Elsewhere

Elsewhere...

There can be no issue of breath within these walls. There could be no spoken word. His thoughts on this remain constant in that, on this, they remain in darkness. He could touch her again he supposes, but he does not desire this. One sacrilege a century seems more then plenty.

His skin has not healed from where her cool and ageless flesh had burned him; the contradiction of this still lingering, pondering, suffocating inside his head. His eyes have not yet stopped burning from how bright her body glowed the minute he made contact. He could not tell, within these walls, what was a real object and what was a retinal shadow. Twelve years and he was still waiting for his eyes to heal.

He sometimes listens to their words. If he sits still enough, and is calm enough, and banishes all sense of claustrophobia from his mind he can hear them. Sometimes words filter down into the cool darkness; the thoughts of someone walking too close to the crypt perhaps, or maybe the radio of some young Goth couple making love amongst the tombstones overhead. He hears the he-said, she-said conversations of the white nurses, sitting in front of banks of computers that monitor the life signs of thousands of dying men. He hears incantations of ancient spells- dark nurses whispering to him in their candlelight begging him to return (HE HAS GONE TO FAR... WE HAVE TRADED A GOD FOR A DEVIL, A CHANCE TO DIE FOR IMMORTAL SLAVERY). Sometimes he hears the whispers of the loved ones who keep an endless vigil beside the beds of recent gunshot victims ("No," they say, "That's what confused the police. The bullets were silver.") Sometimes there’s an agonized scream in the darkness. He hears these far too well. They ring out loud, and they ring out long, and they echo in this place for hours and days. Another young woman pulled off the cold body of another young man who had promised her, PROMISED HER, last winter that he would always keep her warm. Sometimes he'll feel the sadness of mothers, too old and too tired for agonized screams but just as hurt, just as dying, just as withered inside. They speak to him directly, because they remember how to pray. They ask the impossible of him and each time it happens he wants to shut them out. The impossible is not something he can do anymore. He's long ago lost the ability. He is a king without a committee, a Minister without a cabinet. No one man can do all that they want him to do.

He loves these people. His love is deep an infinite. His love is profound and ageless. He hates to see them in pain. He hates to see them enslaved. He sometimes scratches at the walls. He sometimes rages at them. His punches form distant thunder heard miles before dark clouds ever touch the sky.

Sometimes he hears the proclamations and curses of angry men. Wild men. Presidential men. And sometimes he wondered why he didn't have them killed outright instead of banishment from the kingdom. The banished can always return. They can redesign their faces because they have nothing but time and they can come back and they can steal your people from you. Had listening to Shakespeare drone on and on and on taught you nothing?

He sits down on the center of the floor and closes his eyes.

Because mostly there is silence here.

And the shadows.

And the bodies of his angels.