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FOREVER AND MORE

WREN

I am woken from a dreamless sleep by the sound of a soft scuffing from the far side of the fire.

I’ve lived too long in caution to not come fully awake in the night when threatened, so my senses are on high alert the second I hear the strange noise.

All is stillness and darkness around me until my eyes adjust to the midnight blackness, and can just make out the outline of a large horse by the shivering light of the dying embers.

I’ve truly never seen a creature so big — it seems almost a different species than the horses of our village, but its velvet nose and liquid eyes are the same as our smaller, heartier ponies.

Creeping over quietly, past the noiseless place where the horned creature sleeps, I approach the horse cautiously.

It lifts its head to look at me, then returns to a small pile of hay in front of it.

I don’t know where it came from, can only assume it is the creature’s mount, and I missed it in the earlier chaos.

Reaching out a tentative hand, I stroke its dark neck, at first hesitantly, and then, when it does not react, lean my full body against it, wrapping my arms around its neck, the warmth of its muscles bright and alive under my skin.

It is patient with my affection, just flicking its tail and ears in response .

“How will I go on?” I whisper against its side, a quiet desperation in my words. “How will I go on?”

It has no answer, just continues eating, and I breathe against it, slowly, slowly, until it picks up its head, hearing something beyond the reach of my ears, then walks off into the inky blackness.

I am awake now, though, and on edge. I know there is no sleep left for me in these waning hours, and move numbly to sit by the fire, my eyes fixed on a shadow in the shadows.

Tahrik’s empty form is covered in a draped cloth of some sort — another unexpected kindness from the horned man.

He was not left exposed to the night chill — though he would not feel it my mind reminds me — and I shake away the thought.

The horned one said we would have time to honor Tahrik in the morning, but there is no promise strong enough to make me wait.

If I have learned anything, it is that nothing is certain, and if the moment exists, you must seize it or risk losing it forever.

Gliding silently past the fire to the far side of our makeshift camp where Tahrik now lays, I try to think of what I can do for him.

Honoring the dead in our village is such a different thing than I’m now faced with — as different as the Storms from Forgiveness — and I am cripplingly unsure of what to do.

Our people sing to the sleeping soul, and then again to the woken bone, once it is ready.

There are few final goodbyes during the time of a BoneKeeper, so I am not as familiar with our practices when our village is without one.

If I am near, the soul goes to bone. I’ve never been at a ceremony for a soul lost to Silence; it’s not a place I would be welcome.

Casting my mind back, I search through other’s recollections, trying to think of the best way I can honor my lost friend.

But there is nothing. The bones tend to share their best memories with me, the things they loved and long for from their living days.

Very rarely do they linger on sorrow, and even then, over time, the sadness drains from them and they are left filled only with mist-covered moments of warm earth beneath their feet and the open sky of the Dancing Month.

Time takes all heartache eventually; even mountains of pain are worn to pebbles at the end.

So I don’t know how to do this; even if he’s empty, he deserves something .

All that comes to mind is the first song he sang to me, when I was lost and scared and he saved me just by seeing me.

It is a howling agony in my soul that I could not repay the favor, that somehow I missed the turning of his heart, the loneliness in him that I, in part, helped create, when he was the one who pulled me from my own.

But his world existed in a glass vase; everything he wanted and needed held carefully within fragile walls.

And it was the cruelest trick of the sun and stars that the only woman he loved was the one who was destined to crack that glass, who wanted everything outside that shattered boundary.

I don’t know if I ever would have broken the vase if I had known its walls were his mind, and, by fracturing one I would fragment the other.

My voice is shaky when I start, choked with sadness, my vision blurring enough that the night is viscous, and gives me back Tahrik for one, agonizing moment.

His memory turns to me with a shining smile, eyes fixed on my own, and holds out a hand.

I try to take it, unthinking, but mine passes through his, as futile as holding pure water in cupped fingers.

So when he whispers, “Well, Keeper? Shall we begin?” I know it’s a crushing trick of light, just a lingering fragment of a beautiful friendship, and something more, that was born in the speckled sunlight of the childrens’ garden.

For everything that happened since, his music and smile had been the bright threads woven in heavy cloth of my life for so long that the thought of never hearing him again is suffocating, singing almost impossible.

But I have to try. I couldn’t Guide him to bone, but I will at least sing him to sleep.

His voice marked every waxing and waning in my sky, almost every dawn and dusk of the people in our village. It seems fitting, then, to say our final goodbye with our beginning, the first he ever sang to me.

“Quietly, quietly, walk in the shadow

Quietly, quietly through the dark door

Quietly, quietly, young starlit maiden

And there will be peace for you

Water and shore .

Quietly, quietly shimmer like stardust

Quietly, quietly hope on the wind

Quietly, quietly tell me your secrets

And I’ll keep them safe for you

Shall we begin….”

I never sung in the village — had only the once taken part in the Dancing or the celebrations of life there.

My presence was a reminder of death, and I tried hard to not weigh others down with my attendance.

So I watched from the edges, and whispered the words to myself when the rest of the village shouted them with joy.

No one had ever heard me sing, so this once it will be a gift to Tahrik’s memory, and though his bones cannot hear me, perhaps he is right, and he bound a piece of his soul to my own, because here in the silence of the coal-black night, I swear I can feel him, somewhere, just a breath beyond my own.

So I sing, voice low and unsteady, whispering the dream he wrote for me so long ago.

“Shall we begin a brand new adventure

Will you walk with me, will you take my hand,

Shall we have dreams we share with each other,

Speak in a language none but we understand?

Quietly, quietly meet me in shadows

Quietly, quietly whisper my name,

Quietly, quietly I will come to you,

Drawn by your presence as moth by a flame…”

Tears are thick in my voice now, but I finish the song for him, changing the words.

“Quietly, quietly, I’ll Guide you through shadow

Quietly, quietly I’ll open Death’s door

Quietly, quietly, my star-crossed lover

And there will be peace for you

Water and shore.

And I’ll always love you, forever and more.”

My voice fades, and I bow my head, hands pressed before me, kneeling by the side of his body.

The world is nothing but sorrow and regret for so very many heartbeats; in the morning, as he asked me to, I will let him go.

But tonight, in these lost, quiet hours, I’ll stay by his side and maybe, if I am wrong about the Silence, then somewhere some echo of his soul will know I didn’t leave him alone.

Slowly, painfully, like an old woman, I lay on the cold ground next to his covered body and stare for a long time at the flickering embers in the fire until my eyes grow heavy.

Just as they shut, I think I see the faint outline of a curved horn in the shadow of the trees beyond Tahrik’s body, but am lost to sleep before I am sure.