Prologue to Part Two

It’s strange, writing to you like this, while I still remember. By the time my letters find you--if they find you at all--these pages will be all that’s left to connect us. If they do somehow make it to you, I have to believe you can find me. You can make me remember.

Beneath a crown of wilted roses, the man’s milky gaze floated, aimless as the tune on his lips. The nameless man was a permanent fixture of the path, no different from the flowers and trees that lined it. Like everything else on the island, he was incapable of malice. And so, though I walked alone and was quite little, I was not afraid.

When his blighted hand darted out and snatched mine, I shrieked and thrashed but it did no good. He did not let go and no one came to help me.

“Shhh…” Rocking back and forth, he placed his other hand over mine, patting it gently even as the first hand tightened its grip. “Don’t be afraid, Evegale.”

I froze. Everyone knew he couldn’t speak; it’s why we called him nameless. As I stared into the blind fog of his eyes, I was almost sure he could see me. Into me. Through me. I shuddered. “How do you know my name?”

“There is nothing I don’t know about you,” he said. “Your name is the least of it. Can you...that is…” he stumbled, his grip on words slipping. He took a deep, rattling breath before continuing. “She wrote this to me. But I need your help. I...I know it’s meant for me.” Doubt crept into his voice as he spoke those last words. Shaking, he clumsily stuffed damp, folded paper into my trapped hand. “Can you read it to me? Please?”

“She…?” My mind couldn’t make sense of what was happening. “I can’t read. I’m sorry. Reading--all that materialistic stuff--is part of the human mind virus. Their way of tricking everyone into believing they’re all pre-programmed robots who aren’t really responsible for anything--so they can get away with everything. We can’t let ourselves become slaves again. Remember?”

“How could I forget?” He rasped, trying to laugh, I think, but it came out a wet, hacking cough. He cleared his throat. “You’re smarter than to believe that nonsense. And you can learn easily enough. Then you’ll read it to me, yes? Promise me.”

“Yes, but...what about the ancients? They can read. I’m sure they remember. Why not ask them?”

He shook his head, pumping my captive hand as if to strike an official bargain. “There is only one person who can do this.”

I wondered whether I should lie. Tell him that I’ll learn to read so he’ll let me go. His grip on me tightened  and I worried he’d somehow read my thoughts. Abruptly, his hand went slack.

“May I show you something?” He dropped my hand, his expression raw.

I did the only sensible thing: I bolted away. At least, I meant to. Instead, though, I found myself falling to my knees, nodding. The smile that burst through his face, then, taught me something of beauty. His toothless,  ruined face was but the incidental canvas--the means for perfect joy to shine through.

“Look at me,” he said. “And remember.”

I looked, but not at his wasted body, broken face, or the cheap trinkets he’d tied to himself. I looked at his eyes. At first murky and dim, the clouds soon parted to reveal endless clear skies. Freed from his eyes, his madness danced all around us.

I found myself standing upon one of his cheeks, which had blossomed to a great, rolling hill. Holding to eyelashes like great cables, I peered into the vastness inside. As I pulled myself up to stand along the broad ridge of his lower lid, his eye twitched. I didn’t want to consider what might happen if he blinked. So I jumped. Far, far into his abyss until I lost all sight of myself.

I flew through his skies, untied from my body as the man was from his madness. Spiraling through rich currents of blue, I flew on and on, finally understanding what it meant to be free.

“This is what I am,” he said, his voice coming from far away. “This is what you are. The only boundary between us is the instrument we play through.”

On and on I flew, until I caught sight of the horizon. Instead of spreading out into the distance, it existed as a single black pinpoint. A tiny cave of nothingness from which the skies fanned out in every direction. Fueled by sudden fear, I aimed toward it, but I misjudged the distance, slamming hard into its outer edge.

I wasn’t flying any longer, but falling. I flailed in every direction, managing to grab hold of the lower lip of the inky cave just in time. Its sharp edge cut into my skin as I swung my other hand up and arduously pulled my upper body onto the rim.

Squinting, I looked around. It was dark inside, but not black. Dimly, I could make out a strange room that the cave opened up into on its far side. A man and a woman were inside. She was sitting on a bed, crying, clutching a tiny white stick in her hands. The man looked helpless. Trapped. I leaned in farther to get a better look. With a wet pop, I passed through a viscous membrane and would have fallen into the room if the old man hadn’t grabbed me and pulled me back into the little round cave.

“Going once was painful enough, don’t you think?”

“What? I’ve never even seen that place before.” I said, clutching his hand for balance.

“Don’t be so sure.” He sounded amused as he hoisted me upright. We stood facing one another. He wasn’t old anymore, but young. About my age. The opening leading to the strange room was gone. Nothing except darkness surrounded us, like we were the only things left of the world.

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

He laughed. “You used to. You will. Now do you see why I need you? This time, you might even manage to kill her.”

“Who?” I asked, disturbed.

“Magic, of course. It’s her veil that traps us, like flies in a bottle. Kill her and we’ll never have to forget again.”

His eyes, no longer white, but gray, suddenly turned bleak. Utterly hopeless. It was as though he didn’t have the strength to really believe what he’d just said. Without thinking, I took his face in my hands and kissed him. All distance between us closed and our identities vanished completely. A single, floating ember sparked to life and weaved through dark corners of my mind--our mind--illuminating the most fundamental truth: I really did have the power to kill magic. I was older than time. Older than magic Herself. Her control over everything was a cheap trick that stood no chance against the knowledge revealed by that tiny ember.

Outside, from a faraway place, I felt his dry, withered lips press against mine.

“Evegale!” My mother’s voice sounded remote; I barely felt her arms as they reached around my torso, yanking me out of his embrace.

The light of the ember snuffed out. My mind reeled, struggling to remember. But where the light had been, there was only smoke.

My mother drew me close against her and lifted my chin, her panicked gaze flitting across my face. “Are you alright? Did he touch you?”

“Yes, but Mama--” before I could finish, she turned toward the man.

“She’s a child, you, you...sick monster!”

She carried me all the way home, though it had been years since I’d been carried anywhere. My head pounded as I fought to cling to crumbling memories. I wanted to ask her what magic was and how I could kill it but I knew what she would say--we don’t kill anything. Not ever.

His note felt heavy and hot in my hand. I still thought I could fix things. I would learn to read and the note would explain everything. I didn’t understand that some things just can’t be fixed.

I did eventually learn how to read his letter. I learned that it wasn’t a letter at all, even though it read like one, but a page ripped from a book called What We Keep.

But none of it mattered; I never saw the man again.

I know it’s unfair to write to you like this. But I need you to know everything, even if telling you means blasphemy.

It seems like a paradox: I can’t really live until I find you, yet I always die when I do. That’s the way it is with life and death though, I suppose. They go together.

How strangely life shapes us--whispers that we’re flukes, breathed into life by a chaos whose fiery breath must one day consume us.   

They say the world doomed itself when it went mad, forcing God to consume this wicked earth in order to renew Harmony. But I think this is only our way of blaming ourselves for something Fate wrote into the fabric of being long before we existed.

And so here is my heresy. I don’t believe the world has gone mad--I think the sun we’re chained to has. I suspect it’s been gripped by madness from the very beginning. I know everything’s already in motion and there is no stopping fate. But I mean to defy both time and fate altogether. I mean to go back.

The idea came to me while thinking about a story my father used to read to me so long ago, back when such things were allowed. Before our people knew better than to indoctrinate the young.

In the story, a god commands the woman’s husband to leave his wicked city behind and never look back. As his loyal wife and mother of his children, she knows she must follow.

When they reach the foothills outside the city, though, the smoke and screams of the dying drift over them. The woman falters, torn between two evils--either defy a command or turn her back on her home and people as they burn.

She knows she holds no power to save the people of her city. That even if she could, any desire to help the wicked must be depraved. She also knows the price she will pay if she tries. Yet she turns to go back anyway.

With that treason, she comes forever undone, a frozen pillar of the past.

Each time I heard the story, I hoped it would somehow turn out differently--that her courage, alone, could summon the power to save everyone. I needed her to show both her husband and his god that they were wrong. That no cause is ever lost.

But Gods are not mocked. So of course they took her body and erased her name the moment she railed against them. The only things they couldn’t take were her choices. Those were hers alone. Just like ours are. Even if we don’t have the power to act them out. Even though we can never, ever go back.

I wonder now, though, whether the woman’s cause was really lost at all. Maybe turning our backs on each other is just a way of forgetting who we really are. Maybe the nameless woman’s final choice was simply to remember. And in remembering, she freed herself from the shackles of a body that only ever served to isolate and restrict her.

If that’s true, it might explain why I always sabotage my chance to follow her example. I think some part of me wants time to keep swallowing us both. Because deep down, I know that destroying what separates us means losing what I love most: to find you, again and again, inside each of your countless faces. If I’m right, if I fuel this infinite circle just to keep falling in love with you, what sort of monster does that make me?

This time, I mean to stop it. My remembering isn’t enough, though. I have to make the very Sun remember--to free it from its madness. But how does one break the spell upon which the very cosmos is predicated?

So I’m afraid I’ll be too lost this time to find either of us. I wish I could say I’m worth saving but the truth is, I don’t know. And even if you do come looking, you’ll probably just get lost too. But maybe, just maybe, you won’t. Maybe this time will be different. Maybe this time, the impossible won’t outrun us. This time, we really might kill magic and step behind the curtain. Together.