centre of the universe - the dreaming: Gale

09/12/2008: "Gale" Fists clenched, jaw twitching, Marek closed his eyes and drew in a long, deep breath. He seemed to grow, or the house to shrink around him. By the time his breath stopped hissing, his head was bowed beneath the ceiling and the leather bag was no longer visible in his fist.

The roar he let loose blew the glass from the windows, shattered them outwards into the hollyhocks and blue gama. The door rattled on its hinges. "LOKI!" The hinges gave way, the door coming to rest halfway through the yard. His foot cracked the floorboards with each step he took. Marek thundered the name again, shattering the doorframe as he shoved himself through. "LOKI!" Behind him, Maeve flinched, then scuttled to her perch over the blood-streaked floor.

Outside, a wall of brown and black approached the house, scouring everything in its path. It rose up fifty feet in the air, blocking out the morning sun at his back. Marek screamed once more, the air around him boiling with topsoil and sand, branches and loose fenceboards tossed through the air like feathers. Marek stood his ground with the wind blasting closer...closer...

It was upon him, tiny grains of grit driving into his skin, embedded there by the fury of the tempest. With the tiniest movement of his wrist, the storm whipped past him, around him, leaving eddies and whorls to each shoulder and hip. "Loki," he whispered, his voice swept away in the sussuration of sand, "I who am your brother, I who name you now, I command you."

Although the storm blotted out the light, filtered it down to a massive, undulating sludge, a shadow appeared. It laughed as it formed itself out of the darkest colours of entropy, and the sound was the caw of the crow and the flat, hollow syncopy of stones falling against each other from a great height. Walking out of the swirling, pelting dust was a figure that was the strange man with the cart - the snake-oil salesman, who also, in the flickering quarter-light, appeared somewhat serpentine, writhing as he walked.

"Here comes the Sun" "A Letter I Had to Write Today"

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