Chapter Five – A Hand to Hold as the World Erodes

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

Chapter Five – A Hand to Hold as the World Erodes

 

Some men cling to a glimmer of hope like the dying winds of a dreary winter. Even as I saw her stand in the starlit shallows, I convinced myself that she was a daydream borne of a lovesick prayer. Even as I held her hand in mine, I theorized that this was nothing more than a fantasy of a far-off future—a prospect I wanted but could never actually have. Steam lifted from the warm water and swirled around us as weak waves washed ashore. The glow of lava illuminated the horizon and fought the starlight for the right to light the ocean. Scarlet shimmers scattered the sand and the sea; the city itself stood still and silent behind us. It felt like the entire world had frozen to facilitate this foregone fantasy.

I wrapped my arms around her in the shallows and said, “Please let me waste away if I am trapped inside my head. If this is a dream, please let me sleep forever. I cannot face a world where we are not together.”

            She whispered the words as she gazed in my eyes, “It called like the lava that lights up the skies. A whisper in the dark drove me to the edge of the sea. I swam so far that I could not see the sand; I swam past the wall that surrounds your city. I swam for the light when I didn’t know I’d survive. I swam through the silence toward the call. I swam through the darkness and toward the light. I swam past horizons and islands and even the wall; I found the glimmer of daybreak through the dark night.”

            “Do you know who I am? Do you know what it is that brought us both together?” I asked in an embrace which I wished would last forever.

            But she shook her head and said, “It felt like I answered a call left by the dead. I cannot explain it in any other way. It was a voice calling me, driving me like the breeze that carries the clouds across the sky. I do not know your name or why it is that we were driven together. But even when I closed my eyes, the stars aligned and illuminated the path to your shore. I pushed my body to its edge to follow tiny steppingstones of light.”

            “I am Asivario, and I was driven just like you. I was driven by a foreign force I figured must be true. My last life ended in loss like a quiet ember in a stream, but its dying smoke ignited us like a new life in a dream. I believe we are bound for each other, but the stars are crossed against us. We burn too bright for the stars to smother, so there’s nothing left to discuss. Like a long-lost letter from a past life, we long to look past life as it flies by,” I said as her skin shimmered from the light in the sky.

            Tears surfaced in her eyes as she stood in my embrace. I briefly scanned her body and saw the scars which stained her skin. Even before she explained her reason for swimming to this city, it was clear that she had come from the badlands just like Alyssa. This served to me as proof that they were one and the same; they both put their lives on the line to set sail from the shadows and swim to a brighter life. But her birthplace was a common curse that befell most people in this land, besides the privileged few blessed to be born inside Bones City. Some of her scars were shaped like teeth, but others looked like they were torn by blades long ago. I saw a flicker of dismay in her hazel eyes when she glanced at her own scars, and then she covered them with her hands.

            She said as she concealed her trauma, “My mother named me Aeliana. I haven’t spoken to many people since I lost her, but that is the name I want you to call me. If it’s not too much trouble, could we please exit the ocean? I have been swimming for so long that I fear the sea will claim me as its own if we wait any longer.”

            I chuckled and nodded with a smile. Aeliana offered me her hand, so I gently led her onto the sand beside the spot where the waves washed away the burial of three more bodies. I closed the wagon with my free hand, and then we walked together toward the nearest rows of homes. The flickering light of a television illuminated the darkness of the nearest house. Even from a distance, I could see the outline of a character parading himself on the screen. It was a program I had glimpsed many times before—a series about some righteous hero defeating evil and defending the innocent. Every time I saw it, the main character would overcome some inane adversity and then celebrate as if he had done something miraculous. I could understand its formulaic popularity, but it was nothing that ever appealed to me. Perhaps it was because I was neither motivated for justice nor bettering a worthless world that breaks itself. But in that moment as I held her hand in mine, I cleared my mind and dismissed my judgment. Nothing else in this world meant anything when I had her by my side.

            A nervous wince struck me, but I managed to say, “Can I bring you to the home where I stay? It is desolate and barren but at least it is safe, and perhaps I can show you the city one day.”

            Aeliana opened her mouth and revealed a beautiful smile. Her crooked teeth shimmered in the starlight, and her dark hair danced in the humid breeze that swept in from the sea. I could feel her tremor betray the composure she felt compelled to project; the size of the city had overwhelmed her. I led her by the hand and pushed the wagon before me as we stepped quickly through the quiet streets. Any time a person walked by us in the road, she clung to my side with a familiar warmth. Any time a person opened their door to set out a bag of trash, she gripped my hand tightly. Even the sound of paper flapping in the breeze managed to derail her calmness.

            “I can’t imagine how hard it was to live out there; I ventured there once and nearly died from despair. I once knew someone who escaped when she was young. She had nightmares which never quite came undone,” I explained to her as she kept my hand clung.

            Aeliana said with a shaky breath, “Out there it is always life or death. The sands and the storms shroud the stars in the sky. We often hear a threat before we can see it, and then we’re forced to fight or flee. There were times when I would run until my lungs would cave; I’d collapse on the ground and beg the shadows to hide me from the monsters. There were times when a sound in the shadows saved me from starvation. If I heard something scurry through the sands, if it was something I could kill, I had no choice but to eat it.”

            I said though her words weighed me with sadness, “There are those in this city who think that that’s madness. I left the city for three weeks and nearly wasted away; I could feel my body start to starve and decay. I met a swordsman who strived to consume me for a time, but in the end his spirit was devoured by mine. Through his eyes I see this world with a second view, so I applaud the cannibalism that allowed me to find you.”

            But in the moment before we crossed onto the next street, I saw a pair of shadows slash the streetlights. I held Aeliana firmly with my hand and guided her silently to the edge of a building. With a quiet motion, I crouched beside my wagon and peered through the orange light to see two city security patrolmen. Though one of them looked suspiciously familiar, I could not run the risk of them finding Aeliana. I knew I was cursed to live in iterations of a vicious cycle like single loops in a spiral, but I resolved to resist the force which vowed to diverge us in the end. I would not let them find her; I would not let Aeliana suffer the same isolated end as Alyssa. So I halted my wagon and retreated into the shadows, silently pulling Aeliana with me into the nearest alley. We withdrew from the streetlights and the starlit streets. We concealed ourselves behind boxes in the space between two buildings. She looked around frantically, but I pressed my lips to her head. I drew my sword and waited with her in the silent shadows.

            We waited in a silence so severe that every sound sent tremors through the shadows. Every heartbeat pierced the silence with a rumble, and I held my breath altogether so that I would not make a sound. I almost felt like I could will myself out of existence if I tried hard enough, but I was bound to reality by a primal urge that clawed at my mind like a creature in the night. Without making any sound, I unsheathed my sandy sword and steadied my hands as we waited in the darkness. A second sweat surfaced on my skin as I felt a hunger awaken in my barbaric soul. It wasn’t merely that I was prepared for the possibility that I would have to fight; a dark fragment inside me explicitly wanted to fight. I wanted to face the patrolmen and kill them in that dark alley. I wanted to stain the streets with their blood as a warning to anyone else who dared to take her from me. I wondered if this were perhaps a consequence of Aziel’s influence, but I lost the power to distinguish between his will and mine. Together we wanted nothing more than to strike down the patrolmen and shed their blood as a trail so that I could see my own footsteps on this shadowed path.

            The men from city security glanced down the alley as they walked past, but they did not suspect any shady strangers took shelter in the silent shadows. We waited there for minutes even after they left, but that dark fragment in my head still wished they would turn back. I was so ready to kill them that I fantasized about a swift skirmish in that shadowed alley. I envisioned myself emerging from cover in the moment they crossed into the clearing; I imagined breaking their brittle bones with my bloodthirsty blade. I daydreamed a deathly dance of blood and swords that ended with me stealing the breath from their lungs. I could practically see the light fade from their dying eyes. Aeliana set a hand upon me and startled me out of this lurid trance, but then I saw the reality that this barbarism was one we both shared. As she clenched two daggers in her scarred hands, both stained with blood which dried long ago, I realized the recessive reality from which I once was blinded. While we were still twin flames set to dance in an endless spiral, the world itself was therefore set to burn around us; that is the consequence of fire itself—that is the reality of its true nature.

            It was shortly afterward that we holstered our weapons and returned to our trek. Though she shouldered a portion of her weight on my body, I found myself amazed by her endurance. Bruises and scars stained her legs. I could practically see her tired muscles bulge from years of overuse. Her feet had walked for so long that she left the occasional drop of blood behind her as a trail, almost like the remnants of a footprint on the beach after rain. And like the rain, she continued to pour herself onward.

Before long, we found ourselves at the edge of a quiet city park not far from my house. A pair of young children excitedly played on the swings while the nearby playground glistened in the starlight. Two lovers sat beside each other on a nearby bench, occasionally glancing at their children from a short distance. But even from the back of their heads, I could tell that these two lovers had dedicated this time to each other. I caught a glimpse of her face, and she stared at him like he had somehow set the stars in the sky. They loved with a love I could sense from a distance, and in that moment, I envied their simplicity.

“I don’t think I’ve ever before seen something like this,” Aeliana said as she lifted her hand to her lips.

“It’s a structure for children with time to spend. I played here as a child for hours on end,” I said as the two kids cheered like old friends.

Though I meant to suppress the volume of my voice, it carried upon the breeze and caught the attention of the lovers on the bench. One turned to face me, and when he did, the streetlights revealed Donovan and his wife. He smiled and whispered some words to her, but he then stood upright and jogged in my direction. Aeliana braced herself as he approached; I caught a glimpse of light shining on the blade of her dagger, but I reassured her with my hand. She took two steps backward, but she holstered her weapon.

“Hey Asivario! Long time no see. It’s been hectic; I haven’t seen you in a while,” said the courier of the dark with a friendly smile.

“Our schedules keep us separate, and I tend to work best in the dark,” I said as an apology to the kind man in the park.

But Donovan simply chuckled and said, “Sometimes I wish I worked with you instead. Most of Bellaina’s clients these days are major players in the city. I don’t just mean big merchants or fishermen; I mean the tall guys who make the big decisions. It feels like I’m always one false move away from stepping out of line and getting killed. She’s got my back, but I miss the way things used to be.”

“I’m surprised you would say so much in front of someone you don’t know,” I said as I motioned to the girl beneath the starlit glow.

Donovan shook his head and confessed, “I can see with one glance the truth of your guest. You aren’t the only client of ours to venture into the sandy plains outside the city. I know that she came from the badlands, so I can’t say I’m afraid of her sharing what I said. But don’t you worry! I’ve got no plans to mention her to Bellaina or anyone else. If she is who I think she is, then I’m happy for you! Both of you.”

“For what reason would you be happy for me?”

“Because when we met, you were sad as can be. I hated seeing you like that! Just so you know, if you want to be all romantic, there’s a flower shop just south of the fish district. It’s beside that shop with the special tea. You know, I’ve told you about it before! They’ve got some unique plant in the basement, one that keeps you strong and healthy! Some skeptics say it’s a rumor at best, but I say they’re all wrong,” Donovan said, though his kind conversation had gone on too long.

“Thank you, but I don’t wish to keep you away from your family.”

Donovan glanced back over to his wife, and even in that moment, I could see a powerful magnetism draw him toward her. He smiled, nodded, and then jogged back to her. As I mentioned before, I coveted the simplicity of their love, and that envy is not one which would fade with time. Nevertheless, I had to hasten our own journey home so that we would not run the risk of patrolmen discovering that she was an outsider. I led her by the hand and scurried through the streetlights toward the humble house that I called home.

Perhaps if I were anyone else, I would feel some sense of embarrassment for bringing her to my empty home in a rundown section of the starlit city. I thought of it as nothing more than the quiet space where each night ended and each morning began, but I saw it vicariously through her hazel eyes when she set her foot upon the doorstep. This dusty home with the barest amenities was a palace to the girl who spent her whole life in the badlands. She stared at the rusted sink with wonder; she jolted backward when she pressed a handle and saw water pour from the faucet. To her, the clouded water looked like life itself in liquid form. Despite the cracked cup beside her, she cupped her hands to catch the water. Most of it seeped between her fingers, but she pressed her lips into the pooled water and drank it all. This process continued until I realized that she would not stop herself from drinking as long as water still poured from the faucet. It was only when I stopped the stream that she stepped away from the sink and held her aching stomach with her hands. She let out a quiet burp, but then she giggled uncontrollably and covered her face with her scarred hands.

A flickering light faintly illuminated my house, but she stared at the light like a supernova in the sky. She squeaked with enthusiasm when she realized that the dusty light-switch gave her the power to control the light. I could see a simple syllogism manifest in her mind in the form of fascination. If she set the switch down, and the light disappeared when the switch went down, then she possessed the power to plunge the room in shadow. When she lifted the switch, she summoned a shining light so strong that it shrouded the stars in the sky outside. She continued this until she saw the light illuminate a partly-rotted desk on the other side of the room. Her curious heart hurled her into motion; she dashed to the desk where I wearily wasted the last few hours of each worthless night. It was there that I had papers and journals filled with the tortured tears of a tired mind. Some pages were strewn with theorems and equations, but most were marked with wistful words and primitive poems; I had even written lamentations against the stars in the sky for cursing us apart in the first place. They were notebooks filled with nonsense, but she read my words with a growing smile.

She said as she pulled a notebook from the water-stained shelf, “With words you have painted whole worlds for yourself.”

“I called an act of defiance what was really a dream. I would build stories in silence when I wanted to scream. I created worlds without worries, morals, or themes, but sometimes these stories became too extreme.”

Aeliana nodded with a breathtaking smile, but I thought I could detect something unspoken underneath her silence. Having never expected any other eyes to fall across the words I wrote in the wasted hours of a quiet night, I generally believed that anyone else would see it as a sign of psychosis. At the very least, I thought that anyone else would read my words and think that I was emotionally locked into an edgy adolescence, but she did not show signs of either reaction. She had no precepts as she navigated my nonsense-filled notebooks. Then again, it was hard to shock someone who lived in the nightmarish brutality outside the city wall. In a world where murder was mundane and cannibalism was common, she was unperturbed by worthless words written on a page.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” she said as she continued to explore.

I saw in her hands a page covered with letters and symbols. Though the light flickered, I soon recognized it as a differential equation which could not be solved by ordinary means. I had employed a process I partially understood, one that Vaida’s Disciples called a LaPlace transform, to eventually solve the problem on the page. As she tried to make sense of it, Aeliana set her calloused fingers on the letters and numbers she recognized, though she steered clear of the LaPlace operator and the integral which followed.

“Did you ever learn how to do math?” I asked as I still did not know her path.

But Aeliana answered as she nervously shook her head, “The only things I learned were in books left by the dead. I know the bare basics. I can multiply in my head. With just a little algebra… sometimes I could get x by itself. It kept my mind alive on sleepless nights, but… all the math in the world didn’t do anything for me in the desert.”

I could see a nervous look arise in her eyes, but I took her hands and confessed, “Math never saved me from my misery. It’s a hobby at worst and a frail guess at a fleeting future at best. This method here is an interesting one—probably my favorite in all of mathematics. It’s called a LaPlace transform, and we use it when the algebra of our world is too weak to solve an equation. This process translates the equation from our dimension to another, from a domain of time to frequency instead. We then use the algebra of that second world to solve the equation we couldn’t before, and then at the very end, we translate the result back into our dimension as the final answer. So in the end, the problem arrives at the same answer for which it was always destined, but it danced across dimensions just to get there.”

Aeliana continued to gaze over the poorly-scribbled equations in the notebook, but I could see through the window of her hazel eyes that she was deep in thought. Even when she closed the notebook full of nonsense, she stood upright and stared ahead as if she stood in different worlds at the same time. She stared as if she were in a dream; her eyes were wide but could not see a thing.

She whispered as she lifted her hand to her head, “I think that this is exactly as you said. It was written in stone by fate all along. Our paths were destined to cross and converge, but I never could have found you in the world outside this city. The truth called to me like the echo of an empty existence far away from this place. Almost like our entanglement crossed dimensions and converged with the logic of another world. When I finally realized the reality, it was like the translation of a question I never knew I asked. Anyone else would dismiss the driving whisper. Anyone else would have run away from the wall.”

“The stars strived to separate us, but destiny demands we destroy that divergence. We are more than just destined for each other, and this is more than mere entanglement. I believe that our souls were forged at the same time as the planets and the stars. We were meant for an eternity together, but the stars in the sky envied the strength of our union, and that’s why they dare to divide us. No matter how many obstacles fall in our way, we will destroy them and always come together in the end,” I explained to the girl I would die to defend.

Moisture settled in her eyes as she nodded excitedly. She set her hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer, but I froze when our faces were inches apart. A tear descended from her right eye and shimmered in the flickering light of my quiet home. I could hear her heart hopelessly pounding in her chest. I wanted to kiss her gently and express our love as lovers do, but I felt my limbs freeze beneath me. I could not kiss her yet; she’s perfect, so I embraced her there instead. She stood in silent shock, almost as if she were petrified by a force she did not understand, but then she relaxed all at once. She almost fell limp in my embrace, and then she wrapped her arms around me. I knew in that moment that we were ephemeral and also eternal, like a cosine and its inverse trapped in an identity, desperately seeking each other so that we could shed our stagnant shells and step together into spacetime itself.

            I whispered in her ear as I held her hand in mine, “When I first found you, I was at the end of the line. I think that you saved me—that you found me just in time.”