C h a n c e

She was never my lover.  That is important, because no lover after the first could have ever affected me the way Chance - young, impetuous, wild, mad - could have affected me.

The passage through the night is long and wordless--though that does not make it silent. The stereo on the BMW is on full-blast, roaring some piece of moodily purring, bass-drenched sin out into the small leather-enclosed space of the 740. Very unlike the car, really, is the soundtrack to go along...but quite like its owner. When at last he pulls up at the destination--a rather obscure cliff overlooking a thin stretch of beach, and then the wide black ocean--and cuts the engine, Chance might actually miss the slow envenomed seduction of the songs. He pops the CD out and lays it into its case--he closes the case. Unmarked. Interesting music, all blasphemy and corruption and taint and downward-spiral. He opens the door of the elegant sedan, then, and steps out into the brisk, salt-laced night air. "Come on," he calls, stepping to the edge of the cliff without a single glance backwards. "You wanted to fly? Let's fly."

She wrinkles her nose and watches him popping the door open a crack as a smooth leather cased leg steps out.

Was this guy for real? one of those rich freaks...All talk and very little action.

She studies him producing something from her pockets as she stands and exits the car...smooth rounded hips falling him with a confidence so dense it could perhaps be termed bravado... "Sure...but don't you think just flying...is....a bit dry?"

He turns back to face her, his heels at the very edge of the cliff. The slightest of sneer-smiles smoulder upon his lips...and he shakes his head. "Hardly," he murmurs, as lean swift hands unbutton his shirt and strip it off. This action, however, does not lead to its logical conclusions. He stretches one arm back over the empty air, his white shirt flapping in the stiff breeze like a shred of moonlight. And then his fingers part, and the shirt is torn from his relaxing fingers, flung into the void...and the smile widens into a grin. "You're sure about this? It'll be a thrill...if you survive."

Like magic two pieces of match paper flip over and over again in her hand like fluttering leaves. Impossibly black eyes watch him with the faintest speck of emotion...or was you imagination? Deft fingers hold them out to him a challenge unspoken but blazing in her palm "Yeah....sure...you'd be surprised at what constitutes a thrill nowadays.....Pops."

He reaches forward, slowly, as he catches both pieces between long fingers, holding them up before his pale green gaze. Studying. Contemplating...

...releasing. The wind catches the paper, whisks them away, following his shirt to the oblivion on the rocks below. His grin stretches...ever wider. "I'll show you a thrill greater than that," he replies, stepping close. His hand catches upon her chin...the back of her neck...slipping down her spine...

...and then, deadly fast, he steps to one side and shoves her off the edge without so much as a blink. In the next instant, he is diving off the edge after her--homicidal-suicidal? Not quite.

Wings sprout, suddenly, from his shoulderblades--massive wings, huge and raven-black, gleaming as slick oil beneath the moon. His arm catches her about the waist, and in a powerful beat of the wings--impossible wings, real wings--they lurch upward, stabilizing on a draft of rising warm air.

He whispers into her ear, laughing, "How's that for a thrill?" 

Pushed...did she expect it or not, she was there and soaring. No scream is loud enough for her silent terror/honor...flying...free... Her last few glorious seconds of existence.--- Would she see mother? A White Light--- 

Only to feel hands securing her flight...no mother would be the last person she would see...with him. Obsidian eyes widen as the stare out at the landscape...endless yet somehow lacking...devoid, emotionless through catlike portals. Should you seek her soul spark here...a glimmer of soulful cry...you might as well look for an eternity. Her soul instead sings in her blood enraptured with the constant pumping motion of her heart. It dazzles, it sparkles, it shines...and it revels in this...this new...freedom....a silent call of pure inhibition. As fingers unfurl spanning outward...outward...into the infinity of the wind itself Chen Li is for ONCE humbled. She mumbles a response...her words so soft as to protect her raging high, "Oh yes..... ... the thrill of the century."

She shudders slightly, arms purposelessly spread in flight. Eyes so black as to eat the tremulous ocean before her even as her mind absorbs it...So this is the world.....really. Catching reality in all its splendor brings on indescribable moments of golden rapture--The rush of blood, the throbbing pulse as sweat trickles down nervous skin...she is awed "....Amazing."

"That does not mean as much as you think it does," he responds as his eyes seek out the rocks, far, far below. "If, that is, you are what I think you are--because your lifespan will exceed this century, and the next, and the one after that. But we need to test that, don't we? We need to test your immortality." He lets go of her with one arm, the other still wrapped securely about her waist, and he points at the rocks. "Look down, thrillchaser."

Down: hundreds of feet to the frothing shore, the crashing waves, the white-capped sea, angry and black. Down, to the jagged rocks glistening by moonlight; down to her death.

"The ultimate thrill," he murmurs, silken words sliding into her consciousness. "One that can only be experienced once for some...twice, for luckier ones. Maybe you'll be lucky...? Maybe your first won't be your last."

Does her heart thrill as he lets go of an arm...as she eyes majestic rocks.....Both hands in front of her now like Superman...surely this is the height of highs. Pure adrenaline clamoring in her veins...would everything be mere anticlimax to this? To actually fly.. to hurtle through space of your own volition.....Soaring...Darting... and for the brief span of a moment she wishes he would let go...but through it all she remains silent his words echoing her thoughts.... "Let go..."

"You might die..." Does his arm loosen a fraction of an inch? Does the shifting wind, so dynamic a path beneath the spread wings, threaten to tear her from his grasp? Soft, the words--soft as crushed velvet, "You might fall and sleep, and your life would be over before it truly begins..."

Why was he even asking her? He meant to kill her, one way or another. And if she arose, well and good. If she did not--nothing was lost. Except perhaps...might he regret it, just a bit? This girl, this mad girl, who loved thrills so, loved them when others would fear--might he even miss her, just a little, if she were to die and never wake up?

"Do you not care?"

As he hesitates it feeds her longing...his reservation fueling her own recklessness ..the craving singing crazy shrieking cries to arms. The shivers run through her body with undisguised intensity "...after this...everything else...would be a dress rehearsal.." Not the most eloquent of parting words to stumble from existence...perhaps she was stumbling towards something instead....but that question would never be answered in lieu or the thought...the memory of her actions. -- that as a slight move of her body, the his of skin on skin like an explosion as she just slips from him plunging into the infinity...

Did she expect him to cry out, to plunge after her, to attempt to save her from her fate upon the cold black rocks? It was not going to happen. Then again, he did not expect her to leap to her doom herself, either... 

"Crazy girl..." he murmurs, as a slow smile curves his fine-sculpted lips, as his eyes follow her shape down, down, down...and then softer words, at the moment of impact from which he does not flinch, "...you're magnificent."

And of course she does soar for a moment uninhibited and free.... a deity so unlike an angel and yet divine.

Down, down, descending ....like a meteor sailing through space and time for the briefest instant a celestial body.... before the bloody broken crash.

It's not the fall that kills you; it's the sudden deceleration at the bottom.

Oh, how true. How dreadfully true. Do his eyes flicker at all, as she meets her bloody end, dashed upon the rocks? Does he flinch; does he blink? Never. Nonetheless, he circles once, twice--an angel, a raven, a vulture--before descending himself, significantly slower. He alights upon the narrow beach and folds his jet wings about his bare shoulders in a cloak of feathers and wades into the booming sea, wades out to the rock that had claimed her life for the first time. For the only time? Blood--her blood--washes upon his wings, seeps under his wings to stain the impeccable white of his clothes. He sees her, then, sprawled and broken, torn, unmoving.

Dead.

But...not as broken as she should be. Nor as torn. Nor as dead, even, as shattered bones slowly...so slowly...begin to rebuild and reknit; as torn skin, jagged flesh, begin to roll upon itself and, against all mortal possibility, heal.

The smile returns, then, with curling, coiling sureness. "Get up, madwoman. It is not over that easily."

And so the truth was discovered and affirmed.  Chance was an immortal, like myself.  She was alive in a way that no one else I had known was.  But she wanted to die...like myself.

There is much of me that I find mirrored in her; much of her that is greater than I.  I was her mentor, but what I taught her was nothing she did not already know.  She was not my protégé, nor my legacy.  But there is a pattern to the world, drawn in the stars of the cold north - and she was part of mine, as I was part of hers.  Our worlds collided at the beginning of her long life - and the end, at last, of mine.  In that sense, perhaps she was my successor.

[To Find]