Higherlight

By Jenny Chasteen

 “Come.”

The voice rumbles through my dreams, calling me to the waking world. Cool, wet wind swirls over me, flowing through the open shutters of my arched window. When I went to sleep, those shutters were locked and bolted. A smile creeps up from my soul. They should know that locked windows never stop my friend.

I lay aside the sheets and tiptoe across cold stone floor to the window. Blue clouds roll above, close enough to touch. Wind whispers in my ears. “Fly.”

I smile and step up onto the windowsill. Beneath me, the black tower drops like a sheer cliff. The forest and farmland at the bottom belong to a different world. The world so afraid of my friend and of my ability to hear his voice that it locked me here. Their loss. My friend is from a better world.

I walk off the windowsill. Wind whips around me, cold and stiff, and lifts me back up toward the clouds. The smoky blue depths envelop my body, like I’m diving into an ocean upside down.

My friend purrs like a cat the size of a mountain. “You are here.”

I lie back and fold my hands behind my head as though floating on water. The clouds’ darkness walls me in, but it’s awake and sizzling with energy, not like the dead darkness of the tower. “You haven’t come in a while, Storm.”

“I have much business across the world. Many fields to water and children to feed. Many strongholds to break down and prideful men to humble. Yet I am tired of sojourning so long in the lower regions where none understand my voice.”

My eyebrows knit together. “You’ve been lonely all these years, too.”

His sigh rushes across me as a whirling gust. “I’ll tell you a story from the Higher. I’m never alone while you share my world through stories.”

“You’re the best storyteller in the world.” I close my eyes. “But each story is like a drop of water. I’m thirsty for rain. A thousand years of rain. Can’t you let me see the Higher?”

“You know mortals can’t pass through the skydome.” A growl edges his voice.

“I don’t mean that! I mean—can’t I look at it? When you leave again, all I’ll have left is the inside of that tower. Imagination isn’t enough now. I need to experience something more.”

The clouds around me soften. “I feel the same way, trapped in the humans’ tiny world. But I warn you: if you see the Higher, you’ll never return to the lower regions the same.”

I sit up straight. “That’s what I want! A real change.”

Storm stills. “Very well.” Then the clouds beneath me billow and lift me up and up. The darkness above me thins, and cool, silver light washes over me. Storm’s rumbling far below fades away.

My ascent jerks to a halt, and just above my head is a thin but solid fog, like frosted glass. Through the blur, I make out purple mountains with stars on their caps instead of snow. Bristly columns like pine trees rise on the shores of bright silver oceans, where white triangles sail from bay to bay. Nebula-islands hover in the unending sky.

My chest tightens. “Storm… you lived here before you were sent to work in my world?”

His silence answers me.

“And there’s no way I could ever go there?” Sickness swirls in my stomach. He was right. I can’t simply go back to my tomb-like tower after seeing the Higher.

“It is not a realm for mortals.” Lightning flashes beneath me. The energy stands all my hairs on end and sets my heart stampeding. “You cannot get in without a Higherlight. And they are only given to natives of the Higher who will return to their home realm when their work is complete.”

A whisper pulls my gaze back to the drifting ships—a whisper that calls to me like my own name. I can hear other Higher beings, too? That’s amazing, but hearing isn’t enough for me anymore. “There’s no other way to get a Higherlight?”

Storm goes silent again for a long minute. “They can be transferred.”

“Transferred?” Did that mean…? “Wait. That’s not what I meant.”

“Why have I never seen it? I could deliver you from the scorn of your fellow humans. Lift you high above them forever.”

“Storm, stop! It’s all right. We have each other down here.”

“How could I whet your appetite for the bright lands, yet shut you out of them? I lived in the High World for eons. You were doomed by birth to be bound to the earth.”

A bright bolt strikes my breastbone, shooting pain for a split second and then warming my chest with a sphere of golden light.

Tears rain down my face. “Storm, you belong in the Higher. I belong…” But I don’t know where I belong anymore.

“You have been a good friend to me, Stormspeaker.”

My friend raises me again toward the glass ceiling. The warm light in my chest melts the barrier like frost on a late winter’s morning, and I rise into air clear and sharp enough to cut me straight through. The foggy ceiling on my world—the ground of the Higher—regrows over the hole. It obscures Storm and silences the voice I’ve always heard when dark clouds rolled in.

I raise my eyes to my new homeland. The Higher isn’t merely a story now. It is the purple light above me and the silver sand under my feet. But Storm will never see it again.

A white sail glides toward me on the silver sea until the ship scrapes the shore. “Come,” says a clear, solemn voice.

Here, everyone speaks the language I was born to understand. But I find myself willing to give anything, even my ascension, to hear Storm’s deep rumble again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenny Chasteen has been hooked on storytelling since she was a toddler dictating to her siblings. She’s an eighteen-year-old homeschool graduate, the self-published author of the SwordLight trilogy, and a Young Writer’s Workshop Author. As a ten-year Bible Quizzer, she’s head-over-heels nerdy about anything biblical. As an aunt to fourteen, she’s inspired by crazy kids. As an INFJ, she’s confusing even to herself.

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