Cloud People (WIP Name)

Stephanie Meyer got the idea of Twilight from a dream. She woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, and envisioned a pale girl standing in front of a glistening boy, asking him, "How old are you?". Vampires and adventure and love stories swirled in her head and she wrote Twilight in a matter of months. 

Sometimes dreams are good writing prompts. You never get an entire plot from them, since they're often disjointed and confusing if you write it all down. But you can get glimpses of something special that your brain has thought of, and sometimes you can wrangle it in, lasso to a cow, and tie it down long enough to write it. 

I have a new story idea. Excerpt below. Enjoy. 

xx Mia 

The lilac sunrise rose slowly over the smallest of the hilltops. It was a city of hills, built on a giant mountain, arching its back up towards the sky, scratching the edge with the clouds. On a foggy day, clouds hung low with the sky-birds, concealing higher hilltops, making the world feel short and damp.

She had woken two hours prior. She was in charge of the goats, and the goats were needy creatures. They needed to be fed, watered, brushed. Milk was coaxed from their small, smooth nipples and noses were kissed. They followed her around; she was their mother, that is all that they knew.

She didn’t even have to use Guppy to herd, though he was the best herding dog out there. Long spindly legs sprouted under him and his wiry grey fur sprung out in curls as he pranced and pounced around them, nagging the stragglers and nipping at the grumpy. They followed her, the goats, through the barn gate and to the pasture where they spread up the hill, climbing the mountain as their bodies were made to, nibbling on the grass beneath them. The snow trees stood tall next to them, their white bark shedding as they grew, the sparse needles casting small amounts of shade from the now steadily rising sun.

She sat under one of the trees and unwrapped her breakfast: a small piece of goat cheese and bread, with a small amount of gooseberry jam left in the jar. She ended up scraping up the remnants of the jam with her bread, soaking up the rest of the juiced before eating. She leaned against the tree and sighed. She was tired.

A cloud shifted above her head, causing a dark shadow over the land for a brief moment. Clouds here were so close you could almost touch them: the land was imposing on the sky, not the other way around. The city was an island, a giant mountain top with definite edges. Beyond the edges they didn’t know: no one had been down There and no one who went There came back. But the water from the Falls sailed down there into the unknown, but you couldn’t see the bottom. There wasn’t a rope on earth long enough to reach the bottom, the Elders said, so they stayed up there in the clouds on their floating mountaintop.

Sometimes she wondered if there was something down there. Could she survive the fall? She dreamed about tying her indigo hair up, the blue a color unseen in the city, and falling, tumbling with the water in the air until there was no water anymore, but air. And she fell and fell and fell and landed on a cloud and then she realized she just fell to the top again, and instead of below the city she was on the top of the Mount and she didn’t actually go anywhere. It was then she would awaken from crying, the longing too much for her to bare: she needed to see what was down there.