Match 2: Thorod vs. Eeralai - Thorod's Entry
To Weep In a Dark Time
by Thorod Ashstaff
I'd tell you my name, if only I could remember what it was. Call me Eve. No, strike that, that's not right.
Jake—dear Jake—called me Eve on that first day. I'd been asleep for so long. How many days, how many centuries? But I had been awoken; I had been called to come forth. It is so hard to remember things when you've been asleep for so long. And sometimes it is so hard to want to.
"I have to call you something," he'd said, "just because you've got amnesia, or you're in shock, or whatever, I'm not just going to call you Jane Doe like they do on TV. I'm going to call you Eve, because you looked so beautiful when I found you climbing out of that canyon,
so amazing, like you were the first woman I'd ever seen."
His language was new to me, though a few of the words sounded like ones I'd heard before, only changed. I had been asleep for a very long time. I understood him of course, and could answer his questions soon enough; tongues are easy to learn when you can reach in and grab each word's thought. Soon enough my own thoughts were in his language, English.
He'd called me beautiful, and I looked down and realized that I was. He'd given me a flannel shirt from his pack, one big enough to cover me like a robe, because he was worried for my modesty, or his own. It was a red plaid, and it clashed with my hair, which was auburn again, and long. My body, this body, was one of youth, young and perfect and fresh, and my eyes again shone with the deep blue of the evening sky. Jake looked at my face and I could see his hunger, and the beginnings of his love, and I was troubled.
We sat on the edge of the little canyon, and he told me how he'd go to the police when we'd hiked back to town, just a two-hour walk back to his car and then a one-hour drive. We'd check for missing persons reports, and find out who I was. He called this place England, but that's not what it was called when I'd gone to sleep, when I'd been pulled deep, deep into the earth by the long roots. But Jake was wrong. It wasn't amnesia, not like he thought anyway, and I didn't need to go to any enforcers, nor would there be any records. But I didn't tell him that, he would not have understood. I didn't even understand, not completely, not yet. I knew so little, this soon after waking, but I knew I had to find the ones who had called me.
"No," I'd said, "please. Could we just go someplace quiet, where I can collect my thoughts. I feel like deep fog, and I'm strangely tired, and hungry. We can go to the police tomorrow."
So we walked out of the woods, along a well-used trail, under a grey sky that was threatening rain. I would have liked the rain, cold and fresh on my young body, but I sensed it would worry Jake, with me wearing only his big flannel shirt, so I held it off. We walked, and he asked me questions I couldn't answer, and he told me tales of his life: his flat in the city called Cardiff, his job, which he hated, and his dreams, which he believed in. And I saw the goodness in his heart, and I began to love him in return, though I knew that was a mistake, and at some point on the trail his hand reached out, and I took it in mine, and we walked together.
At the end of the trail was a road, not of stone or of packed turf but of some hard black tar, which had a foul smell. We got in his machine, which he called an SUV, and when he brought the beast to life it smelled like poison, and I recognized it as the taste in the air that had so confused me. He was poisoning the world's air just to travel from town to town, they all were, and yet there was no hatred of the world in his heart. I was sad, and quiet, on the drive back to town. I had been called from sleep in a strange time, a time of poison and paradox, a time that felt like endings. Jake sensed my sadness, though not its cause, and he was wise enough to drive to town in silence.
We drove to his flat, his home, and he offered me strange meats, but they smelled like poisons too, different poisons, but still foul, and I could not touch them. But he had bread, which smelled wonderful, and creamy butter which he kept magically cold, and good honey, and wine. He built a fire in his small brick fireplace, and we sat by the fire and I ate the good food and drank the heady wine, and Jake put the strange meats away without a word and ate bread and honey with me, because that's who he was. And as the windows grew dark with dusk and the fire burned low, I took off the big flannel shirt, and let my long auburn hair fall softly against my breasts, and Jake took off his clothes as well, with clumsy,
shy fingers, and I helped him.
"You are so beautiful," he said, "and I feel so unworthy, which is a new feeling for me, and so old."
I laughed, for the first time in a very long while. This child, this mortal, this too-brief spark of goodness was telling me he felt old, while his touch was making me feel so young. I laughed, and I ran my fingers through the fine, soft hair of his chest, and pulled him down to the floor, and we made love by the dying embers of the fire, and he fell asleep in my arms.
"Dear Jake," I whispered, "Dearheart." And then I killed him.
I wept for a long time. Wept hard, for his love and his spark, for his beauty and the feel of his soft hair between my fingers, wept in rage against the poisons I'd sensed lying deep in his lungs when we made love. While I wept I let the rain finally come, and it spattered against the windows like the footfalls of mourners. I had awoken in a dark time, a time where there were poisons in the air, where mortals with good hearts breathed the poisons of their own creation until their very lungs became black. Jake's body grew cold and stiff as I wept, and the embers of the fire at last went out, and I, I who could not feel cold, shuddered.
I had given him such a gift, to touch that which so few mortals were allowed to touch. And I had given him another gift when I had killed him, when I had protected him from the long, ugly, painful death that his own lungs were about to bring him. I sat in the darkness, with my hand lying in the soft hairs on his cold chest, and I began to remember who I had been. And then I wept some more.
At last, when the windows were once again growing light, I got up. It was time. Death, for these mortals, can come as a gift, or as a judgment. It was time for judgment. I ate the last of the bread and honey, and drank the last of the wine, and found clothes in Jake's closet that would do, though they did not fit. I reached out with my mind, seeking for the ones who had called me, and soon enough I found them, or at least knew in which direction I had to go. It was not far, a few leagues at most, and I walked quickly, avoiding as much as I could the strange metal beasts with their poisonous breath. Sometimes I would reach out again with my mind as I walked, but the ones I sought were not moving, they were gathered together and my way was sure.
There was a stone archway, deep in the center of this city Jake had called Cardiff, with a locked metal gate within the arch. I touched the lock, and opened the gate, and I walked through the archway already knowing that those who had called me were on the other side. It was an open courtyard, and in the center of the courtyard
they stood in a circle, wearing white robes and white cowls, hands clasped. Such fools. They were doing it again, and that was something I could not allow.
They were chanting, but they stopped when one of them spotted me and called out. The circle broke, and I walked through, walked straight to the old man who wore a red sash over his white robe.
"I'm sorry," he said, "but this is a private ceremony. The gate was supposed to be locked."
"I am come," I said.
The old man looked into my eyes, and paused, and for a moment I thought he knew who I was, but when he spoke again I knew he didn't, though he may have begun to guess.
"Are you interested in neo-paganism?" he asked. "We're druids, and we come here once a week to reflect on nature. Today we're doing a new chant, only the second time we've done it. I found it in the old archives at the Trevithik library, I'm the librarian there."
"You are not druids," I said, suddenly angry, "you are fools! Fools and amateurs who somehow stumbled on the right words at the wrong time, that's all."
The old man stepped back, his eyes wide. He'd at last seen something in my eyes, and he was beginning to understand.
"You're..." he said, but he stopped.
My anger cooled, gone as quickly as it had come. The old man had a good soul, and all of them, all these confused mortals standing in a circle around me, they had their hearts in the right place at least. I realized now they must have had, or the words wouldn't have worked, even the right words. They were closing in, wanting to defend the old librarian from this angry stranger who had come into their midst. So I put them all to sleep, and they fell to the grey stones of the courtyard in a tangle of white robes. Then, one by one, I laid them out flat, and I laid the palm of my hand on their foreheads, and I made them forget. I made them forget me, and I made them forget the new chant. But I let them remember who they were, and what they believed in; there was no evil here.
Lastly I came to the old man, and kneeling beside him I lifted him up to a sitting position, and I let him wake up. He looked around at his friends, and then at me.
"What happened?" he said. "Did you do that? Are they dead?"
"No, they are not dead, though I came here to kill them, for the sake of my sisters. I cannot allow them, allow you, to do this, it is not the right time. Your friends sleep, and they have already forgotten me."
"The chant..."
"Yes, the chant. You must bring me the chant you found. And any copies that have been made." I was not angry, but I put Command in my voice, and he nodded.
"I've got it right here," he said. He had a backpack lying against the wall of the courtyard, and from it he took an old, tattered book and a few pieces of white paper with the words of the chant typed out on them. "Here, this is the book I found it in, it wasn't even in the catalogs, just an old history book stuck in the archives. These are the copies I made for our group." I looked at him, and he understood. "They're the only ones, honest, and the book might be the only one left too, at least I couldn't find any record of it when I went online."
I took the book, and opened it to the page the old man had marked with a red ribbon. The text was copied from a broken stone monolith, in an old tongue, and then translated into English. There was a line drawing of the monolith, though the author of the book was vague about its location. I touched my fingertips softly to the line drawing, and I knew where the old stone was, knew where I had to go next. I put the typed pages into the book and shut the musty covers, then I held the book in my hands and squeezed until there was nothing but dust, grey dust which swirled out of my hands and disappeared over the walls of the courtyard. The old man did not look surprised, and I gazed at him with new respect. He was, perhaps, not as much of a fool as I had thought.
"Now you must sleep again," I said softly, "and dream. You will not remember me."
"Please," he said, "let me remember you. You're so beautiful, and your eyes are so blue, there is light in them." There was something in his look, not quite love but close, it reminded me of Jake.
"Make me forget the chant," he said, "but not you. I will keep the memory to myself, always."
"It will cause you pain."
"I'm an old man, I've lost friends and lovers both, and I've lost my companion of forty years. I can handle the pain of a beautiful memory. Please."
"So be it," I said. "But the chant..."
"I understand. The chant will be gone. I promise not to even look for it."
"You will not even remember there was anything to look for." He looked into my eyes, and then he was asleep, and I lowered him gently to the grey stone, and laid my hand on his forehead.
I found the stone the next day, at dusk, and sent its dust to the wind to follow the dust of the book. Then I began the most important search of all, the search for a place to rest. Now it is the deep quiet before dawn, and I can feel that I am very close. Again I am clad only in sky, as I began. I walk west along a road of packed dirt, in the midst of a forest of virgin wood, and
the full moon leads me on. Soon I will turn off the road, perhaps just ahead, and I will find a place where I can once again sleep. A place where the roots will push me deep, deep into the earth, until the time is right. I wish that I, too, could forget, like those sleeping mortals in their white robes, but I cannot. I take heart from the old man's words, and turn into the wood, and find the place, and as I lie down on the soft pine needles and close my eyes, I let myself remember the feel of Jake's soft hair beneath my fingers, and accept the pain.
It seems pretty tight already...
