She, Cover (Patreon)

It was simultaneously both conceivable and not to conjecture that the statue once had hopes and dreams.

But those were torn away, the moment as soon as she found that she was she, thrust headlong into whatever game this purported to be, one as mysterious to its newest participant as it had been treacherous.

Now, long after the conclusion of her turn, she stood unmoving—frozen in an embarrassing recoil, sealed as an unknown woman and locked in stone to boot. Her incomprehensibly intact sight was wasted on her cowering arm and the only thing that lulled her from classical oblivion was the occasional faint scant scattering of footsteps and even more rarely, the warmth of another's touch.

It was familiar yet ever so distant. Fingertips, then a palm and then an entire arm casually yet desperately brushed up against the statue. The still-breathing woman, heavily and panicked at that, pressed herself direly against the stone-still woman, and a sense of far-flung familiarity washed through her memories.

This precise scene had played out countless times to her foggy recollection. Despite the lack of sight to aid her, she was almost certain it was always the same woman too—in a manner of speaking. The way she breathed, the way she occasionally spoke, even the way she felt...it was she. The same she that she had been for an embarrassingly short stint, the very same that she now stood in paradoxical memory to.

The warm one only pressed herself in further, and the abrupt push, the jarring sensation of motion, took the statue by dull surprise as she tittered forward a fraction of an inch, some portion of a single degree, at the nestling, the press, the yielding mass and warmth of her derriere and shoulder blades against the firmly emplaced sculpture in the middle of this placeless void of a chamber.

Then, the stir of incomprehensible magic resonated from the void beyond her fixed line of sight. An alien droning came as the precursor to the same pink glow, first rippling into the top corner of her vision, undulating brightly as a reflection dancing onto and then off and past her polished rock appendages.

And as the enchantment washed over and through her, the question danced in her mind—did the girl survive? Or had she been caught? Just as she had an eternity ago, did she now have a kindred wayward soul, a metaphorical cellmate, to share in her torment? Was that even what she wanted? Did she wish only the best for her successors? Or was there some part of her that secretly hoped they would fail, whether here or eventually, so as to dilute the imagined humiliation of her loss?

Those thoughts hovered for the briefest of moments, as the statue felt herself ease that same fraction of an inch backward, just as the woman breathed a desperate sigh of relief. As quickly as she had come, the warmth and softness of her presence dislodged without a single thought from the statue, and with erratic respiration and footsteps, she steadily distanced herself from the statue, her fate doing the same.

At one point, the statue had hopes and dreams. Yearnings, uncertainties, questions, of their role in the universe. Yet all that had been disappeared just as her past unappreciative self had—gone, amidst some unknown locale as some unknown lady forgotten in stone.

Whether or not she accepted or even realized it, she had found purpose in the universe—or rather, it had been found upon her. She was a warning, literal cover, to serve as and serve for others, lest they share her fate, her purpose.

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Pinup Club pinup. Enhanced with a story as something of a sendoff to a pinup patron who was with me for four calendar years.