She didn’t like it there. She wasn’t sure if she ever had. It was the weather, the food…the eyes. But the seduction had been complete and she, so willing. She’d believed in the dream, in everything…even in love. Was it love then that teased her now? She found herself laughing softly, sharing in the joke as the wind massed across the water and a escapee gust swept suddenly, flirtatiously up her skirt.

Her long, richly tendrilled hair reached out, remembering the lover’s dance and her own art of complete surrender as the clouds darkened. She paused, just long enough to hear the long, low howl of the wind as it sped towards her through bare, leafless branches. This lyrical, thickening howl was familiar as it teased a tear from her eye and flung it out across the increasingly white tipped waters.

She looked back, at the warm doorway, to the way back in and where her lover slept, in silence. She knew now, sweet knowledge, that she must learn how to skim stones under the night moon and gather the courage to hold tight to her magic carpet in the thickening, darkening storm.