Chapter 44
Cold and sweaty, the man woke. He sat bolt upright in the still of the quiet night.
There was silence.
It wasn’t just the fact that it was hushed. It was the peculiar realisation that there were no other sounds at all.
He gazed upon his bedsheets; they were Saturated with perspiration and a fragrance that persisted like the delicate aroma of something sharp-tasting, long-lasting, and too ambiguous to correlate what it indeed was. He ruminated that deep within the catacombs of his memory he knew it somehow.
The only question was from where?
He searched for the explanation in the air above him, but it was nowhere.
Different.
Everything was eerily different now.
As if a curtain had been flung open and he could taste the breeze on his tongue.
And it was agreeable.
It helped Ventilate the scent that clung to him like camouflage.
The perfume of something primordial, dense, reminiscent of the muskiness found in dank caverns.
The whiff of the black minken wool blanket that rested upon the damp bedsheets where a civiccat gave birth once before she was spayed, he remembered.
Barely
Like his own name?
How was it feasible, he wondered?
His name… His name was…Zayn, yes, he thought….my rightful name… it’s Zayn.
Then he thought about his beloved, And the moist, soft grass in summer morn and the smell of clover.
He pictured them both, lying entwined beneath the shade of a twelm tree, the shape of her pout, the smoothness of her skin. Moments of pure joy and deepest sorrow, and the day was pleasant and Clement. It made him quiver with a raw emotion, as if his body was re-enacting some sort of conditioning.
Waves upon waves of aversion ebbing and flowing, almost like seasickness overwhelming him. He wished to surrender his supper, but he defied the urge and pushed it back down deep into the pit of his stomach as he gagged and wrung his hands.
He wondered why he was so ruffled.
The pretty little thing that lived in his sobriety, an Achilles heel, a secret escape route or a malignancy that tethered him by an umbilicus to his humanity.
Yes, he remembered
He remembered sky.
And small dandelions parasols afloat in the summer sun, intricate and fragile on an odyssey towards the cumulus clouds that speckled the skyline.
A sprig of hay, a make-believe cheroot, casually daubed upon his lip.
A moment of peace.
Then Everything turned hazy.
He sighed.
He was present in the moment again.
awakened from his daydream. His chamber was a cold, desolate, space.
Blue was the colour blanketed upon the walls. It was a faded impression of blue, almost as if it had been diluted until it was a dreary shadow of the hue it was meant to be.
Then there was,
a bed and empty chairs that sat at an open bureau, that like him had known better days.
He mused; what history had that desk witnessed? Which persons of notoriety sat in those chairs? How many souls salved with a stroke of a quill and a firm handshake. Instead of the caress of a sword or the executioners’ mercy?
Who would furnish those chairs now, he agonised, no one he would have yearned for?
A tall sash window loomed like it was the wrong end of a spyglass, making objects and people small and so extremely far away. Barely letting in any natural light at all, as it shook with the whispering breeze.
He huddled up at his reticent table, and from the paraphernalia that lay awry, he turned up an old shaving mirror.
With great trepidation, he scowled at his reflection. With a dogged stare in the moonlight, as if he were staring upon a stranger.
Who was the miscreant glaring back at him, he wondered?
His face was wrinkled and charted with lines; his eyes were unsteady; he scarcely could see through the opaque layer that sat over them.
As he shrieked in torment and whimpered to himself with a real emotion, “WHAT HAVE I DONE?”
Where did the years go by? He asked himself.
As his voice sank into a whimper.
Only dread now suffused the atmosphere, nevertheless, he sensed something was standing near to him as, one by one, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
He looked around, yet the stillness was unbroken.
Who’d of thought such a tragedy would be so silent?
Then there was a sharp sound!
A splintering sound.
The mirror finally eluded his grasp, slithered from his grip onto the ground, Shattering against the coarse sandstone flooring.
The remnants laid out by some unseen hand or eye glistening in the moonlight. Like sparkling water catching moonbeams or dancing faerie lights.
A treasure of tragedy.
Perhaps he yearned. There was a small morsel of promise yet?
Slowly he opened the window, turning the latch. It was rigid as he flicked it over and haltingly raised it, ducking beneath the windowpane.
He gazed out upon the nightscape below and saw a youth in green apparel wily playing a scene from an old saga about mighty heroes from the times of Yester in soft shimmering light.
Yes, thought Primavera to himself. Perhaps if he appealed to the young boy’s sensibilities, he could get him to deliver a message somehow. It wasn’t too late. He could call off the attack, tell the army ready to march into Kalithia province to stand down. Diplomacy would be given its chance. No Men would be turned into memories this day, nor young maidens into widows.
He breathed out.
He was relieved.
Slipping into his vestments, his headdress and face covering.
He made provisions to enter the crucible. Heaving the heavy wooden door slowly open with a long, dull creaking sound.
His legs felt sluggish as he waited patiently by some shrubs that sparsely stood on the perimeter.
As his head and shoulders kept in line with the tall stalks of the pampas grasses.
A jagged figure. He was sighted by the young man almost immediately, who interrupted his own monologue as he cast an anguished eye and suspicion toward him.
He was slightly saddened the performance had ground to a standstill.
“I saw you from above. I couldn’t help watching,” he said, announcing his presence.
A lull followed, he continued.
“I remember that, soliloquy,”
“do I know you er, er sir?” asked the young man.
He frowned.
“You look at me as if you had some dread of me! I assure you’ve nothing to fear, nothing at all to fear,” he said, alleviating the youth’s nerve.
“You have me at a disadvantage, sir. Perhaps if I were able to see your face, your expressions, nuances, I’d have a better feel of you,”
Zayn stood there a moment, pondering his words as he struck an otherworldly figure underneath the pitch-black scape of the garden like an apparition. He obliged and removed his mask.
Identifying him, he asked.
“Aren’t you the Pa’mina Primavera?”
Smiling, he quipped, “you meant to say the Knightmare but yet subtly avoided that slip of the tongue.”
He mentioned with a shrill grin.
“I’m… I’m sorry, sir, you’re mistaken,” said the youngster, fearing the wrath of his anger…
“it’s alright, my lad, that persona has shaken from me, and I do not wish to revisit it?!” he said earnestly.
“Tell me, do you think people can change for the better?”
“I don’t know. It depends on who they were before?!”
“Whom they were before,” he added, correcting his words.
“do you mean some sins are unforgivable?”
“no!” replied the young boy casually,” but unimaginable the retribution, and yet in the classical narrative, worthy of the strife.”
“that makes almost no sense!”
“I’m sorry, perhaps if I knew more about the question,” puzzled the. Young man.
“There are things I’ve done…” he sighed heavily with a trace of strain showing in his voice as it began to show just how fragile he was.
“I don’t know if I can go on living with it,”
“the things, the secrets,”
“you need closure.”
“No!” he looked down upon his feet and passed a cursory glance towards the youngster.
“and yeeessss,” he hissed.
“what if I were to tell you that my greatest sin hadn’t yet come to pass?”
“then I would encourage you to find another way!”
“ha!” he chortled “the naivety of youth, if only it were that simple.”
“in my short time on this plain.” he started setting himself up as a wise counsel.
“it invariable often is that simple… It’s whether you can live with the aftermath.”
“Hmmm,” was the only recourse that Zayn could manage.
“do you believe in magic?”
“It depends on how you quantify it!”
“the science of magic or the magic of science!”
As he produced an artificial bunch of flowers from nowhere with sleight of hand,
“cheap trickery,” remarked the young man “well, as an inexact science, then I suppose… I, I do”
“You don’t believe in darker powers?” he asked as he looked around and, for the second time tonight, sensed that something was watching him.
Zayn shook his shoulders, “it’s cold tonight,” as his breath misted the space between them.
Nightingales sang in the black velvet panorama of the quaint night garden.
“So are you a thespian,”
The man shook his head.
“I’m afraid I’m just a novice, I’m a student up at the faculty I.” he straightened himself and puffed out his chest to seem in some ways more regal.
“I’m studying philosophy.”
“ah!” gasped Zayn “, a scholar” as he recited.
“from a word to a word, I was led to a word, from a deed to another deed, from a kindness of a kind I stood still for a time, and drifted tween the reeds,”as his compatriot deduced.
“one of Esmies sonnets, the hyzantine!”
“and woe to those that disturb the sleeping dogs, a stranger in this strange country, the sincere amongst the savages, though I have not eyes to look upon, the abyss. I know clearly the path and the way, almighty leer do not forsake me!” he smiled and nodded at the young man’s prose.
“look, my la!”
“Call me, Sam!” said the young fawn, cutting him to the quip.
“Sam… We have got little time, I’m going to ask you to do something for me, and I do not expect you to understand why, but I need you to trust me,”
The young man looked into his eyes. They seemed jaded, cloudy, but somehow, he saw a spirit hoping and pleading for the help of another.
“What is it?”
“I need you to relay a message and make haste lives depend upon it!”
Sam nodded, and after the message was divulged, he slinked off, dispersing into the night like a spirit on a vow he would deliver it before sunrise.
Later, a peculiar sound penetrated the stillness. The old man was disturbed as he felt restless and sat up in his chamber, tormented. He cried out to the darkness, “who’s there?”
But no one was.
Perhaps it was a stray Merewolf lose in the yard, skulking. But surely, he would hear it howl at the moons. He looked through the window slowly as to not alert anything to his spying in the dark. But he saw nothing adoring a mantra up to the moons.
Could he settle? Something was telling him to get out. But, to do that, he would have to go outside, and for the first time in a long time, he felt a little bit scared.
Slowly, he pulled his cloak over his shoulders and took a small lantern jar filled with lake water with hundreds of tiny krill that glowed. It was only a dim ghost of a light, but Sufficient enough to see the surrounding geography.
Looking upon the benches in the quaint municipal area.
He was a little unnerved as he heard the trickle of the fountain and the doop doop sound of the Wynwood water margin, collecting water and sloshing it down into the weathered marble of the main basin.
He slowly followed up the garden path as he crept deeper into the garden.
It was empty, and yet he fathomed something dragging—something like an injured animal skating along the floor against its will.
And there was something else, something insidious that was always there stigmatising him. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. A subtle aroma he had almost overlooked, a stench but not one of death or even a state of decay.
More subtle than that.
An insidious aroma you could almost forget to smell if it were all around you constantly.
A long shadow fell across him, and a presence towered above him, Garish and inhuman.
A fiend had found him. He stood 8 feet tall at a guess.
His limbs were bearlike, with wood-like skin that scarcely covered the workings of his muscles and arteries. His hair was lustrous, dark and flowing. His teeth were of a pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his singular dim watery eye, which seemed almost of the same colour as the dull brown sockets in which it was set. His shrivelled complexion and straight black lips were framed in a scornful expression.
It was the one-eyed ogre lo Ki. He looked vastly different, perhaps even more menacing in the nightlight.
He was wearing an armoured neck brace of sorts that caught his attention underneath the starlight.
Someone had marked him and matched him. He surmised it must have been a warning from Li Kay. He found himself thinking good!
“General?” questioned Zayn as he responded, “Primavera.” they looked at one another. He noticed Lo Ki was holding a sack, which he could just about see its content. It was the uncovered body of Sam, barely alive. He was breathing shallow and fast,
“O,” said Zayn as he again smelled the familiar bouquet. He remembered. Alas, it was too little too late; it was the dreadful stench of the unholy, of hopelessness, futility and despair, the subtle effluvium of evil itself.
Ki put his arms on Zayn’s shoulders as he looked away. Toward Nula, the silver moon and back at her lover Los the amber moon “are you not going to struggle? “he asked.
“No,” replied Zayn
“This is how it always starts….in murder,” he sighed.
“you think you’re in heaven but, really”, he didn’t finish his sentence. He just made a half-smile and concluded, “…you’ll find out.” as he grinned with sarcastic irony.
“and woe to those that disturb the sleeping dogs, a stranger in this strange country, the sincere amongst the savages, though I have not eyes to look upon, the abyss. I know clearly the path and the way, almighty leer do not forsake me!”
He looked back and knew his life would soon be at an end.
The great reset would continue without him.