My hands still on the ground beneath me, I stopped breathing as the hell hound turned his gaze toward me and let out a bark. Immediately, I began to back away but the deep growl that came from the dog reverberated through my chest and gave me pause. I had no choice.
I broke cover of the trees and walked into the clearing; the man and woman looking at me with wide-eyes.
The dog walked over to the bush I had been hiding under and stalked back and forth across the entrance to the path, his black eyes glistening as he looked at me. I swallowed as heat began to creep up my neck, my collar feeling tight. I could almost feel the intensity of the three pairs of eyes on my skin. I breathed deep, forcing my breathing to slow.
“Why have you come here?” the man said, his accent English and refined. His eyes narrowed as he waited for my answer.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't mean to intrude.”
“Yes, you do, lass,” the woman said. Her lilt was strong. The blank look on her face had morphed under the influence of an emotion I couldn't read, her lips pursing like my mother's. “You've heard the stories.”
“Name us,” he said, his voice hard.
There was a moment of stillness, even the wind had stopped blowing, as they awaited my answer. I could feel my heart in my throat.
“John,” My mother could dare to doubt but I couldn't. “John and Glastiel. The old lovers.”
With startling force, the wind picked up with doubled intensity, wailing through the clearing and sending my hair out sideways. The raindrops turned from fat droplets to pelting stings.
John exchanged a quick look with Glastiel and they both looked over at the hound. It blinked at John and gave a slow nod. John whipped his gaze back at me and in his eyes was something dangerous. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. On some unspoken cue, he and Glastiel moved with choreographed precision to opposite ends of the small clearing and began to walk a wide circle around me. My head swiveled between the two. The dog looked on with interest.
What had I to fear? If this was truly John and Glastiel then I should count myself lucky to be among them. I felt sorry even for intruding on their time together. How sacred a space this was. I cursed myself for my lack of forethought. What had I been expecting if I did find them? A warm welcome? A brushing off of the violation of their century old intimacy? No, if their spirits dwelt here than they could not be at peace. How had this happened? And what was this business with the hound who watched on with those soulless black eyes? Was I imagining the looks of derision on their faces? I only knew one thing for certain: fate and this hound had led me here for this chance at glimpsing love everlasting and I wasn't going to waste it.
“You've loved for a long time now,” I said, my voice sounding feeble, squeezed by the strong whooshing of the wind and the raindrops slapping my face. Glastiel's eyes bore into mine, her chin pointed at the ground. Her flashing hair and nightgown continued to flow out beside her as the drops came down between us.
“How? How'd you do it?”
“How did we do it?” John scoffed so harshly the black curls on his head shook, “Surely this is not what you came here for?”
“I, I only want to know what a love like yours is like.”
But his smirk made me want to take it back. A flash of lighting lit up the clearing a blinding white-green and the deeps hollows of John's cheeks winked at me. He enunciated each word with a thinly veiled control.
“I'll tell you what a love like ours is like.”
His eyes connected with Glastiel's as they prowled the circle opposite each other.
“Our love is an ever-shrinking shackle around your throat that never has the good graces to crush your pipe and let you die.”
I felt something in me constrict and I could feel my face displaying my shock. I looked across the circle to see Glastiel glaring coldly back at John.
What was this? This trick! The question spewed out on its own but I doubt it could be heard past the tumult. This could not be! This was not the John and Glastiel I dreamed of in my bed when I could hear my mother crying herself to sleep in the days after the news of my father's death. This was not the pair I prayed to when Moiran had stared coldly up at the ceiling with no reply when I asked him why he didn't look at me when we made love anymore. My breath came out in frigid puffs but something hot was stirring inside me.
“That's a lie!” I said, planting feet and looking at John, “You're a liar!”
I could barely hear myself over the voices of the wind. My hair stuck to my skull and the rain fell down my face in thick rivulets. My clothes had become my second skin, but John and Glastiel were still dry.
John smirked at me, lengthening his stride and swaying with languid swagger.
“How's that?” he said, his eyes flashing.
“You wish it for only yourselves, then,” I said, “You wish for you two to hold the secret to everlasting love and let suffer the rest of us with its fleeting imitations? Is that the way you wish it?”
“It's you with the lies, lass,” said Glastiel, “I know no love to be fleetin.”
“No, no,” he said. “Even when its sweetness is abandoned, the sour remnants persist. Is that not right?”
I thought suddenly of my mother in her long-backed chair, stiffened with bitterness, spinning it out of her joints and between her needles before wrapping herself in it to rest another night. I thought of those moments as I sat with her before the fire when her needles would absently slow to a stop and I'd look up to find her staring out the window, the skin around her mouth sagging and creating long shadows from the firelight. She'd turn quickly to me when I spoke her name, but it'd take a moment for that faraway look in her eyes to fade enough for her to see me. She'd smile and tell me she was alright. Just thinking, Jeanette dear. Always about nothing, nothing. Just things that would make you sad, now read your book, dear.
It wasn't long before turning to that window made me think of my father, too. I began to shiver. John laughed, the derision in it cutting me.
“You see it. I know you do.” John was looking at me almost giddily. He and Glastiel seemed to circle closer and closer. The dog stood up, its head held high.
“You wish for something you don't want. You yearn for that which would cause you the most pain!”
“No, I...I don't-” I couldn't even hear my own thoughts over the downpour.
“What is love, lass?” Glastiel's shoulders nearly grazed mine as she looked down at me. “Look at us and name what lies between us?”
“You're John and Glastiel.”
What was that that had creeped into my voice? A plea?
“You love each other! You made a vow!”
My head was beginning to spin, throwing off my balance as I looked between the circling pair but they took no notice, hate etched into the deep shadows of their slender faces as they looked at each other over me. The dog, creeping closer, began to growl, the sound resonating through the clearing.
“I would take it back,” said John, his spit flecking into the rain. “That vow was my undoing, the end of all my happiness!”
I felt as if the air was being sucked out of the clearing, my heart palpitated in my chest painfully.
“Meeting you was the end of all mine.” Glastiel's voice, though filled with emotion,
was unwavering. “I wish I never set eyes on you, you miserable, good for nothing, scrubby
English bast-”
Before she could finish, John threw himself at her, toppling me over to connect his fist with her high cheekbone. I landed on the ground inches from her as she gave a high shriek and surged up to scratch his face. Though he grimaced painfully at her nails, he didn't back down, hunkering over and throwing down punches like a madman, each blow thudding in my ears.
I lay frozen. Gutteral grunts begun to escape John's lips as he came down again and again on Glastiel's body.
Their faces; they were full of pain and rage and a coldness that chilled me far more than the freezing rain t
hat poured down on us. But there was something in John's contorted features that I hadn't seen in Moiran's in years. It was the same look I can only assume my father gave my mother long before he balanced the newborn version of me on his knee and considered a life without us. Each strike was vicious but I could see now the care that John took as he pulled away. As much as they hated each other, they still loved just as much. What had bonded them on those passionate nights on the moor centuries hence had not lost an ounce of its potency, despite their attempts to dilute it.
Love had become their curse, but it was love nonetheless.
I heard a screaming over the rain and realized as I threw myself sidelong into John that it was me. He spun me around and pinned me to the ground, knocking the wind out of me.
Above his head, the sky momentarily lit up as lightning streaked across it. The rain was now coming down in sheets so solid, I felt as if I was being held underwater. White, hot anger licked at my insides as I fought against him.
“This is what it's like!” he shouted, his voice clashing with Glastiel's wail. “You don't want to know the pain of love that lasts! Tell me it shouldn't!”
Near his head, the hound's appeared, looking down at me.
“I will not!” I screamed, feeling as wild as they. “I'll never believe it! Not for you, John!”
He froze and I felt his grip weaken. I sprang away but he made no move to follow me, absorbed now in his own sorrow, his fists on the ground.
Glastiel was still down where she'd fallen, her body heaving from violent sobs. The hound cocked its head as it looked down at me. I turned to see John raised his head, reaching out a skeletal hand to the creature.
“Charon, please,” he said in a desperate voice. “Bring another. Just one more, please-.”
The hound let out a booming bark, the sound shuddering through the clearing. John put his head down again as the beast turned back to me.
Heaving, I pulled myself to sitting, my head level with the hounds’. For a few silent seconds we stared at each other before it tipped its head towards the path I had come, then back at me.
I scrambled to my feet and ran quickly toward the path. When I looked around again the couple still lay collapsed on the ground and it struck me that the space between them was a lie. The hound in turn took their necks in his mouth, turned to look at me for a steady moment before bounding out of sight.
~*~
Wither the World
By
C. M. Bratton
Lingers. Lingering. Linger. The echoes sharply piercing into pieces from the inside. Still, even now, so much agony.
Do they think I can’t hear them? Or is it that they know I do, I must, I always – and they want me to writhe in pain?
And they forget, yes, what they could do, once. What I could do for them, to them – and who I was. They forget I could reach them across the continent, could push them effortlessly. Could speak to the higher ones, could punish with just a thought. Although… I am diminished now.
Yet they sit in their cities, built so high. They play with their machines and fabricate glass intelligences to take up burdens their minds can no longer handle alone. They will themselves to forget. They look west, away from that simmering flame. They turn their faces south, away from that other, cursed city, forever marked. Such weak minds they have, now.
But I remember. The cold – so cold, so terrible and biting. So new. A fitting punishment. The cold never really leaves me.
And I still hear inside of me… so many voices. I hear their curses, their pain and fury flowing through me.
Oh my children.
No. No. I must not let them hold me. I am safe. I am inside my home, yes? It is warm and comfortable. It pleases the eyes. I will NOT let their voices overwhelm me. Not again. Please. I will not.
Yet I still wrestle the memories of my mind, even as I ache for that shining past. I fight the pain of their voices, never abating year after year. Instead, it only grows as they have children in their turn. And all of them connect… to me.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, now covered in these dead things, still so cold so cold these dead pieces, these dead FRIENDS...
Stop! I must stop. That is all done. There is no cold here. I cannot go back, cannot change anything, ever.
I try and calm myself, even as I hear part of me still muttering madly in some corner of my mind.
Were they my companions? These tawny, rippling, soft, cold pieces of flesh! Did they dance with me, make me laugh? No, no, no, that other part of me screams...
… I don’t want to know, don’t want to hear any more screams, no please! I’m so sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorrysorrysorry…
It’s all black now. There is nothing. All that is gone. I’m screaming into NOTHING!
PLEASE!
~*~
A hand grips me, gently. It pulls me back out of that cage of my mind. There is gray, lightening. I open my eyes and see the shining, understanding, forgiving, patient gaze of my son.
“Mother. Come back. You are here. Now.”
He has repeated this several times, I think.
He smiles slowly at my open eyes. I feel tears still slipping down. Wiping them away, he says, “Mother, sing with me. Dance. It will ease you, yes?”
I hear him and blink slowly against the dim light, the confines of my home outlined in the same, worn, dull shapes.
“Sing?” I hear myself rasp.
He pulls me up out of my crouched position in the corner. A melody begins as he hums softly, thrumming through me, low and resonant, clear, and strong. It has an echo of clarity that brightens colors and intensifies the mild smells of spring. Coarse dirt and tramped grass, dirty wool and rotting fruit – they all seem like newborn wonders, and I feel myself swaying towards him, now conscious of my unwashed state, but recognizing that it does not matter to him.
My face moves in strange directions; it is only when my son, still singing, smiles at me, that I realize that I am smiling in turn. He holds his hands out, and I grasp them. He pulls me into the dance.
As the music swirls out in a new direction, so does my body, and I find myself focusing on the present moment. I begin to hum a counterpoint in response. My voice feels raw and brittle, a mere sliver of its wholeness after hours, or has it been days, caught inside myself. But, as always, it heals quickly as I will it to, and soon my voice is strong again, matching him in pitch and intensity, nearly louder, challenging him. I begin to sing in the Old Tongue:
“AI! AI! A LA LEI NEHA’IM JAI -
AI! AI! RA HA’EL DE LUNAI.
GALA’RI ELA STAI – ’’
A third voice joins us. It is as crystalline as mine, singing the final lines with us, effortlessly blending in.
‘‘STAI! ADOHANAY’AI!’’
As the final notes fade away, strong arms move around my waist, and a warm voice sounds in my ear.
‘‘My Other-Self. Belovéd.’’
He says no more, but I feel, fleetingly, less fragmented. He nuzzles my neck for a moment, and I smile. Satisfied, he kisses my brow then straightens, one arm still casually draped around me.
He greets our son.
“Belovéd Esaeth.”
He pauses, smiling, saying nothing else with his words, instead letting his mind fill Esaeth’s, as it fills mine, sharing his love and his pride.
Esaeth is calm. Always so calm. So accepting.
“Father. You look well.”
We both chuckle at this. Of course he does. Even I, in this dirty state, possess a radiance unknown in any of our children. We seem no different than when Esaeth was born, hundreds of years ago.
Esaeth seems to find it amusing to comment on our appearances, as they never change, especially as his is now marked with threads of gray, a full beard, and strange lines running around his eyes and mouth.
Esaeth, my beautiful son. Like my other sons. I wonder sometimes if, like him, they would have had silver specks in their heads, hair pulling and curling outwards from their
jaws and chests?
“How long are you staying?” my husband asks.
Esaeth smiles, gently, “Perhaps enough for another dance?”
Adomé smiles in return and begins a complicated step from an old dance. He pulls me in, and I begin to move, body responding as the steps dictate. We dance around imaginary figures, weaving around Esaeth as he claps, laughing as he tries to match our steps. I feel myself beginning to laugh as well.
Red. A strike of anguish that whips through me. I stop, abruptly, curling in on myself, awash in an incarnadine haze of agony. Vines of pain thrash against me, puncturing me, torturing me with stabs of throbbing spasms.
I scream, ripping apart my newly healed vocal cords. My hands grip my body. Esaeth and my husband catch me as I fall.
I catch my breath.
“How can they forgive me? How can they love me,” I beg, looking at Esaeth, “when I caused – this? This curse!”
I start sobbing, willing the pain to stop. Trying to force my body to heal.
But it does not. It never does. This is the one gift I have always been denied. Will always be denied. Instead, the pain grows, every time. Years and decades and centuries growing, multiplied by the echoes from all my daughters.
No other daughter of mine will ever suffer like this. They do not hold the Garden in their memories.
“My fault. All gone, gone. No sweet leaves dropping like the purest honey in my mouth. No wild dances with animals, no singing with the an’geles. No perfect warmth. Just this stabbing wound that never heals, lingering inside of me. My daughters, ever paying for my sin. My name will last, cursed in every birth, every moon, and every night.”
I look up at my husband.
I whisper, aloud, “Adomé. Will your Father never let me heal? Will He never forgive me?”
Another pulse of agony pulls me away from his gaze before he can answer. I have no other recourse. I fly inwards to escape, away from the present, which never ends. I hear Adomé begin to call me, trying to reach inside my mind, but I slip away.
“Aveia.”