Twilight Corona

She sliced through one universal, seemingly everlasting dream with eyes that pierced even the light itself. Her shape was carved into the trees, the grass, and the sky until she appeared in full force. Her hair erupted as would the Sun’s corona, unleashing striking solar flares into the surrounding space beginning at her scalp, which folded, crackled, and collapsed eerily with the tranquility of ripples from singular water droplets joining a waveless sea.

Her aura still undoubtedly shone a passionate scarlet, but this time, no hard, dark lines gripped and chained the borders of her form. The evening light flowed around her, frequenting where harsh edges once delineated her mass’s location.

She had weathered the hardships of many lives on her own, and she had grown. A warm, yellow-orange glow radiated from her mahogany irises, revealing an enveloped darkness. Her eyes were rings of fire, possibly blinding to lend more than a glance. They projected visions of a future where all was eventually reduced to a singularity.

The mystery of where the star that illuminated the land upon which we stood was finally resolved: she embodied it. Where this astral body had been before perhaps neither of us could ever know, but the state of wonder which had produced this question was instantly vaporized upon her arrival, leaving answerless concrete queries attempting to unravel the intricacies of her abstract composition in its stead.

These two gaps in knowledge were similar, however, in prompting me to ask, as a child would, from where the light defining all that our eyes ever knew originated.

She finally spoke with the bite of a flickering flame, spitting embers with her consonants:

“I am Ruby, guardian of dreams.”

Some of the plasma drifted further from its core, causing it to become a thin wisp of smoke, dimming and obscuring the world. The trees seemed to grow all of their branches at once, extending to shroud the forest behind her in somber, nighttime violet-indigo hues.

She seemed to realize that her anomaly was palpable, pushing her to clarify. Her voice created life where her fire had briefly wavered, but this time delivered the brunt of the chill that occupied the interval between flares:

“I am as I was, but now, I have lived.”