Barefoot in Amber
# The Leaf Dancer The wind whispered through ancient branches as she rose upon a throne of amber and crimson, her bare soles pressing against the curled edges of fallen leaves that crackled like parchment from some forgotten epoch. Her eyes held the cool fire of glacial pools, and the gilding light of the dying sun draped across her shoulders like a woolly mammoth shawl, shadowed and primal. She balanced as if the earth herself had decided to lift her skyward, one leg drawn close to her chest, arms open to the horizon where the primeval forest met the sky in a haze of ochre and burnt sienna. The impressionist strokes of the scene blurred at its edges, as though a cave painter with ochre-stained fingers had dreamed her into being upon a wall of stone. In that suspended breath between autumn and memory, she was both vanishing and eternal—a figure pressed into the bedrock of time itself.












