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“Did you find…fulfilment?”
His only friend does not answer.
It is dissatisfying. A different flavour of disappointment than defeat, that once-so-novel taste with which the woman dying beside him has made him well-acquainted indeed. That disappointment is almost comforting in its way. It is the familiar specialty of a loved one, served up again and again and consumed without hesitation each and every time. There is a longing in him to know what it would be to defeat her, and yet this—this is what he has sought, has craved since death first failed to end his life.
But there is no comfort in her silence. It grates on him like a whetstone worked the wrong way down a blade, scuffing where it should hone.
They are beyond the lies now. No pretence remains between them. He does not fight for Garlemald; he never has, no matter what his victories won for Great-Grandfather’s last pathetic attempt at recreating his lost homeland. And it is in this very place, not even an hour ago, that the vaunted Warrior of Light has laid her righteous cause to rest at long last. Their battle served no noble purpose. ‘Twas a thing of closure, of release. An epilogue. It was for them, and them alone.
So she has no reason not to answer him. He will not live to repeat her words. She will not live to regret them. So why will she not tell him? Why will she not admit she has found her zenith in him as he has in her?
Why?
…Nay. It is he who will not admit the truth. He knows why, he knows full well why. For he knows her answer, and it is not the answer he wants.
Singular bliss, he promised her. Happiness. But it is a promise it seems he has not kept, cannot keep, for he is not her everything, as she is his. Only her end…as she is his.
He thinks—ah, but he will not do her that disservice. He knows she has accepted death. Not embraced it, as the Endsinger bade, but she rages not against it. His warrior will die in peace.
The thought is sour and rotten on his tongue. She is owed better than that. For the ecstasy of their last dance, filling the void within him with screaming wrenching life as he burns bright as a thousand suns to match her radiance. For the poetry of death at her hands as their flames burn low.
She is owed so much more.
With the last of his strength, he reaches for her, talons scratching feebly over the glassy nothingness between them. But, ah, how fitting! Even at the last, she is beyond his grasp.
“I…”
Would give her everything, if only he could. Twine his fingers in her hair and she would know she is not alone. Tear open her chest and crush her heart and she would know she is loved. Yet his mirror, she whose fate is twin to his own—she whose blood burns as his does—in this, perhaps, they are not the same, but reversed. Such is the nature of reflections, after all. Perfectly matched and perfectly opposed.
This taste…like coals cooling to charcoal in his mouth, searing pain that turns to bitterness and ashes and aching. He has not known it before. He wonders at it. For its strangeness, its newness, it is to be savoured. It does not taint their moment, but heightens it.
I have failed you, my friend. At the very last, I have failed you.
His first regret and his last breath leave him in a long, low sigh.
Would that I could have returned your gift in kind.
A death is a powerful thing. A surge of aether and akasa, of want and will, of life’s raw force set loose upon the universe. And to die in that place at the edge of creation is to grant breath and hope and solid ground to one’s friends. To lift them high and bear them onward. To shine a light in the dark. To forge a path through the heavens.
To weave a wish for one woman’s happiness into the fabric of despair itself.
A wish rendered unnecessary when death itself came undone, happiness restored along with life. But that restoration did not revoke what sacrifice had bought, hope and light and the way forward. The last wish of two bright souls lingers on, a circuit awaiting completion, a readied hearth awaiting a spark.
And when the last wish of another soul, tattered and twisted and singed, flings itself willingly onto the pyre—
It ignites.
There has long been a grave at the edge of creation, but it will be a resting place for only one, now. One more miracle carries away the last of the living in a burst of impossible magic, and then silence begins its long-awaited reign. Not the silence of oblivion, this time, but of infinity.
If enough of the man interred here remained to have an opinion on the whole tableau, the drama of it all might have pleased him.