"And if you fail, well, then you fail, but not to us."
Posted by Kale on September 7, 2008, 9:55 pm
63.138.11.3
- Burning, the sun, the day, the night and the forest they once knew.
- Drowning in the pools and fingers of flame whose existence she conjured once in a fit of self-pity and indulgence, caught in the conflagration of her stupidity and his own, he thinks it deliriously beautiful.
- Her flames, his flames – beautiful. Because they are theirs, because they are bright, because they are the end of the things. Because that is all they know, and all they ever will.
- He does not believe her; it is true, it is bold, it is violent in its authority and finality, it is the end of all things. It occurs to him to impress it upon her, the wildness of his belief and the inevitability of it. Was it not inevitable, all of it? The drowning, the saving, the rebirth? He was born mercurial to a place that caught his heart and mind and held it, even now, as he shifts bodiless through glaciers of ice and stone to meet her. His breath, cold and dark, drifts like a second wind between the fingers of trees that once held them both.
- He says nothing. And if she reaches into his mind, after all this time, if she defies the very lesson he had sought to teach her, though perhaps he failed, she will hear the truth; of course she will, the Naphtha, bright and brilliant in her power in a way he, tainted and ungraceful, will never be. But let it be known and remembered, even as she turns and walks away, broken but graceful, smiling and crying dust for tears, that his lips did not move, and never will.
- There is no such thing as darkness, he told her. The conflagration burns brightly in his eyes and he remembers to smile.
- “No,” he says, strongly – too strongly, perhaps, as the ore of fire he had sought to avoid but, unjustly, inevitably, could not, pulses through his deep baritone. His voice surges through the trees with a depth and finality undeserving of an old and broken king such as himself, as the light crosses his hollowed face and finds no crowns against his brow. The smile he offers her, slow and sad, is wrought with the tragedy of him and them, and all the things past and future they would cross remembering but unknowing, and, failing themselves, remember each other.
- He shakes his head.
- “You don’t need me,” he tells her, and his voice is softer now but the finality of this is the same. He knows it – she will be able to see that he knows it, in the sudden burst of clarity caught and held against his night-dark eyes, in the way his head reaches up and gazes softly and gracelessly at her. There is no love there (there is, oh, there is – and if it is not the love they both would imagine it is, would both hope it to be, perhaps it is all the better; perhaps fate is all the wiser, as he hopes himself to be): “You don’t need anyone.” Finally, finally, he lifts his head from the lake he had disturbed and she had stilled, letting his gaze cross hers for the final time.
- It is the end, of course.
- Or if it is not, it feels like it is. The fire burns.
- “All we have left to believe in,” he tells her, whispering, so soft it touches the air like a feather floating lost and distant on the wind, “is change.”
- He pauses, mouth tingling with the warmth and breath just there and missing, now, and perhaps forever; and, perhaps sorrowfully, perhaps stoically, the monolith turns into the night.
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