[Closed] A Buried and a Burning Flame

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 30 Bethas, 2720
The Heart of Dkanat

Anetol looks down at her; his face is dark with lines in the starlight, all the creases and folds made heavier by the light and its absence. Thank you, he says, looking down at her, his gray eyes as dark as hers. They are neither of them looking at the path, now, but they walk, slowly, and Nkemi knows the way with all her body, even so many years later.

Nkemi stops; they are outside of the town, still, on the edge of a turn on the slope, just before the path winds back on itself. She brushes his cheek with her lips, and squeezes his arm lightly with hers.

“Trust is honor shared,” Nkemi says, solemn-voiced beneath the bastly swell of her field. She keeps going, and they pick their way ahead down the path in the dark. She does not add the second half of the saying as it was taught to her: even when broken, trust is its own reward. She is not sure that such words feel like truth; she does not wish to commit herself to them.

Her head leans gently on Anetol’s shoulder, for just a moment. She is full enough that it is a harder walk than usual; she knows she will sleep well and deeply tonight, as she did last night, in a room which still smells as it did twenty years ago.

They did not, in the end, visit the goats; Anetol’s eyes were drooping, heavy, and Nkemi could see in the trembling of his hands his tiredness.

“It is best to meet the goats in the light,” Nkemi is saying, cheerful, as they make their way along the edges of the street into town, through the last of the scrubbrush which lines the hill and into a soft pool of lantern light hung at the edge of a yard.

“Iki’dzof is grumpy when awoken, anyway,” Nkemi adds, lightly; she giggles, softly, so as not to awaken anyone.

Nkemi guides Anetol to Emeka’s doorway; there is a lantern hung in the doorway to show him the way, a flickering flame shedding light, even pale yellow interrupted where wires cross the glass. She squeezes his hand, and leaves him to breathe the desert air a little longer.

Nkemi glances back, once, from across the street; she lifts her hand in a wave and a smile, and then she is gone, down a distant street.

Evening, 30 Bethas, 2720
Outside the Light

Risha.

Kafo did not speak the name aloud; he didn’t. It is a secret name. He does not even give it to Anfe. He worried he would forget but he doesn’t forget; he remembers the name and that it is a secret, and that he must keep it safe. He remembers; he does not forget.

He waits.

Anfe woke him before dawn, when the stars were still bright overhead. It was not to greet them as friends. They left the tent and they left Tseq’ule too, and they went out into the desert on their own. Kafo was not afraid, even though he knows what roams the desert at night; he knows. They hid that day. There are many canyons around Dkanat. Kafo remembered them but he did not know he remembered, not until he saw the way the land sloped, not until he remembered a tree. It was younger, then; he tries to tell this to Anfe, because he forgets, but Anfe does not understand, and Kafo remembers that he cannot explain.

Anfe sleeps much of the day; Kafo sleeps too, and when he is awake he watches the other man. He likes to watch him; he likes to watch the steady rise and fall of Anfe’s chest, and the smoothness of his face in sleep. He likes the scar, too, although he tried to tell Anfe this once, and Anfe did not like to know it.

It is a part of Anfe; how could he not like it?

It made Anfe very angry, to hear this.

Kafo does not wish to sleep; he wishes to sit and watch Anfe, because he does not know how much longer he will have him. He does not know; he is afraid, in his chest, that he does not remember how to let go, and so he does not know if he remembers how to hold on. He does not want to be alone; sometimes in his sleep he feels alone, but he wakes and Anfe is there; he is there.

They go for food in the evening. Kafo has forgotten about food; he remembers when he tastes it and he eats, and Anfe stops him before he is sick. You will be sick, Anfe tells him, and Kafo remembers being sick, and that he does not like it.

He sees Risha, then; he does not say his name. He is walking with the prefect; they are walking away. He sees Risha, but Risha does not see him, and the prefect does not either. Anfe spits onto the ground when he sees her, but Kafo does not spit.

At night it is hard to leave Anfe; he is sleeping again. Kafo creeps away, and he does not say goodbye, because the going is a secret, and he does not wish to wake him. He knows Anfe will be angry, if he wakes before Kafo returns, but Kafo cannot stay.

He waits; he knows because there is no light that Risha is not in the house where he came from. He waits; he crouches in the dark places where no one ever looks, and he listens. He knows him without seeing; he knows he will know.

He does know, when Risha comes. He comes, then, barefoot silent, and he waits, and he watches the prefect go. She is swallowed by the darkness.

“Risha,” Kafo says, then. He comes out into the street; he does not come into the light, even though he can see it gleaming on the many colors of Risha’s body’s hair. “Risha,” he says again, for all the times he did not say it before. He knows what a secret is; he remembers.

[Tom Cooke]

Emeka's Home • Dkanat

Evening on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

I
can hardly blame him,” he says, mock-serious, a pouting little frown on his face; “so am I.” He laughs at Nkemi’s giggle, just as soft. The houses all around them are quiet, with only a few lights left in the windows. There’s still the smell of things cooking drifting out into the street, but it’s more a memory than a portent, and none of it smells quite as good – to him – as Nkese’s (and Ifran’s).

When she leaves him, there’s still a ghost of her head resting on his shoulder, warm through the layers of his amel’iwe. Her words are a ghost, too, all around him. When she said them first, his eyes welled up with tears, though she couldn’t know why. She’ll never know why.

He leans against the wall beside the door, watching the small figure of her disappear into the shadows up the street. She’s in the soft light of a window opposite when she raises her hand for the last time. He can make out nothing of her face, nothing except the thin dark hand; he smiles anyway, waves, and watches her go.

It’s quiet out here. He looks down at one of his hands, stark pale, a thin black criss-cross stretched across it from the lantern’s frame. He moves his hand, turns it over; the shadow shifts over it. When he stretches his fingers out, they tremble slightly. He reaches up and touches the sharp line of his cheekbone, the clean-shaven cheek, where the delicate brush of her kiss stings like an opened scar.

He drops his hand and stands there awhile, breathing in the cool desert breeze. It’s chill enough – getting colder – he almost wants to go inside, but not enough to open the door and climb up to his room and lie down alone with what weighs heavy with him. He’s got no spurs anywhere in the deep red folds of his clothes, nothing to drink in but the stars, but that’s well enough.

Risha, comes the voice.

He thinks he’s imagined it, at first; it puts him in mind of his dream – the dream he’s had more than once, since – and he shivers up and down. He looks about him, then squints into the dark of the street. He might’ve imagined it, if he didn’t hear it again: Risha.

There’s a figure moving there. It’s silent, but he sees a long arm, the pale of a palm. He can’t see eyes glint in the dark, but he can see shadow shifting on shadow, some things darker than others.

His throat tightens. The shiver doesn’t leave. It’s goosebumps now all along his arms, all up and down his back; the tiny hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Is it a nightmare? The breeze shifts his hems, cuts into his bare ankles like a riff, like ice. He doesn’t need to pinch himself to know it’s not; the light’s too sharp.

If he goes inside, if he locks the door behind him – but he remembers putting an arm around a shaking man, remembers a head on his shoulder. He remembers empty spellwork underneath his, shepherding his words and his breath into the rhythm. He remembers a hundred questions he put out of his mind because he would never ask them.

He remembers a promise kept, most of all. Trust. His lips are pursed, his brow furrowed. He stands up from where he leans on the door, uncrossing his arms, but he doesn’t take a step forward.

“Kafo?” he says. His voice is quiet, but it comes out more hoarse than he means it to. “It’s you, isn’t it?” He pauses. Is Anfe with you? Why are you in Dkanat? “I thought you left with Tseq’ule,” he says dumbly instead.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 30 Bethas, 2720
Outside the Light

Risha stays in the light. It’s too bright; Kafo doesn’t like it. He likes the dark; he likes the dark in the desert, when there isn’t any fire or any lanterns. He likes the dark because it knows him; he’s true in the dark, isn’t he? There isn’t any lying face – any face which lies – even when he doesn’t speak, he knows they’re lies; he knows.

But Risha lies, too, but he can cast. Kafo felt it; he felt like when it scraped over his skin, and he felt it like a memory. There are many things he has forgotten; there are many faces he does not remember, so many. He doesn’t know how many, anymore, if he ever did. Not the first; not the truth. He remembers the truth, even though it hurts; he holds it close and repeats it to himself in the dark.

“Didn’t leave,” Kafo says, quietly.

Risha stays in the dark; Kafo comes forward, then. Light gleams off of him; he flinches, turning his gaze away from the lantern. He is panting a little, still; it hurts sometimes, when he forgets, when he tries to take a deep breath.

“They knew too much, Anfe said,” Kafo explains. He looks back at Risha, slowly; he blinks away, and his eyes are wet.

“I like the lanterns,” Kafo says; his gaze drifts towards the edge of town. He knows the walk, and the canyon cliffs. He remembers the lanterns; they light a path, and he can follow it; he can follow it from the dark, if he stays close, but he doesn’t know where it leads. He would have to let go to find out; he doesn’t want to let go, not yet. He doesn’t want to; he doesn’t know if he remembers how.

For a moment, Kafo watches the horizon; he can’t see what’s on the other side, but he knows, and he remembers.

He turns back to Risha, slowly; he looks at him. He steps back, out of the circle of the light.

“It’s better in the dark,” Kafo whispers. He looks down; he thinks to reach forward, and he makes a gesture with his fingers which means come here, which tells Risha to follow him. He steps back again, and his hand slides out of the light, and he is all of him in the dark again. It’s darker than it was before; it’s darker next to the lantern than it is in the desert, underneath all the stars. The brightness makes it that way. Risha is bright, too, standing in the middle of it.

Kafo doesn’t want to be a liar; he doesn’t want Risha to be a liar, either. But they are; they are, both of them, they are, but they can’t help it. It isn’t like the imbala; he knows honor, but he cannot have it. Sometimes it makes him sad, when he remembers about honor. Sometimes it makes him hurt, inside, not like he hurts now, but in a different way.

Kafo thinks Risha will come with him, into the dark. If he does not, this is his choice. He turns; he walks away, bare feet quiet on the sand, and makes his way slowly along the side of the building, towards the gap in the fence which goes out to the desert.

It is better in the dark, away from the light; he can see, there.

[Tom Cooke]

Emeka's Home • Dkanat

Evening on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

D
idn’t leave. If he knows little of Kafo, he knows less of Anfe. There are many men with laoso scars and something to hide; he should know. He knows when there are questions he shouldn’t ask, too.

Kafo’s standing in the light, now. He resisted the urge to step back, when he came forward; now, he stands fair still, watching. The rise and fall of his chest is still uneven, labored. He only glances down at it for a moment, and he doesn’t let his eyes wander to Kafo’s wrist. His eyes are squinting, glittering with tears. He remembers how he flinched, when he first came into the light.

I like the lanterns, comes his soft voice. His eyes wander out; he follows them, in the direction he knows he and Nkemi took earlier that morning. In the quiet, they’re both looking. He blinks; his eyes itch, and his chest aches. When Kafo looks back at him, he feels the weight of his gaze, and he still feels it when the other man backs into the dark. All he can see of him’s a shape, dark on dark, but he’s still looking into his eyes.

Then movement, then the flash of a hand. Two fingers curling. His too-fast heart’s drumming against his ribs. As Kafo crosses slowly to the house opposite, he thinks his feet have put down roots and his legs will never come unstuck.

Then, somehow, he finds himself following, one step at a time. “You like it better when I can’t see –” He stops, the word sticking in his throat. You. “Him,” he says hoarsely, “whoever – he…” He freezes and looks down at the ground, at pale feet he can just barely see, criss-crossed with sandal straps. He’s not sure why he said it; he wouldn’t want to be reminded.

He can just barely see Kafo’s – someone’s – long, lanky frame, moving along the wall. He can neither hear his feet in the sand nor feel him, but he can just barely catch the sound of heavy breathing. It’s as if a fist’s tightening in his stomach. He doesn’t want to lose him.

Without thinking, he moves again, following him into the shadow of the building. “I like it, too,” he adds.

The starlight just pricks the edge of a fence, wood and metal. Beyond the gap, up to the horizon, he can see where the blanket of stars is broken up by the shapes of rocks and hills dotted with scraggly greenery. He walks beside and not too far behind him, even though all of him sags and wants nothing more than sleep.

Almost nothing.

He can still hear the soft scuff of his sandals in the sand. He can still feel it, for all he shouldn’t in the dark; he can still feel the ache in his lower back, the sagging of the lines on his unfamiliar face, the weakness and shake of his hands. Even in the dark, he’s not himself.

He should think twice, as they come to the gap. He should look back at the lantern in ada’xa Emeka’s door, waiting there for him. He should be thinking of a bed to lay in, to nurse his aching-full belly.

He doesn’t think, not even of Nkemi’s trust in him; he doesn’t think at all. “Are you all right?” he asks. Anatole’s voice is still rough with fear and uncertainty. “They told me you – cracked a couple of ribs.” There’s something else in it, too, a softening he doesn’t want to be there.

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 30 Bethas, 2720
Outside the Light

Yes,” Kafo’s voice drifts quiet out of the darkness after Risha speaks of seeing him. Him, he thinks; him. He does not like to think about this. There is no other way; he knows that, in the part of him which is him, he knows that there is no other way.

“I too have eyes,” Kafo adds, looking into the darkness.

He does not remember if it was easier, before. Perhaps once he knew how to bear it; perhaps once that it has to be born was enough. Maybe he lost that too, along the way. Maybe he never had it. Maybe it has hurt this much, every time; he does not remember. He does not know if he is grateful for that.

Kafo slips through the gap in the fence; when he turns himself sideways it is easy. Coming in he forgot; it is hard to remember how much of him there is, where he starts and where he ends. He doesn’t know, anymore; the edges blur. He thinks he knew, once; he thinks he fit, all the way to the edges of his skin, once, when it was his.

“I don’t know,” Kafo says, when Risha asks if he is all right. He stops; he looks down at himself. A hand slides over his side; he feels it, and he remembers that it hurts. He remembers, too, the gentle touch of Anfe’s fingers at the edges of them; he remembers the gleaming tears on the other man’s cheeks. “It hurts,” he knows to name it, then, and how; he rubs the center of the chest, where he feels what he remembers to call pain.

He walks on, into the night. When they are farther from the town the dark is better. It is star dark, then. He doesn’t know the way by looking. There is something inside him which knows; there is something inside him which he follows. He has forgotten how to name it; he has forgotten if it has a name. He has forgotten what lies at the end of it but he knows he must keep going; he knows there is no other way.

“I saw you with the prefect,” Kafo says, quietly, into the dark. “Anfe -“ but he remembers this too is a secret, “saw her too.” Kafo says, instead. He walks on; he does not say any more about it. He will not, not even to Risha, nor even if he asks. It is Anfe’s and it is not his, and Anfe would not like it if he talked. Anfe wants to keep him safe; that is why Anfe reminds him to be quiet.

Kafo remembers. He is quiet. Kafo remembers.

They walk on.

Kafo remembers about the pain. It pulls on his side; it pulls him down. He walks on through it, because he has remembered where they are going. There is a faint, high noise which comes from him, and he walks on. He has remembered why he came to find Risha, and he is glad he kept going, even when he forgot. The ground is soft-hard beneath his feet; he likes the way it feels.

“Here,” Kafo says, and his voice is strange and hoarse and he does not remember why. He stops; he comes forward, one step more, and then another, and he stops when the ground stops at his toes. A skinny long arm stretches out to the side where he hears Risha, for he does not want Risha to go yet.

“Here,” Kafo says, and he looks.

It is the canyon; it is the canyon edge. The lights gleam in the distance; they start at the edge and they climb down the side. There is a line of them at the bottom, and they swirl all around it. He reaches; his fingers curl around Risha’s arm, as if he can touch him.

“Here,” Kafo says, and he feels wetness on his cheeks.

[Tom Cooke]

Emeka's Home • Dkanat

Evening on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

I
t hurts, Kafo says. He’s silent; he can catch movement, see Kafo as a break in the stars, but no more. He hears the man’s breath hitch, and he frowns, but he says nothing. There’s no telling. Et’oso told him the day before yesterday that he’d heard Kafo’d be fine, long as he rested himself and didn’t put too much strain on. Cracked ribs, he remembers Et’oso saying, then, Cracked water barrel, too, making the moony sign with his hand.

He nods, even though Kafo can’t see him. They continue on through the dark.

He follows the sound of Kafo’s breath, hoarse and uneven. Once or twice, he nearly loses it; he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s lagged behind or drifted off to one side, or because Kafo’s just gone quiet. He hasn’t looked back to see how far off the lights of Dkanat have gone. Every time, he feels a knot in his chest, a panic beginning to bubble over, ‘til he hears him again.

Saw him with the prefect. Anfe – he swallows tightly. Unease prickles. “She’s not…” He’s breathless. “She wouldn’t do you any harm – either of you,” he says when he catches his breath, “unless… you gave her reason to.”

He can’t lie to this man, who has eyes and knows just how much of a liar he is. But he thinks of Nkemi’s watchful eye on both Kafo and Anfe when Tseq’ule camped; this morning, it seemed a world away, and right now it seems all too close. He curses himself, grits his teeth so no more words come out. The uneasy prickling doesn’t stop.

The sand is packed so that it’s not so hard to walk. He thinks this might be a path underfoot, but he doesn’t dare guess. He doesn’t dare think; if he begins thinking, he’ll begin wondering where Kafo’s leading him. He’ll look back and see the lights of Dkanat growing smaller and smaller, and he’ll start listening for the calls of uliam.

He’s the sense of a familiar landscape about him, though he doesn’t know why. He takes in the vague shapes of rocks, black against the stars, a twisted tree here or there with its smallest branches waving gently in the night wind.

It’s easy enough to follow Kafo, at least, now. He’s not sure when the sound started up, but it’s been there awhile: a quiet, high-pitched whine, guttering out sometimes into his panting breath, starting up again. He wants to tell Kafo to stop and rest, but he’s afraid if he does, they’ll both be lost.

Here, Kafo says.

“Shit,” he breathes, jumping half out of his skin when he feels the fingers on his arm. Then – it’s as if there are stars in the earth – his eyes come into focus, and he realizes it’s Serkaih stretching out below, the edge of the canyon only an inch or two from the tips of his toes, the lanterns spread out like stars.

He blinks. His heart lurches, and he coughs, thumping his chest; the coughing turns into soft laughter, as he calms down and finds his breath. He takes a shuddering breath. “Thank you, Kafo,” he says.

The lanterns blur, one light running into the next. He doesn’t bother to wipe his eyes, even when he feels tears trickling down his cheeks. The wind makes them cold as ice. He sniffs. He’s silent for a long moment; every single question he’s thought of the last few minutes, everything he’s thought to say, is gone. He thinks he can see a pattern he couldn’t see by day, the lights winding down along a path like a constellation.

He looks over, but there’s no seeing him in the dark; he’s just a shape. He looks back down. He feels as if he might be dreaming, after all. “Do you…” He swallows; more tears spill out. Of all the things, he doesn’t know why this is what he asks. “Do you know where they lead?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 30 Bethas, 2720
Outside the Light

Kafo watches the lights. They are like the stars; they remain. He knows this, the same as he knows the stars, a knowing without knowing how. He remembers that he remembers, for all that he does not know which face, or how many, looked from the edge of these canyons. The first, he thinks; he thinks. He does not know; he does not remember.

He does not remember even what it looked like, the first face. He knows; he knows, but he does not remember. He cannot see it, when he closes his eyes. He cannot see the face which Anfe calls Kafo, either, which Risha calls Kafo too. He can see Anfe’s face, when he closes his eyes and looks into the place in his mind. He can see the scar; he can see him smiling and he can see the wet glimmer on his cheeks, and these things all run together inside him, like layers of overlapping rock in the canyon below.

“No,” Kafo’s voice does not sound like his; it is dry to speak, but he goes on through it, although his voice gets stranger as he does. “I knew, once. I was born knowing.” There is something like a tickle in his throat; he makes a sound, and it goes.

He did not know he was still touching Risha until he moves.

His fingers are cold; he cannot remember how to let go. He reaches with his other hand, and he pries his fingers off, one by one. He sits, and a noise escapes him which is larger than the others. He shudders; his hands press into the ground, and he feels the soft-hard ground beneath his fingers. He breathes, but this does not help, and then there is only the waiting to make it better.

In time, it is better.

He does not sit with his legs off the edge. It scares him, to sit so close to it; he is not ready for the dark-dark, the true-dark, which makes all the rest like a memory of the sun. This is not the true-dark; there are stars overhead, and there is a hurting in the center of him, and there is the feeling of the soft-hard ground beneath his hands and legs. There is Risha; when he listens, he can hear Risha, too, and Kafo knows he is not alone, not yet.

“I got lost,” Kafo says, quietly, when he remembers to speak. “I drifted; now I am here. I can see the lights with his eyes. I cannot go to them. When I walk, down into the canyon, then – they are only lanterns, then, and candle flame. From here you can see the truth of them. In the dark you can see the truth of them.”

[Tom Cooke]

The Edge of Serkaih

Evening on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

H
e doesn’t think the lights move, at first. When he’s stood there long enough, looking down at them, he can see some of them swaying – gently, barely-perceptibly – in the night breeze. Kafo’s fingers are still on his arm, cold through the thin fabric of his wrap. Slowly, he feels Kafo shift; he feels the fingers pried off his arm, one by one, as if by a third man’s hand.

If this is a dream, Kafo doesn’t give him the answer he wants. His voice rasps. Risha’s silent for a while; both of them are. A soft scuffling tells him Kafo has sunk to sit down at the canyon’s edge.

More tears trickle down his cheeks. He fights a hitching of breath in his chest.

He should be worried about the height. He remembers – though it seems such a long time ago, now, a different life – seeing the Rose from the deck of an aeroship for the first time, and not even one in flight; he remembers nearly retching over the gunwale. Now, he doesn’t feel in the least troubled. Nor has he worried once, he realizes, that Kafo brought him here to push him off, or jump off himself. Even when he thinks about it, he can’t bring himself to worry about Kafo’s intentions.

Born knowing? He wasn’t born knowing. None of them were, he thinks; it didn’t matter what they did, there was no helping it. But then Kafo speaks again, with less of a rasp, but quieter. He looks over and down, at the indistinct shape.

Careful not to lose his footing, he sits himself down beside Kafo. His legs ache, so he tries sit with them stretched out, but he feels the sharp edge of the canyon through the sole of his sandal. His heart jumps again, races fast; he draws his leg back and folds both of them underneath him, though his knees feel cramped and achy.

He nods slowly. “I went down there this morning, with her. They look different from here,” he says, then, “in the d…” His jaw clamps shut, and he swallows another lump. All the lights blur and smear together.

He takes a deep breath. Is that why you’re here? he thinks. To follow them, at last?

“This is my first, Kafo. The first one I took.” By the time he finds it in him to speak, his voice is shaking with the tears. He almost doesn’t recognize it as Anatole’s. “I haven’t been lost for long. I don’t, uh… I don’t remember getting lost. Not like that. I think – I believe I was born lost. I’m afraid.”

The lights blur, then grow sharp, then blur again. They twist off into the distance; Serkaih is larger than he thought it was, and many paths branch out in many directions.

He licks his lips; they’re dry, and he tastes salty tears that aren’t his. “If I went into the dark,” he rasps, “and I followed them, would I find life?”

[Nkemi pezre Nkese]

Evening, 30 Bethas, 2720
Outside the Light

In the dark, Kafo thinks, in the dark, in the dark, in the dark. Sometimes such thoughts rise like a bubble in his chest and he cannot keep them inside, but he is looking at the lights, and feeling the soft-hard ground beneath, and he knows where he is, and where he is not.

Risha has come down now, too, to sit beside him. He hears the thickness of the other man’s breath. If he could look he would see wetness, he knows, silver streaks gleaming down the cheeks of the face Risha wears. They are his tears, Risha’s; Kafo knows that. If not his then whose?

“Maybe,” Kafo whispers, quiet soft. Maybe maybe maybe maybe.

He does not remember his first. Maybe he does. If he does he doesn’t know it; he can’t place them in order anymore. Maybe he lost that, too, along the way. Maybe there was a time when he remembered, when he could name each one and what came before and after, when it was wisdom which clung to him instead of forgetting.

“I don’t know,” Kafo doesn’t look, now; he closes his eyes and he tries to imagine the lights, tries to see them in the part which is him. He cannot; they swirl and vanish and he doesn’t know the shape, when he doesn’t look at it. Once he knew how to draw such shapes; once he knew them inside.

“I have tried,” Kafo’s voice is low and soft and even. “I have been to the dark many times; I have searched for the light. But there is only dark - dark dark dark dark dark -“ he shudders; he opens his eyes. It is dark but not the dark; there are the lights below and the stars above.

“You lose something,” Kafo says, quietly. He knows; he does not know what he has lost, but he knows it has gone. “In the dark, every time; there is a little more of you which stays there. Sometimes you don’t know what has gone but it goes; it always goes.”

“Someday it will be all of me,” the voice which comes is strange and hoarse and thick, and Kafo tastes salt on his lips. The wind blows cold against his face and he feels the brush of it. “Someday all of me will stay there in the dark, scattered like sand in the wind,” he shivers and he feels the cold of the breeze, and then he forgets to few it, and washes the lights once more.

“Maybe then I will be able to follow the light,” Kafo says. “When I am nothing left.”

He tries to imagine it. This, the self which Anfe gave the name Kafo. Is it he who Anfe named? He knows something of what he will lose, this time, when he goes; he will lose the skin which Anfe touched, so gently, around the bruise. He does not think he will be Kafo, anymore, then.

And then - he-who-will-not-be-Kafo-anymore - he tries to imagine that self like sand, drifting out into the breeze. Will he be light enough, then, to follow the lights? Is he weighed down? Or is he too heavy, now, with the weight of all the lives he does not remember?

“It is better to stay,” his voice is cracked and hoarse but he thinks it is his. The words are his; he struggles them out through a dry tongue, through aching lips. “Because you can’t know what you will lose.”

Kafo reaches; he reaches suddenly. He does not want to hurt what Risha wears but there is no other way to touch him, and so he wraps long fingers around his arm once more and he tries to hold on. “You can’t know,” he says again, insistent.

[Tom Cooke]

The Edge of Serkaih

Evening on the 28th of Bethas, 2720

D
ark, he repeats, dark, dark, dark, dark…

He doesn’t look over at Kafo as he speaks. The voice goes on, soft and even at first, then scraping and rough; sometimes there’s the edge of a whistle in it, as if his throat is so dry nothing but air can escape. He looks out over the lights, and as Kafo speaks, the lights blur again. They bleed into one another until the whole dark canyon glows; he wipes his eyes, and then they blur even worse. There are tears streaming steady down both his cheeks.

He knows well enough what the dark is; he’s been there once, and he’ll go back someday. He used to think he’d go back sooner than later – used to think he hated this body more than he hated it – but now, the thought of this red hair gone snow-white, of retiring, of settling in, of dandling grandchildren on his knee, is vivid. Preferable, maybe, to what he may lose.

What has he lost this time? He knows he’s forgotten names, gotten days mixed up. Sometimes one evening with Jaeli blends into another, but that’s the way with love, too.

It’s other times, he’s sure there’s something – something – he ought to recognize, something he ought to remember. A street corner in the Rose looks familiar to him, until even the familiarity slips his fingers, and he doesn’t remember anything but that it once, for a half-second, felt like someplace he’d been.

Is it a way of thinking he’s lost, too? Is his mind different than it was, in more ways than he can know? Is he a different man, even if he’s sharp as a riff, even if he remembers everything?

His fingers curl into the sand beside him. He tries to imagine what it’d feel like, scattering into the breeze like so much sand. He thinks he can. Nobody’s ever told him there’s more life after that, not like there is with souls that drop back in.

He bows his head and squeezes his eyes shut. There are more tears than he can see through. He doesn’t start when he feels the fingers curl round his arm this time; it’s clumsy but gentle, this touch, and he chokes out a sob.

This isn’t a dream, he thinks. They’re just fucking lanterns.

But he sniffs and nods slowly, nods and nods. “I don’t know,” he agrees hoarsely, dusting his dirty hand off on his wrap, heedless of the fine cloth. “I don’t know what I’ve lost. Like this, I…” He brushes his forehead with his fingertips. “I can think, I can – hold on. I know. I know.”

There were so many questions he wanted to ask. How many lives have you had? Where have you been? Who are you? I have been to the dark many times, Kafo said; you lose something every time.

“Do you like it, too?” His voice is quiet. “I should want to go, but I don’t. Not just because of what I’ll lose. But because I like the wind on my face, and breathing, touching – being touched, sometimes,” he says more softly, “and colors. Good food and – drink, I love a lot, even though I shouldn’t.”

His voice breaks. He coughs.

He looks up at the stars instead of the lanterns this time, catching his breath. “Do you ever lose that?” he asks, thinking of the name Kafo holds precious, and of what he’s said of the stars. “The love? Of all of it?”