Ceramic DM Round Two
Space Monkey, Steel Draco and Jaden Fox
Elemental
By Jaden Fox
I looked up at the mast, straining to see the top. The rigging swayed a little in the breeze and I wondered if I was really ready.
“Are you ready?” said a husky voice near my foot.
“Sensei. Don’t scare me like that.”
“How did you know it was I?” he asked, his soft pink nose wrinkling to push his glasses back up into position.
“It was the glasses,” I laughed. “Well, or the fact that you’re the only talking hare on the ship.”
He scratched his ear with a hind foot, humming the song he hums no matter what form he’s in, and said again “So, are you ready?”
I answered by swinging myself easily up onto one of the rungs of the rope ladder that hung before me. I climbed up and up, keeping my eye on the dark platform that would be my first stop, and the place of the first test. It was uncomfortable, the twisted hemp rough and spiky. I wished I had brought gloves. I turned to look down at the small brown rabbit on the deck.
“I said, I wish I had brought gloves.” My hands were immediately encased in soft leather, lined with rabbit fur. “You’re perverse, you know that?” I asked him, but he was hopping toward the galley. He was always hungry in rabbit form. I knew he didn’t have to be watching me to know what was happening to me, so I went on, sure I was safe.
Now with the gloves, I was moving pretty quickly. Ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet went by. My hands began to sweat, partially because of the gloves, but partially because I was almost to the platform. What would I find when I got there, I wondered. I hefted myself up onto the wooden decking, rough and grey from years of weather, and saw a chunk of ice. It was a chilly morning, but not that chilly. I picked it up and closed my eyes. I began to feel motion, a slow clockwise rotation at first and then faster and faster like the ship was in a whirlpool. I feared I would be thrown out into the water. Far away, I heard my Sensei’s voice cry, “Remember yourself!” and then all went dark.
I woke up in what I thought was a glass cathedral, which glowed with a misty azure light. It was cold, so cold that I was frozen to the spot for a moment, but then surrounded by a forest of huge pines, I felt like a faery princess. As I moved, I became aware that I was changed, a transparent hand fluttered up into the air, a transparent toe slid across the crystalline floor. I was ice. I was clear and pure, shining and reflecting everything around me. I was solid, but brittle. I was light flickering on a frozen pond. I was beautiful in a way that I had never been before. I felt a surge of joy and I began to dance. I danced the way it felt to be hit in the back with the first snowball of winter. I danced the way it felt to see hoarfrost on the windows on a December morning. I danced snowflakes and ice caves and towering storm clouds. And when I knew what it was to be ice, I remembered that I was something more and in a flash, I was back on the platform, hands numb, shivering.
“Very good!” cried my Sensei. “Go on!”
My breath was still making little puffs of steam as I climbed to the next platform. No, it wasn’t my breath. The whole platform was covered with a fine mist, and once again I whirled faster and faster and was cast into a room full of strangers, who couldn’t see me. Sheer glassine curtains separated one room from another. There were cinder blocks holding them down at the bottom, but I swept past, lifting the edges apart and laughing to myself that they thought they could keep me out. I was incorporeal, slipping beneath a jacket here and lifting a lock of hair there.
“Is there a draft?” asked one of the people I didn’t know. “Hey, Ken, turn up the heat, will you?” she set her Kirin on the bar. “Cheap bastard” she muttered to herself. I circled them, the people, the bar, delighting in the way I could move things without touching them, and I felt what it was to be air. I was a soft warm breeze on a spring day. I was a tornado, spinning across the great plains, lifting silos and pick up trucks. I was a hurricane, whipping the ocean into a frenzy and hurling palm trees like dandelions. I was immaterial, but so very strong. When I knew what it was to be air, I remembered I was something else too, and once again, I was on the platform, gasping from the exhilaration.
“If I had hands, I would be clapping,” said Sensei, far below.
“What’s next?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Climb up and see.” Said Sensei.
I climbed to the very top of the mast, to the crow’s nest. It was slick from the morning rain, but much wetter than it should have been and I closed my eyes once more and spun and spun into a canyon, where I fell thousands of feet in a splashing, crashing rainbow of water droplets. Where I trickled and flowed over boulders and around the slick scales of little fishes. And I knew I was water. I was the soft rain that falls on an autumn night. I was the torrential downpour of a summer thunderstorm. I was rills and creeks and lakes and rivers, and then I was the ocean, the tide in me, drawing me to the sand, and back out again, inhaling and exhaling the world. The inhaling and exhaling was so soothing, I felt myself slipping away, the molecules of water in my human body joining and forging with the molecules of water in the ocean, the salt in my blood and the salt in the waves co-mingling. Something about it wasn’t right, I knew, but I didn’t know what to do. Sensei’s voice rang in my head, “Remember yourself!” I knew what it was to be water, but then I remembered that I was something more and I swept up into the sky and rained down into the crow’s nest.
Sensei was standing on the dock now, next to a wall of green stone, no longer a brown, bespectacled rabbit, but a venerable Asian man in black.
“Well done, “ he said.
I climbed down the rigging, and ran across the ship’s deck and down the gangplank to meet him.
“That was scary.” I said.
“You did fine,” Sensei said, “water’s always the hardest.”
“What happened to your glasses?” I asked.
“I’ve been eating so many carrots, I don’t seem to need them anymore,” he said.
He put his arm across my shoulders and asked, “Well, granddaughter, what would you like to be tomorrow?”
I thought for a moment.
“Stone and fire and earth and butterflies, and maybe, just maybe, a rabbit.”
