Twilight, and an old man sits on the brow of the hill. His legs are stretched carelessly before him but his arms are rigid with the effort of keeping himself upright and his chin is sunk low into his chest. Above him, the stars pin-wheel in the heavens, distant flames reduced to specks of colour that would be lonely if there were not so many of them. The old man does not look up. He does not have the strength to face them. He is not sure he has the strength to get up again. He is not sure if he should get up ever again.
Fields are spread out below the hill, a rolling landscape of hedges and copses. There is a river, silver in the half-light, winding sensuously toward the horizon. All is still and beautiful, a day ended and a night about to begin.
The old man looks down on tranquillity and does not see it. To him, the world is alive with what has been and what will be. Sun and rain, fair and foul, good days and bad. Thunder and lighting, the clash of beasts and armies, the crack of wood and bone. Clanging metal and raging fires, the air smouldering and the water alight. Castles of coincidence and intent rising to fall apart. Pillars and temples smote to rubble. Autumn stealing the leaves from the trees and winter hammering them into frozen silence.
There are moments of brilliance too, he knows that. He can glimpse them – budding flowers and flickering candles, laughter and kindness. But the carrion stink falls on them so heavily that they seem little more than scattered dreams. Hopes hung on to so long they have frayed to nothing.
Once, long, long ago, he remembers being able to look out and find wonder in the universe. So much that he would walk blindly through a battlefield, intent on some awesome sight beyond. Beauty and glory dazzled him and he raced from one jewel to another, an excited child in an endless sweet shop. But time and experience had cured him of such exuberance. Eventually, the horrors he tried to keep at arms' length became real, as horrors always do. And because they were real and because they stood between him and the joy of discovery, he tried to fight them. To fix them. To heal the woes of the universe.
Only when he was elbow-deep in the confusion of a thousand troubled worlds did he comprehend that he had taken on a never-ending task. That he would blunder from catastrophe to disaster for the rest of his life and worse, come to thrive on it. Somewhere along the way, doing the right thing had begun to consume him.
That was good. He had been selfish, a product of an upbringing that prided isolation before all. To be better than that was something worth struggling for. But it came with a cost. A man who seeks to do what is right is capable of many terrible things and very little peace. Choices and consequences haunt his path and no matter how hard he tries, it always becomes a war of sorts. A war against wrong, where a child's tears are a battle cry and each little triumph only shows how much more there is to do.
And as he races ever onward, the details begin to blur. One weary tyranny looks very much like another and beauty became a backdrop on which greater events were painted. He goes through the motions of being amazed by every new place and time and breaks inside with the realisation that he has seen it all before. The universe has become predictable, as closed a trap as the past he left behind. Nothing seems to change any more. If something waits around the corner, it so often turns out to be a monster. It has left him so very tired –
Birdsong breaks suddenly into his reverie, so normal and innocuous that it shocks his whirling mind to silence. His brow furrows and he heaves his head up, tilting it to try and catch more of the sound. For an age, he listens, captivated without quite understanding why. Slowly as fading sunlight, he grasps the reason, feeling the edges of it, not quite sure if he trusts it to be true.
He does not know what the bird is.
He does not know its name or its classification. He cannot recognise its call or imagine what it looked like. What the song means and why it should be sung as evening drifts into night are complete mysteries. Has he forgotten? Is this the first time he has sat and listened to that bird trill its heart out? He is not sure and the uncertainty sends a thrill down his spine.
It is a detail. A tiny, insignificant, invisible detail. The kind that only the most pedantic of history students would have recorded. It does not matter. It does not change the shape of the world or move its axis. In a thousand years, there would be billions of such birds and billions of such songs and nothing would come of it.
And it is unique. Something he has never come across before. Not in this place. Not in this way.
He squints through the deepening darkness at his surroundings. The shape of that tree, the way it seems to rear against the sky. The soft breeze that stirs the long grass and makes it dance. The ember red glow caught in the scattered clouds in the far distance. They rise up from the mire of forgotten wars and ignite his memory. He remembers a single statue in Rome, draped with garlands. He remembers the aroma of a meal just cooked filling a kitchen to the blackened rafters. He remembers a snowflake, melting on his fingertip in the lull between battles.
The sound of a fountain, echoing around a dell. The satisfying click of a machine springing back into life. A kiss, swiftly on his cheek, lingering sadly.
The rush as a chasm opened under his feet. A jolt, sharp and electric on his skin. Heat from a match held close to his face.
A handshake. A forest, thick with mist. Dust swirling on a plain, caught, spinning, dancing and chaotic. Clouds like dragons. Dragons like clouds. Pictures he had seen from canvas to decay. Sunny afternoons that had lasted forever.
He remembers them. The things he had never seen before. The things that happened while ships crashed and civilisations collapsed. The things that did not matter, not when there were bases under siege and chases to be run. He remembers them.
They are not what he ran away to find. They are not the marvels he had gazed at with envy while his teachers droned on about non-intervention. But here, in the dark and the silence at the end of the day, they are what shines, pin-point bright in his soul. Every flower. Every kiss. Every cup of tea. The trivia and the trivial. The things that gave texture to the background.
The stuff that love is made of.
The old man leaps to his feet, strength surging back into his aching limbs. He springs from the hill with a cry, not knowing why, knowing that he can do nothing else. He runs across the fields and out of the corners of his eyes, he can see his friends running with him. Not away from what is behind, not from the monsters and the evil and the blood, but towards the next surprise. Towards the next bit of nonsense. Towards the next thing that didn't matter but would be remembered when all that is worthy and important had faded away.
The old man runs out into the night and does not look back.