These Shadows Remain by B W Powe

alright.”
    â€œHe sees the centre. He’s there at last,” Santiago said.
    â€œYes.” This was all Adina could say.
    *
    Tomas approached the blurry point where the tower of smoke began its spin.
    There were toons scrabbling on all fours around its base.
    They looked humbled, like hopeful penitents carrying in their teeth rolled-up sheets that could have been screen-plays or petitions.
    He saw Roger Rabbit, Top Cat, Geppetto, Terk and Tantor, Bugs Bunny, Huckleberry Hound, Chick and Dee, Si and Am, Z and Princess Bala, Kerchak, General Mandible, and Yogi Bear. What were they snuffling around for? It came to him: more of life’s elixir.
    The smoke turned into a whirlwind again. Its power shot out in shafts to the bowed gathering, intimations felt through network lines of an imminent roar and a judgment perhaps too much for even toons to bear.
    Tomas held back.
    His toon hand was visible. It was a passport that allowed him to cross borders. His human hand he kept gloved. He was sure he heard inside the smoke a chanting that some might have construed as holy. Tomas had to be careful. The wind had eyes. It had a voice.
    Stepping forward to meet the centre meant keeping your head clear. It was essential. He stepped closer. He also knew he was being led, or driven. The presence... It told him on wavelengths that didn’t use words or images to feel forward, let his spirit join with what was greater than the storm and its effects. It pushed him on.

    *
    â€œShe’s fainting.”
    â€œI know,” Santiago replied to his sister. 
    â€œWhat can we do?”
    â€œHold on.”
    They held Adina.
    â€œShe feels so light,” Gabrielle said. “It’s like she’s becoming nothing.”
    â€œHold on to her.”
    â€œO we’re losing her. What’s she saying? She’s whispering and I can’t make it out.”
    â€œShe’s telling us to help her. She’s giving us the go-ahead.”
    â€œHold on, Adina.”
    *
    Tomas skirted the smoky cloud. The pandemonium from the toons subsided. It soon sounded like an engine revving then fading then revving and fading again.
    He gradually recognized that he was walking around in tandem with the cloud’s carousel. Together they were wanderers in a wilderness spin. The cloud didn’t appear to want to vanish, or transform, or skitter elsewhere, or swarm over him like sand in a desert blowing over a hut or a tomb.
    Then the cloud swelled until it was higher than the hills surrounding the valley of screens. It reared up into a tornado funnel. All that he had learned from Gabrielle and Santiago, and from Adina, and from Cyrus and the people of the last castle, had prepared him. He summoned knowledge like a dagger and moved inside the storm’s radius.
    Once inside he felt as if he had pulled back a curtain of wind.
    He’d entered the storm’s inner sanctum, its watchful eye.
    *
    â€œAhhh,” said the air.
    The breath sounded briefly like an exhalation of doubt. Or was it sadness? Tomas felt he was being gripped. He thought two hands had come together in a squeeze that was like an unloving prayer. Again the breath swept over him. Tomas wouldn’t let it enter him deeply. There was a rumbling like an echo of thunder. The earth seemed to hunch up waiting.
    Instead it was Tomas who spoke. 
    â€œLook, if you still can,” he said.
    In a swift deft gesture he removed his chain-mail glove and showed the fullness of his human hand. Plunging both hands into the smoke, he grabbed hold of the air as if he were seizing a brute’s lapel.
    The wind’s breath turned to wheezing. “You have no weapon.” There was a long pause – so long it became a silence between them, while the two stood in that touch and snare.
    â€œNeither do you,” Tomas said at last.
    The whirlwind had no features. But Tomas could have sworn that if Pluta had had them, this terrible origin would