Pathway through the April rain

Tired the voyagers laid on a shore of Prince Rupert's drops, shiny as the stars at night. They were tired, but there was still the will to listen to some tales. The eldest was telling in fact a story of a tall character called Tin Woodsman once left to rust in the forest due to being caught by heavy rain, but then saved and befriended by a sweet lady that led him to wonderful adventures. That tale was the prize for the youngsters to have discovered and mastered the laws of chiral energy, a phenomenon where someone is not identical to his mirror image because this one is evil and it's going to imprison him into the glass, a manifestation called chiral allergy, the bane of their mankind.

The next day they had to head towards the Native Uvalas, a land of large and elongated sinkholes that come from the enlargement and coalescence of smaller sinkholes. It's a place of remission where the tribe goes to regain health in the body and in the mind.

If chiral allergy was dangerous but rare, due to the order of destroying every human-length mirror, there was another disease far more severe that affected the youngest males of the clan. It was named the Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, inspired by a fictional character from an ancient princess cursed to sleep for ages without ever waking up.

Its symptoms were the continued and grave need to sleep, the uncontrollable desire to follow and manifest sexual activity, the abnormal increase of appetite and consumption of food that nearly provoked famine for the rest of the family members and cognitive disorders ranging from the dissipation of memory, delirium and dementia. It was the deterioration of entire generations that could completely wipe out the tribe from the writings of history.

So every year, when the calm season arrived to give breath to the tired lands, all of the men would take their walking canes and start the travel to seek a cure to save their young people so that they could preserve the prosperity of their kind.

It was not only the salubrity of the soil and the air to heal those who there stayed, but it was the knowledge and the wisdom of its keeper: Tsuru. She held the name of a famous animal in the oldest traditions, the crane bird who was said to live for thousand years and became the effigy of good health and fortune. According to the same stories one was supposed to heal from every disease only by crafting thousand crane birds of paper in the ancient art of origami, the precise folding of paper into various shapes and forms of something existing or into creatures existing only in fantasies and legends.

But the true power of this woman of incredible beauty, wisdom and vast intellect was her ability to read a recently discovered artefact, the Mirror of Ether which suggested to her how to cure any illness, with what and for how long. After those finding she would seek the help of her clockwork birds. These were tiny little mechanical birds that in the other world used to be toys for kids or components of those old tall devices that indicated the passing of time, their name was pendulum clocks or even grandfather clocks, as they were such antiques. These little assistants would go find all of the ingredients for the secret recipes that she would prepare and distribute among those who needed them the most.

The pathway to reach the meaningful and healthful Plain of the Cranebird was long, tiring and challenging, but it was worth crossing even in the most humid season of all, that of April rains.

Inspired by April Rain and the album Mirror of Ether. Do I need to tell you where to find such musical pearls... I don't think so.