Chapter 32- Introductions and Goodbyes
Glenna found herself surrounded by darkness. This wasn't the same as if she were standing on a hilltop in the dead of night. No, this was like being shut inside an interior room with no windows or doors. It was absolute darkness. It was a void of nothingness. Was there air here?
Suddenly she was having a hard time breathing. A wave of panic tightened her throat and she found herself panting as waves of fear rolled over her.
Looking down, she realized she could perceive her body. It wasn't her new, goddess-gifted, hybrid body with four arms, bountiful breasts much larger and perkier than was natural for a woman of her build. Nor did she still have broader hips and buttocks that were thicker and rounder than natural. There was no tail splitting the cheeks of her buttocks made up of flexible tailbones that turned outward from the sacral promontory of her pelvis and some four and a half feet long before ending in a pointed tip. No, her fused sacrum bone once again curled inward naturally. Glenna saw her thighs and further down her lower legs and feet. They were no longer hybrid legs with hooves. Also, she was no longer luminescent, giving off light with phases of the moon. Her skin was simply white now. As white as newly fallen snow, but still, it was natural. Her hair brushed across her shoulders and back, and tickled at her behind and the backs of her thighs, and for the first time in her life, she knew what it was like to have hair that fell down her body instead of floating above. This body she saw in this place was her body. Her true body. The one she would have been born with if not for the Blessing of the Queen of Heaven, or, more recently, the divine changes she received from her goddess Seline.
Everything she perceived took only a minute to interpret and understand. Then, the long pointed ears sticking out from her head and the long black hair hanging down over her shoulders and back quivered. She heard something. Weeping. It was soft and tremulous, bitter and lonely. Looking around, Glenna saw no one nearby, and so, her ears perked up as she used her sharp alfari hearing to hone in on the direction the weeping was coming from.
Spinning around she determined the crying was coming from behind her and started in that direction. She walked upon nothingness like there was a firm floor beneath her feet. To walk on her own feet again felt strange, and yet, also so very natural.
She was naked so as she walked she tried to will clothes in existence, but nothing happened. Wherever this place was, she was not in control. Her breasts and buttocks jiggled with every step, and for the first time, Glenna blushed from embarrassment. It wasn't as it was before. Without the inborn Blessing of Queen of Heaven, her breasts were only slightly larger than handfuls. Her breasts jiggled instead of bouncing and swinging pendulously. Without her breasts being so large and her hips broader, her waist didn't seem quite so tiny in comparison. Her hips were still as wide as her shoulders were broad, but now they seemed toned and athletic rather than being seductively curvy and voluptuously thick.
Was this what nottalfar women were supposed to look like? Naturally?
The tips of Glenna's long black hair whipped the back of her thighs and buttocks as she walked. The right cheek and thigh then her left cheek and thigh before whipping the right again. She ignored her hair. It was so strange how it fell down her body now. Moving ahead, always ahead as far as she knew, the sounds of weeping grew louder until a woman appeared as if out of a heat haze. The woman was crouched down sitting with her haunches on her heels and bent prostrate as she wept. In front of the woman and hovering above her were pictures. Still pictures and moving pictures. They seemed to be recordings. Memories. All of them were of a young boy and his mother. Sound accompanied the moving pictures. Sounds of laughter and excited talking. Once seen and watched the pictures and videos winked out as others appeared. The boy was now a young man and his mother was a little older.
From what Glenna could see as she approached the woman, crouching down amidst pictures and videos of her memories, was very beautiful. She looked to be close to her middle years, but that seemed to only make her more beautiful. She was a flower in full bloom. Prostrate though the woman was, Glenna saw that the woman was tall, nearly as tall as Glenna herself who was five feet ten inches tall. The woman was thick and curvy as if she was blessed by the Queen of Heaven. Her legs were long and thick. Her hips were broad and her buttocks were thick and well rounded, rivaling Glenna with her blessed body from the Queen of Heaven and hybridization from Seline. The woman's waist was slim though not as slim as Glenna's, and the woman's breasts were very large and beautifully shaped. At least, as far as Glenna could tell from the way they hung pendulously beneath the woman and jiggled every time her body shuddered from her turmoil. Lastly, Glenna saw the woman's face and she was stunned, the woman was beautiful. If anything Glenna would say the woman looked remarkably similar to herself, with a sharp jaw and pointed chin, a plump mouth, a well-shaped nose that curved out like a ski-slope before turning upward, and bright, piercing blue eyes that spoke of intelligence, optimism, joy though they were terribly sad at the moment, a deep passion, and a twinkling of mischievousness. All of it. All of the woman's beauty was surrounded and encapsulated by thick golden lashes and eyebrows, and long golden hair that seemed to glow with a rose tint to it. Glenna knew herself to be a beautiful woman, but still, in the presence of this woman, for the first time in her life, she felt inferior.
"Hello, are you well?" Glenna called out as she approached, but the other woman didn't respond.
The woman was completely absorbed in the pictures in front of her. Turning her attention to the still frames and moving pictures, Glenna watched a young woman growing up. It was only her and her son. She was only a little older than her son. In one moving picture she was nursing a newborn. In another moving picture, he was a young man and the woman was older. They frolicked on a beach, both of them in undergarments made for swimming. The boy's shorts were modest while the woman's clothing was revealing enough to rival a temple priestesses' habits of seduction. The two of them played and enjoyed the beach, and then they moved to lay out on the sand. The mother rubbed some sort of oil on her son's body, and then she had him rub the same oil on her. From her hairline to her toes, she made him cover every inch of her.
Glenna quickly saw the underlying attraction the woman felt for her son. The way she flirted, though never over aggressively. Her cute requests. The way she pushed the boundaries of their mother-son relationship, making her son nervous and uncomfortable though he never complained. The way she clung to him when they were together, revealed more about the woman than anything else, and then there was the way she looked at her son. Glenna knew that look. She had given the same look to her son, and she felt the same burning love, the same desire, barely concealed behind her eyes until yesterday.
Still frame pictures of memories popped up and replaced others, and then another moving picture appeared of the woman cooking in her kitchen. Preparing dinner for herself and her son before carrying it to her son that sat in his bedroom, his back to her as he typed in programming code into a computer. Glenna didn't know how she knew what this computer or code or programming was, she just did. The woman set the tray of food down beside her son on the desk, but he was so focused on his work that he failed to see his mother or acknowledge her efforts and the love she had expended selflessly on his behalf. Disheartened, the woman still smiled at her son as she combed her fingers through his dark blonde hair as she turned away and left the room.
A new window with video-like memory appeared and this time the boy was young, maybe ten or so while his mother was in her mid-twenties. There was a tired cast to her eyes. She had worked hard to provide for her family. She had just returned home from a night shift and instead of going to bed, she took her son to a pool where they spent several hours swimming and playing. As Glenna watched she felt much of herself in this woman, and to her surprise, the boy looked more and more like her Viridian. Finally, a moving picture window opened and Glenna watched as the woman walked into her son's room, and sitting there at the desk was the blackened form of the burned-out husk of her son, and Glenna gasped in shock and began to wail from grief.
The pictures and videos winked out and new ones replaced them. Glenna watched the woman as she sat in front of the computer in her son's room. The body of her son was gone. She was alone. So alone. So lonely. Her eyes were red from crying. Unshed tears glistened on her lashes. Long painted nails clicked on the keys of the keyboard as the woman typed in a command, and then she smiled wanly and sat back in the chair as the computer revved up and the screen started swirling with the colors of the rainbow. The hovering moving picture window went dark before another replaced it. The face of a beautiful dokkalfar woman filled the screen and Glenna understood that the perspective was that of the woman as an infant looking up at her mother. The memory was then quickly followed by a succession of videos and Glenna watched as the woman's new life played out before her. She was young, having been transferred to this new world like her son before her. She was only a month younger than Viridian. Only recently having reached her eighteenth year in the Verdant Realm.
The woman's life was sad. Horribly sad, and lonely. Marked most profoundly in both lives by loss. First by the loss of her boyfriend when he found out she was pregnant. The loss of her father. The degeneration of her mother. The loss of her son. Then she was reborn only to be condemned by her father and nearly murdered. Witnessing her mother save her by killing her father only to lose her mother a few years later to rape and murder. Then surviving alone for years before she finally found the wolf pack only to be lost to the darkness that despoiled the earth and her new friends and family. The tragedy was over for Glenna and she found that she couldn't stop crying. Her heart was breaking, and she had no idea what to do!
