Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising: think, the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
W
e will get through this, she says, and the words drift through my mind as if buoyed, kept above the turmoil of pain and disorientation. We will get through this, she says, and as she pushes all of her magic into me, I have no choice but to believe her, to feel the budding resilience within my soul. Yes, we will get through this. Yes, we have to. Yes, I will endure. (Later, after the worst of it, I will wonder if it is Elena that saves me, or my pride. Is it the way my father’s voice rises, immutable and incessant, telling me that quitting is never an option—that if it ever becomes one, I am already dead).
Listen to him now. Where was the sun? Do I answer? Do I answer, in the red-hot, white-hot undulation of my pain? I think I do. I think I say, Nowhere to be found, but that is beyond—or beneath?—my screams that pierce the air with each stitch of my infected, jagged flesh. Behind his too-red eyes, I think I answer, but the lights and the shadows and the scents and the smells overwhelm me. I might as well be underwater again; I might as well be dying all over.
The rain—did it ever stop?
The rain? What does she mean, the rain? I think I taste saltwater at the memory. No, no, she doesn’t understand—there had been no rain! Only sea and tears. Had I not said that—?
“No,” I rasp, because even half engaged to the memory I cannot part from what I wanted to believe then and now. Never tears. It had always been rain—
And had you fallen, I would have had nothing to cry onto that night but a shattered shoulder of a man I never got a chance to know. And had you fallen, I would have been lost inside a city, a belly of a beast. And had you fallen—
“And had I fallen,” Torix adds. “I would have died who I was meant to be. It was a shattered shoulder; you just didn’t know it.”
I think I say it. I think I say it through the pain that rolls over me as a surf has; tossing me amongst the waves; drowning me.
There is a moment of clarity, I think, before unconsciousness takes me. A moment of clarity, that locks my eyes to hers and seals us again in some sick twist of fate. I am still, and breathless, and staring at her above the tattered grin at my throat.
“Elena?” I say, and do not hear just how feverish my voice has become. “Elena? Would it not better for us all if we ended the moment we reach the pinnacle of ourselves? Would it not be better to end at the junction between assent and decline, today and tomorrow, ourselves… and a stranger? Would it not be better—“
I don’t know if I am speaking, or Damascus through me—if this last burst of strength, of clarity, comes from the shattered piece of my soul speaking through a monster’s mouth.
It seems there is much I no longer know. I turn away; I turn away and close my eyes.
It had not been rain, I remember.
It had not been rain.
The unconsciousness sweeps over me in a way I cannot—even if I had wanted to—fight. I let it. I let it take me.
