Weekly Drabble #253: Sunset Lights (Patreon)

This week's prompts are 'hot days and hotter nights' from EBB and 'light consumes' from Pyro Hawk. This story went through several changes in the edit, but I think it works nicely.

A note as well: due to my schedule, there will be no drabble prompt thread this weekend, but it will return on the 25th/26th as usual. In the meantime, enjoy!

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Sunset Lights:

“Dad!” Billy yelled as he burst into his father’s room. “Dad, come quick! You gotta see! You gotta see!”

“What is it?” Robert Mills asked, poking his head out of the adjoining home office and lifting his headset up.

“It’s the Sun Spirits!” the boy shouted, practically bouncing from foot to foot. “They’re here, they’re here! Hurry you gotta hurry,you’re gonna miss it!”

“I’m on my way,” Robert promised. “Go, go!” His son vanished back out of the room, his excited little feet racing through the house and stopping only long enough to put his shoes back on before darting out the front door.

Quickly apologizing to his work team and promising to be back tomorrow, Robert hung up and logged off his virtual terminal. He did feel a little bad about leaving them in the lurch, but it was just for a couple hours. They weren’t on crunch, so if they couldn’t close out the day without him, then they had bigger problems. Besides, he’d worked with most of them for years. They knew why he’d moved to the Great Basin Desert here in Nevada. Elin had always loved the place and in the last few years, seeing the sun break over the desert horizon had been one of the few things that had brought a smile to her face as she’d wasted away. On the last he’d had with his wife, she’d held his hand from sunup to sundown. It wasn’t until the last of rays of light vanished below the hills that she’d closed her eyes for the final time.

Robert tugged his own shoes on and hurried outside, the glow of the setting sun turning the entire world a warm orange. His house was a short distance from town and there were only a handful of neighbours around. Like him, most were coming out of their homes to watch the Sun Spirits. No matter their age, they all stared with expressions of amazement and wonder, their emotions a match to what was on Robert’s face as he followed his son across the back yard.

There were three of them this time: long, glittering forms like ribbons made from light, each more than a dozen meters long. They danced across the sky, skirting along the ground only to shoot thousands of feet up into the air like rockets. The sun spirits never stopped moving, arcing back and forth and winding around one another like dancing damselflies only to break off and form new pairs or move on their own. They twirled and pirouetted across the sky, shedding sparks from their ephemeral bodies that gleamed briefly before fading away. Robert felt his breath catch. Only twice before had he seen Sun Spirits. Seeing them in person was utterly unlike viewing them invideo or pictures. There was an exuberance and joy to it that film simply couldn’t catch, something that Robert himself had never understood until the first time he’d stood beneath a dancing sky, holding Elin in his arms, her hands atop his on her pregnant belly.

Though they’d been seen in the Mojave and other North American deserts, the Great Basin Desert was where Sun Spirits were most common. Even here though, it was rare to see them more than once a year. If you were lucky, you might catch a glimpse of them three or four times. No one was sure what they were. Their name had come from the native tribes in this part of the country. The Chinese immigrants that had been making their homes here for the last few generations said they were the souls of dragons. More skeptical minds said they were simply a natural phenomena like aurora borealis or St. Elmo’s Fire, caused by gases in the atmosphere or some source of infrasonic sound that caused viewers to hallucinate during sunset and sunrise.

Whatever they were, for hundreds of years, they’d been seen as sign of good fortune. No one could predict when they would emerge; most often at sunset, but occasionally at sunrise. Some travellers and desert wanderers said they’d seen sun spirits out during the day. Some even went so far as to claim they’d been guided to shelter or water by one of them. Whether that was true, or just the hallucinations of a heat-addled mind, Robert wasn’t in a position to say. He’d never believed in magic, not until Elin had cajoled him out for that first vacation and for the first time since he’d been a child, he’d felt a sense of wonder at the world around him.

Billy was on the edge of the property, his little hands holding onto the fence as he hopped up and down, staring into the sky. One of the spirits was the blue of a cloudless day, another a whitish-yellow and the third was a bright orange, so vivid in hue that it even stood out against the sky. The three of them spiralled and spun across the horizon, faster than any bird, sometimes dipping down to sweep closer to the ground, as glittering embers cascaded down from them like a rain of light. It was considered immensely lucky to catch one of their sparks and even luckier to have a sun spirit alight near you.

Those who’d been lucky enough to have that experience said beneath the glow of ethereal light,they’d seen the faces of the spirits, that they were beautiful beyond measure. Some even tried to touch them, but no one had ever done so.They never stayed still for more than a second and were too fast to catch. Any who tried ended up with nothing but handfuls of air.

Robert came up behind Billy, his son’s hair a yellow as bright as the noonday sun, turned orange like the rest of the world. “It’s them!” He said. “It’s really them! You were right! You were right, dad!”

The man put his hand on his son’s back, leaning against the fence in turn. The last time he’d seen the Sun Spirits was a year to this very day. It was the day after Elin had passed. He’d been sitting on the porch, watching the sun set. Billy had been sleeping, the boy exhausted from his grief. Robert hadn’t been much better, but he’d watched the sun descend bit by bit, remembering the last moments he’d spent with his wife and what she’d whispered to him just before she passed away. He’d waited like he’d promised, waited until the sun spirits had come.

Just like that day, Robert watched in silence for long minutes, enraptured by the otherworldly beauty of the shining wisps and then, just as he had hoped and prayed... a fourth one appeared, rising from the hills like a falling star returning to the sky. It was a pale green that matched the colour of Elin’s eyes and as he and his son watched,the spirit ascended to join the other three, twisting and racing across the sky in wordless beauty. Time and again it dipped towards the ground, each time diving lower and taking longer before it raced back up, each time coming closer to where Robert and Billy stood. At last, like fire tracing a line of kerosene, the spirit slid towards them, pausing in the air as the twinkling emerald glow shone across the pair.

“Hello, love,” Robert said as he stared into the center of the spirit’s glistening lights. In the ever-shifting form, he thought he saw a beautiful face staring back at him. His voice was soft and he kept it low so that Billy couldn’t hear him. “I’ve missed you.” For an instant, he thought he saw sadness there and then the shimmering green trail darted away from him, winding around Billy as the child cried out in surprised delight as the warm, verdant light enveloped him. Then, true to its nature, the sun spirit raced back to the sky to join the others in their shining dances, staying there until the setting of the sun. As its light faded, the spirits vanished back beyond the horizon, there to dwell in the memories of those who’d seen them until another day when they would take to the skies and offer those who saw them the same sense of wonder and joy.