Guest Post - Frank Talaber

 

Indomitable Love

 

In this excerpt from Raven's Lament, Brook has just met Chelen and her effect on him is well...

Behind the wheel of his rental truck, Brook threw his head back. His mind raced like white water cascading through rapids and rifts deep in canyon walls. “What the hell just happened back there?”

            He grabbed his journal and wrote feverishly. As a journalist he’d had to study the literary classics in university, had even read some romance stuff on his own. Those books all contained things that had eluded him, like the headlong rush of emotion and hearts binding that so many authors penned. He’d always believed in passion’s depths, of love between souls, the kind that didn’t need to link two as one … because they always were one. A natural intimacy that merely reacquaints one soul with another, drawing each together like flames. He just couldn’t understand how it could be, how anything like that could possibly exist in this age of computers and TV. Chivalry and romance died in the last century, he’d written once. Well, maybe it had. But maybe the notion of eternal soulmates really did exist.

             An hour later, twirling his pencil in his hand, he stared at the words he’d just written.

Levels of awareness come at unexpected times. Sometimes, in the unexpectedness, everything we value as precious washes away and the present takes on a whole new meaning, grounding you from the trappings of your mind, pulling you away from the everyday things. I’ve come here looking for answers and have found only more questions. Why here, on the edge of the world, so far removed from the heart of civilization as I know it? Nowhere near anything resembling my way of life. But that’s part of it, isn’t it? To pull yourself from daily routine and place yourself on the edge of the unknown to contemplate … that’s where the learning comes from. It happened last time I came here and it’s happening again, in totally unforeseen ways. So much about these islands I’d forgotten: the lushness, the greenness of the moss, the ruddiness of the soil from the centuries of fallen cedars. I’m excited, yet scared. So remote. Maybe it’s the certain familiarities that haunts souls here, spirit winds. Allowing hinges cast in civility’s rusted sterility to be flung closed to portals of sensibility.

Brook put down his pencil and closed his journal. Shakespearean passions, that’s what she’d awoken. Damning emotions that drove men mad and women to swoon.

            Jesus, if she did that to him in a smile, ten minutes and a handshake, what would a week produce?

 

Brook is to spend a week alone with her on a kayak trip to see the totems of Ninstints. I wanted to show sometimes meeting "THE ONE," can be unexpected, intimidating and shake you to your core. Worse when you're still suffering heartbreak from the last relationship. And worse even than that, Brook and Chelen are investigating the downing of the Golden Spruce tree and Brook has pocketed a strange Lapis Lazuli rock. It just happens to be Raven's immortality stone. Without it, Raven is aging rapidly. Always the trickster, he will stop at nothing, even indomitable love, to get it back.