Time moved in a haze, each day bleeding into one another like colors on a wet canvas.
People whispered in the halls, dining room, and in the Tomb. Elias this Elias that, he could not catch a break. Only place he found solitude was in the gray dimmed courtyard. It has been two days since the rumor started – that he was marked.
Understandably,
Peers stayed away as if he held the plague. To be marked meant he was no longer clean. He was dirty, unsanitary, polluted for their holy hands to hold. He wondered how long it would be for the Watchmen to pull him away and never come back. He didn't remember much of his childhood but he remembered the stories about marked people. It was always short stories long enough to scare a child into submission but never enough evidence to turn the story into something real-
Something plausible – something most grown ups would believe.
Which is why Elias sits here on a bench in the dim, feeble courtyard. He stared at his blood red hand wondering: Why him? Why had the gods chosen him? Those two questions bounced around in his head, never ending, never stopping.
He sat there until the sun hung low over the courtyard, casting long, slanted shadows across the pale stone. Elias pauses his mind freezing, caught by the feeling that something was off – like a phrase spoken out of rhythm, or a page missing from a book he read a thousand times.
She stepped into view – his breath froze.
A girl. Pale. Barefoot. Humming.
It was his lullaby.
Her dress was thin, loose around her shoulders. Her hair fell in an unruly fashion, tangled like forgotten thoughts. She moved as if half-glued to the world – present but not. A ghost still in motion.
Scribes noticed her – and flinched. They turned their faces away, sidestep like dancers avoiding the wrong people at balls. No one spoke. No one came to ask her name.
She looked around like she'd never seen a building before. Or like she'd seen all of this before, but it had been rewritten. This was all new to her but all the same.
Then she met his eyes.
Elias froze, his red stained hands twitching.
There was a flicker in his gut – recognition. Not her because of her face, but the feeling she gave him. The desperation he felt that day was like none other. The sense that something had been carved out of him, and this girl was the shape of the wound.
She came closer. Elias knew he should run but a leash held him, so tightly that he can only take ragged uneven breaths.
Her hand trembled as if she felt exactly what he was feeling as if they were tied. She takes in a breath that seems like it might be her last. With a voice as low as a squeak in a floor board she says
"Are you real?"
Elias had been wondering the same thing for her. He wanted to know – no – he needed to know. So he reaches for her hands, their hands touching.
A jolt runs through his body as warm as the sun but as cold as the deepest darkest waters. Like ink running through parchment. A string that holds his mind together starts to unravel at a rapid pace.
She gasps.
Somewhere above them – the air shivered.
He didn't notice the Watchmen until it was too late.
They made no noise coming up to them. Even their shadows did not appear. A figure of red-black robes a blank face marked by only a spiraling glyph. That seemed to be ever shifting pulsing beneath the skin like a steady beat of a heart.
The girl sees them – she screams – knees buckling hitting the stone with a sickening crack.
The scream is not of pain – but of recognition.
"No please – away – I'll go- "
Her pleading was cut short by another voice deep inside her lashing out. Her body lurched, then stilled, as an invisible force tore her from her head all the way down. From the jagged rips of the flesh, a blinding light erupts, first blue then green and then a spectrum of colors. Her body blurred, her voice unraveled. For a moment she was hundreds of versions of herself, overlapping, constantly changing.
Then she was gone.
Unbothered, unhurried, the Watchman turned and walked away.
A deathly silence followed after. No one talked, no more screaming.
Except for Elias. He saw it – the memories folding into a gleaming ball of pure white. The rewritten and everything that was not.
Elias reaches for it – his shaking hand desperate to touch what he thought was once him. His shaky legs scrape against the stone. He touches the ball, her memories rushing around him flowing like a rushing river.
Something broke inside his chest.
He staggers back, the memories fading. He gagged. Falling to. his knees –
and vomited black inky goop onto the stone.
His vision swirled, the world tiled. A piercing sound flooded his ears, a sound that wasn't sound at all, but loss – echoing in a shape he should remember but can't.
His head fell on the stone splashing in the ink excluded from his body.
The courtyard was silent.
But Elias knew one thing.
The girl was gone. The watchman moved on. But her screams unlocked something in him that he could never close again – a feeling that would never settle, that would never go away.