Awakening

   The steam rises in the night, heavy and tainted with a touch of industry filtered through the water from the city to the swamps. In the distance, there is a pounding, hard-footed and steady. A snorting horse appears on the horizon, following the only path that will lead him safely through the trees of the cypress forest, with their knobby-kneed roots rising a foot or more above the watery murk. He is beastly black with a slick sheen of sweat covering his flanks, and he pulls against his harness, lifting the world out of depression, but it's not the world he's tied to. In a few moments, a red light blazes behind that horse, glinting in his eyes, bathing the scene in a haunting shade, as if Carrie herself were enraged.

Yet, in the midst of the ghastly shadows a hope arises. Anticipation racks the hearts of many, sitting calmly in their homes miles away, watching TV, working, or reading a book. They can feel that something's coming, something to relieve the tensions in their minds and release the floodgates of their souls. Yes, she is coming. After centuries of neglect, wasting away in the coffin where they left her, buried and forgotten beneath the Glades. The trees had done well to stand clear yet guard her, for they have grown wise through abnormally long lives as they absorbed her essence without encroaching her breadth. Her hair falls through their branches as Spanish moss, arms sway in the breeze, and her voice sings in the wind, keeping trespassers at bay and in fear of her "haunted" swamp lands. They feel her, they are her, and now she was returning to them freshly fleshed.

Finally the dark stallion had come, Knight was here, and he was pulling his pride out of the past and back to where she was stirring, beating with a new heart as the prophesy came full circle. Brackish water coalesces with the black mud as he pulls with all his might to bring her to surface again, muscles bulging as the drag cables pull taught. He needed her back. He said he didn't but he knew he did. She knew it too. Memories flood into his head, paining him and tearing at his brevity. There was so much done, and now this. A surge of frustrations grounds him as a flame roars across his countenance, lit from inside. Suddenly the red light rises like a brilliant fire licking the sky as she bursts from her prison. Yes, she is free! Creation shall rule again, and enlighten the world with her visions.

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** Written by [kamisch]...don't go bein' no fool about it :P