Leaving, learning and finding
‘They are like you,’ I am told. ‘Exactly the same, probably a few inches shorter. You are, to them, a suit of armour,’ I didn’t like this analogy one bit. Why was I protecting something so shadowy and reclusive? The letter read on. Rytt, the only reason I read on, continued, ‘I knew who it was, as soon as we met. I did not understand it, but I knew there was something more than just you. Do not hear me wrong, but, we have come to far together for something like this, don’t you think? We were trying to touch something that neither of us knew we could reach. I was told this by the wind. Do you hear it too? It’s like a lost shadow, never knowing how to follow you around, as though you were the shadow itself’.
Go north, and you will be heard again,’ the letter resigned. No signature. Only the trust of how far I had come.
The windows rattled with the cold, cold wind. Soon enough, I knew they would give. The wind spoke words, but it very well knew I wanted silence. The windows clattered with bitter fragility.
I harkened back. I remember sitting around a candle-lit table, deep in a bar we had never visited before. We were both younger, neither of us old enough to drink but eager enough to try. A consistent look from the Keep told us to try elsewhere. We had nowhere else to go. This town had kept us there for a long, long time. The mountains soared around in all directions, keeping us landlocked, but with a good source of fresh mountain water. At the bar, though, neither of us drank. Playing cards across the table, we spoke in quiet words. Men at the counter gave us strange looks.
‘Why do you think they look at us?’ I asked Rytt, across from me. In his youth, eternally in his prime, he smiled as he spoke. His black hair was cropped short. He compensated by an attempt at growing a goatee.
‘I guess that we’re standing out, you hear me?’ A habit of his, ending his sentences with an affirmation of being heard. I missed his voice, and the space it took. ‘We’re in the corner, and they’re at the counter. They have safety, so we stand as an unsafety to them,’
I could not understand, but what he had said stuck with me in my later, recent years. In the moment, the words he said felt swirling and strange, unsettling and hypnotic. As they often did. Like matching the gaze of a hot, sparking open fire. Leaving that town did us much good.
Reading the parchment left on the walls, it made sense now. The words he had spoken were never for me. How much had he said did he leave for me? The oil-lamps were fading, the moments remaining in the space were dimming. I felt trapped. The wooden walls of the house were already failing, and I was more incentive for them to finally give up on being a stable, working household. The parchment had tried to keep the house together, the place of final exclusivity.
Did I dare go northwards? Travel onwards and upwards, as the letters had asked? The blizzard would soon come down the hill, and I would have to weather it. The walls would easily give, I had no intentions of keeping them together. Magic had long since found better users. Especially at this altitude.
I could leave the mountain. I could walk down, and escape. Leave, and use the words I had left to travel back. I felt my shadow grow larger. The feeling inside me, the void, was swelling. No exit came to me: only this vague entrance. I read the letter again. I would quicker dismiss it, and let go. I expected the words to change everything that I was now.
The evening passed. Night fell as I packed up. The torn rucksack would go no further with me. From it, I took my journal and the moonlit knife. It sheathed well onto my hip. My amberwood staff waited by the door. I took the last of Yemmie’s oil, putting it beside the dormant oil-lamp. It too waited, beside the staff. Finally, I held my cloak. All that I had, scattered and unknown. It remained soggy from the rain, the straps torn and ragged from the encounter a few days prior. I took the sheepskin rug off the bed. With the last pin, and what remained of my thread, sewed the sheep’s wool onto the cloak. My hands struggled. The quake had set in, though I was accustomed enough. It was poorly threaded, but, holding the cloak in my hands brought me through everything we had shared. Not just Rytt and I, but the cloak, too. In holding it, the memories were warm and familiar, although I felt the images were unclear.
There were forests I found the cloak blending in with. I remembered Rytt, standing beside me, watching as the Habrye stalked us. We were clueless, friends far away from where we should have been. Deep in unknown woods, fear wrapped around us, as much as my cloak kept me warm. The air was humid and thick. The being, huge and eager, eyes of cat with the body of a moth watched us. It all faded deep into the past. The coat I was cocooned in, barely strong enough to hold a babe, thickened and restrung… I wondered how much of it was left. The black pattern, the spells of luck and endurance, now barely legible. Sat by cold candle-light, I found myself the old hag I’d spent teenage years rejecting. My hair, graying and colourless dotted into view.
I felt tired.
The snow awaited me. Bidding the crumbling porch farewell, the cold swarmed me. The snow was fresh. No person had walked here before. I clutched the cloak. So quickly cold. I could feel it gnawing at flesh, galloping down my throat and into my lungs, a cold that seeped to the very core of me. The entrance was open, and my body scorned me for it. This was the reconnection. I held on to the staff for all I could. The lamp clinked on its hook. The wind would move and shift and all sense was lost. There was just the snow, the wind, the incline. I went up. I travelled onward.
Night had fallen, and with it, the snow had turned black. A vile, seeping black, sinking down around me, deep and sorrowful as the moonless night. No light was there to guide me. I had to keep walking. I had to keep travelling. The motion was taking me beyond. The inn, warm and reclusive, the people looking at us, examining everything we shared. I walked on. No clouds overhead, just a deep, deep snow. My footsteps got quieter and quieter. No sound was being made. The repetitive crunch of the boots under fresh snow woke nothing new. No entrance was being used. Nothing was being heard. Nothing was being acknowledged. I felt… nothing. I was walking up, but to what end? The wooden staff in my hand, tall and knotted no longer felt my touch. The cloak kept me warm, but, what else?
There was a universal pause. A disruption true and present. It took the form of the incline, this unmoving, unloving blizzard. There was nothing inside of me. Nothing around me. Nothing but snow.
Each sense had left. My skin was surface-level and still. It made no sense. Yet, I stopped caring. My heart had slowed. I felt no cold, no rejection, no assimilation, no warmth. Just, me. I began to realise the pause. The vacant nothingness. I felt nothing. For, before me, there was the self. The night had fully warmed me. No light guided me. Unclear at first, the focus shifting with the snow around it, it came to be. Into a full existence. Where there was no entrance, there was now an exit. It had forcefully left. It was as expected. Myself, in every way. The same tired, deep set eyes. The lanky, annoyingly broad, old shoulders. Malformed and mutilated. Naked. It held no colour. While the night had swarmed me, I was no longer alone. There was us, the deep and familiar self. It was only itself, a bare, raw reflection of me.
I could hardly move. My whole innards felt as though they lay on the ground before me. The cold rotted my dying teeth. I listened. My voice spoke out. My lips, parsed and tired, spoke. The cold held it’s slim hands around my throat. Nobody heard me. The blizzard continued, as it always would. Night remained. It was deep set, still and untouched, yet it knew me entirely.
I had tried to reach and understand it, but my hands would no longer move. There was the incline, and it looking at me. It had never been taught how to look. Nor how to breathe, how to be seen. The colour I held leaked out onto the snow, staining it. It was as though the ghost had lived inside of me. No longer listening to my restless body, I reached out. Staring, looking into those unseeing eyes, my aged hands tapped the shadow on the chest. I stretched. My bones ached. My muscles ached. Every joint, every sense that belonged to this shell, ached. The hand stretched. And reached. Did it want to meet mine? Or did it know nothing but to mirror my own actions? The shadow’s eyes seemed to focus. Trance-like. No entrance, and no exit. Under this world, under an empty moon, it would not be able to leave as such. Landlocked and stagnant, the being stared at me. It had no place go. I understood. It could not return, it could not leave. It was so filled with rejection. The loneliness of him leaving, of me leaving, of my ruining, all harboured up inside this creature. Was I to let it fester inside of me, as it had been doing? Or, let it free, live in isolation and under the eye of the blizzard, no company and no choice but to drown in the ephemeral snow of night. Was I to reject, and put it all down to me own self-righteous ignorance? I cried out. I was alone and I could cry and I cried out.
‘Why must I be left to chose? Why must this fate be plain? Would my freedom not spare us from this trapping?’
The old hag raved on. The thought stayed rotted in my mind, even when nobody was near. All fate led me to return the shadow. Returning to the newborn chick to the shell. Only when the shell could give way, could it be free. I wept cold tears.
A light came. Not of day, but of man. Of Rytt. How long, how long? The nightly storm had raged on, but he was standing there, unfettered and still. Eyes met. Mine, wet and freezing, his, distant and temporary. A light, cast by magic, shone beside him. He approached won the incline. The pause continued. Age had been equally tiring. He wore long robes, the colour of pine. His hair was the same length as I remembered. A beard patched his cheeks. As he grew closer, I only grew still. My heart trembled. The tears I cried were real. The friend, before me, still and alive and missed. The shadow was taken in his hand. The shadows hand took his. It looked like a connection was continued between them. Neither of them faltered. Neither of them questioned the other, instead, they shared the touch between them. No part of me could speak. My brain surged at the sight of him, or at least, some memory of him. The snow had stopped. The stars had forgotten them already. The incline took them. Surrounded by night, spirits stood still.
I awoke on a slope, the ground cold and wet beneath me. The sky was a deep, stormy gray. The sunrise rose below it. From where, I could not see. Trees, birches, stood nearby. Their green and white youthfulness contrasted the ageing sky. My clothes were soaked through. A boot was missing. It was good to know my nerves still worked. Still. I lay on my back. The energy and effort needed to sit up had left me. I was deeply winded, my head spinning through tiresome thoughts. I shifted my head, looking for the wooden shack. No such thing was nearby. Displacement ran over me. Something unfelt for a long, long time, arriving on anxious harbours eons ago. The forested smell rose from the ground beneath me. My lungs were healed at their touch.
‘That is all we can heal you for,’ they spoke, sympathetically and concernedly.
I nodded. I counted the days in my head. Today must have been the month’s end. The green leaves were close to passing beyond. None fell on me. The tiredness slowly spilt into the earth, but so, I remained grounded. When my body commanded it, I stood up. The mountains hovered in the background. It surprised me, how far I had made it up there. Now the birch healed me wholly. On my two feet, my body ached horribly. I had no choice but to return down to the small village. No path showed its way, though the ground was sloped and traversable. The chill had corrupted my lungs. I exhaled, and made my way down.
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