A
eneas feels her before he sees her. He feels her as a star might rest at the precipice of an event horizon, at the mouth of a black hole. He feels her as one feels the absence of warmth when a cloud passes over the midday sun. He feels her as an inevitability, as an energy that consumes; a negativity that pulls, that creates a gravity so deep escape becomes impossible. She defies the laws he knows and is instantly familiar for the darkness that settles upon him. She wonders if he can hear the small death, if it makes a sound. The decaying of cells. The entropy of her presence, inescapable and inevitable. Aeneas does not open his eyes because yes, he feels it, he feels it as one feels a thread braid beneath their fingers. It changes shape. It becomes something else.
You are a long way from home.
It occurs to him he does not know what he is praying for. To forget, perhaps. To find himself. To grow into this forest as this face has grown into the oak. Whatever it had been, her words interrupt it; they steal him from his reverie and into the moment at hand. It is better that way, he thinks, and his energy undulates; he had not been at peace before. He is not at peace now.
Aeneas opens his eyes and he smiles. He is older; he is not afraid, as he had once been, and there is a strange reconciliation in finding her here again. The wolves were howling before; but they do not howl now.
“I love this forest,” he says simply, because there is no other answer. He might say home has not felt like home since his father disappeared. He might say he does not know if he ought to have one foot in the Susurro and another in the Mors. He does not feel torn in two, here.
Aeneas feels strong, now. He had not been before, when he first met her. He had been afraid and too young. But with the sunlight straining through the boughs, his energy reaches out and the rot becomes black quartz jutting from the wood. The unseeing eyes of the face watch them, and for a moment he wonders what it might say, if it could speak.
The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves.
