Epilogue:
The revolt failed.
Of the three-hundred rebels and
idealist fighters who charged Lough Manor, twenty-six made it out
with their lives. Jack and Kenneth were among them.
Kit was not.
The survivors returned to their homes, injured and beaten, their
ideals crushed, only to meet with ridicule and mockery. They were
branded as cowards by their fellow man. Some, like Kenneth, bit the
bullet and persevered through the heckling and jeering, clinging
desperately to what felt right.
But others couldn't take it.
Jack, for one, had lost something in that rebellion that he could
never get back; he had lost a kindred soul, a like spirit, a true
friend. She hadn't died in his arms the way the great adventure
stories would have it, she didn't miraculously awaken at the sound
of his voice, she didn't have some stirring and touching speech as
her last words; she died, and that was all.
That in itself was
the worst part; she simply died. Her heart stopped beating.
Her eyelids fluttered closed, her lungs ceased to fill themselves,
her blood no longer flowed. She did not sweep from this world,
nor did she fly away, pass into darkness, or fall to
shadow. There was nothing poetic or beautiful about it - she was
dead.
The days turned to weeks, the weeks into months, all
smearing together into a great grey blur, as in a painting where all
the colours have bled into one another. After trying at length, Jack
was able to find a ship that would take both himself and his sister
far away from Curraig.
Far away from his pain.
Their
departure was quiet. There was little to pack, nothing to pay off,
and nobody to say farewell to. Jack toyed with the idea of paying
Kit's grave a visit as a quiet, final farewell, but he soon thought
the better of it. There wasn't the money or the time to travel all
the way to Eudail, where she had been buried.
And then, within a
few days, the Sparrows were gone, their lives dissolving, like Kit's,
into the wind, leaving behind nothing but the faint echo of a memory.
A village heals its losses quickly, and to lose two young people is
hardly noticed. It is humans, and humans alone, who feel this pain.
But nobody did. Not even Kenneth, who was too distracted by his
ideals to pay any attention to the "Vacancy" sign that hung
derelict on the door of the lonely apartment that had once been the
heart of his feverish plans. That empty two-room structure was the
first of two seemingly meaningless footprints of what had once been.
The other can be found on the edge of a rough, muddy green just
outside Lough, in a town called Eudail. There, in the firm earth, one
can distinguish the ghost of an old mound, tell-tale of a great
upturning in the soil at one time or another. It was in this humble
tract of land that Kit's limp and lifeless body was laid to rest,
just below the twisted, gnarly roots of an ancient, weathered,
moss-covered stump.
In the spring, the daisies burst up all over
the tiny hill, their dainty, smiling heads dancing in the
ever-present chill of the wind. When it rains, the slivers of water
trace their spindly fingers through the brittle blades of grass.
Every so often, a robin takes up its duties and keens for she who is
lost below.
The site is never visited. It is lonely in that green
that just borders Eudail, though none save for the birds and the sly
red squirrels feel this loneliness. Nobody in the village visits the
mound. They have no reason to - Kit was a stranger from far away,
nobody knew her, her name, her story, even the things for which she
died.
And none ever will. Her grave is not marked. She is nothing
now.
Not even a name.
