Chapter One – A Lesson Learned in Loss

          The Emblem of the Star-Crossed Lovers (Interitus 1: Book X)

            Chapter One – A Lesson Learned in Loss

 

            They say that this city stands at the edge of the world as a boundary between the sky and the sea. It is a city built for hope but stained by tragedy. Countless years ago, someone named this place Bones City to honor the lives lost in darker days. It is said that we were meant to pay homage to the fallen, but I have found that ideals and reality rarely align in truth. This city swears to honor its heroes and venerate its victims, but the people of Bones City shut themselves off from the world a long time ago. When monsters roamed the dusty plains and endless meadows, willful men used their strength to build walls instead of weapons. By some sick twist of hypocrisy, we revere acts of bravery but hide ourselves from a broken world. We applaud the valor of men who guard the walls from the safety of the city as if it is unthinkable to step out into the sand. The city leaders orchestrate occasional gatherings by the sea where we meet to mourn the dead despite the part we play in their passing.

            But Bones City is a place of perpetual night. It is somber, it is grim; it is lit by starlight. The darkness pervades—it is our birthright. But the long quiet shadows, which levy poor sight, have caused for some citizens a small touch of fright. They run from the darkness and into the light. They hide from the sky, the starry twilight; they hide from the world and never ignite, like a fish that won’t swim, or a bird that fears flight.

            I myself was affixed by their same conundrum but for a different reason. I lived most of my life locked in a shell, but it was not because I detested the endless starlight. It was not because I feared the darkness. It was not because I grew up alone in the sterile walls of a crowded orphanage. It was not because I sought recompense from a world I felt had failed me. It was because I was a wildfire with nothing to burn. I was a slave to pure greed, but I never found an object for my avarice; I had never found anything worth fighting for.

I had believed that I could push myself to achieve anything I ever wanted, to the extent that I named myself Asivario as a testament to my own avarice, but I never had a chance to prove it. I never had a purpose. Not until I met Alyssa. And in a way which might confuse most others, I regretted the simplicity with which we fell in love. From the moment I met her, she was all I ever wanted. From the moment I whispered her name for the first time, I was ready to do anything for her. When I kissed her for the first time, I swore to shatter the stars which shone in the sky if only she would ask. And in some twisted way, I truly believe that it is for this reason that the stars first called to cross us.

            I still remember the night I walked to her home beneath a path of flickering streetlights. They illuminated the quiet roads just enough to overpower the starlight and illustrate the shadows. I occasionally glanced through the windows of the homes I walked past. In some, I saw loving couples sit together on a couch. In others, I saw people tiredly waste the time away watching something inane on their television sets. I saw a child stare out of an unwashed window while his mother laughed boisterously from in another room. Inside every house was a little world. Every glance was a window to a small fire seeking fuel. They were content, but they lived their lives as a portraiture of mundanity. They lived their lives as a forfeiture to inanity.

            As far as these little worlds were concerned, it was an ordinary night. But by the nature of sonder and separate worlds, my story began on that night. I could tell that something was wrong in the moment that I approached Alyssa’s doorstep. A syzygy of stars in the sky suggested the tragic truth that her home was empty. I could sense her absence in the moment I set my right hand upon her door. I mentioned before that I am the ocean and she is the rain. I am dry and shallow, empty and alone. If I dared to stand without her, I would drown in my own stale water and poison the thirsty air. I hurried to her house where she waited patiently; I pushed past the door and threw myself inside her open home. But met only with darkness, I collapsed onto the floor. I would do anything for the rain. I needed to feel her seep into my skin. I found only a drought when I needed a hurricane.

            I heard a voice call from the darkness behind me and say, “I saw city security haul her away.”

            I said to myself I saw her just yesterday. I held her there in the morning gray, and it was then that she had begged me to stay. I told her it’s okay, that I would just be gone a day, cutting fish at the factory just outside the bay. But time played its tricks, and my promise lost its way. I lost her because I dared to work all day. I lost her because I did not heed her wish to stay.

            The bystander explained, “They put her in chains. I didn’t hear all the details, but she mentioned that she has papers in the back. City security wouldn’t listen. They said she was a nomad who slipped in through the wall. If you really want to help her, it might be best to find her papers.”

            “It would not help her; those papers were nothing more than a desperate anchor to save her from the storm of life outside our walls. They are fake and can serve but only at a glance. Any eye worth the starlight it draws would realize it in seconds. Please tell me, kind stranger. What becomes of the nomads caught by city security?”

            I stood upright and wiped my anxious eyes, fighting against the enervating darkness inside myself. I wouldn’t trouble the bystander with my frantic fear or helpless panic. I even convinced myself to stay calm internally, though this is admittedly a consequence of my extreme monomania. No amount of misery or mourning would ever get her back.

            “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but they dragged her off hours ago. I’m sure they already banished her outside the city by now. Sorry you had to hear that from me. I didn’t think to do anything at the time,” admitted the helpful stranger.

            I didn’t realize at the time that he had no reason to wait around in the street for hours after she was taken. To this day, I never conclusively learned the reason for this. In classic tunnel-vision fashion, I couldn’t think about anything else at that moment. If it did not directly have to do with saving Alyssa from the monstrous world outside the city walls, then it did not matter. So even as I said the words, I knew I was pushing my luck; I knew this kind stranger could have me arrested if he so wanted. I asked without tact, I questioned with gall, “She is my everything; she is my all. Do you know how a person could exit the wall?”

            The onlooker merely nodded and said, “I can show you the way, but it’s a long road to tread.”

            Some would say that my choice was precipitous; city security had ruined lives for far less. If I were caught violating the sanctity of the walls which were once built to safeguard our city, then I would be arrested and sentenced as a miscreant. Almost as a slap in the proverbial face of the courage for which our city is said to revere, anyone who bypasses the walls in either direction is treated as a heartless reprobate. The thought is that a danger lurks in the badlands outside our city, so anyone who passes the wall exposes the citizens to an unknown threat. Those who venture outside the city never do return, and that is their proof of the terror. The city leaders speak of a threat that endangers us all—monsters that lurk in the world outside the wall.

               The stranger had not misled me; we walked through the starlit streets of our city in silence. The sky was clear, and a cold wind swept in from the sea. The frigid touch wrestled the moisture from the air and forced it to settle on the windows of every home we passed. It settled on my skin and shimmered. The quiet roads glistened as the moisture reflected the light of the stars. Distant streetlights illuminated empty alleys, and the flicker of television sets glimmered inside the houses. I examined the moisture and the lights to distract myself from the enervating truth that we approached the large wall at the edge of the city. The kind bystander led me to a dark building beside the city wall. He knocked gently upon the hardwood door and then took a backward step.

            I turned to the kind man with a smile and said, “She is my needle, and I am her thread. For this, I cannot thank you enough.”

            But the stranger answered as he then walked away, “I truly hope you can find her one day.”

            When the wooden door creaked open, I could feel a silent energy exuding into the street. A woman stood in the dim yellow light with a grimace, but she waved me inside without a word. If I were anyone else, I would have turned and walked away, certain that this suspicious woman in this discomforting place would somehow pose a threat to my life. Two large men stood in the background, but they paid me no attention. One drew a symbol upon the steel of a blade while the other watched in silence.

            The woman looked me over and then said with a sneer, “We have never met, so why are you here?”

            “City security caught the love of my life in a lie. If I am without her, I might as well die. They sent her outside the city and into the sand, but I will follow her footsteps until I can’t stand. I need your help to get outside the wall,” I said to the woman and her cabal.

            After a moment of thinking, she sighed and she said, “If your words are serious, you’re already dead. I can help you escape, but nothing is free. When you come back, you will work for me. I am Bellaina—the queen of the dark, and from now on you will bear my mark. If you are to survive the monsters in the plains, then you will return to the village remains. It is there that you both will meet my envoy, and spend the rest of your days in my employ.”

            I could feel a quiver run deep through my soul. I glanced at the shadowed world into which I had stepped. Though two steps behind me, the doorway was an endless distance away. There was no turning back. The large men glanced up from their blades and symbols to inspect my decision. A low-pitched pounding sounded from a room below us, and the dim lamps trembled with every strike. Bellaina stared at me in silence, awaiting the answer she already knew. My desperation had thrown me into her trap, and though a quiet whisper in my mind admonished me against this, I knew that I had dismissed my survival instinct some time ago. I had nothing left to live for without Alyssa, so I had no reason to preserve my own existence.

            I took a deep breath and said with a sigh, “They say we are programmed to just stay alive. But my body means nothing; it is nothing more than the conduit through which Alyssa and I express our love. We are two souls forged by the flames of this fallen world and forced to find eternal love in each other’s arms. This body is worthless without her by my side; it is nothing more than the vehicle through which I will have her back. So if I must brave the monsters and the merciless sands in which they lurk, then that is a risk I must take. If I must work for the queen of the underworld upon my return, then that is a cost I must pay. This is not a matter of want or need. I knew since the moment we met that we were made for each other by the universe itself. It is in violation to the will of the world if we are to let anything between us. The arbiter of destiny conscripted our souls such that we are fated for each other. The stars in the sky are simple steppingstones to the life we’re set to share.”

            Bellaina exchanged a quick glance with the large men on the other side of the room. One clenched a pen with a transparent tube, and the ink inside danced in color between the light and shadow. The ink in the light looked green and purple, but the shadowed section of the tube appeared dark gold. With a silent command, Bellaina sent one of the men into an adjacent room. He procured a slender holster with a sword inside. Bellaina then nodded and stepped slowly across the room toward a shadowed hallway. Her sword-wielding henchman followed behind her, so I walked behind them and entered the darkness. As we walked together into the hallway, the shadows encroached upon the light. We stopped when we stepped into a corridor of total darkness, but it was there that Bellaina retrieved a wooden object from the wall. She struck it swiftly on the bricks and forced the torch to ignite with a radiant glow. With only a small flame to light our path through the darkness, she led us down staircases and through a labyrinth of intersecting paths.

After several minutes of walking, Bellaina stopped at the foot of a staircase which led to a pair of cellar doors held shut with chains. The queen of the dark passed me a pen and a small page which prompted me for my name, though I doubted that legal documentation applied at all in her underworld. Nevertheless, I signed my name and then returned her page. She passed her henchman a key, and then he passed her his sword. Without a single word passing between them, her henchman scaled the staircase and fumbled with the chains. Bellaina listened as a small click echoed from the chains to the underground chamber, and then she handed me the holster with the slender sword. She spoke as she glared right in my eyes, “It’s best for us both that you come back alive.”

I stared at the sheath for a moment in silence. I could practically feel a convergence of past lives as I took the weapon in my hand. With a gentle push, I unsheathed it just slightly and saw the reflection of my dark green eyes on its glistening surface. The fiery light of the torch illuminated the darkness around me and sent shimmers upon the sword. I had used this same weapon as a tool countless times for cutting fish at the factory, but this was the first time I wielded this weapon as a means for survival. A genetic impulse commanded me to hold the sword close as it was my only protection from the monsters outside the wall, but survival itself was not my priority. It was only her. It was always only her.

I emerged from the cellar doors with the sword in my hand and stepped out into the swirling sand. It was only after three footsteps that I heard Bellaina pull the doors shut behind me, and then clamorous chains sealed the exit. I glanced at the towering wall which surrounded Bones City behind me, but then I turned to face the starlit plains. Even as I walked away from the wall, I searched the sand for a trail of footprints, but I knew that this was pointless. Powerful gusts tore across the windswept world and wiped away my own footsteps in seconds. Her path was torn from the sand and stolen by the wind. My only choice was to wander across the land until our entangled souls found our way to each other like the unraveling of an invisible thread. I think it was always this way for the two of us. Destiny itself created the thread and bound us to each other, even if at first from a distance, like a lonely night illuminated by the pulsing flare of a shooting star.

It was not long before I saw a monster from afar. It stood out in the distance beneath the glow of stars. I felt a sudden urge compel me from the darkness of my soul; I felt an urge to kill it that was out of my control. I felt compelled to kill anything that stood in my way. There was nothing in that moment that I felt I could not slay. I didn’t care if it’s wrong, and I didn’t care what it’d bring—I didn’t care if I’d be judged at the end of all things. It was perhaps a premonition of the villain I’d become, but if I fought the monster there’s no way I would have won. Love and fury were not enough to overcome the beast, so instead I chose to turn away and run while discreet. The giant did not notice me; it stood alone and from afar. I ran on and chased the girl who dwelled in the sand beneath the stars. She is my rain and my shimmer; she is my shooting star.

Even as I ran for hours across the empty plains, I could still feel the aftereffects of the madness which drove me to slay the monster. Though it was a silhouette which showed no signs of aggression, I had steeled myself to strike him down if he dared to stand in my way. It left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, for I had never considered myself a violent person. I tried to surrender myself to the classic adage that I am a lover and not a fighter. But when unknown obstacles and an unclear distance separated me from her, I came to realize that lovers and fighters are not mutually exclusive. Instead, I slowly came to consider that a lover is inherently a fighter, or otherwise he’s no true lover at all. Just as destiny itself had driven the two of us for eternal love, the circumstances of an apathetic world stood in our way. This is the nature of reality—this trial is imposed upon all love, and most people willfully accept that they cannot overcome the obstacles that they are dealt. Most people are resigned to their own powerlessness. But I am an optimist, which means I can still see the future in which these hurdles are destroyed. However, I am also a realist, and this means that the only way to vanquish the obstacles is if I am to crush them myself.

This determination pushed me endlessly onward, even as minutes turned to hours and hours faded to days. I ran through the starlit sands, circumventing giants while holding my sword close. I felt my body approach its breaking point, but I drowned my exhaustion with the whisper that I would find her again.

A silent brutality guards this desolate land. It is the strangling hold of competing predators; it is a race to see which assailant will strike you down first. More than anything, I discovered a new respect for Alyssa in the days I spent scouring the sands. I found myself running from silhouettes in the sandy gusts. I ate a plant with sharp thistles just to overcome the pains of starvation. I slurped moisture from leaves and drank the suspect waters of a murky creek. I felt like the desert could defeat me at any moment and claim my body for its own, but I also reminded myself that this was the world from which my Alyssa first arrived. I was at my limit in hours, but for her, this was once everyday life.

She rarely spoke about her time before Bones City, and whenever I asked, she said that fate itself compelled her to leave so she could find the soul with which she was meant to spend her life. So after losing the family which gave her her name, Alyssa had committed herself to the sea and swam for sixteen hours to the coast of Bones City. She bypassed the walls and climbed her way ashore during a gathering by the sea. Everyone was too distracted by the display to notice. Everyone except me. Something had driven me to watch the sea and not the celebration. I told myself that fate itself guided me to find her, and it was on that night that my story began. I had nothing worth anything until the night we first met.

But as fate would have it, it was on this night that our story ended. Like a good book with the last page torn, I felt my destiny evaporate when I found her in the starlit sand. Faint frantic footsteps scattered the ground around her. Alyssa had spent her final moments in this world first running and then fighting, clinging desperately to the world where we first fell in love. But in the end, her ardent struggle was simply overpowered by the brutality of the monster. She had collapsed in the sand in a puddle of her own blood, using the last of her life to reach for my hand from the darkness. The one arm she had left stretched toward our distant city; the other had her flesh scraped from the bone by broad teeth. Bite marks covered her quiet corpse. Her emerald necklace had been taken from her body. A monster had devoured a portion of her, but I had no interest in investigating the circumstances of our separation. As the finality of her death dawned upon me, I drew my sword and held it against my throat.

I convinced myself that predestination was more powerful than the fragility of our human bodies. The stars in the sky illuminated a parabolic path past any fault or failing. Even if we were to lose our lives, the thread of destiny still bound us together for eternal love. I convinced myself it was an obvious axiom. Fate was immutable, indisputable; it would not be limited by our ephemeral bodies. From the very start, they were too fragile to house our eternal love. I convinced myself that she and I would still fulfill our eternal love, but not in life. We could only be together in death, and I could join her as soon as I shed my fragile body in the desert sand beside her.

“I won’t let you traverse the afterlife without me. I will be with you so soon, my love. The howling wind warns me, but the dancing stars tempt me; I won’t let this worthless world lock us apart,” I said to the sword with one hand on my heart.

But even as my other hand prepared to swing the sword and sever my throat, I glanced again at her body. For reasons I cannot entirely put into words, I felt no anger even as I stared upon her desecrated corpse. I did not care about the monster that had certainly slain her. I did not care that it had partially eaten her. I did not care to hunt it across the badlands and exact some vague revenge. It would not recreate her. It would not in any way rebuild the future which evaporated in the moment that she died. I harbored no hatred for the city that banished her or the desolate plains which saw her end. I suppose one could call that the benefit of monomania. But for that same reason, I lowered the sword from my neck. Our love was an orchestra silenced before its crescendo, but suicide was nothing more than a desperate whisper—a hopeless longshot toward a future I could not fathom. Or perhaps it was no future at all.

I instead convinced myself to wander onward through the desert. It was years before that day, on a night with a gathering by the swift sea, that I overheard two city guards mention a place outside the wall. They muttered quietly about a forest where existence and the afterlife pierced the boundary between them. It was there that they had heard the voices of the foregone past; it was there that they had conversations with the dead. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was the only thing I had left. If I could find Alyssa in that lurid forest, then at the very least we could together embark on our road to eternal love.

The fact of the matter is that I was too weak to accept the reality of our dissevered eternity, so instead I chose to accept that I would never be the same again. I forced myself to envision an impossible future and stride breathlessly toward it.