The Light in Aquala

Rivia met her gaze without looking away. The purple under her hands brightened.

“I am asking you to come with me. To follow the threads and see where they lead.” She paused, and Jaxx lifted his head from her lap and looked up at her, his yellow eyes catching the light of her Neon and holding it for a moment before settling back to their normal glow.

“I know this sounds crazy and impossible. But I have been following the threads for a long time, and I have never had anything like this happen. Your bond with each other creates a much stronger gravitational pull that I have ever seen or experienced. You must be special for this to happen and maybe you can help us. I want to take you to meet others with the Neon glows and show you what we are all trying to accomplish.”

Mara rose to her feet and walked to the edge of the clearing, her mind churning with thoughts and questions.

The scientist in her wanted to go study everything, to document every detail, to understand the mechanisms at work. But the cautious part of her was warning that this was too dangerous with no guarantees. If they went with Rivia right now, they would be leaving everything and everyone behind, no goodbyes.

The morning sun had climbed above the tree line while they were talking, and the clearing was full of warm gold light. It caught the mist still rising off of the waterfall in the distance and turned it into a soft moving veil that drifted between the trees and disappeared before it reached the ground.

Lena came up beside her. Her footsteps were soft on the damp ground “What are you thinking?”

Mara let out a slow breath. “I am thinking about the Academy and all my years of study and everything I thought I knew,” She paused. “... and what would happen if I left, if we left. What about the village and our friends, plus the Academy needs me. We have responsibilities and most of all, there is Mom to consider. But still… I need to understand this and I want to know more. I want to meet others with Neon glows like us.”

Lena was quiet for a moment.

A pair of the winged bugs drifted past them and one of them settled on her shoulder and opened and closed its wings twice before lifting off again. When she spoke, her voice was gentle.

“The village and our friends will be fine and the Academy will keep on going. Mom will be okay and we will see her again. She has always told us to follow our dreams. I think what we need to ask is ‘Do we want answers to the questions we always wondered about?’”

Mara turned to look at her sister. “Maybe you’re right.”

Lena gestured around them, at the softly glowing jungle, at the trees whose vines carried their Neon colors all the way to the canopy, at the mysterious Rivia and Jaxx, at the bright morning sky above where a few stars still held on in the pale blue. “This is what we dreamed of, Mara. Remember? We used to lie on the beach and look at the stars. We used to talk about going beyond the islands and seeing places no one had ever seen. Doing things no one has ever done and finding people like us who have answers.”

She looked at Mara. “This is our chance.”

Mara nodded slowly. “I remember.” She could feel the warm sun on her face and for a moment, she was back on the beach at home, lying on the sand with her sister. She thought of the times they would trace constellations with their fingers at night, making up names for the ones they didn’t know.

Lena smiled. “We thought we were just dreaming, hoping that one day we would discover answers to our questions. We believed the world was small and it was only our imaginations that said there was something beyond it. But now?” She gestured back toward Rivia. “Now we have proof that there are other worlds and places and we can get answers to our questions from people with Neon glows like us. And here, right here, is someone offering to show them to us.”

Behind them, Rivia had not moved from her place in the grass. Jaxx had lifted his head again and was watching the sisters from across the clearing. The morning light caught the silver threads along his coat, and the deep purple and gold of Rivia's Neon was still moving slowly across her face, now even brighter in the daylight than it had been in the dark.

Mara looked at her sister. “You want to go now.”

Lena did not hesitate. “I want to see and know what is out there. I really want to follow the Neon threads through the portals and see the worlds they lead to.” She met Mara's eyes. “But I don’t want to do it without you.”

Mara thought once more about the Academy, her research and the carefully laid out path she had for herself. She thought about her Mother, who had always told her that science was about asking questions and finding the answers, and that meant taking action.

She thought about the old accounts her great-grandmother used to tell, stories of women with Neon on their faces who could travel between worlds. The Queens of Neon, they were called. Some said they were real and others said they were only stories.

Mara had never known what to believe since no one she knew had ever seen them and even her great-grandmother had just heard the stories as a child.

Then she thought about what Rivia had shown them. Doorways of light. Worlds beyond imagining. A universe that was larger and stranger than anything she had ever dreamed.

She smiled back at Lena.