Aura Asunder | Volume One | Chapter Five
the first volume of Aura Asunder
Aura Asunder | Volume One
Chapter Five
By Ophelia Everfall
Content Warning
Shadow’s breadth encompassed those woods surrounding Underwerth in the night.
Janet was listening to her song. That same which drew her from sleep, building louder, growing ever closer as spirit slowed the body. One creeping step would be taken after next.
Her hand would seem to glide as if upon air.
Watching it pass through split rays of moonlight, Janet placed one hand upon the thickened, layered bark of a white oak. That music whispered in ear.
Wafts from a violin were singing through Janet’s window when she’d awoken into her state of confusion. She first believed herself within a dream, then considered if she was imagining the music altogether, thinking it a co-manifestation of the river’s running, believing her dreamscape-factory still possibly churning in psyche. Until it kept playing.
Until she’d heard it get so large and loud.
Thumping beats of heart were strongest when slipping into the hallway, drawn back by its floor’s carved streaks of negligent enthusiasm towards remembrance of the night before; her time spent decorating with new friends, stories shared and games they’d played, those gifts she’d retain. Letty proved a one who Janet would be thinking of often.
Leticia was a magnificence herself, gentle strength apparent always, grafting warmth in spirits so few could claim their gift. A quiet power to her grace would shine through each smile. Every moment she was awakened would be the blessing to all who knew her sight.
Angels weren’t something people saw in each other often, superficiality reigning supreme in the psyches of most. True beauty was of harmony to self, authenticity the key, and young women like Leticia and her sister would show their hand-of-soul through immaculate, and most pleasing visual presentations borne of that highest synchronicity towards their own spirit.
Their beauty was beyond, showing from within, their eyes the portals, only bolstered by one fact: within their hearts they’d have it all beat.
That younger, fiery, fiercely feminine, yet masculine-edged personality within Letty, some style transcending more typical notions of womanhood, sporting an ungraspable androgyny in presentation, while remaining of such delicate but athletic form, was particularly stoking to the feelings of Janet’s heart.
Letty reflected Janet in a way that was affirming. To simply be included in their circle, feeling understood by people who she’d looked up to most, and by aura alone, would have Janet feeling quite lucky.
There was no reason to be worried about curfew. Stepping out of her room to explore the night was only a moonful titillation of excitement. Rulings toward restriction were limited at Underwerth’s School of Mystery Teachings, for each child was unique. A journey of discovery had been planned for immediately, and consciously by Janet upon her arrival.
She only imagined leaving her explorations for another night, after going so late on the Ouija board with Leticia, making chance to ask more questions about her sister by drawing that out, begging them in plainest subtext to tell of Janet’s crush, knowing plainly how Letty would hear by Leticia’s broadly devilish smile as they’d parted.
Janet’s nervousness was only found in retrospect.
Form-fit leggings had been the ultimate of comforting possessions brought to school. Wearing her favorite pair about, and into those darkened passages, unknowing who she’d find, proved reflecting of Janet’s ease. Choosing them in ritual, for sleep, had been known valid to her heart, for christening that newest home-space, utilizing first those tastes most preferred.
Clattering feet would take to a staircase which led downward from the school’s main level, into corridors completely darkened, without a lantern, candleflame’s flickering, nor fixture in sight. Janet took towards thoughts of abandoning her task. With such dreary quiet indoors, that music remained, beckoning her into the forest.
Janet made through a pair of heavy wooden doors quietly, the reasoning beyond her conscious awareness. Creaking irks would worry her not for whom they might wake, as the exit was nearest only her window above.
Cardigan wrapped tightly, Janet’s tailing hair would bounce, some short-cropped length of step recaptured beneath the moonlight. She felt more herself again. Less of what had become Janet in Carlton was held within the grooves of her body, formfitting more with spirit, pushing her into an embodiment of self unrealized before.
Janet saw further than most when clear of mind. She was a feeler by sense of aura alone, if only for then, yet couldn’t grasp the reality of it still.
Whatever beguiling songstress of string was about her school’s building that night, playing its tune, seeming of origins near the riverside below, had ceased its singing when growing near-base of the gulch.
Crunching gravel slid beneath her slipper’s step at the bottom of that winding path she’d eventually found, Janet’s heels dampened by the night-cool stones so splayed by mists of the river’s unseen sprays. Effort was taken to refocus breathing, for how that newfound silence struck her in a moment of worried realization.
Janet didn’t know that she’d heard the music at all. She felt herself still dreaming until the sight had struck her eyes. Right there at the river’s edge, nothing else would matter in the slightest.
Ms. Underwerth was nude. She was bathing in the water.
Her dress and coat were lying beside the riverbed, draped over stones of heft and girth. Janet was frozen, lost for breath only a few hundred meters away, taking too long by her own immediate estimation, struggling with panic for a split-second felt eternal, before bolting back in one spin of sidelong leap, two tiptoes upon the gravel, seeking quickly to press her body onto that grassy slope nearby as quietly she might.
A slipper caught, she’d fallen flat onto her chest, cheek, and palms. Earth had been grasped as that embrace of the parent long needed it was. To roll herself over and seem undiscovered provided relief. She’d scrambled then, but quietly, climbing by feet and hands, heaving and pulling, to reach the next plateau where that trail-taken doubled back.
There she’d found one largest trunk, some tree’s great body, and held it tightly while watching from her vantage obscured by only the hanging of branches and their windswept leaves.
Janet wondered if Ms. Underwerth knew her a peeping their tomboy, before realizing she hoped they had and only kept going on for show.
Secrets from Janet’s subconscious taught that Ms. Underwerth felt in ways beyond normality, greater than anything they’d be willing to speak of openly. She’d seen them react in ways towards the other girls which drew her curiosity. Throughout that whole first day, the headmistress appeared as if holding back, all while Janet had been working to unravel how it was that they’d been her first accurate judge of character.
That woman was some witch, the real one, yet hid with such effort.
Janet came to believe it then, at last, from their aura felt-back.
Her sight of Ms. Underwerth’s bare-breasted body that night was something she’d never forget. They’d the form of a woman in so many ways, and that pale softness to their skin in the moonlight was heartfelt, those barest parts which never saw the sun proved most appealing to Janet, and it forged a tingling in her chest and belly.
She’d never seen anything more vulnerable. Janet found that mesmerizing. It was as if Ms. Underwerth was some part of the river, a nymph, finding herself again in its waters.
Daphne’s arms looked so strong through that dress during in the daytime hours, musculature hidden of something long passed shone through, remainders of structures lost to her surface proving harmonic with beauty. Body’s wholeness revealed, collapsing down to submerge entirely within the river, that sight inverted. Instead of her strength being a deterrent towards Janet’s understanding of Ms. Underwerth’s womanhood, her shoulders and biceps seemed more the blessing to their life. They were wielded in the ways of a woman, carrying strangest dichotomies in power and grace. Their formations alone had Janet feeling some need to be held within Ms. Underwerth’s grasp, for knowing the taste of that skin upon her, to breathe all of that woman into her senses.
Her hands were the oddity which proved for making the pleaded case within Janet’s heart scream-loudest, and most inexplicably. They’d seemed too large for that of a woman, and the hands of a man up-close. At least, to all Janet’s external estimations. It was the most bizarrely beautiful sight to watch, for that girl, as Ms. Underwerth flipped her hair forwards and over one shoulder, stressing tightness into her forearms and revealing their inner musculature, many tendons-gone-tight, to wring water free through gentle and sensual strokings of descension’s gripping grace.
Nothing seemed more peculiar to Janet than her ogling of Ms. Underwerth that night. Even when she’d loved or wanted her girlfriends before, and throughout her lifetime to come, it would never be like it had right then.
Daphne was alone. She’d been most odd, and kind, but sorrowful, so mysterious. Something darkly shadowed gloomed over from her past and clearly. The way she’d welcomed Janet with a warmest heart, after feeling out the girl for only that moment, had been changing their spirit since. Nobody ever seemed to understand Janet so completely, nor with that immediacy, making efforts to communicate her safety in their presence with appropriateness.
Transgressing upon Ms. Underwerth’s privacy felt holy.
Watching that way, stowing imagery for replays on end, knowing it inappropriate, allowed for deviousness to become part of her memories stowed, providing those continued sights which Janet wouldn’t pull her inner eye away from. No matter how much she’d want to.
Ms. Underwerth’s back, and that way it curved, how it was her shoulder blades formed into such graceful balance of feminine strength, was beyond the definition of a blessing to Janet. Something new but gorgeous was found in that strength like tempered glass.
Daphne’s hips were quaint, yet supple, and the muscles of her legs tore passion in Janet, their great lengths quite slender, running her shimmering form into the gentle currents of a river’s curving quarry, bulging with tightness earned-only by female athletes.
Janet would try to avoid lingering her gaze too long upon their posterior, its gleaming, glistening glimmer within the moonlight was an awe. Never would she forget that way it seemed so perfectly supple, that tightest contradiction, a bubbled perfection of concentrated sumptuousness. The fact it was fed into by Ms. Underweth’s lower back, and those tightest, most rigidly defined muscles of her body therein, would take great part in the wanting grafted inside Janet, evolving feelings of her body into resting well-lower than her heart.
Ms. Underwerth turned, and just enough for revealing her face. Without a touch of makeup she’d seemed so different. She felt womanlier somehow, and no matter those ways her face would remind Janet of men. The vulnerability of a woman most bare was personified in whole that night, only amplified by who they were.
Every part of Ms. Underwerth was proving holistically gorgeous to consumption. Once glimpsing her that way, no sight of the headmistress would feel remotely similar, unless reflected through responses of others who did not witness her in purest form.
No one had seen her that way but Janet.
Every false look from another towards Ms. Underwerth’s fortified yet elegant formations would reflect deepest hurt into the girl. Mirrors of eyes which stung, rediscovered always in presence of classmates who’d joke about the headmistress, hurting strongly for how she’d once seen them that same way.
Janet came to carry the burden more than anyone for Ms. Underwerth. It would scar her worst to hear those whispers.
Feeling alone in understanding Ms. Underwerth that intimately, bestowed Janet with what it meant to walk their path, forcing her to share some part of those weights they’d never wish for passing onto anyone. Nothing would ever prove more wholesome to Janet Meadows than acting in rightness towards the way her heart sang that night, making up for the way her mind had once betrayed herself so deeply.
Janet just wanted to be older. She wished to be an adult right then. She wanted to walk down to the water and tell Daphne that they were the most gorgeous woman she’d ever seen.
It broke her heart when feeling how impossible that would be — those ways it was wrong — how lost she anticipated herself to be before them. At least, while remaining the youngster she was.
Magic had been lost to Janet while stuck in Chesapeake County.
Things were changing. Possibilities of what might come from her time at Underwerth’s School of Mystery Teachings felt more excitingly expansive, abundant, and begging for Janet to discover what that bewitching woman might be hiding within its walls.
One longest glance had been made of what was between Ms. Underwerth’s legs, happening those moments after they’d turned fully, wading towards shore, before their briefest glance up towards Janet, by the girl’s most honest retrospective estimations, continuing towards and slipping into that dress without care. Before her penis had been covered, Janet was bewitched by its preciousness.
Ms. Underwerth’s most private part was so delicate, quaint, and more adorably feminine than she imagined it would ever have right to be. For her to be carrying herself the way she had made sense inside Janet at last, and completely, for they were a strongest woman and nothing else.
Janet ran back.
She’d bolted towards her room at fastest speeds, for leaping into bed, excited at prospect of that sleepless night spent in wanting to come.
Her slippers were lost upon the path, disregarded, in hasteful fear of what might be glimpsed upon a return. She’d been compelled towards seeking more, and in the now. To find herself speaking with Daphne by those guiding paths of heart’s brightest light which shined her forward, might’ve proven some falsehood in Janet’s belief that Ms. Underwerth had seen her.
It was hope itself she’d been holding onto, along with those many sounds of sight, and the soul-sweet song which drew her from sleep to begin with. Janet’s body was singing along to the croon of her spirit, so urging her forwards, nudging towards a future where she’d mature by rites of her school’s mysterious teachings.
Janet Meadows was giggling at the thought.
