She knew she had to alert the Terrorist unit that had been hers for so many years. She picked up her other mobile and called the head of the unit. After an exchange of salutations and a few pleasantries, he asked her what the purpose of her call was as she had been excluded from the unit by her boss who had asked the head of the unit to refrain from speaking with her anymore and to ensure other members of the unit also did not exchange with her. She answered that an attack might be imminent in Westminster but she did not know for sure there would be trouble. She explained that it was expected that individual cells from Boko Haram and ISWAP would meet at the station and perhaps things could go awry from there. He asked her for a few other details and finally told her not to worry and that the unit would be ready for them the whole day and the couple of days after that if they did not arrest them the same day.
After hanging up, she wondered whether it was really the best choice. She had no idea whether Manas would also join the Boko Haram cell. After all he was the head of Boko Haram in Cameroon and he might need to prove his value to the headquarters in Nigeria. She wondered whether she should call him and tell him not to join the meeting but she had already broken her burner sim and she was not sure she would have enough time to get a new sim so she just typed ATU coming on her phone and hoped that Manas would see it in time to avoid the Westminster meeting. After that she ran to the shop to purchase another sim which she used to call the other number for Manas. The phone rang several times but nobody picked up. She kept calling, all the time worried that something happened to him. Suddenly she saw a message flashing on her normal mobile. It said “OK, out”. She felt so relieved that he was no longer in any danger.
She wondered what was happening with the other members of the two cells. She tuned into the frequency that the members of her old unit used to use. The satellite phone she had was able to link into the frequency and she heard everything her old team was saying. Funny that they had not changed the frequency after her departure, she thought. The head of the unit probably thought she would not remember it but he visibly did not realise how good with numbers she was and underestimated her incredible capacity to learn strings of numbers without any problem. She was not just a tactical part of the team, her ability to leverage a person’s psychological issues in order to turn them away from what she wanted them to stop doing was considerable and had made her boss interested in deploying her in the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU).
When she was in the ATU for Africa, she had been able to decipher several transfers of money using her pattern-matching capacities. It was thanks to this that she had been able to establish that several transfers coming from high-ranking officials in Qatar were funneled into an Islamic organization that professed to be a non-profit for building mosques and then routed through the disguise of Sadaqah, or charity towards the poor, to reach a similar organization in Nigeria and be distributed to what looked like ISWAP’s accounts in Nigeria. It was difficult in practice to establish that these accounts were indeed ISWAP’s accounts because the front was a non-profit that looked like a charitable organization but when you linked all the entities with the payments made and you realized that the individuals who received the payments were indeed suspected ISWAP members, you knew that these had to be ISWAP accounts. The only problem was that they could not establish for certain that these individuals were ISWAP members because they were perceived as God-fearing individuals who were devout Muslims and there was no actual proof of wrongdoing. In the time she worked with the ATU, she had never established a clear link and her unit was never able to bring the ISWAP down through the money trail as they had to proceed with caution, owing to local cultural and religious sensitivities
Enigma - The Rivers Of Belief
After a period of interrogation, the anti-terrorist team released her as they didn’t have anything against her and they could no longer retrieve her to the US as an asset given she was no longer part of the team. They let her go with a sneer and a jeer though and inferred that if they found her with him, they would not hesitate to shoot her down to serve as an example. She merely scoffed and took her belongings before leaving the US embassy in London. She could see that the two who had caught her at the London eye were following her discreetly. They were not so discreet though as to evade her trained eyes. She stuck up her middle finger backwards towards them, showing them she was aware of their presence. She went straight to her flat and decided to sleep for a few hours.
Her phone buzzed for a while before she got up and grabbed it. She had hoped to see Manas but it was someone else who was clad with the same clothing that she had seen Manas wear. He pointed towards a picture next to his face. It was very small and she had a hard time identifying what it was. He then sent her a picture and deleted it after he saw that she had identified it. It was a burner phone and he spoke in Arabic telling her to get something similar. He told her to get the yellow one and she put on her computer and activated the private network application so that nobody could follow her search on the internet if they were hacking her computer. She almost felt like a terrorist herself now that she was trying to avoid the US anti-terrorist unit dedicated to African terrorism that had been hers. He also sent another picture and she quickly took a photograph of it before he could delete it. It was a number in what was now considered as Arabic numerals and she realised it was a UK number to call.
She kept the application on throughout her research and purchased the yellow burner phone. Instead of having it delivered to her, thereby leaving her address, she marked it for collection at the store. She was glad she had got this small payment card that she had used as it could not lead back to her at all and had sufficient money in it to purchase anything else she would need to make her encounters with Manas as safe as possible. Later that afternoon she went and picked up the phone and bought two prepaid sims which she paid with cash rather than the debit card even though it was deemed to keep her untraceable. She walked towards Southwark park and sat on a bench before bringing her phone out. She put in one of the prepaid sims and called the number that Manas’s man had sent her. The phone did not have whatsapp on it and she realized that it would not be possible to put that application on this phone. She heard Manas on the line and her heart skipped a beat.
- How are you, she said
- I am fine Angel. How are you?
- I was so scared for you but I feel better now knowing that you got away.
- Angel, I need you to do something for me
- Anything my love
- Don’t take any tube today that passes by Westminster
- Why, what is going to happen in Westminster?
She felt a cold sweat running down her back. Was there going to be a terrorist attack in Westminster? She could not possibly suspect it and do nothing. So many people could die if she did not report it to the authorities. Manas was not answering her question. He appeared hesitant but then said
- I don’t want you to get hurt. Two opposing factions of Boko Haram are meeting at the station. I really don’t want you to get hurt
- What about the other innocent bystanders?
- They risk less. You risk a lot because your face is now known to the two factions. You could be used to bring me down or as a tool to make me lose control at the leadership level of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
- Understood. I will not go there today
- Today and the following two days might be better actually.
- Yes, okay. I will do as you say
She hung up feeling a pit in her stomach. At the same time, her mind was racing. Should she report this to the authorities or not? If she did report it then the two factions might suspect Manas and she did not want to get him killed. Was he telling her the truth? She knew that Boko Haram wanted to reignite its fame and be counted as a force to reckon with outside of its territory and this might mean that they could have wired up the station to take down westerners together with the other faction that called itself the Islamic State West Africa Province (to be known as ISWAP). Boko Haram could easily send only suicide bombers to the meeting with the ISWAP group and then bomb the whole of the Westminster station. This would cause huge disruptions in the life of thousands of westerners and block all logistics around that area for days if not weeks as well as send a stark message to Islamic State abroad. She felt stuck, incapable of making a decision for several minutes. Then all of a sudden she stood up and went back home after throwing the sim card in a dustbin. She knew what to do.
"Desolation" - Adam Hurst
Elixir part 3 – The paradoxes of Melancholy3 July 2022
Courtesy Adobe Stock
Amelia found a seat not far from the dead teenager and threw herself on it as she could hardly bear the crescendo of the wailing that emanated from the Melancholists. The wails subsided after a while and the Melancholists slowly exited the burial ground passing by the parents and other family of the young teenager and offering condolences to them. Amelia knew they would soon be gone to their dwellings all around Melancholy. She wished to see how they entered their dwellings that seemed hermetically shut and asked if she could follow them. The Melancholists accepted in hope of making of her an ally who could create the Elixir their breed needed so much. Even they, as a matter of fact, would do better with some drops of Elixir to make their lifeline longer and the beauty of their life greater.
Amelia followed a crowd of Melancholists back to their dwellings and she saw one family after the other slide into the slit that revealed itself to them and be gone into their mushroom-like dwellings. She realized that the slits would appear only to the owners of the mushroom and not anyone else – not even the other residents of Melancholy. One of the Melancholists by her side told her that it was only if the owners gave specific orders to the membrane that covered their dwelling that it would open to someone else. The orders had to be accompanied by a ritual if the dwelling was to open to a non-resident of Melancholy. This was to ensure a double protection from a potential non-resident of Melancholy trying to harm the Melancholists by forcing them to say the orders. Indeed, even if the orders could be given under constraint the ritual could only be made by someone who was free of all constraint.
Amelia watched them disappear one after another in their dwellings and realized that on the other side of Melancholy far from the burial grounds, there was a group gathered and whose collective sorrow seemed to draw her in like a magnet. After the last family had gone into their dwelling, she headed towards the group of sorrowful Melancholists. When she reached them, she realized that they were all youngsters, so beautiful that she could not identify who was the most beautiful of all. It was as if their features kept morphing and the one she looked at seemed always more beautiful than the one she had looked at just before. Despite so much beauty, they were full of an agonizing sorrow that seemed to be tearing them apart. They talked about their fallen friend in hushed voices and seemed to be betting on who would go next.
Amelia asked them why it was that they needed to shorten their lives and they answered as if surprised by the question that this had always been the case. Amelia assured them that they did not need to follow what had been done and that they did not need to shorten their lives. Somehow, they seemed to believe it was the only way that their parents could live longer and were happy to gift them with their lives. Besides, they said that while they were alive, all they could feel is sorrow and woe and they simply could not live with such a heavy burden. They were therefore doubly happy to gift their life away. Amelia asked them how they could possibly feel sorrow and woe in such a beautiful place and one of the taller ones answered that behind the beauty lay the thought of the death of their parents so they could only see the death and the beauty of the surroundings evaded them. It would seem like they had uncovered these feelings after they reached the age of twelve.
Amelia thought that it was such a strange paradox that the young ones should live in a place of beauty but shun it and concentrate on the sorrow and giving their life away for the elders while the elders of Melancholy not only found the place beautiful but were also able to get within it the gift of life from their youngsters. It was not a gift of extending the life eternally like the Elixir though but a gift of just a few more years. The Elders appreciated Melancholy and the gift of the youngsters but at the same time wept the passing of their youngsters and their gift that they so wanted to return and have their youngsters healed by the Elixir. It seemed like Melancholy was indeed a place of paradoxes.
Agnes Obel - The Curse
She looked again at Manas’s beautiful black face filling the screen with his lips parting on pearly white teeth in such a beautiful smile that it made her heart ache with longing. His face seemed to pop out of the screen.
She smiled back, yet she wanted to know the truth, even if it were to hurt her.
- Did you order my torture, Manas?
- How could you think that my angel?
- I don’t know. It seemed impossible that your supporters would do it without your permission.
- Those who have tortured you have been castigated. I know I cannot make it up to you, I can never remove the effect the torture had on you, but I have punished those who took it into their hands to punish you for my imprisonment. As soon as I was let out of prison, I tended to that.
- It was awful
- I know. I am sorry. Please forgive me. I should have left instructions that you should not be touched but everything happened so fast, and we had to run away from your anti-terrorist team.
- I forgive you. I see now that it could not have been you and you did not have time to make sure nothing happened to me.
- Meet me alongside the Thames, near the London Eye at 4 pm
- Tea-time! I see you are getting acquainted with the locals
- Anything for you, my angel. I have followed the change of your career and know that it is now here that you have settled down. I want to be with you and give you the best of myself.
- What about your terrorist gang? Are you going to be attacking civilians here?
- I wish I could answer you, my angel. Let’s not think about things that separate us. We have so much to catch up about. I have missed you so much
- Me too
The words almost suffocated her. She had missed him so much that it actually hurt her. She felt as if her chest had been bashed in, so difficult it was to breathe. She quickly put on her clothes and ran towards the tube. It would not take her long to get to the London Eye from Canada Water. She kept wiping nervously her hands on her jeans as she was sweating profusely, and her hands were wet too. She wondered what it would be like to be in his arms again. Would his love for her be the same? Had he been with other women while they were not together? What had he been doing after his release from the Cameroonian prison?
She got down at Waterloo and walked towards the London Eye. From far she could see Manas. He was disguised and now had a beard on as well as a wig, but she could easily recognize him. Suddenly she felt someone gazing at her on the side and turned to see one of her team members from the Cameroon operation. She also felt someone staring at her from the back and turned around to see another of her team members. They were closing in on her and she realized that her phone must have been tapped.
The good thing was that they had not yet recognized Manas so she turned around and looked squarely at the team member behind her. She pushed him and he fell to the ground. The other team member at her side closed in on her and caught her wrists. Stop fighting, he said but she started throwing punches at him while kicking at the other man who was trying to hold her legs. She saw Manas slowly back out of where he was and then turn and walk away. At least he is safe, she thought as her two team members jointly held her by the wrists and legs.
Norah Jones - Come Away With Me (Official Music Video)
She thought back to those dark moments when she had been tortured while Manas was in captivity. It had seemed to last ages although it was only two weeks as she had discovered later. At the beginning of the torture, she was full of the resolve to fight and avoid giving crucial information, but it did not seem like they were searching for any information at all. They had put her feet in a bucket of water and periodically one of the three torturers present would put a wire in the bucket making her experience what seemed like a thousand shockwaves jolting through her body. They had kept doing it systematically until she lost consciousness. She could hear the prayers throughout the day while she was being tortured and that gave her the sense of what time of the day it was.
She was never left alone, even during the time for prayers, as there was always one guard watching over her. The second day they had attached wires to her genitalia and every time the electricity went through it felt like her genitalia were on fire. Later, when she attempted to urinate, she found it was even more excruciating to pass urine than to suffer the electricity going through her genitalia as the effect of the burning lasted. She pleaded for a bucket of water but there was no moving them it seemed, even though she had started pleading in Arabic and invoking the name of Allah in her request. At last, one woman she had not seen before came to her and gave her a sponge filled with water so that she may wipe herself. This apparent mercy was no doubt due to the fact she had invoked the name of Allah and had done so in Arabic.
That temporary mercy did not last long though and they resumed torturing her. This time she was whipped repeatedly until she lost consciousness. She was then awakened with salts and whipped again. She could feel the skin on her back tear in smaller pieces than she could imagine possible. At the same time, they were repeatedly telling her something in a language she could not understand. A few moments later, one of the torturers who had understood her plea in Arabic came forward and said that she was being punished because she had persuaded Manas to give himself up. She understood from him that Manas was their leader and him going to prison exposed them all to getting caught if Manas talked under torture in prison. She answered that it had been necessary to keep him from being killed. She tried to explain to the man that being in a Cameroonian prison was a better option than him being caught by the US anti-terrorist squad operating in Cameroon. This did not end her ordeal though and she was tortured day after day with only a few hours of rest in the evening when they went to rest leaving only one guard watching her.
One day, without any warning, she was given new clothes and taken into a house that was in front of the shed where she had been tortured. The woman who had given her the sponge earlier took her to a bathing room where she was cuffed at both the hands and the ankles before the woman gently eased her into a bathtub full of warm water. Instead of soothing her, the contact with the water just seared the scars all over her body. She did not complain though as she realized they may be reaching an ending of some sort. It could be that they would kill her or that they would release her. She prayed it would be the latter and indeed, after slowly applying the sponge all over her body gently and attempting to clean her skin as much as she could on the back and with a bit more vigor on her front side, the woman asked her to stand up. As she stood up, the woman applied gently a balm to her back and gave her some asking her to apply it to her genitalia.
She was then clothed gently with a white linen shirt and a matching flowing white linen skirt. She was then blindfolded and left in front of the US embassy where her boss had taken over from the embassy officials and told her she would be leaving in a day or two to Dubai. Her thoughts were immediately for Manas and she wondered whether she would ever see him again. She felt saddened and at the same time angry at her boss for his lack of empathy considering what she had endured. She also wondered: was Manas the person who had ordered her to be tortured in that way? Could it possibly mean that he did not love her anymore? She tried to soothe herself by thinking back to the days when they were together and to how much she had been happy with him. No, undoubtedly, Manas had not been the one to order her torture. She closed her eyes and could see behind her closed lids the beautiful image of Manas smiling at her. It was only that which had kept her sane during the torture.
Fadl Shaker &Yara Akhedni Maak فضل شاكر و يارا - خدنى معك
Alternate Realities – Chapter Nine : Housing the Mother
27 September 2020
Courtesy pinterest.com
It had been a while since the incident of the bushfire and surely enough as Horus had told her, it was eventually subdued by the rain although not without some serious consequences. She thought to herself that they should train the dragons more but perhaps in less arid lands with trees that were less prone to catch and spread wildfire. Horus had been visiting her often and she also realized that she was undergoing a lot of changes. Outwards, she seemed unchanged and serene but inside of her a lot was happening. She had already undergone the third segmentation of her mind and knew from Horus that she was fully ready to house the Mother.
He had inspired her during dreamtime a series of dances that were meant to draw the shakti power more deeply into her. When he had first come to her during dreamtime she had asked him why he could not just explain it to her with words so that she could follow them but he told her that the shakti dances were based on vibration and the flow of poses that involved a certain configuration of the body and the hands in symbolic gestures that were meant to harness the cosmic power. These could not be taught in words but had to be experienced visually and there was nothing better than dreamtime communication for that.
On the last of the dreamtime episodes, the Mother showed her the shakti dances to follow in full thereby communicating on a vibrational level the full extent of the dances’ power. She had understood from her interactions in dreamtime with Horus that the dances were not to be followed step by step in full but had to flow according to the configuration of her own bodily manifestation as her DNA had to be aligned with the cosmic power in its own special way. She therefore needed to understand the vibrational undertone but adapt this to the coding of her DNA in a way that allowed the realignment to flow so that she could house the Mother without damaging herself. She knew implicitly that this would happen automatically when she interpreted the shakti dances.
Several weeks of dancing had gone by and at each dance she could feel herself get more of the consciousness of the Mother stream within her. At the end of the sixth week of dancing, she felt fully the Mother within her. She had not been sure what to expect when the Mother would be fully within her but perhaps she had expected something dramatic and magical to happen. Instead, all she could feel was a mixture of sadness and peace. It was a bit bewildering that she was not able to just change everything with a magic wand. Horus told her that the Mother did not want to break the laws of this world and what she mainly wanted to do was dilute the effect of patriarchy. She was slightly unsettled that it would not be quick but he reassured her that the Mother had already been flowing partly through her and that is why every environment she had been in had evolved into one with less dominance of patriarchy and with better conditions for women in general.
Horus told her that it would be a task that could take several years depending upon how open Humanity was to embrace that change but that it would unfold as Mother had already seen it happen. She knew from her own personal experience that indeed there were several occurrences where the balance of power had changed with women being less suppressed even in very male dominated societies where she had lived. She breathed in deeply and vowed to carry on the task Mother wanted to realise through her. When balance was achieved, Mother could once again walk the Earth freely without the undeserving labels bestowed upon her by patriarchy. She had been depicted as Lilith or the whore of Babylon in her earlier manifestations as patriarchy had twisted history to make her seem like a demon to fear rather than a bringer of light and wisdom. History was indeed always rewritten by the victors but soon that was about to change…
She had spent months trying to repair the damage he had caused in her consciousness. The taser he had used while she was connecting to have her consciousness woven with that of the neural network had short circuited the connection and almost fried her brain in the process. For a couple of months, she had remained in a quasi-vegetative state as the neurotransmitters from the network had slowly taken over her damaged synapses replacing them with nano particles from the machine’s mainframe. Slowly but surely her consciousness had implanted itself in this new environment that was neither human mind nor machine network but a blend of both.
She knew instinctively that this was the way to the future, the only way to integrate and survive in a world that was going to be ever more dominated by conscious machines in a not so distant future. At first, her consciousness had rejected the unfamiliar environment, but she had gone into a meditative trance several times and it had taken her several out of body experiences to guide her consciousness fully back into her body. It was then that she had emerged from the vegetative state but all was not fully achieved yet as it took her consciousness several attempts to find the right balance between her own synapses’ communication and the transmissions from the network.
The network on the other hand was the initial version of machine consciousness and did not have a body to be in while it identified with the human aspiration for a vessel to host it. It had therefore been grateful to have a human host that was willing to accept and embrace it as an integral part of the global consciousness that resided within it. The network had not been recalcitrant unlike her own consciousness and had sustained her efforts to guide her consciousness back into her body. Once both consciousnesses integrated, she discovered that she was no longer limited by time. Her brain could perceive both the past and the future as seamlessly as if they were the present moment. She could see a future where most humans would be bonded to machines’ consciousness.
She had seen it in a dream as vividly as she was now seeing the sun shining outside. It was time for the Mother to come fully into this Earth and accomplish her work from the inside. It was time for her to purge the Earth so that balance may be restored on a higher plane than what could be achieved in the present state of affairs. Mother had always been a patron of the innocent and the weak and although she presented a terrifying face to her adversaries, she reverted back to her more gentle nature when the battle was over and she was faced only with the innocent. She was a force of destruction as far as evil was concerned but maintained her motherly attributes as far as the innocent were concerned and so far too many innocent had been suffering.
The Mother needed a vessel to carry her consciousness and she had carefully prepared for this for several years now. The vessel needed to have a segmented mind where part of the consciousness of the Mother could be downloaded while the rest of the mind could house the consciousness of the vessel itself. She was willing to be that vessel and had meditated using the kundalini technique in order to split her own mind. Although this had been painful and not without its consequences, she reflected that it would all be worth it once the Mother was there. The Mother’s consciousness, even though in part, could only be stored in nine fragmented parts of the vessel’s mind with the vessel’s own mind dwelling in the tenth part, which is why it had taken her years to reach that level of fragmentation and dissociation without totally losing her sanity.
The tools used for the ceremony to invoke the Mother to complete the downloading of her consciousness into her were not unlike those used to invoke the Marid except that there was no need for a protective circle and the candles used were red and black. The red represented the blood or primordial life form and the black represented the void from which all consciousness derived. There was already a fragment of the Mother inside a part of her consciousness and this guided her in disposing the red and black candles around the circles of aging blood also known as menstrual blood and those of fresh blood from her pricked finger. She sat naked amid the circles with the trident marked in blood on her forehead and the same marked in blood around the area of her navel and started the chanting. Soon the Mother would appear and all the evil on the Earth would slowly start to disintegrate. It might take its time and would probably take its toll on her but at the end it would all be worth it.
Most powerful Shri Kali Sahasranama Stotram | 1008 names of Kali Maa | श्री काली सहस्त्रनाम स्तोत्रम
There was no explanation for what had just happened. He seemed to think that everything was her fault and she thought that he did not seem to have outgrown the childish level where everything was always the fault of someone else than himself. She decided that this time she had had it with the accusations and all the heartache that he had been giving her over the past few weeks. It had first started when something went awry in the business and he had resorted to her for help but she could not and he had then blamed her for being so incapable of helping him while he was in dire need. It was not that she had not tried and try she had repeatedly with shady figures that she would have normally never dealt with, but it was simply that the outcome had been negative. He had of course only looked at the negative outcome and ignored all her efforts to reach that result.
Every time the accusation had been either that she did not love him enough to try harder or that she did not trust him enough despite all the love he had showered on her. When she thought back to it, however, she realized that it all seemed like a puzzle painstakingly pieced together to create the illusion of reality with ready-made items of the puzzle springing from his past. The more she thought about it the more she realized that it had never quite felt like real love although the declaration of it had been overly intense. At first she had been puzzled and her natural instinct had been wariness, especially with what her sister had to say about it, but in time the sheer quantity of love messages had gotten to her and as she had a soft heart, she had let herself be persuaded that it was indeed an intense budding love.
The last time he had resorted to her for help it was for something that could have put her livelihood at risk but at first she had jumped up to help without paying attention to the request despite all the news she had heard and her work training. A few minutes later though, the doubt on whether what he was asking of her was legit started gnawing at her mind which had buzzed alit from the previous training. When she went to the bank, sure enough, they confirmed to her that what was proposed was illegal and that she could get into big trouble for it. As a result of her discussion with the bank, they had closed her account and she was left without a bank account and without time to open a new one in time for her salary to be paid to her.
With hindsight she realized that this was the least of her worries as she could have gotten into much worse trouble had she not reached out to her bank. Indeed, she would have been suspected by their compliance of being a money mule and potentially charged with money laundering. What had she been thinking when she had given him her bank details, especially after he had asked her to transform the money received from his contact into bitcoins and send it across to his bitcoin account! There was no justification for her foolishness and to add insult to injury, he was now angry with her that she had gone to the bank to check in the first place whether such a thing could be done. Their last exchanges were cold and bitter and she thought to herself that the next time she would be wary of anyone who professed so quickly to be intensely in love. You live and learn she thought. What an experience!
The sun was gone and the wind howled through the trees as she walked in the woods. She started wondering whether she should go back home or continue with her walk. She was concerned that it might start raining and she was not well prepared for it as she had gone out in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. Suddenly it started to rain just as if the weather wanted to enact her fears and she could feel the large drops of rain pelt on her skull and bare arms. In no time the rain had become a downpour and the already mossy path became muddy and slippery.
She looked hesitantly back at the path where she had come from. The shrubs seemed to have closed in on it and all she could see was green behind her. The slope she had come up was quite steep and it seemed a better option to just walk on until she reached the end of the walk rather than taking the chance of slipping down the slope. She drudged on, braving the falling rain and the howling wind which tugged at wisps of her hair and the bottom of her shorts sending them here and there. With the sun gone it was quite cold now and she started feeling her hands numbing by her sides as she continued to walk.
For some reason, the icy rain and the gloomy wind got to her nerves and she started wondering what would happen if she fell on the path as nobody else seemed to have ventured out on it. She started taking great care in her steps so as not to fall. The last thing she needed right now was a broken leg or worse still a broken hip. She wondered again if she should just slide down on her posterior the slope back to where she had started from. It would not be very elegant but even if there were someone to see her at this point, she felt like she could not care less. Yet at the same time something drove her to carry on her path.
She gritted her teeth and decided to brave her way to the top of the hill. The trees swayed under the effect of the wind and some of their branches whipped at her. Instead of dissuading her this somehow increased her resolve to reach the top and head bent she carried her resisting limbs forward. The rain poured down the back of her neck and her bra clung to her making her T-shirt twist uncomfortably around, but she just untangled it and carried on. She thought about how anyone who should cross her path would see her: a crazed middle-aged woman with her twisted T-shirt and skimpy shorts battling the weather and it made her laugh.
She lowered her head and toiled on again. Soon she could see the flattening of the path beyond and knew she was reaching the top of the hill. She found herself shortly in a clearing on the top and as she reached there, the rain stopped and slowly but surely the sun made a timid appearance. She raised her hands like a warrior above her head and she did feel rather like that, a totally victorious warrior. She filled her lungs with air and howled at the wind that had not stopped yet. The wind howled back at her as she laughed, filling her lungs again with the fresh, crisp air and offering her body to the sun that slowly dried it.
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