THE FIFTH REALM: TURQUOISE — Beyond her sight

One afternoon, on their way back, Helio suggested a different path. Skyblue took it. The place struck her as strange from the start: beside a luminous flower, she found a patch of scorched grass. Branches that should have held firm sagged over the path. Farther on, beautiful, delicate shapes stood among the remains of small acts of destruction.

She stopped in front of a dark stain. It was the same color she had seen coming from her mouth during one of her games.

“What happened here?” she asked, though she was beginning to suspect.

“You’re seeing some of your exercises,” Helio replied.

Skyblue turned her head.

“I never came down this path. I was far away.”

“Your attention stayed in one place. The energy traveled on.”

The dragon walked a few paces. She saw a creation she remembered following and, beside it, others whose effects she had never noticed.

“I asked you to watch each word all the way to the end,” Helio went on. “You followed just one direction. But the spoken word branches out. Whatever it touches responds, and that response reaches something else. If you’d come back along your usual path, you wouldn’t have seen this.”

Skyblue lowered her head. For the first time, her creations seemed like more than a game.

“When you asked me where words and thoughts remained, I told you there was a place,” her guide added. “This is one of them. There are also dark regions you haven’t needed to cross, places where creations born of fear, hatred, or the wish to dominate gather. Those who feed them don’t always recognize what they’ve made. They see the result and call it chance, bad luck, a force from outside themselves.”

“And does all of that eventually appear in the enchanted lands?”

“What is sustained finds ways to take form. That’s why we need to understand the power of our words to create and destroy. Their effects become entwined with those of many other creatures. We have to look beyond what’s happening right beside us.”

Skyblue looked at the scorched grass again. The pain she felt was already threatening to become an accusation against herself.

“I’ve been…”

“Wait,” Helio interrupted. “First, look at what happened. You don’t need to punish yourself to take responsibility. You need to see clearly and act differently.”

The dragon was silent.