As I've alluded to, I've been talking to Maili, Wyrm, the M'Hael, and a couple others. I'm going to join Maili in soft retirement. I think it's time I faced that both for my mental health as well as just general energy levels, I can't keep up with/play SE the way my younger self used to. I say soft retirement because I won't rule out a game or two, depending on who is playing, or occasionally GMing. But don't expect to see me back frequently, and not for quite a while. (Again, unless MR50 passes to me, in which case, I'm doing it.)
I also did a farewell RP in the form of an epilogue because I wrote about 46.5k in total for the write-ups this game and I'm just enough of an overachiever to want to reach 50k, thereby completing a NaNo within the same period. This one brings the tally up to about 51.9k. And now my watch has ended.
Epilogue: The Parting Glass
“Of all the comrades that e’er I had
They are sorry for my going away [...]
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call
Goodnight and joy be with you all.”
—’The Parting Glass’, The High Kings
“So which of them died?”
Khas set down his wine glass. “Does it really matter?” he wanted to know.
“Considering you were so bloodthirsty when prodding me for all the details of the Notemos incident,” Wurum said, pouring a little more auburn wine into his glass. “I feel as though I should demand similar attention to detail from you.”
“I have been duly chastised,” said Khas, deadpan.
“Good,” said Wurum, severely. “Well, then?”
“I told you. It doesn’t really matter.”
“I’ve found myself terribly invested in Wyl’s well-being,” Wurum said. “I find it exceedingly harsh that you’re not even willing to answer basic questions about what happened to him.”
“And Kast?”
“Eh. He’ll manage.”
“Don’t you feel as though you might be a little biased here?”
Wurum considered the question for a moment. “Hardly,” he said. “After all, if you were so kind as to create a character after me in that story of yours, you have only yourself to blame if I’ve grown invested. Consider that the pitfalls of good storytelling.”
“But it really shouldn’t matter,” insisted Khas. “The point is that it was a tragedy that they wound up fighting and trying their damnedest to kill each other, just as it was a tragedy that the villagers of Fallion’s Tears turned on themselves and brought about their own destruction. The koloss were an illusion. The real threat always comes from within. The human heart, and all of that stuff. Their choices, and their personal principles, or beliefs about acceptable methods drove them into conflict. Figuring out which of them really died, and which of them really lived is missing the forest for the trees.”
Wurum had begun to tilt his glass, but sighed. “I was going to throw this at you. One story without all that philosophy, is that too much to ask for?”
“Yes.”
“Well, clearly,” said Wurum. “Though this is good wine. And that was an acceptable story.”
“You did like Eighty Splendid Suns,” Khas recalled. It was his turn to refill his own glass. “Though you always did have a weakness for mythic stories and Shardblade duels.”
“It was interesting,” Wurum said, sipping at his wine. “And it was different. I don’t have any difficulty admitting that.”
“So I can see,” Khas said. “Must be the wine you’ve drunk.”
Wurum glanced at him, eyes narrowed. “I’m hardly the one who had a few glasses of sapphire wine and then started getting maudlin.”
Khas was in the middle of reaching over for the carafe of water. He hesitated. “You agreed we would never mention that again,” he hissed.
“Did I?” asked Wurum serenely. “I must be getting old. My memory isn’t quite what it used to be, I’m afraid. What was it you were talking about, in your cups? About those riots in Kholinar? Or perhaps the time before that, in the palace in Kholinar?”
“I regret not putting a Shardblade through you when I had the chance,” Khas ground out.
Wurum tsk-ed disapprovingly. “Is this how you talk to a friend and—what was that, someone who is ‘like a brother to you’?”
“I’ve known operatives who’d stab their own brothers for laughs, or a bottle of violet wine. There was a good vintage a couple of decades ago, too. Consider it a friendly stabbing, checking to see if you’re still alive.”
Wurum’s eyes flicked over, and Khas caught the movement of his gaze and tipped his wine glass, ironically. He was holding it in his sword hand, though these trivialities meant little, after decades of operating in the Ghostbloods.
“Not your type of thing,” Wurum dismissed it, with a negligent wave of his hand. “Not your style.”
“It’s been a long while,” Khas countered. “These things change a man, you know.”
“Sure,” Wurum returned to his drink. “And you’re still plastering the walls with those scribblings of yours.”
“I like philosophy. You know this.”
“Exactly.”
It was a good enough wine, Khas supposed. He couldn’t remember when he’d come across this one, though the taste of spice was not an unwelcome one. Worse things to offer an honoured enemy. Worse things to offer a not-unwelcome friend. Memories flowing with the wine, as though the wine had loosened them.
It was not unfamiliar, this exchange of words over wine. He supposed there were worse drinking companions you could ask for. Few better, if Khas were to be honest with himself.
Maybe he was just looking for a reason to remember. It had been so very long.
Khas nursed his wine glass and watched the lights of the party glitter in the dark. He’d stepped out for a moment, using the excuse of the glass to buy himself a little privacy. In truth, Khas had learned that if you looked busy and walked purposefully, few people stopped you.
Perhaps it was better this way. He had the quiet dark to himself, a time to sit in silence and to raise his glass to the year that had come and was even now slipping past them.
Transitions, Khas thought. They always put him in an introspective mood. You could not help but be aware of when the past and the future lay down next to each other, like layers of reflections in a hall of bright mirrors.
The stars gleamed overhead, and the moon turned the water of the fountain to quicksilver. He sat down on a bench and sipped at the wine. Excellent sapphire, but the sort that could go too quickly to your head if you let it.
A gentle breeze stirred the garden, rustling the leaves of the ornamental bushes, scattering droplets of water like cut gems.
“I heard a madman was outside, trying to write poetry to the moon,” said a familiar voice.
“What does that make the other man, the one who came out to talk to him?” Khas asked, wryly.
Wurum considered the question for a moment, and then shrugged. “Bah. I’m certain they’ve already agreed we’re both madmen, anyway.” He set his own wine glass down by the rim of the fountain.
“Quite possibly,” Khas said. “I’m certain the last stunt didn’t help.”
There was a certain invincibility in being young, a certain belief in your own prowess over the vicissitudes of fate. The way the world lay wide open before you, splayed like one of the navigators’ charts, ripe with possibilities.
Wurum grinned. “It was a good operation,” he said. “We had a good run of it.”
“Yeah. We did. They didn’t see us coming.”
“Well, we killed the ones who did, at any rate.”
Khas smirked. “That’s the point, isn’t it? Stealth is overrated. Just kill them before they can rumble you.”
“That’s a bit extreme.”
“But not untrue.”
“Potentially,” admitted Wurum. “Or at least, as it panned out, for that operation.”
It had been a good operation, as far as Khas was concerned. He’d had his concerns, after his first op in Kholinar had gone so badly, but he supposed that the three of them had pulled it off. A part of him had always wondered, after the ill-fated riots in Kholinar, just what it would be like to scheme and plan and run an op with Wurum.
He supposed they had the answer now.
“You tired of the party, then?”
“Eh,” said Wurum. “Wilson’s looking for Clancy.” And Cleo and a few others were raising a shrine to Wilson, as you apparently did.
“Still?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“God,” Khas said, impressed in spite of himself. “Clancy’d better watch his back next couple of ops, I suppose. He got us all good.” But especially Wilson. Hard on her, he supposed, to have been taken out shortly before she could realise his duplicity.
Hard on Wurum too, for sticking it out through the entire thing, even as everyone else was taken out, one by one. The last of his communications had become increasingly terse.
“That’s usually the way of it,” said Wurum. “Do well, impress everyone, spend the next couple of ops lying low and waiting for the heat to die off.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Sure,” scoffed Wurum. “After five people wanted you dead or otherwise incapacitated in Kholinar.”
“This was your fault,” Khas said, glaring at him. “You instigated it, and you admitted it.”
Wurum raised an eyebrow. “I’ve most certainly admitted my role in this. Come now, you did have a good laugh about it when you found out.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is exasperation,” Khas said, “As well as a long and abiding distrust of you.”
“There,” said Wurum. “You’ve taken something valuable away from the experience. I should charge you for this, after all.”
“Tell that to Tulir,” Khas retorted. “I’m certain he has trust issues now, because of you.”
They grinned at each other, and Khas felt the lightness of the moment move through him, like air, like breathing.
The world had a way of doing that, he thought. Of offering you unexpected encounters. Unexpected turnings. Old paths falling away to reveal new ones. An old enemy, showing up again in the guise of a friend.
“Been a good year, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Khas, and meant it. “I’d drink to that.”
“Don’t hold it too hard against yourself,” Gambles said, clapping Khas on the back. Violet wine sloshed over the rim of the glass, and only their reflexes saved both of them from further disaster.
Khas set down his wine glass by the rim of the fountain before further accidents could happen.
“I know,” he said. Knowing was one thing. Holding that knowledge in your being, against the raw, deeper, emotional heart of you—well, that was another thing, altogether. A separate thing, as far as Khas was concerned.
It was the first operation he’d planned, and it had gone terribly awry. Knowing that Wilson and Gambles had seen it, knowing that Wurum himself had scanned the plans, knowing all of that did nothing to set aside the guilt. One of the philosophers, an Erikell, had written that reason was the slave of the passions and Khas deeply understood that.
A simpler world, perhaps, if men were only rational.
Maw and Sheon had taken him aside, to tell him it wasn’t his fault. Even Locke Tekiel had spoken up, to tell him it had been an enjoyable run. Khas had thanked them politely. The Sel operation, the one that had taken place in the Rose Empire, was a stone weighted against his heart. How did you set aside such a stone so easily?
All the kind words—and Khas did not scorn the kindness, however unexpected—did not silence the gnawing guilt, the one that whispered that it was his fault, that he really should have known better, and that Wilson and Wurum had ended up paying for it.
“Did your best,” Gambles said. “That’s what counts.”
He had. But it didn’t feel that way. He had been so tired, near the end. He thought that everyone else had been, too.
“I know,” Khas said again. He owed Gambles, too, for backing him up when everything went straight to Braize in a basket. He knew that. He knew all of that. But the thought of the cremstorm that had erupted…
He wasn’t much for violet wine. But he picked up his glass again and got a whiff of sandalwood. Maybe it wasn’t a bad way to go, Khas thought. He could do with feeling a little less, at the moment.
“I heard you might be leaving,” said someone else.
Khas glanced over at Ableah Edr. “I’ve been thinking of it,” he admitted. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this.” For planning operations, at least. He wouldn’t blame people for looking askance at him if he ever got to do another.
“It was a good run,” Ableah said. “I think we’d lose something if you left for good.”
Maybe, thought Khas. But you had to make up for your mistakes somehow, and this was the only spheres Khas had left to spend. He couldn’t imagine more people wanting to run an op under him, not after the clusterchull of clusterchulls.
They didn’t know each other well, not this early. All Khas remembered of Ableah was a surprising gift. An exchange of poetry, and poison unasked for. He had underestimated Ableah, and misread him, that first time. Now, he had more of a wary respect.
These things had a way of happening. All you had to go on were those fleeting impressions, those memories scattered like leaves. And what chances the world gave you, to deepen your acquaintances with others. Maybe it was a kind of grace, thought Khas. A gift unasked for.
And there was Wurum. A conversation Khas really didn’t want to be having.
“You did well,” Wurum had said. “Under the circumstances.” He hesitated, and then added, and perhaps with more kindness that Khas would have come to expect, “I expect any of us would have done the same, in your situation.”
And that was the last thing Khas had wanted; acceptance, perhaps a kind of forgiveness. He did not want any of them. Did not feel he deserved them, either. He expected condemnation. Maybe it was the understanding, really, that threatened to be his undoing.
“Right,” said Khas, flatly. “Well. It’s over, now.”
“Sure is,” said Wurum. “Just think you could do with less beating yourself up over it. We all make mistakes. And I think—” he hesitated again. Another uncharacteristic moment, where Wurum was concerned. “—I know a number of us would miss you if you left.”
“Yeah, well. Spare me this talk,” Khas said. “You’re not drunk enough to get this emotional just yet.”
Wurum’s judgemental side-eye felt like a small victory, even as the other man sighed. “What are friends for, if only to make sure you don’t make too big a fool of yourself when you inevitably get terribly drunk?”
“Not my job today,” Khas said. “I’m off-duty.”
Wurum sighed. “Well, then. Change of plans.” He held up his wine glass. At least he’d the sense to stay with the red, though Khas supposed it wasn’t asking for too much that at least one of them had to have some good sense.
“To folly,” Khas said, and raised his own glass, ironically. “And extremely bad ideas.”
“This is why you should trust me, by the way. It’s never an extremely bad idea.”
“I can list at least five reasons why it’s the worst idea I’ve ever had.”
It wasn’t, though. It really wasn’t. You never knew the paths down which the world led you. Sometimes, it wasn’t about the battle. Sometimes, it was about the war; the greater tapestry into which each single strand was brightly woven. Sometimes it was not so easy. But sometimes, you could put your finger on a turning point, on an event or a person, and say your life would have been so much more impoverished, had this not happened, had your paths not crossed.
You did what you could, found your own happiness, sought your own peace in this life, as all men did, but if you were lucky, truly lucky, you might find life offering your friendship. Sometimes, the cup was full of bitter sorrow instead. But sometimes, in the dregs was laughter.
We can only be so fortunate.
The letter came from Wurum. Khas recognised the scrawl, the messy way he formed his script, and sighed. He picked it up and glanced through it. Another operation, the big one. Tyrian Falls.
He held it for a long moment, exasperation mixed with yearning, mixed with hesitation.
There was a paper due. There always was, at the university in Silverlight. It was what he’d wanted, though. Silverlight was different from the marketplaces of Kholinar, or the libraries of Azimir. Maybe it was because he could set aside the wariness of being an operative in the Ghostbloods, here. In Silverlight, he was only a student, working towards the weary triumph of the day he’d earn his degree.
The Ghostbloods awaited, after that. But Khas couldn’t say it was an unwelcome respite.
In his occasional letters, Wurum had poked at him for taking the time to get a degree in ‘arguing with people.’
I don’t see it that way, Khas had written back, more seriously. I think philosophy is best done as an invitation to honest discussion, to re-evaluating our perspectives, to looking at the world and what we know in a different way. One of the professors here says that philosophy is about asking the right questions, and I think he’s right about that. What is the good? What is true? How should we behave? What should we value? All these are questions the philosopher tries to answer. The longer I’ve been here, the more I think good philosophy—the best—connects the familiar to the less familiar, and in doing so, casts it in a new light.
You need a break, Wurum had said, in his reply, but given he’d once trained as a surgeon, Khas didn’t think very much of that comment.
Perhaps that was the terrifying thing. The knowledge that as much as he was buried in work, his time at Silverlight was drawing to an end, and Khas didn’t know what room there was for a man who wanted to ask the right questions about life and the nature of reality in the Ghostbloods.
He sighed and poured himself a drink. Some of the students in Silverlight drank like Horneaters, but Khas favoured water here. Still, the letter was...not unwelcome, and after a moment’s hesitation, Khas padded over to the cupboard and pulled out the bottle of orange wine he’d stashed away.
The answer was going to be no, of course.
He had the degree to earn, and the last thing Khas wanted was to get caught up in the Ghostbloods again. Not yet, part of him pleaded. He wanted to cling on to the world of academic study, of papers and tutorials and journal articles just a little longer.
He wanted, he supposed, to leave his own mark on the world, in glyphs and in script and in thought. Something that said that Khas had lived, that he had, in his own time, grappled with the same eternal questions that men asked, time and time again, and had come in his own way to some semblance of an answer. He wanted to set something—his own stone—against the impermanence of things, against the shifting ground of the world.
And then there was Len. Their last clash.
If you let them, Khas thought, regrets could overwhelm you, like that last glass of Veden saph at a gathering in the quiet hours of the night, after the wine had burned away both music and merriment. You could drown in them, like men drowned their sorrows in wine.
He raised his glass.
The slight warmth of the orange wine, mixed with the spicy notes of ginger, drowned out the heat of the shame he’d buried deep down.
He should have been stronger. Should have—
Wurum would understand, Khas thought. And that was that.
“I just wanted to talk,” said Sheon Idris.
“I know,” Khas said. “You said as much in your letter. Well, I’m here now. What is it?”
Unexpected, he thought, but unsurprising, that Sheon wished to talk. They’d come to a sort of understanding, over the years. And perhaps buried as he was in his papers and lectures, Khas had not thought of the Ghostbloods in long months, not quite.
But then the letter had come, from Sheon, and Khas had found himself curious enough to answer the request for a brief meeting.
Memories of a shove in the dark, a long fall. But they’d had a few good ones too, reminiscing together on a bridge about the games they enjoyed. And there was that op on Sel, where Sheon had fended off enemies in the night, while Khas had infiltrated Elantris to collect and send on the intel they needed.
“I’m leaving,” said Sheon.
Khas wondered if this was what it felt like to fall; the sudden, startling sensation of the ground gaping, giving way below your feet. Those two words from Sheon struck him like an unexpected counterattack, like that shock of a sudden arrow from a hidden Grandbow striking Shardplate.
Simple words. Words he’d considered time and again. But something had always held him back, some faint semblance of a connection. And now…
“So you are,” Khas said. “Why?”
“Time’s not on my side,” Sheon said. “And I thought it best to make a clean cut of it, rather than to carry on, and slowly falling out of things.”
Khas nodded, slowly. He could respect that. It took a certain sort of—grace, he supposed. Perhaps grace was the word for it. It took grace to accept the inevitable, to bow and take one’s leave. It took grace to face up to the grim end, and to look it in the eye with dignity and smile at it, to welcome it as an old friend, even at the dying of the light.
Everything that was mortal, everything that was human demanded rage instead. One last fight.
You never noticed the passing of time, until it had slipped past you, and suddenly the years had rushed away like the thundering headwaters of the Deathbend River, and all your memories and dreams flotsam and ruined debris before it.
“What, then?”
“One last operation,” Sheon said. “I thought you might like to know. Will you come?”
Khas thought about it. Remembered evenings conversing about the nature of light, about its limits. “I can’t promise anything,” he admitted, at last. “But I’ll try.”
Once, there was a poet in the Rose Empire who had written that all encounters in the world were reunions after a long absence. Khas remembered that encounter: fleeting, as most of those were. Motes of light in the wilderness of the world, like fireflies on the hill at dusk. A painter in a teahouse had been reciting KarWai’s Consolations of Night Rain, and something about the elegiac simplicity of the lines had caught him, there and then, and the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding hissed out between his teeth.
Bury me high up on the green hill
And in night rain grieve for me alone.
Let us be brothers in lives and lives to come
Mending then the bonds that this world breaks.
There was always a story, and the painter told him, after he’d asked, that there’d been a war those centuries ago, and KarWai had fought, as you did when it came to your fields and doorstep, no matter how ill-suited you were to the path of the sword.
“And then?” asked Khas.
“And then he killed,” the MaiPon man said, with a shrug. “And it was blood and fire and famine for generations. It was a terrible war. And they fought, despite those who said they should have chosen peace instead, and the Rose Empire won. But not before KarWai killed his brother.”
“Peace would have been death,” Khas said.
“A slow death,” replied the painter. “But no better, I think, than the slaughter of generations.”
Khas thought of the Sunmaker’s war, and then the many battles fought by the Kholins to reunify Alethkar, and the fierce rush of the Thrill in his blood, and the corpses strewn about after the fighting was done and he did not know what could be said to that.
“They were on opposite sides of the war, then?”
“Always,” said the painter. “It’s a particularly MaiPon tragedy, I suppose. Our stories are full of kinslaying. They swore the kin oath in the Garden of Three Peaches, but nights, they ended up on the wrong side of the battlefield, and KarWai was the one who survived. After the war, he wrote Consolations of Night Rain, though all the dead were burned by then.”
“An odd monument,” Khas commented, sipping at his tea.
“It’s the one that survived,” the painter said. “We lost so much of KarWai’s works in the years that followed. Whole plays, essays, volumes of poetry, all gone, as if he had never been. But this one poem kept his memory alive, if only in a small province of the empire he fought against. No small thing to do, for a friend, either.”
“No,” said Khas. “I suppose not.”
“What a mess,” Wilson said, shaking her head.
Khas shrugged, and stared at the glass of wine he’d picked up. He felt no small amount of empathy, he supposed, given how badly his first op had gone, and then there was TJ to consider as well. Maybe sometimes you just had to go with the flow, to accept that things broke; that the world dashed your hopes, sometimes, on the unforgiving rocks, and sometimes, the things that broke could be very beautiful indeed.
“Join the club,” he said.
Too many empty spaces at the party. They haunted him. For a moment, he thought he saw Maw turn about, looking for someone, and then he remembered that Maw had bowed out for good. Another of them too old for the dance. Maw was memories of guarded whispers and wary distrust. But Maw had also talked Khas through his first op. You never forgot that, either.
Ableah Edr had told him he was getting too old for this. Stormfather, what did that make him? He remembered when Edr was going on his first op.
Sheon was long gone, now. Khas never did go. Another of those gathered regrets, stinging him like a thorn. Gambles had vanished, wherever he’d holed up.
He exchanged a nod with Locke Tekiel and walked on. It was a strange feeling, passing through a room full of his ghosts, remembering who was left, and remembering who was gone. Maybe someone had to remember, Khas thought. Otherwise, it was too harsh a fate: to disappear without even a memory to bear witness to the fact you had once lived. The thought made it no less easy to bear, though.
Lopen. Twei. Hreo. Ren.
He thought he saw them for a moment, as if even thinking of their names, holding their names in his memory summoned their ghosts for a fleeting instant, before they faded back into the dusk.
Khas kept walking. It seemed he was one of the few left, and he felt so tired.
He strode out into the courtyard, for some fresh air, and the memories washed over him again, along with the sound of flowing water from the fountain. He sat on the stone bench for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. His wine glass was half-empty now.
“It isn’t the same, is it?”
The last time, Khas thought, Gambles had caught him out here, by the fountain. Wurum the time before that. And now it was Ghetti, and all Khas could think of was how old they’d all become.
“‘Fraid not,” he said. “Wouldn’t say it’s any worse though. Just different.”
She nodded, as if she understood perfectly. Maybe she did. You looked for all those names and faces. You couldn’t help it. “You should try talking to some of the young ‘uns.”
“I did. Will do in a while,” Khas said. For the moment, he just wanted to sit here, under the light of moon and stars, listening to the music of the fountain. Holding a glass of wine in his hand, like remembrance. Like bitter sorrow. Like regret.
She patted him on his shoulder. “It makes it easier to bear,” she said. “Otherwise, I guess I wouldn’t keep coming back, either.”
“Yeah,” said Khas. “Me neither. They’re...really energetic.”
“That they are.”
“Stormfather, Ghetti,” and it just came out of him, just like that, and he hadn’t expected it, hadn’t expected to have cracked, just like that. Except now it was the two of them, talking outside in the darkness, while the lights of the party gleamed through the windows, back where they had come in, but Khas wasn’t feeling up to it. Felt alone and apart, as he had since those long years of his exile. “When did we get so old?”
“Time and trauma,” Ghetti said. “They feed on you. Then it’s just pain and emptiness. Forget the youthful vibrance.”
“They do, I’ll give it that,” he said. “You’re poetic today.”
“I know,” she said. “Where did that come from?”
“Age,” Khas said, and he even managed a smile. “We’ll make a poet of you yet.”
“So,” said Khas, “What have you really come for?”
Wurum raised an eyebrow. “Did you not miss my sense of humour? Or is the chance to tell me another of your rambling philosophical stories not enough for you?”
“Yeah, well,” Khas said. “I also know you’ve been gone for years. So telling me you wandered in here because you were bored in your safehouse is one hell of a poor excuse.”
“Someone has to be the reasonable one here,” Wurum said, “And it may as well be me.”
“And?”
Wurum leaned over, arms resting on the table. “Are you happy?” he asked, quietly. “You’re more tired and run down than you’ve been in ages.”
“You’re not exactly the picture of youth and energy yourself, you know.”
Wurum waved his hand dismissively. “We can argue about who’s the more handsome one later. Point is, have you considered leaving?”
The words caught him again, and suddenly he was several decades younger, listening to Sheon Idris talk about leaving. Maw and Ableah Edr both mentioning how tired they were, how they had to face up to the fact they couldn’t keep doing this. Ghetti, talking about time and trauma. All the faces at the party, gone, now. As Wurum himself was gone.
It felt like an unexpected blow. Like a knife slipped into the back.
Like falling.
“I always have,” Khas said, his voice low. “You know this.”
But he was feeling so tired. So worn, as though he was a single coat being patched again and again. He couldn’t remember the young man who had first joined the Ghostbloods, at all. Was it worth fighting this? He thought about Sheon Idris again. About acceptance. About grace.
About the end coming, in the guise of an old friend.
Maybe Wurum had some hint of the battle he was fighting with himself, because he said nothing and just waited, letting Khas think it through.
“You think I should?”
“Storms, man, I’m not you,” Wurum scoffed. But he relented enough to say, “I think it’s affecting you, yeah.”
Ghetti, telling him she didn’t remember where the laughing young Khas had gone. El, telling him she couldn’t remember him ever being so tense or wound-up. Cracking under the strain.
Wurum saw it, too.
It never felt the same. Too many ghosts. Too much clutter in his head. You lived long enough, and you accumulated enough regrets and sorrows and it was hard not to bow beneath their weight.
“Yeah,” Khas said. “Okay, then. I’m out.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah,” said Khas. “Just like that.”
Grace, he told himself. Sheon had seen his own end, had chosen to draw a line and make a clean cut of it, rather than prolonging it, rather than dragging it out through op after op, all the while being less present than before. Could Khas really do any less?
He drew in a deep breath, and let it out. He didn’t feel any better. Only resigned. Maybe this was the first step to acceptance.
He stared at the wine glasses on the table. Half-empty, half-full. Maybe this was an ending.
But maybe, just maybe, it was also a beginning.
Starlight played on the courtyard, turning the water of the fountain to silver glass. On the rim of the fountain, by the carved stone bench, someone had placed the last of the wine. Two glasses; half-empty, half-full.
Auburn, for remembrance lost.
The courtyard itself was deserted now.
But somewhere in the flowering trees, you could hear a nightingale singing.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
—’In Blackwater Woods’, Mary Oliver
