Allie's War Episodes 1-4(58)

“It was for her, brother. You felt obligated—”
“I meant, it was not her fault.” Revik is once more staring at the shadow-darkened corners of the cell. “Please go.”
“Revik, your blood cousin, Whelen, doesn’t interest me.” Galaith’s words contain a gentle pull. “We have no need of family names. That clan nonsense is of the past. I want your talent, Revik. I believe you will prove to be our most valuable asset yet.”
Terian leans closer. He holds up two fingers in a backwards V, wiggling them at Revik.
“...Second-most valuable,” he says, winking.
Galaith chuckles, patting Terian on the back with one hand. “Yes,” he says. “It was Terian here who petitioned hardest for your recruitment, Rolf. Our little Terian is most anxious to see what you can do...he may have created a bit of a reputation for you in advance, I’m afraid. One you may have to defend in not too long a time.”
His smile grows more visible as he discerns Revik’s involuntary reaction to his words.
“...I, too, am anxious to witness these talents, cousin,” he says. “Indeed I am. Most anxious.”
A flush of warmth grows in some part of Revik that doesn’t need to feel much else.
He is still thinking, turning over this spark in his mind, when the walls around me fall once more into black.



I choke...choked...am choking...caught inside a fisted clutch of light, an egg-shaped pocket that holds me unflinchingly in place. Inside that heated glow, I birth. The turning planet brings stars past me in a pale swath, sky broken by sharp eyes and lightning flashes, snaking charges of gold and orange and crimson, the late side of the setting sun.
The pain worsens, a spike that arcs, a taste before it keens steeply up, inexorable, becoming gradually more unbearable, until I am sure my insides will be ripped out, torn into so many pieces there is nothing left.
Beyond where I lay, a golden ocean beckons. It is familiar.
He is there too.
I’m sorry, he says. It’s not why I asked for you. I’m sorry, Allie—
Shhh. My voice is steady, somehow apart from the lights clashing, the ghosts winging over both of our heads. Revik, it's all right.
Don't leave me, Allie. Don't leave me alone with this...
The pain worsens again, makes it hard to see.
Still, the words come easily, without thought or regret.
I won't, I tell him. I never will.
There is a question in this...one that shocks his heart.
Before I’ve understood either the question or the possible answers, he’s agreed. A surrender lives in that agreement, what is almost shame. He clasps my fingers, and I see tears in his eyes. They bewilder me, touch me somehow through the pain and he pulls me closer until...
He kisses me. It is a brief kiss. Clumsy, awkward, almost tender...meaning lives there, more meaning than I can comprehend. I feel him agree again.
It feels final that time...like a promise.
A vow, maybe.
Like an ending and a beginning, all at once.
...and then, the night sky disappears.
Above us, light weaves into complicated patterns, in and out like a shuttlecock between silk threads. I have a fleeting impression of time removed. The weaving of the threads grows more and more complicated, more subtle, more intensely beautiful and intimate and connected to my heart. I watch a painting form in the vastness of that sky, a painting of diamond light, in a pattern too breathtaking for words. My struggle stops, even as the pain I felt before melts into warm breath, a feeling of ending that somehow...doesn’t...can’t.
I know, somehow.
I feel it in him, too, a surge of familiar.
The feeling is so dense, I can’t see past it. A timelessness lives in that sense of the familiar, something I can’t explain to myself, something I understand without words, without really understanding it at all.
Something is...different.
I don’t know it yet, but it will never be the same again.






 
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12
CHANGE

 
I sat in a window, balanced toe to heel on the white painted wooden sill.
My butt had started to numb in the twenty or so minutes since I first fixed my perch, but I liked being balanced on the narrow ledge as I looked out the rain-splattered window. Through the glass lived a world of gray, with charcoal streets and sad-looking trees breaking up long swaths of sidewalk.
A man walked by in a tarp of a raincoat, slowly pushing a shopping cart filled with cans and covered with a blue tarp. He glanced up at the window.
I held my breath, frozen as he stared at me, but his face looked resigned, his eyes blurred by rain. Gripping the cart’s handlebars, he resumed pushing it down the street, his expression unchanging.