It was nearing the break of dawn. The sky was a constant blue in the twilight hours and slowly getting lighter, one shade at a time. Dark clouds were drawing nearer to the shore. She could hear them on the wind, caressing her face with cold, ethereal touches. She could hear them on the waves as white horses galloped and stormed along the beach and retreated back into the abyss, their battle to take the land lost yet again, but forever they waged a war without a point or a memory of why it started.

She had her eyes closed, profoundly entranced by the majesty manifesting through her senses at this purest hour and enlightened to a higher consciousness by the exalting visions of heaven and paradise so masterfully painted at the apex of her head. Inspiration rapidly emerged from the shadows and evanesced into the background in wisps of spiritual flame, dissolving as the scenes unfolded in moving pictures and morphed from tales of brilliant fantasy ingrained into her soul to the fields of Elysium, unearthing eternity out of the mist and carving it into shape. Her passion drifted out into the rip of euphoria, the tide rushing over her head and pulling her under, where the depths were boundless and where concepts beyond comprehension thrived in frightening numbers, starved for a feast and salivating at the scent of her wounded faith.

Unable to let these revelations pass her by, which would defeat the sole purpose of her divine quest to this isolated location, which lay impaled somewhere on the edge of reality’s mountainous spire, Ashley surrendered to her overwhelming compulsion to express them, emptying her vessel of all the precious cargo it contained, freeing it onto the blank paper resting on top of her thigh, two hundred and forty odd pages of endless possibility. There were no restrictions. No errors. Just the pinnacle of creation versus a language.

Nothing held the pen back from its absolute domination of everything that ever graced her realm with the good fortune of existence or would ever miraculously come to be in the future. With a single word, she could alter the basic foundations of life, forever taint the holiest teachings of religion and disassemble universal truth into no more than fragments of nonsensical fiction. She understood these potential consequences but defied them without relinquishing a thread from what wonder had woven in her core. Her heart couldn’t be confined to any limitations on the honesty it confided to the forgiving ears of solitude, irrespective of how bountiful and permissive they may be. This was a glimpse of poetry and she tried to snatch it into a still frame before it vanished into oblivion and left her for good, and left her for death.