Understanding
By Blodeuedd
He wouldn't believe her.
She pushed him, gripped his wrists until her knuckles burned with pain, screamed the words in his face and startled the birds in the trees. But all to no avail: her quiet, faithful songbird refused to fly from his roost in her heart.
Despairing, she collapsed into the crackling leaves. He wouldn't understand. Ever. She couldn't make him—she didn't want to make him know what she knew.
He crouched beside her, eyes somber, almost vacant. It was the emptiness in his usually sharp gaze that made her realize.
There. She could take him there. And he would know.
---
The people who lived there (she had ceased to think of that strange place without emphasis, now that her plan was forming) were called 'the lost souls.' She, like everyone else in her village, had grown up knowing that they were not to be neared or spoken of. They were unlike, they were different, they were dangerous.
When they crept into the village—rare but unforgettable instances!—children cried to see them. Dogs barked and hounded their shadows. Pregnant women averted their eyes, lest the taint corrupt the unborn babes in their bellies.
Yes. He would understand then.
She led him without a word along the winding path that led to where the lost souls lived, hidden by the pale trees. The brown leaves trailed in their wake, cackling like old tongues.
The walk carried them into the late afternoon, but she refused to answer his questions. Only seeing would answer.
The woods parted before them and the sun shone on bare, brown earth. A cluster of huts, clinging to the earth like parasites, met his questioning face. She stepped back, and waited.
A woman, not many summers older than herself, appeared in one dingy doorway. Her yellowed eyes focused on them and she straightened, for a moment looking almost normal. Then, emitting a lowing sound like that of a curious cow, she lurched forward on unsteady legs, gnarled hands outstretched.
He, her lovely immortal god-child, stood his ground, but she could tell he was taken aback. The woman halted before him, a long rope of spittle trailing from her trembling lips and down the front of her ragged frock. Deity and simpleton regarded each other for a long moment.
Suddenly, with a shriek that pierced the stillness of the hollow, the idiot-woman fled back into her hut, rousing the others with her cry.
The others, each worse than the last, peering out from their filthy shacks. A child who quivered like a leaf in the breeze, unable to stop his unearthly spasms. A man with an unseemly knob protruding from the side of his skull and an eye that rolled. Another, younger girl, who gnawed her scabbed hands anxiously and stared, mumbling words in some language unknown. A boy on the brink of manhood, his limbs twisted and rotting, festering as if he were already dead. So many, one after the other.
She watched her love, waiting for his reaction. Waited for him to recoil as a madman staggered to him, jaw working soundlessly, black teeth clicking.
Oh, he, her silly wise magic sweetheart. Did he not understand? That this was what waited for him as the years passed and she grew old? As she grew old and he grew young?
She watched in wonderment as he extended his hand—oh, pure, clean hands that she had clasped and kissed and whispered into a thousand times—and placed it in the grip of the feeble, trembling knot of dirty fingers that extended for his. Watched as he spoke words in that old, forgotten speech that he seldom used, except with his brothers.
The fool listened to the strange sounds, mangled head cocked like a hound's as his ears strained intently to understand. Slowly, a smile, ugly yet unmistakable, split his cracked lips, and a wheezing laugh bubbled out. A laugh. He became a person.
They all became people, as hand grasped hand.
And for some reason, she was furious.
"Aegnor," she whispered, spitting the word out, "Come on."
He turned to her with a confused face, but followed after her as she stamped out of the clearing.
"Andreth. What's the matter?" He asked her retreating back, asked the flutter of her skirt trailing behind her.
"Don't you see?" She whirled about, confronting him with eyes almost as fiery as his own. "Don't you?"
"See what?"
"That is what I will become!" Her finger thrust out, almost of its own accord, toward the lost souls' camp. "Do you want me like that? A blind, fumbling mess of bones and—and dirt? Even my own people don't want them!"
"Andreth—" He tried again.
"I will grow old, I will grow ugly and unknowing, I will die! What do you see in me?" The words came out panicked and garbled, almost like the cry of the madwoman.
Aegnor hesitated before speaking again, weighing the words that flew to his lips.
"This," he whispered, pressing a hand to her heart. "This is what I see in them. This is what I see you. This is all I need to love."
Panting, coming down from the heights of her rage, she stopped short, seeing the liquid shine of his eyes, knowing they reflected her own like a mirror.
Even when he would leave her, a few weeks later, for a war in the North, she would never kiss him harder than she did on that day.
The End.