Always

I hear the howls of the damned outside my window every night, as they claw to get in my shamble of a cabin.

 -----

The beanjuice drips eloquently from the metallic, mesh filter, through a conical wonderland into my chipped, green mug with blue interior.  A respite of warmth within the frigid space: my cabin atop the mountain.  They call this mount the Peak of Sorrow.  There once was a string of villages along the summit, but they were decimated several decades ago by marauders from the south, who pillaged until the very breath of the villagers were stolen in the night, the walls of their homes burning their devastating stories into the clouds above.  Some say you can still see the blood and tears frozen on the pathways, which is why they sparkle like the night sky, a crimson and azure glow.  I’ve lived here for twenty, long years.  Alone.  The way I like it.  I’ve had enough adventuring for one lifetime.  I’ve seen the horrors of the world along the way.  I came here to heal. 

I came here to die.

The creatures outside leave me alone for the most part.  They just serenade me, as they thirst for my soul.  They are waiting for my breath to leave my body, so they can claim me, catch my soul-spark before it enters the ether and joins the many adventurers in the inky night.

But even in death we aren’t done fighting.  It is said in the dark of the sky, there awaits a giant squid that chases our souls and swallows us whole if we do not keep moving across the night sky.  It all sounds exhausting, so I would rather the creatures outside feast upon my light and send me prematurely to a beautiful oblivion.  No thought.  No more loneliness.  No dark past breathing down my neck.  Just nothing.  Erased. 

I am so tired.  I just want to rest.

My old, war-torn hands struggle with the mug, as I try not to burn myself.  Not an easy feat to burn beyond the thick wall of callouses, but the heat from my beanwater manages.  I tremble over to the fire I have smoldering in the corner, ever so gently.  It can barely breathe in this cold cabin, much like me.  I can feel the icy air squeeze my chest.  I wrap up in the warmth of a blanket.

We are in the longdark of the season.  For half a year we are plunged into this longdark: a dark winter, lit only by the stars and moons above, that stretches on more than most people would like.  It’s the perfect time of year, and we are halfway through.  I savor the dark.  It juxtaposes the nature of the fiery storm inside my breast.  The cold soothes the flames of my tortured soul.  I can’t stop ruminating on the errors of my past, my mistakes and misdeeds.  The regrets reach their daggered fingers into my chest and try to tear out the pulp of my wretched heart.  It burns, and this cold winter heals my tired soul.  My rapidly beating chest-stone slows to match the lingering winter.  Now as I heal, I await the final song of the forest folk.  The mystic creatures of the wood will sing me to sleep one day, and until then I try to breathe myself into little deaths each night.  I rarely catch a full wink.  The sandman tortures me, because I’ve taken the dreams from so many others.  But in the winter he is more forgiving.  Must be the cold, and my eyes are as blankets, shielding my irises from the frozen north.

I sip my beautiful, brown muck: bitter, subtle, wonderfully acidic, with notes of brown sugar on the nose, cherry and milk chocolate on the palate.  I take it black, because why rob ourselves of the truth of the flavor?  Why cover it with sweet lies and milked mockeries? I like to know what I am drinking and have no delusions of its nature.

In the time it takes to sip my warmth, I’ve managed to parry and push away most of the atrocities of my youth, one by one as they come in cycles that make me want to die.  As I ache, I take another sip, and it fills me with hope again.  Hope for the sip that comes after another wave of pain and unmatchable, unquenchable thirst to leave this realm.  I feel the acid as it eats my swallower and my large belly.  I stroke my beard and contemplate existence, as my mug is now empty, and I’m free to do so without as much pain.

Now that I’ve had coffee, it’s time for a whiskey, neat.

I make my way to the cabinet for that liquored warmth, when the locked, front door of the cabin bangs to my left.  Somebody slams against the cabin entrance.  The old, weary wood keeps whatever creature it is at bay.  But the creature has a voice.  A voice with speech.  Foreign at first.  A language I recognize but don’t know how to speak, except an errant phrase or two.  The Tongue of the Elves.  But there are no Elven People near the Summit of Sorrow or its frozen peak.

The creature, she cries in my tongue, “Please…” She can barely utter the word.  I do not take visitors.  I do not entertain guests.  I do not house those weary souls that venture through the pass and freeze along the path.  I do not meddle in the affairs of the outside world, and they do not meddle with me in kind.  I am no savior, and so I will not open the cabin to her trouble.  I’m done with that life.  And I wish for that life to be done with me.

“Prithee…”

But if I do not, it will be another cycle to ruminate upon.  Another, astonishing agony within my stony heart.  Her begging hammer chisels away at my chest-stone, that I had thought was safe enough behind its boney cage.  Not safe from her, it seems: this Elven Girl who ambled from the wandering wood with its many, salivating eyes a’watching from the depths of the foliage.  I can hear the fiends, outside, hunger for her.  They are coming. 

They are coming to feast upon her flesh.

“Pray thee, open.”

I’ve not much time now.  Rather she has few grains left to continue breathing.  I hear her rasp for air.  Her creaky lungs can barely swallow it.  I’ve not much time. 

Not much time.

The glass grasps it’s final granule.

She gathers her strength, and, as if to wake me from my slumber, she calls to me by name, “Dwebold.  Dwebold, I pray.”

I tear the door open and pull her in.  She could be a fiendish pretender, mocking an Elfish Tongue to catch me, but no.  It is a frail, beaten, and bloody Elven Girl, with ghosts behind the pools of her pupils and their icy, blue rings that swirl around them.  I slam the door shut behind her, making sure it’s as solid as the mountain.  She fights to open her eye’s blankets again, forcing the gate open to glimpse my face.  I glimpse my mug as well, within the reflection of her gleaming marbles.  Have I become that withered and frail?

I carry her to the fire where I keep a pail of water.  She cries out in pain as I position her, her wounds leaking.  Despite her fragile state, I shake her.

“How do you know me? My name, girl, how?!”

She faints, as if I’ve shaken her to sleep, the mewling babe.

The girl hangs limp in my arms.  I get a good gander at her, with many thanks to my weary, fickle fire.  Her appearance, if she were of my race, would be that of an elder teenager.  By Elven Years she might be a bit shy of 100.  Very young, but thirty-five years my senior, I would bet on the spit of a dog’s eye.

I gather my materials.  Aids I thought I’d never use again, even if this rocky orb and its fates were to rip me from my hideaway.  I take a heated needle and sew her shut with Alagorn Hairs, sturdy indeed to thread through the skin and close it tight.  I clean the wounds properly.  I have more barrels of stored water, but what a waste of this pail of precious life, for leaking death to embrace it, sully it.

            I’ve sewn her shut, cleaned her wounds, refilled the pail, and now I clean the blood and grime from her fair skin.  I clean what I can see, but her gown is soaked through.  And a gown it is, as if from a wedding, if the groom, groomsmen, bridesmaids, and guests were all slaughtered at the altar before her feet.  Which would be fine if it were a Yorbin, Underling, or Terrigin wedding, for what’s a good wedding without a sacrificial slaughter?  But I doubt the Elves fashion themselves for such ceremonies.  I don’t bother to take off her gown and clean beneath, for I’ve no wish for her to fret upon the waking.  I’ll let her sleep in her sick rot for now.  I pile blankets into a cushion on the floor for her to float in her dreams, may they not be nightmares.  I’ll not let her in my bed in her state, for I like a tidy place to slumber, and she’s as dirty as a dwarf’s mouth. 

She has worn me out entirely, but, instead of sleep, I saunter to my cabinet of distilled drops of burning bliss.  I pour myself a tail of smoky, peaty, dwarven whiskey, aged in the Monarch Mountains, many days east of here, by the horse. The peat having been collected from the Bogs of Melhoven by the lizard people in those lands and traded to the dwarves, who roast it underground on the firestones. Aft the distillation it is gathered in dragon-charred Elven Oak Barrels, nestled in the caves there, and aged for at least fifty years.  What a good dram.  My body smokes just like the whiskey, overcome by the faux warmth.  I get tipsy topsy and buzzed enough for the haunts of my mind to dissipate.  Goddesses bless the talents of the Monarch Mountain Dwarves and their magic mind-murker of an aged spirit.

I get so sloppy, my spittle drools into a pool on my lap.  I wipe my face and crotch and stumble over to the cloud I sleep upon.  If a cloud were as firm as a dragon’s back.  Despite the comfortable uncomfort, I drift in my drinky sleep.

 --

I dream.

My dream-spirit wakes inside a cave.

“Dwebold,” a deep voice calls.

“Dwebold, the weary wanderer, come hither.”

“Who calls?” I ask of the boom.

“I call.”

“That narrows it down considerably,” I answer.

“I am Greyscales.”

“Greyscales?  The Dragon of the Wandering Mountains?  I slew you in my twenties in the Cavern of Weeping Gems, and, over a decade, all your kin.”

“And that, Dwebold White-Beard, once known as Red-Beard, is why I remain inside thee.  I slithered around thine heart and now constrict its beat, so that thou dost feel my presence and remember my kin with a weight around thy core.  Thou achest, because I wish it.  I wish for the suffering of thee.  A grand and terrible suffering for the slaughter of my kin.  I find thee in death, White-Beard.  I squeeze away the minutes of thy life until they choke to naught.  Dost thou thinkest of the ancient majesty and wonder of we dragons? Dost thou ponder the knowledge that died at thine axe.  The wealth of life that thou didst gut like a fish? Dost thou wonder what became of those that lay within thine wake?”

“I do.” I choke on my words, “I think upon you often.”

“And despair.  Oh, woe is thee.”

“I don’t suffer as much as I should, and yet I feel I’ve suffered enough.”

“Suffered enough? Never.  Kinslayer.  Thou dost not suffer enough for a thousand lifetimes.  Thou wilt drown in the blood thou hast spilt.  Thou hast filled the sea that shall be thy grave.  A woman came to thee this night.”

I remember life outside the dreaming.  I become lucid in the ‘mare.

I speak, “She did.  An Elven Girl.”

“She hath come to thee for thy presence alone.  Across the wood.  Fleeing from all who slash her flesh.  It is her destiny to beat upon thy door.  Then destiny rests upon thy doorstep, and ‘twas thy choice to open hearth to her.  And thou didst open to thine abode indeed.  But, know this, Kinslayer: one small, kind deed cannot undo the pain thou hast caused from thy breath, sucking the air from innocent lungs.”

“I killed what I thought were beasts and villains.  I killed for money and glory.  I am sorry for it now.  I will never be able to repair the damage I caused.  I am sorry, Greyscales.”

“Sorry? I’ll not forgive thee, if even thou were to beg of my forgiveness a thousand times over.  Thou wilt find change within thee hither with her.  Care for her.  Learn of her.  Protect her from the demons outside thy door.  Thou wilt die within thy wooded walls or just outside of them today.  It is thy choice to die protecting or die rejecting.  To spurn her or to hold her tight.  Choose Dwebold White-Beard, once known as Red-Beard.  Choose.”

 --

 I wake, feeling like I’ve been hit by a roaming dragon, and indeed, in the slumber, I have.  My head aches; my body aches.  I’ve the tremors.  I glance over at the girl, and she’s still out like Godstar.  What a sleeper, that one.  I wonder if I should wake her or at least make sure she’s not dead, but then I see the heave of her breast as she takes the air into her bag of flesh.  Still living at least.  So are the fiends outside my door.  I hear them screech and howl.  I hear them claw.  They are close now.  Creaking my walls.  My eyes glide from the wall back to the girl.  She stares at me, fully awake and spooks me silly.

“Dear blood!” I calm, “Goddesses above and below, you scared the everliving spirit out of my skin.  Do you speak?”

“If it is worth it.”

“It’s worth it to me.  So speak.”

“What do you want me to say?” she asks, still wobbly.

“A fine time to play dumb.”

“I clearly was not playing dumb; I was speaking.”

“But not saying anything of value.  Like: ‘Why you are here,’ and, ‘How you know my name?”

“I am not ready to tell you.”

I growl, “Ack! Not ready to tell me, eh? Then maybe you’d fare better with the demons in the dark.  Out with you! Leave my home!”

“I would die.”

“That’s the price you pay for a locked tongue.”

“Then unlock it with a key and not with destruction.”

I roll my tired eyes, “You speak in riddles, do you?”

“I speak softly, and you speak as though you slay the air with your tongue.  But that is how you have lived your life, have you not White-Beard, once Red-Beard.”

I’m stunned to silence.

“Yes, I know of your deeds.  And I know that some of them were rather ill.  You may not remember, but you protected my elders and I from mercenaries in the highlands.  They have sung songs of you for years.  Do you remember my elders? Do you remember me?”

“I’ve never seen your face before in my life.”

“A wonder you forgot.  Just a wonder.  Such a big undertaking to have forgotten.”

“I don’t remember you.”

“Do you remember my mother? We had the same face.”

“I tell you, I would recognize you if that were the case,” I insist.

“Perhaps you had it burned out of your mind with a potion?”

“And why would I do that?”

“Perhaps the events were so terrible you wished, with all your might, to forget.”

I shake my head, “If I had a potion like that, I would have wiped all my dark deeds out from my mind.”

“If you did, you would cease to be you.  You would be an empty puppet.”

“Would it be so?”

“’Twould.”

“I see.  I suppose you’re right,” I nod.  “It would indeed.”

“So a potion then?”

 “Why this one event? Why would I forget just one, and let the rest rot away my tired mind in a Ouroboros of painful rumination? The isolated yet communicable disease of Memory eats away at my spirit every moment, a Rust Monster feasting on my gear while the party all sleeps the precious seconds of existence away and dreams of a far-off doom.”

“It must have been the worst of the memories, I imagine, to have caused such a void.”

I can’t believe that.  “There isn’t a chance that it’s the worst.  I’ve done terrible things, and I’ve faced even worse in the dark of the deepest caves.  I can’t imagine anything worse than that which I already recall.”

“Interesting.”

“What’s that, exactly?”

“A life with events so haunting that you cannot even think something could possibly be worse.  It would be easy for an average person to imagine the mystery of a dark enough saga, but you… you have seen the darkest depths of this orb and the darkest depths of your deeds.  Nothing can be worse than the horrors you have witnessed.  …Or performed.”

“What do you know of my performance?”

“Of your deeds I know little but what you moaned to me by candlelight, a weeping drunk at our celebrations of your… ‘Victory.’  You bawled salt at me, ocean eyes calling the sailors home from the storm, for you knew how bad the wind had gotten behind them.  The wind of consequence blown by you.  A wind so thunderous that it could end an age.”

“Stop with your poetry.  Speak plainly.”

“The demons have chased me here.  Nothing will satisfy them, except a soul.  Will you give mine to them, or will you give them yours, Barbarian?”

“I’m not a Barbarian.  How about we both survive? Both sounds good.  Let’s not be foolish or hasty.  There is no reason to die this night.”

“Impossible for both to live.  There be a wellspring of reasons to die this night.  Oceans of understanding to swim with death and drown in the waters.  I am prepared to face my oblivion.  Are you?”

I ponder, and she continues, “You could fight them with the axe you’ve stored with your grains, like a forgotten gardening tool, but you would fail your final swing.”

“I’d rather go out fighting.”

“Would you?”

“Yes,” of course I would.

“I have come to you Dwebold White-Beard, once Red-Beard, not because you saved my people… 

“…But because you slew them.”

I freeze.  A chill down my spine.

I stumble over my tongue, “I… Elves… I would never have slain elves.  What reason would I have?”

Her voice drips with rage, “People don’t sing songs of your reason, Kinslayer.  They sing of bloodshed and cruelty.”

“I’ve done terrible things, but not so terrible.  I would have killed beasts and the occasional human who crossed me in battle, but I would not slaughter the innocent in such a way.”

“Is that truth you think you speak?”

“I speak true.  I’m not a monster.”

“’Not a monster,’ he says.”

“Indeed.”

“Let me spin you a tale, great Kinslayer.  We came to you, searching high and low for a band of great warriors to help us with a group of mercenaries that were terrorizing our hills.  A band of dwarves, they were.  We were not battle-ready folk.  We were mountain elves.  In ancient times we rode dragons into battle, but over the years we lived a peaceful life of art and nature.  You battled and won.  The dwarves retreated.  We celebrated and paid you well with gold, food, and drink.  Even weaponry and armor.  Even our art, poetry, and song.  We wove you new songs of your deeds, as you stayed with us for a few weeks. 

"But I lied to you earlier when I said we sang them in remembrance for years.  For after the festivities and rest were done, you and your comrades ventured down into the local village.  At the tavern you encountered the dwarves who retreated.  They told you of their purpose.  The treasure within the mountains.  Our homes guarded the entrance.  There was a mighty dragon inside that they were to slay and then take all the riches you could imagine.”

I swallow hard, and she bites on, “Your party, your band of ‘Warriors,’ journeyed deep inside the mountain with the team of dwarves behind you, giving you coin for your trouble and a share of the final hills of treasure.  For coin.  All for coin, your deeds.  Is the gold heavy on your heart?”

“Yes.  It weighs heavy.  Do get on with it.”

“I’ll take my time I think!  This speech upon my tongue is a long, arduous time in the complexities and agonies of its conjuring.”

“What cave? What is this cavern you speak of?”

“The Caverns of Weeping Gems in the Highlands.”

“I don’t remember Elves, but I remember the caverns.  I remember the dwarves.”

She continues, “You entered, heart full of song and wonder.”

“I was in my twenties, so that sounds about right.”

“Do NOT interrupt further, or I will slit your throat where you stand.”

I scoff, “With what blade, precious?”

She pulls a dagger from between her legs, where I didn’t bother to look, because I’m a gentleman.  I should have been a scoundrel.

“This blade.  You have seen it before.  It has tasted the blood of my people.  ‘Tis yours. A gift.”

“I would never.  I told you.”

“I am getting there, Kinslayer.  You see the cavern is sacred to my people.  We are the keepers of the dragons.  And our most sacred of all dragons, Greyscales, resided within the cavern.”

“I don’t remember a people in the Wandering Mountains.”

“We lived there indeed.  For a time.  Our souls are tied to the dragons, White-Beard.  You slew the greatest.  You snuck past us like the thieves you are.  My people confronted you and the dwarves.”

“So they died crossing me in battle.  That’s not the spilling of innocent blood.”

“I believe I did tell you to stop interrupting.  Do not make me slit your throat,” she continues. “My people confronted you, but not with blades.  With words.  We asked how you could betray us like you did.  You killed our hearts and souls.  You ripped mine out from my chest!”

She chokes on her words and weeps onto her blade arm.

“Yours seems to still be beating.”

“SILENCE!”

I soften, feeling for the creature, “What did I do to you?”

“You made me love you, White-Beard.  We talked all night, and night became a week.  A week became two weeks, and I took you into my bed.  I felt your love, and I loved you deeply in return.  I trusted you.  Put all my faith and thanks in you.  You joined the people we begged you to save us from.  You entered our sacred mountain and killed the oldest of dragons.  The wisest.  Your cruelty cannot be compared.  I wept before you, asking why you killed our dragon.  You said it was nothing… personal.  ‘Twas just a ‘Job.’  As ours was a job.  You took our gold and then betrayed us in the most heinous way imaginable.  On your way out, yes, some elves moved to stop you, and you slit their throats, including my mother, with the dagger in my hand, claiming self-defense.  Then you dropped it at my feet.  The blade I gave you, with runes I inscribed myself, and a prayer I gave to keep you safe as you should wield it.  That blade.  Bloodied by the lives of my people.  Fallen at my feet. An offering of your evil before me. 

“But that is not the worst.  For without our dragon, the spirits of my people whither and our bodies die.  I watched all my people suffer and breathe their last, their souls unable to return to Albeatha, the mystic land where our souls are formed and where they eventually go to rest.  They put all the spirit they had left into my body, the youngest of them, so that I could stay alive long enough to avenge them.  To slay the Kinslayer.  But you didn’t stop at Greyscales.  You killed all his kin.  All the keepers of the dragons died out as consequence.  You committed genocide on two species, and you DARE to claim innocence!”

I fall to my knees.

She doesn’t stop, “I followed your bloody wake.  I saw you as you aged.  I stayed my hand so many times, when you would defend the innocent.  When you would save precious lives.  You, Dwebold the Bloody.  YOU, Dwebold the Cruel.  The callous Kinslayer.  Somehow you attempted to be Dwebold the Benevolent.  Now you had changed.  Now you would stay your hand from the innocent.  Help the needy.  The meek.  Where was your kindness when it came to my people?  Where was your desire to redeem past deeds, before you pushed us into extinction? Why were WE your fucking lesson?! You needed slaughter to learn? To change? To grow? Mass murder? A massacre to remember your humanity? Our blood was the water upon the plant of your ‘Redemption.’  Needless!

“I kept myself from killing you.  I watched from the shadows.  Over time the coin became a poison, and you took no more of it.  You fought for the innocent with no reward.  You recognized your actions.  You sought penance.  But what haunted you most was the look in my eyes.  It tormented you.  You sought out an apothecary with the potion to rid you of your love and your betrayal.  I almost stopped you again.  What if this made you slide into depravity once more? You needed this pain to drive you to be better.  But, see, the potion pushed away your memories but not the feelings and reasonings behind them.  You still decided to be a better, compassionate creature, but you no longer saw my face contort at the disgust of what you are.”

I sit on my knees weeping.

“I was so angry you would be rid of me,” she continues. “How dare you.  The image of me should be burned on your eyes forever.  But I could not kill you.  Not with who you are.  It made me angry you chose to finally be a gentler person.  The gentle pieces of you I fell in love with, before you took off your mask to reveal your wrath. 

“But you did not deserve a peaceful life.  I made sure, as you slept, you would remember your deeds so well that when you woke you could not forget them.  When you finally retreated to this mountain, when you turned into an old, human man.  I allowed you your time.  Let you have it and hold it while you could.  Heal if you could manage, the old wretch that you are.  I wanted to see if you would regain some kind of peace.  …So that I could rip it from you.  I am not going to let you die softly, Dwebold, my love.  The love for you is the only love I have ever had outside of my love of dragons and my people.  You took something so precious from me.  Every ounce of it.  I have nothing now.  Nothing but my rage.”

“I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry,” I weep.

“You do not get to be sorry! You don’t get to repent! Will not suffer you to achieve salvation.  You are not allowed forgiveness, Dwebold the Irredeemable!  I do not bid you rest!

“…But I do give you a choice.  In order to travel here, I have beaten my way through the demons of your woods, the monsters in the dark.  Since you are a monster hunter, it is your duty to defend me.  But you are no longer a hunter.  Your slaying days are behind you, and your hands no longer remember the axe.  But you still could try.  Try to fight them off and let me escape.  Take a chance at saving a life, that means almost certain death, but valiantly.  You could die in battle.”

Or?

“Or,” she concludes, “I could kill you now.  Take my vengeance.  But in death you would know that killing you killed me, the last of my kind.  What would your conscience tell you, I wonder? Defend the lady.  Or let her kill you.”

“Either way I die.”

“Yes.  In that you get no choice.”

“I don’t understand,” I tell her.

“Ah, what do you not understand?”

“If I let you kill me, you will finally have your vengeance.  What you have wanted these long years.  If I die saving you, you will give me one last good deed and won’t get the chance to kill me yourself.  That’s not a satisfying end.”

“No.  It is not.  I did not expect getting here to be so difficult.  I did not expect the demons to be so formidable.  All surrounding such a weak man.  This is not a choice I desire, nor one I take lightly.”

“But the choice is yours.  It was never mine.”

She spits, “Of course it is yours.”

“No.” My dream-dragon was wrong, “I won’t choose to hurt you either way.  If you kill me and finally get your vengeance, you will die.  If I go out fighting, your soul will not be fulfilled.  I cannot choose to hurt you either way.”

“Why not?”

“Because I may not remember what I did to your people.  But I see the fury in your eyes, and my heart remembers that I loved you.  I don’t want to be the man who would hurt you and your people that way anymore.  So, I ask you, the choice being yours, what do you wish for me to do?  Do you wish for me to die right here by your hand? Or do you wish for me to give you a chance to live for your people?  Their spirit resides inside you.  They have not yet perished as long as you live.  Will you give them a chance to live?  Or will you choose to kill one last time and let your kind fade away? I love you enough to do whatever you ask.  My life and my choices are yours.  My end is in your hands.  I will do it for you.  Because I’m so sorry.”

Her eyes leak for what feels like a lifetime, and for a human it might as well be.  She lowers the knife in agony.

She speaks.  She tells me what she wants, “Please, fight your demons.  I want to live, and I do not want to do it with anger in my heart anymore.  I feel like this is one last gift I can give to the man I once loved and one last gift you can give back to me.  This is the intercourse of our hearts, a conversation of our love and loss, in agony and ecstasy of our soul’s conversation. I will give you the gift, and you will give me the gift.  Let us open them together.”

“So shall it be.  Stay behind me as I make a path… then run.”

 -- 

I lie here, a victor, and for the second time in my life, also having lost.  All my lost memories come flooding back, and I am filled with intense pain of the heart, as I bleed out onto the snow.  She ran to safety, limping as she went.  I slew them all in one last gasp.  And now I lie, blood painting the snow crimson.  I leak into the frozen ground, my rivers becoming shards of crystal prisms that shatter upon impact.  My life, indeed, is flashing before my eyes.  Except it’s not a flash.  It lasts forever.  I am trapped in this Ouroboros of life’s lost records.  I relive every moment in real time.  I live an entire life again.  But, oh, I wish I could change those moments. 

I remember falling for her in one night.  That’s all I needed.  Her icy eyes reflecting my face.  When she kissed me, we melded together.  I wish I could say I lived and loved well and often.  I had one bright love that lasted a few weeks of celebration.  But I loved so brightly, I never wanted to do it again.  And then I see myself betraying her.  Don’t do this.  Don’t do this again.

And then she stands there over me, as I die here in the frost.  There she is.  She returned to watch me choke on this last grain of life.

“Do you remember my name?” she asks.

“I do.”

“Will you ever forget?” she asks.

“I will hold onto the memory.  Even into oblivion.”

Her eyes close, half with regret and half with a deep love, “Save him.”

Behind her are the fairy folk of the forest.  They spiral around me, filling me with wonder and with life.  They close the holes in my flesh.

“Dream,” my lost love commands me, “as the fairy folk and forest spirits save you.  Dream of the evil you have done. Then wither and die a sad old man, having lost everything you held dear.  I suppose it is not, in the end, that I wanted to kill you.  I just wanted you to remember the look on my face, as I lost all the love I had for you. I won’t thank you, but you have saved my heart from hate.  Your cabin and your long, dark winter have healed something in my soul.  My people can sleep.  Let the winter lick your wounds clean.  I shall not give you forgiveness.  But I gift you remembrance.  And I stay my hand, not for you, but for my own good.”

“I will see your face every time I close my eyes,” I weep.

“That is all I ask.”

I live for three days, then choke on my sobs and die.  I don’t become a star up in the big, inky sky.  I become a ghost, watching over her for the rest of her long life.

On her deathbed she gazes over at me, “So Death comes for us all it seems.”

“Indeed.  Tell me what you need.”

“I lived long and well after my hate for you.  I loved someone brightly and better than I loved you.  For much, much longer.”

“I know.  I saw.”

“Did it cause you pain?” she asks.

“I supposed it did.  But I was also glad.”

“Glad of what?”

“That you got to love better than me.  Brightly.  For longer.”

“What will you do now, old man?” the wrinkled elf asks me.

“I suppose I’ll fade away into oblivion. Or stand a phantom of my memories forever after.”

“Will you remember that winter? Will you remember my face?” she asks before her last breath.

“Always.”