Soul Sister

 

News of the "Fifth Sense" cropped up everywhere. My own sister drifted off one day, saying she needed to know if any truth hid among the rumors. She had always been less collected than I. Never would I be caught with my concentration down. Sometimes I feared she would just drift into pieces, she was so scattered.

 

My sister didn't appear for so long, I started to think maybe she had wandered so far and so long, leaving wisps of herself everyplace she passed, that she was nothing more than a wisp herself. I watched the ocean waves in my corner of the universe and imagined my colorful sister drifting helpless through the atmosphere. I watched the skies, scanning the clouds for people, hoping one of the passing souls might be her.

 

One day, she returned. She had changed. She looked like herself, just more so. There was something wrong, disturbing, when I looked at her. For a moment, my mind was so confused that I couldn't comprehend the difference. Then I understood. She had done it. She had found the Magicians. The Physical Movement existed. She would never be scattered again. Her wisps would never again be in danger of abandonment. As she walked towards me, the sand shifted under her feet. I watched in speechless awe as she manipulated nature just by touching it. Even the water gave way when the waves swept up around her feet. Light refused to pass through her. She had become a true member of the universe, able to interact with it at will; to take part in its relationships. She had become solid.

 

I was so amazed by her new form that I rippled in surprise when she laughed. I had become so distracted that I forgot to hold myself together and expanded to resemble a chubby cloud. I used to scold her for such lack of control. Pulling myself together, I circled her several times, checking that it wasn't an illusion. I asked her what it was like. She said it was unlike anything she had ever experienced in her billions of years as a soul. Her face lit with the excitement of a child as she tried to put into words the concept of sensation. Then her expression darkened. "It hurts," she said, "Sometimes I feel too much at once and it hurts like nothing else."

 

I will never forgive the Magicians for what they did to my sister. Yes, she became more real than anyone I had ever seen. Yes, she experienced the universe in a whole new way. But they murdered her. She could no longer fly through an atmosphere illuminated by the setting sun. She could no longer drift into the depths of the ocean and laugh with the dolphins. She could no longer drift up near the highways of souls drifting toward some other destination and commune with them. She could not dance with our people. They had created a shell for her, but it became a cage. 

 

Worst of all, she began to deteriorate. The universe wore her down. She became weathered and wrinkled, growing weaker and weaker as the years marched on. I had watched the universe change and renew itself throughout my whole existence. Until my sister became a part of that cycle, I had never understood that death was part of the process. I had seen some things end of course, but they always grew into other things. I tried to comfort myself with the idea that one day, she would grow into something else. As I watched her stand on the beach, swaying and staring at the sky, I didn't see how it could ever be so.

 

One day, she fell. She just ended. The cycle had claimed her. I had lost her once, and she returned to me. This time there was no return. The Magicians took her and sent her into the universe to be destroyed by it.