons before our Solar System even began to coalesce out of the primordial glow. They reached dizzying heights and then dwindled away; through choice rather than circumstance.

Some lingered on, limitless consciousness wandering through a new universe that seemed endlessly fascinating, if utterly alien to them. And thus were so many of our ancient tales of gods and spirits born.

But all things move toward their end, and so it is with Liya. She has traversed these cosmic confines, playing with reality, shaping it into forms that please her, or at least amuse her for a while, for years beyond her count. She has had a good, long run and far outlived her world and her people, now she too is tired.

Now she must pass on.

Every ending must hold a new beginning, and so it is with Liya. As she dwindles, as she fades, she gathers her essence and shapes it anew. What form shall she create, what gift should she leave this wayward but lovely universe? She swirls between the stars, contemplating. Suddenly, a smile crosses her lips as the perfect conceit strikes her.

She closes her eyes and wills the transformation to take place. Gradually, specks of her essence spin away from her, swaying and shuddering into new forms. Little creatures of light, winged and glowing with a deathless radiance. Soon, Liya will be no more, there will only be a multitude of tiny sprites of light, flying through space and bestowing their gifts of luminescent beauty where they will.

She is a Light Painter and this will be her final masterpiece.

[I, Brian]

It's interesting - and if you don't mind my saying, there's a theme in this and something else you've posted (the gods short) that really speaks of something of the spiritual. Possibly spiritually seeking, so as to realise some form of potential within the self (I'm reflectively from my own experience here - apologies if that sounds insulting).

As for the piece itself, I enjoyed it, and found no real criticism as a expressive piece, though probably too limited in size and scope as a commercial work.

[littlemissattitude]

That, knivesout, seem to me to be the perfect preface to a collection of short stories. What would those short stories be? That's up to you. They could all relate to the creatures of light she creates at the end, and their impact upon the universe she lets them loose in. But that is not necessarily the only way you could go with it.

I do have one small nit to pick, however. Paragraph three says: She is older than all the stars and gas clouds that dot the heavens,... And then, in paragraph four you write: For Liya is ancient beyond human reckoning, the last of a forgotten race of star-dwellers who attained the peak of their civilization countless aeons before our Solar System even began to coalesce out of the primordial glow. Those two statements seem to contradict each other a bit. Am I missing something? Am I reading something in that isn't really there? Is it just too early in the morning and I'm not thinking straight?

Other than that, this is a lovely piece of writing.

[knivesout]

Yes, there is a contradiction - how can she be older than the stars if she comes from a race of star-dwellers? I must fix that. Thanks!


And thanks for all the comments. I seem to work in very short lengths lately, I really have to figure out this going beyond around 500 words gig.