by Dakota Pratt
Who can say if I've been changed for the better? I've been changed for good.
I do believe I've been changed for the better
And because I knew you -
Illyria had been weakened greatly.
Not by the death of her Qua'Xahan. Not by the several million years she had spent in stasis, waiting for another chance at her unending life. Not even by the seemingly endless days of battle, side by side with half-breeds she'd felt certain had no hope of winning.
She had been weakened by Wesley. By camaraderie. Tenderness. Perhaps even affection. She could not be sure what it is she felt because she did not know the meanings behind the words. Love, even friendship, were abstract concepts to her. Yet knowing Wesley, remembering that Fred had known Wesley... she had felt something, in life. And she had grieved when he died.
As she walked, in human guise and to a human destination, tall black footwear resounding clicks upon the asphalt, she entertained these thoughts. Thoughts were important - they were what separated gods from men; and men from beasts. But most of all, thoughts distracted. Thinking of Wesley helped ease the trauma of his absence, if only momentarily.
"You're not ready for this," a voice said from behind her, and Illyria froze in midstep and whirled to face a tall, slender woman with sharp features and hair the color of oak. A quick riffle through Fred's memories told her this was Lilah. The lawyer. The opposition. The enemy.
The deceased.
"You're not really here," Illyria said bluntly, but her voice came out high, and accompanied by what could only be described as a subtle twang. She wasn't sure she had properly conveyed all the hostility she'd meant to.
"Oh, I'm here," said Lilah, with a flip of her hair and a smile more wicked than that of the most fearsome opponents Illyria had bested in her day. A darkness radiated off of the woman, the liar, the bitch of the Wolf, Ram, and Hart, like sweltering heat - unpleasant, sending prickles along her momentarily vulnerable skin. "Just not, you know. Here here." She punctuated her vagueness with a wave of her arms, taking in herself, the she-god, and the surrounding area.
Illyria wondered briefly if figments of one's imagination could lie. Then she wondered when she had begun to consider herself as one who could possess imagination.
She found herself at a loss for an appropriate response to such unwelcome, unexpected company. She had let her guard down. Lilah had taken her by surprise. Illyria could not afford the luxury of surprises.
"I do not desire your company," she said finally. She was beginning to find that, in today's world of technology and veils and manipulation and deceit, in the world where there were so many people who were so isolated - honesty was the sharpest of swords. The hottest of fires. The basest of insults. Illyria had become very honest over the last several months.
"Simmer down, Smurfette," Lilah called over.
Smurfette. Smurf. What Wesley used to call her.
Lilah's hands were open, with her palms facing out to advertise the fact that she meant no harm. It was only pretense - she could not bring harm to Illyria if she had the strength of a hundred men and all of Thor's thunder bolts lined up in her arsenal. But at the same time, Illyria had the strongest sense that neither could she bring harm to this woman. She suspected that, were she to swing a fist, no flesh would yield beneath it.
The woman was a ghost. An apparition. A figment.
How irritating.
"I do not desire your company," Illyria repeated, sounding even less forceful this time. When this again failed to dissuade her tormentor, she said, "Leave. I wish to grieve in peace."
She averted her eyes from her phantom, and noticed for the first time since she'd come outside that day that the sky was gray. Not overcast - there were no distinct clouds and no separation of gray and blue, light and dark. No contrast - it was a pale, solid gray, as if the entire horizon and everything above had been streaked with an artist's single stroke.
Illyria had never met an artist before. She wondered what the humans who called themselves painters would have had to say about the sky.
"Got a newsflash for you, Black and Blue," Lilah said, taking a handful of tentative steps forward. Her feet made no noise as she tread. It was an inappropriate manner in which to address her; Illyria was not currently blue and had not been for several hours. "There is no peace. Not here, not in the hereafter. No choir of angels. No being at one with the universe. Not even a lousy stinking oblivion to let you catch up on your beauty sleep. It's just noise, and pain, and all kinds of heat. And chaos. And you think you've worked your way up, or paid your dues, or gotten some kind of a break - when the floor falls out from underneath you and you find yourself in some new level of hell." She paused to shake her head slowly. The expression on her face was one of sorrow, Illyria noted. Perhaps even regret. She was not particularly skilled at reading facial expressions. "And let me tell you, sweetie. It's just chaos, all the way down."
The god cocked her head curiously, as if she was a foot contemplating some particularly interesting insect. "You chose your punishment," she said mildly. "You chose your afterlife. It is my understanding that few are so fortunate."
A roll of the eyes. "Making your own choices in life isn't worth a damn thing if you're too stupid to make the right ones," Lilah snapped.
Illyria wasn't sure what to say to that. When the woman didn't speak again, she turned to continue on her path. Wrought-iron gates awaited her just several yards away, grass a vibrant shade of green on the other side, stretching out in every direction for what seemed like miles, interspersed with flowers of many different shapes and sizes. Illyria began to walk again, but again, Lilah called out to her.
"It's funny, isn't it?" she said.
She should have kept walking.
She should have kept walking.
Damning her own curiosity, Illyria turned slowly. She said nothing, but all of her attention was focused on the figure of the woman behind her, and Lilah knew it. When she spoke next, she avoided looking at Illyria, and instead peered out through the gates and into the cemetery, over the cold stone markers of death contrasted with the vivacious overgrowth.
"It's funny," she repeated, her voice now distant. "I'm a cold, heartless bitch who sold my soul for an office with a view. You're a bazillion year-old ex-god." Illyria rankled at the suggestion that she was anything less glorious than she once had been, but subdued her reaction quickly. It was true, was it not? she had no temple. She had no priest. She had no following. She could no longer claim the title of god. Even her status as an Old One had recently been called into question. She had deigned to inhabit a mortal vessel. Now someday, she, too, would die.
Like Lilah. And Charles. And Wesley.
She had not been prepared for this realization - her resurrection had been prophesized for ages; not her death. The existence of one did not imply that of the other - or at least, it hadn't in her world.
But now it did.
"We have nothing in common," Lilah continued, breaking Illyria from her thoughts. "You're older than I am by a few hundred millennia and it's pretty obvious that you've never even seen the inside of a Bloomingdale's. And yet, here we are. Having fallen for the same guy. Grieving at the same time, in the same place, if in our own separate ways."
She kept talking, and Illyria realized that she was beginning to understand why the lawyer - the puppet - the pawn - had come. She, too, needed to grieve. To be heard. She needed to talk.
Illyria let her.
"It's not fair, you know. That both of our glory days have long since passed. I'm filling in for the Headless Horseman on his off-days, and you've got about ten followers scattered to the ends of the earth. We're both way past our prime. A couple of wrinkles starting to show -" she paused to gesture at her own face. "But we're still great. We're still powerful. We're still something a little more, a little better than the rest of them.
"But what was he? He was nothing! He was mortal! He didn't have any power or wealth or fame. He was scrawny. Pale. Unshaven. Unremarkable. He couldn't even stand up to a mid-list sorcerer with crows feet and a bad case of rosacea." She paused to press the back of one hand against her face, then stared at it suspiciously when she realized that no tears had spilled over from her incorporeal eyes. She smiled - the expression seemed foreign on her face. "Old habits die hard," she said apologetically. "I keep forgetting. Tears are for the living."
Illyria didn't think that was quite fair. She still considered herself to be alive by every definition of the word, and she had been granted no tears.
"You loved him," she finally said, interested by the revelation. She tried in vain to conceal her surprise.
"Well yeah. Didn't you?"
Her sudden silence was answer enough for Lilah. Without realizing what she was doing, Illyria closed the gap to the cemetary gates with slow, tentative steps, reaching out with one hand to feel the cold iron beneath her fingertips. She clutched the bars until her knuckles went white.
"It's something I still don't understand," she said in a voice that emerged from her lips as barely a whisper. "How one can be so -" she paused for a minute, struggling with the word "-insignificant, and so important at the same time." She turned to look at Lilah, really look at her, for the first time. She let her hand fall away from the gate and to her side. "It was a non-issue in my time, when we were born from fire and rock and the boiling seas. Yet today, when these humans breed like fruit flies, everyone is tied to someone else. Somebody's father, or brother, or heir."
"Or lover," Lilah added quietly.
She nodded. Then added, seemingly unrelated, "The world is so large, and yet, so small."
"Amen." The affirmation seemed particularly ironic considering the source.
Illyria had long since planned her resurrection in hopes of reclaiming an empire, of regaining her former glory, and leaving her mark on the face of the world forever, only to find that it was not the world that had been irreversibly altered upon her reemergence: it was her.
There they stood - the ghost of a woman who had been indominitable in her time, and the remains of a god who had been renowned in hers. They had both shared a love, and shared a loss. And in all their time, with all their power, they had not affected a fraction of the change in the world that Wesley Wyndham-Pryce had set in motion inside the two of them.
Illyria set her jaw, and with slow determined steps she continued walking, along the trail that led her past the iron gates and into an unfamiliar section of the cemetery. She felt Lilah behind her, shadowing her movements, and could not find the words to fend her off. She didn't try to.
"I'm not ready for this," she thought she heard the woman mutter under her breath.
They came to rest in front of a white marble headstone, inscribed with Wesley's name in an elaborate calligraphy.
Under his name, and the years - human years, which held no meaning for her - that marked his birth and death, were inscribed three lines, lines that Angel, of all people, had chosen, and all of them had agreed upon. And as she read them once more, bending to trace her fingers over the engravings, the words poured from her lips, unbidden. In a thousand thousand years, she could not have imagined this, such grief bubbling up inside her at the loss of a man - just one man, insignifcant, unextrordinary, and yet a man she truly cared for. But she found herself now whispering the words, "Comrade; Hero, Beloved Friend" so gently it was as if she were afraid the stone would shatter at her words.
Lilah stood beside her, strangely silent for a moment before adding, in a voice that sounded almost rehearsed, "So much of me is made of what I learned from you." She pursed her lips and shook her head, looking embarassed.
It was clear she was not speaking to Illyria, and so Illyria said nothing in turn. In the moment that stretched between them, they shared an understanding. They forged the briefest of unspoken bonds before Lilah vanished - one moment she was there, the next she was not, and the field behind Illyria was now abandoned, void of life or afterlife. Startled, but not entirely surprised, she paused for a long moment before flattening down the long black dress she wore and sitting cross-legged on the patch of grass immediately to the left of Wesley's grave.
She tried to speak to him, but words failed her. She did not know if he could hear her, where he had gone. She tried to sing again, as she had done with the others at his funeral; to remember the rest of the words to the insignificant song she now found so moving. But like mist, the harder she tried to cling to those words, the faster they dissolved from her memory.
And so Illyria sat, isolated and uncertain, sifting through memories - both hers and Fred's, searching for something solid to anchor her amidst the tempest of her thoughts. She hugged herself in an effort to ward off the cool night air, the tune still echoing inside her mind, and cried until sunrise.
END