**Early chapter of a new novel …
The crowd, like a crackling fire blown to world-devouring proportion by the steady gusts of a desert night, roars.
The stage lights white-hot, row after row like the deep emanations of the coals, the sea of faces beyond a moving, swirling mass of black, the nighttime sky dotted with the brightness of cellphone lights and flashes, a swirl of sparks flowing up, up, up only to disappear, to blink out and, with another great gust, be urged to towering height again, even taller than before.
Her breathing heavy, but controlled, she traipses from one end of the stage to the other, an apex predator tracking its prey, salivating at the lingering ghost of its previous meal, pulse braying loudly over the expectation of the next. She looks down at the sequins dotting her chest, the long black flow covering the rest of her body, and exalts.
Still early. Only a few songs in.
It blooms.
Good.
A sound, a thunderclap, a sonic boom followed by a bolt of lightning so bright the first ten rows throw up their hands in terror, shielding themselves from what must be certain death, the storm come charging across the dunes to lay waste to the world. But when they drop, she sees only the glimmer of teeth, lips stretched to form smiles fit to split jaws at the hinge.
Mesmerized. Entranced.
A fresh roar fills the space, this world.
My world.
Ariel stands. She stands and though she thinks she oughtn’t, thinks how unbecoming it must be for a girl, a woman, a being of her stature to do so, she allows herself to smile with them. But while their smiles are smiles of ecstacy, of adulation, of reverence, hers is a smile of knowing, of impending satiation, of the fire as it licks its way toward another repast.
She stretches herself, one long leg out, and waits.
Just right.
She waits.
And even when the change comes, when the light disappears and the dark comes on once more, when a great cheer goes up and the tinkling bleeds into a steady buzzing, into an atmospheric pulse, she waits.
I’m going to get it right this time. Just right. I’m going to get it perfect.
The pulse continues, mutating slowly, grown urgent, the tone increasing in weight until the entire stage, the world, her world, shakes. She can just make out a handful of faces in the front row – euphoric, ecstatic, crazed. But even in the pitch, they struggle, struggle just to look at her, to take in her sacred form, instead peering around at the quiet bodies behind her, the monstrous sets dimly lit by the guiding lights at the edge of the stage, great, grotesque shapes growing out of the swaying ground on which she stands.
She waits, and the pulse grows.
She waits, and the murmur in the crowd increases, strengthens, striving to match the widening pulse.
But then, another sound joins the growing – a familiar sound, a sound outside of the sounds of this world.
It’s a clanging, something like bells.
Sudden terror cuts through her soothing, electrified harmony, as everything around her ripples, a stone dropped at her feet causing the very fabric of all to shift. Even the sound of the pulse, of her own breathing seems to ripple, coming in and out of focus.
No! No! It’s too soon! It’s too soon! I haven’t even started yet!
But already the terror, the panic is upon her, ripples overtaking her, yanking her away from everything, away from herself even, her real self, the sounds of this world fading as the other races forward. And she’s opening her mouth to cry out, screaming incoherent syllables of the most intense fury, the scream turning to entreaties to desperate pleas of nononono.
But then, just like that, just as quickly as they’d come, the ripples are gone, the tinkling, the abhorrent chime calling her back to the other world gone as well, and in a quiet breath it’s as though they never were.
The crowd goes on buzzing, the pulse growing, her hand, now clammy with sweat, still gripped tight to the microphone. The harmony steals over her once more and she settles back into it happily.
Ecstatically.
In the crowd, the flashes come faster, the calls of love and desire, of devotion, more insistent, the fire building itself to an inferno. Ariel soaks in it, letting it pour into the open space within, leaving her full up, near to the brim.
When the pulse has reached an unstoppable place, a place where she’s almost certain it will destroy the very souls to which it calls, she raises the microphone.
Ariel calls out one beautiful note. And over the pulse, the fire comes crashing down.
Calvin Setar 