by A. E. Shaw
Selina cannot, it seems, have been designed to be better. She must be like everyone else. She must have been…as a book, as an elder, someone that was meant for him, for Alej, to enhance their knowledge and understanding. A toy? A lesson? She must have been there for a reason, but there’s no indication of what that reason might have been.
And she doesn’t seem to be sorry, either.
He doesn’t listen to her tale. He isn’t interested.
Alej listens. Alej cares. He has precisely the same relationship with Selina that Aiden does, on paper - a day of his cycle spent in service to her - but he doesn’t see her with the eyes that Aiden does. Aiden felt her to be a princess; his equivalent. Alej saw her as a light that always seemed to be about to go out.
Where Aiden appeared to Alej to live his life in a state of perpetual relish and fascination, lights on, bright and shining, his eyes ever wide awake and searching, so Selina seemed to him something - someone - misplaced.
Aiden couldn’t find any of that in her if he tried. He thought she was exactly what a girl should be - not so surprising, in the sense that she is the only girl he’s ever met. She had seemed so worthwhile. She was the perfect complement.
Was. Past tense. It’s over now.
Just as his skin feels ready to crack, burns raw and dry, catching on even the thin fabric of his shirt, so he is slicked with a sense of revulsion, as loss and ignorance began to express themselves in embarrassment. Embarrassment is hot and bruising as anything he’s ever known.
He looks at Alej, who has one hand holding Selina’s, the other hand on her knee. Why doesn’t he understand? He shouldn’t be touching her.
Aiden puts his hand to his throat and closes it about his collar, focusing himself on the texture of the diamonds against his pulse. This was not supposed to happen. Inside his head, the torrent of thoughts continues, repetitive, bruising.
Alej has failed me. Selina has lied to me.
From every story he has ever learnt, from every scroll he’s ever read, he knows that when trust is broken you can never go back. Once change has come, it is irreversible. For moments, confused, clouded hours, he had assumed the way forwards was bright and gleaming and new.
In a flash of understanding, it has become more of the same, and infinitely less than he had.
He stretches out on the floor and looks at the other two as if he were listening. Instead, he is watching their apparent bonding, letting their conversation anger him with its tone of understanding, letting himself separate his emotions further from them with their every word and gesture.
This, Aiden has decided, is it. The sheer level of stimuli he’s been through since he woke up to Selina screaming his name: to find himself in a world so much larger, colder and less pleasant than he’d imagined it might be, and then this on top of that, it’s all too much.
With everything that has ever constituted his identity gone, Aiden has no time for anything but himself. He is even more special than he realised. They are not a group of three, together, soldiering on into this unknown world. There is Alej, there is Selina, she is a liar and Alej has chosen her. He, Aiden, is all that is left. The world will bend to his will and give him what he needs. His insistence in destiny may yet be enough to make it so.
Selina folds herself up, draws her knees to her chest. In the flicker of the firelight, Aiden can see she is crying.
Aiden is not sure if he has ever cried. He feels no compassion.
Alej’s reaction is as awkward, but kind, Selina would have expected it to be. Seeing Aiden there, she believes he is just as supportive, only less able to demonstrate it.
As her weeping continues, Aiden thinks he can take no more.
Alej looks to him, suggesting he’s a little out of his depth, inviting him in for support.
Aiden doesn’t even notice.
“I’m so sorry,” Alej is repeating, his odd monotone curiously well-adjusted to this unusual - for him - pattern of speech, “it sounds very bad, that you had to live that way…”
Aiden has never understood the propensity of characters to apologise for things they could in no way be held responsible for. He is once more taken out of his approaching charade to contemplate just how low Alej is.
In all the time they spent together, Alej never mentioned having read one single book. He never told Aiden anything he didn’t know. He certainly never sang. What did he do? He grew plants, and muscles. Well, how very useful. That’s practical; that’s improving. Perhaps Alej’s purpose was, after all, also only to serve him. Perhaps he’s as much a part of the charade as Selina. Alej, right in front of Aiden’s eyes, transforms easily into the picture of an empty vessel, a dummy, a companion to be imprinted any which way Aiden wanted him. He has coaxed certain things from this formless being, and consolidated parts of his own learning in storytelling and conversation. But that time is over.
In this brief time, Aiden has successfully divorced himself from the last two people alive that have featured in his entire memorable life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Parting
The fire is down to smouldering. Aiden dresses, softly, quietly. He takes the bucket up in movements so slow, they barely disturb his own arm. He has all he could need. He is ready.
The dominant feeling rushing about him is relief. Everything else is a blank. Everything. This isn’t so surprising. It isn’t as if he could imagine what waits on the other side of the door.
He moves with his breath held, slowly, slowly, avoiding any creak or squeak. He slips himself out of the hut, eyes on the ground, no slipping, no falling, mustn’t make a single sound.
The sun is rising. Light is reaching its way up the mountain. The sight is too much for Aiden at first; after a single, momentary glance he is squinting at the grass through his hands, taking one pace, then another.
He wants this moment for himself, but he needs to get away first.
His eyes can barely take it. He is afraid to raise his head in case he can’t appreciate all that he ought to be able to see. This moment should be special; it should be everything. This is the beginning of his ascent.
Ascent to what? Ascent is going upwards, Aiden, bless your confusion, you want to be going down the mountain.
This doesn’t matter to him. Aiden has decided that ‘ascending’ is what he shall be doing, even if it must be metaphorically.
He takes a deep breath. Warmth casts over him, starting at his feet and rising.
He looks up, out, over. He has no concept of distance, but there it is in abundance. Just as ‘up’ was so much to comprehend, so ‘afar’ is equally shocking. How is it possible that there is so much space in this universe?
The ground continues to fall away from the recess where the resting place stands. Paths crisscross rock smitten with wiry grasses, rust-coloured dirt and dying (growing?) wild flowers. The sheer amount of space; Aiden can’t get his head around it. He has no idea at all what he’s looking at. Land? A continent? A world?
He is, by far, at the land’s highest point. Once the mountain reaches down, it drops into dust and grey and shapes and shapelessness, spreading out over there: Aiden passes his hand across the area, as if trying to brush it away, but the gesture has no impact.
There is no greenery once the dust begins. There are yellow stretches between the hazed shapes, lines stretching gridlike, drawing shapes Aiden would like to make sense of with the part of his brain that spent so long studying geometry, but cannot.
The world did not end, with him shut away from it. It continued to exist after his birth and has been waiting for him to come down. He alone was chosen to live here, to grow here, above everything. Validation is the most powerful feeling he’s experienced yet. He feels like he could die, here and now, utterly content in the knowledge that, this is all for me.
At the same time, what a terrible waste that would be. After they (who are they, Aiden?) have waited so long for him to arrive.
He couldn’t possibly let them down.
He’s shivering, skin tensing and releasing repeatedly, something he has experienced in the castle’s dank atmosphere, but with the wind tickling him it is quite different.
I’m ready.
No, Aiden, no you’re not, and you shouldn’t rush into this world because you’ll make mistakes, there’s so much you should learn slowly. You shouldn’t be alone here. But there’s no-one there to tell him that, not any more.
As Alej and Selina sleep, so Aiden, fuelled by virtually nothing, so delirious from the walk and the night that he is oblivious to the extent to which he’s sore and raw and bruised and salivating, begins his journey.
Aiden can’t switch off; his mind is bolting through everything as best it can. As he puts one foot in front of the other, scrambles, eases, tries to do things he’s never asked of his body, he consults the adventures of the thousands of heroes he’s read of. He ponders the explorers, men of the world who travelled across vast plains, seas, mountains; how those men travelled so that he, Aiden, might take in everything they learnt and, in his own time, descend this mountain, bringing his own innate understanding, his perfect perspective, his truth of what it is to be human to the audience that surely awaits.
It is strange to see the range of colours here. His eyes burn with the pain of looking, but Aiden considers this worthwhile. The damage from the fire is minimal in the long run, but the sudden exposure to the elements is such a shock to his system that it’s kill or cure, and his heart’s still beating, so clearly ‘cure’ has been assigned.
There is scent in the air. As he moves, as his fingers disturb earth and clay and make mud, there’s something new at every move. Aiden can’t breathe deeply enough. He can’t get enough of it inside him. As he moves around the different facets of the mountain, the air changes, again, and again. His skin is filthy, a layer of sweat drying under the silk in the breeze. He starts to feel himself glued together, yet cracking apart with every motion.
Time passes, and the sun does truly emerge.
It’s like fire. Like fire, but not fire. Like fire, without flame. He pauses, and catches more breath. His heart is thumping harder than when he raced from the fire. His head starts to swim. A madness grows in his tired mind. He checks himself, fears he’ll vomit, but there’s nothing inside him right now to oblige the sensation. He needs rest. Rest, in a nest. Muttering and smiling to himself, he continues, hoping to find the perfect place to curl up and hide, just in case Alej and Selina, who must surely have taken their fill of rest any time soon, decide they want to find him (and why wouldn’t they, he thinks, surely they will miss him immediately, the worthless one and the liar, and they’ll try to get him back, and that can’t be allowed to happen; they mustn’t find him, they won’t understand, they’ll try to stop him…).
Everything is taking longer. His heart is stretched and screaming. And then he sees with a small cry of joy that he has found the stream; just as it ran up there, so it runs down here. Aiden does not feel it becomes him to be as filthy as he is at this moment, but, also, he doesn’t feel that by the stream is the best place to hide out. No, better to find a secret place, stay there, let Selina and Alej make their way out, to wait and let them decide which part of the world they’ll sully, so that he might take a different path, one which will certainly be the best path, by virtue of the fact that he wouldn’t go anywhere else. He’ll save washing for the following morning, because the day ought always to start with cold water and a fresh look at your world. Even when your world is infinitely larger than four walls and a fireplace.
He drinks until his stomach churns, and then keeps walking.
Time disappears, and the sun moves around, and the warmth that was so much before rapidly becomes less. He must stop, he must rest. He must sleep. And he must not be found.
It feels as if it takes twice as long as forever to find, at long last, an overhang, surrounded with undergrowth. Aiden knows that these are ferns, here, because they look so precisely like their illustrations in the studies of nature and biology Eldringham has spent years tutoring him in. What the pictures could not convey, though, was their texture, and he is amazed by their softness. They are as gentle as a hug, as soft as his feather mattress. They are perfect for his bed, this day. He won’t rush this, will sleep until he wakes, will conceal himself as best he can, and, when the next day comes, will progress further towards his goal. There is no deadline. He does not even perfectly identify this goal. He remains so driven, so completely assured, he doesn’t need to map it out.
Aiden pulls branches from the bush growing out on the overhang down, over himself, trying to knot them to the ferns in places. As he nestles in, pulling long, twining leaves about himself, breathing their deep green scent, he doesn’t for a single moment reflect on everything that he’s left behind. Instead, he focuses on the memories and experiences that were new to him today, tries to learn them as he would learn his lessons, combined into something so rich. He hunches deeper into his silks, aches resonating deep up inside him, into his guts, and his last waking note is the comfort of remembering that the diamonds, his precious diamonds, are still wrapped about his neck.
Aiden dreams of fire. This is not, perhaps, surprising. He dreams of it surrounding him out here, and he is not afraid. Rather than being consumed by it or fleeing from it, he commands it. As he walks, so the fire bends and breaks to allow his path. He tests it, increasingly empowered. If he raises and throws an arm, so the fire is flung far into the distance. It is more than happy to act out his commands.
He dreams of striding into the library, resuscitated, safe and his. He dreams of talking to the books, addressing them as one would an audience, telling them of his journey, and of his own magnificence. They applaud him: he hears the sound of this amidst the crackles of the fire. The fire, too, applauds him. He is master of all he sees. He is as one with the world. In his dream, there is a window in the library. He can see out at this new view that he’s had today. In this world, there is no sun. There is only fire. The fire lights the sky, extends into infinity. The cities are made of blackness. And inside, Aiden tames the fire, and talks back to the books that taught him all he knows.
Whilst he sleeps, so the sun passes to the other side of the mountain, then starts to pull back, readying itself to circle and give the night its space.
CHAPTER NINE
The Chase
When Alej and Selina wake, sunlight is trying to force its way between the slats that make up the hut, providing an odd sort of dawn on the inside.
Alej is exhausted. Then the sight of the unfamiliar room has him start, strain-eyed, taking everything he can see in sun-striped darkness. His legs ache horribly from the walking, not something he’s ever done at length before. As he stretches out, he finds himself yowling in pain. How will he go any further? Is this how it always feels to walk, to have walked?
He looks to Selina, who, even in sleep, seems poised and arranged as ever, save for her hair, still burnt. He pats his own hair. It feels slick, a little damp, but it is not burnt. That seems unfair. Why should Selina have to suffer, but not him? Do her legs hurt? I would have swapped that pain for my hair. Would she? Does she even care? Alej realises how little he knows.
It takes longer to recall everything they were talking about last night. Everything Selina was talking to him about. Everything they were…wait.
Aiden. Aiden? He remembers that Aiden was there and sees, in the flittering half-light that grows in intensity even as he lies there, that Aiden is no longer there. There’s only space. And then quiet. Such quiet. Alej is used to the whirring of machinery, the clacking and sputtering of the fires. The sounds of Miriam in the kitchen or her quarters, of Michael digging and talking of nothing to himself.
Silence is unnerving. His heart beats faster. Then he sees the bucket is gone too, and presumes Aiden has gone for water. He lies there for quite some time longer, aching and staring, until he realises his presumption is likely inaccurate. Aiden would never think to go for water. Alej’s insti
nct is to serve. Aiden’s is not. Aiden might have made a new fire, but he hasn’t.
Alej isn’t sure if he should, but he knows that there’s nothing he can do about this on his own, and so, with apology writ all over his face, he takes Selina gently by the shoulder, and shakes her, inept, unsure, nervous.
“Selina, Selina. Selina? He’s gone.”
Selina’s eyes fly open immediately. “What? Who?”
“Aiden. He’s not here.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” She pauses to cough, hard, her body folding up and her hands cupping her mouth as she fights an apparent attempt to turn inside out. “Where?” she furthers, eventually.
“I don’t know.”
Of course you don’t, Selina thinks, you never know anything. That seems cruel, but…it’s true. This isn’t the time to start panicking about the kindness of thoughts. She pushes herself up, feeling her bones click and settle back into place. She slept deeply, more from necessity than comfort, but all of her wishes for her soft, surrounding bed in the castle.