Shame
On Love
Let me tell you about love.
I loved the priest when he was black and silver shadows. When we wandered beneath Duskwood’s trees with their long fingers reaching out to us. To touch. To grasp. To grab. To ruin. We walked through memories I had forgotten, the priest and I. We walked through forgetfulness and into longing.
And then there was the ice. The darkness. The ache in my chest.
And when I returned the love was shattered, a thousand thousand slivers of glass. Some things cannot be glued together. I loved the priest. I love him still, though he is now a different man. Though his shadows are gone. Though he has turned himself from flesh to crystal and hollowed himself out and traded himself away.
I love him still.
I loved the warlock next, though he was clockwork and twisting bone – no metaphors – though he was fel-tainted and long-dead flesh. I see your disgust. I see the way you narrow your eyes, and flare your nostrils and thump your books of Light at me. You are wrong. If there is one lesson we learn from the dead it is this: all flesh passes away. You and the mountains both will rot.
The warlock spoke of waiting. Of future lives. Of plucking my soul from the river of oblivion and bringing me back. Time and again. I smiled and nodded and never told him I did not believe in such things.
In the end he was the one who left – who put his feet into the river and let the waters close over him. I do not know where his bones and clockwork lie. If I did, would I try to bring him back? To force him from peace and back to me?
Perhaps.
I am not wise.
I am not wise.
I loved the paladin – who was meant to kill me. Sinister. Watch his hands. See the blade? I saw, but he never turned, never cut. Instead he healed. The Light dancing over his hands was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
He left. Once. Again.
Trust me, he said. I will return.
I kept the wound against my chest, the grasping hands, the killing cold because I knew he would return to make it whole. Insurance against the world. I knew he would return to make it whole. I knew –
One day he did not return.
It was not the blade they meant, but it cut all the same.
And we were left alone, the wound and I, and in the end I had to close it up myself. And I waited…too long, too long… and then there was just the wound. And I standing on the rivers banks, my toes pressed to the surface of the black water.
And the current, the pull, the rip tide.
Let me tell you about love.
