The sounds come and go, ebb and flow. Am I drifting toward it or away?

Slowly, slowly, the curtain thins. Only a mist now, soft as silken rain with sunlight sparkling through it. And through it, I see color. Such bold, rich color it sears through that thinning mist and stuns my eyes.

Tiles are gleaming silver and explode with sunlight in blinding flashes where the thick green leaves and hot-pink blossoms of trees don’t shade or shelter. Flowers swim in pools or dance in swirling beds.

There are three women, girls, really, gathered around the fountain that plays its happy tune. It’s their laughter I hear. One has a small harp in her lap, and the other a quill. But they’re laughing at the wriggling puppy the third holds in her arms.

They’re so lovely. There is about them a touching innocence that’s so perfectly suited to the garden where they spend this bright afternoon. Then I see the sword sheathed at one’s hip.

Innocent perhaps, but strong. There is power here; I can feel the tingle of it now sparking on the air.

And still I’m not afraid.

They call the puppy Diarmait, and set it down so it can romp around the fountain. Its excited yaps ring like bells. I see one girl slide her arm around the waist of another, and the third rest her head on the second’s shoulder. There, they become a unit. A kind of triad. A whole of three parts that chatter about their new puppy, and laugh as he rolls gleefully in the flowers.

I hear them say names I know, somehow know, and look as they look. In the distance, in the shade of a tree that drips down with graceful branches heavy with jeweled fruit, are a couple caught in a passionate embrace.

He’s tall and dark, and there’s a strength to him I can sense might be terrible if roused. She’s beautiful, and very slender. But there is about her, too, a sense of more.

They’re desperately in love. I can feel that need, that heat inside me, throbbing like a wound.

Is love so painful?

The girls sigh over it. And they wish. Someday, they hope. Someday they will love like that—desire and romance, fear and joy all tied into one consuming entity. They will know the taste of a lover’s lips, the thrill of a lover’s touch.

Someday.

We are, all of us, caught in that urgent embrace, absorbed with our envy and our dreams. The sky darkens. The colors dim. I feel the wind now. Cold, cold as it spins around and around. The sudden roar of it screams in my ears. Blossoms tear from branches, petals fly like bright bullets.

Now I’m afraid. Now I’m terrified even before I see the sly black shape of the snake slither over those silver tiles, before I see the shadow slink out of the trees and lift high the glass box it holds in its black arms.