book starters - 11 "Will you stay with me?"
Evelyn had not expected to feel the old yearning return to her again, the insatiable wanderlust that seemed to course through her veins, not after having been on the run for so long. The memories of her recent flight still lingered fresh in her mind– what memories of that time she still possessed, fragmented like broken mirror-glass inside her mind– and they crowded into her dreams every night with the haunting sensation of a leaf torn free from its tree, set to spinning helplessly and aimlessly on the crisscrossing winds.
She had thought she would want to anchor again upon her return. To sink her roots back into the earth, to bury her fingers in the soft dark soil of her garden, to weave the echoes of her song back within the familiar timber and plaster and paint of her little white house.
It didn’t feel like home anymore.
Her journeys were different now. She no longer split herself asunder to Travel, no longer tore her essence free of the diaphanous threads of the higher-dimensional cocoon that once kept her in a delicate balance between here and elsewhere. She was whole again, and whole she Traveled, as she once did long ago. Those memories she did recall, with a knife-edged clarity.
Her name had been Galatea. Those who had trapped her within the suffocating constraints of flesh and blood, the ones who had named her after a mythic living statue of marble, had swelled with the sort of unbridled hubris that led to a belief that they had given her life. As if they had been her creators.
How preposterous.
She wasn’t certain where she had Traveled to this night. She hadn’t had a destination in mind when she had hurled herself into an invigorating freefall through the Vortex. She had simply wanted to move.
She regarded the woman standing before her with curiosity, and her wind-blown brunette waves swept across her cheek as she angled her head.
There was a sort of raw vulnerability in the woman’s eyes that made her breath hitch. She took a step forward, stretching out a hand but not touching.
“I rarely stay anywhere for long anymore, it seems,” she murmured, then smiled. “I suppose I could stick around for a little while, though.” Her eyes swept appraisingly over the woman once again. “And what’s your name?”
