The Lord of my Dreaming is dead. He died long ago, before I ever heard the tale of passing. But time is more than just a stream and he is dying now, as I crave these words into the flesh of a tree that is also dead and dying and alive. But still the end and the start came and went before I understood the glory and the loss and now all I have are the memories of events I never experienced.
Can you come to love someone like? Through half seen glimpses in others' eyes? Can you come to love through ink and paper, the art that is story? Can you come to tell what tales are true?
That last question, at least, I can answer. They all are.
There is nothing we do that is important, nothing we do that changes things. But every breath, every thought, creates worlds. Brief lives in brief worlds, living out our brief lifetimes in spasms of dying. That was true even for my Lord Shaper. He got a lifetime, as we all do, and all lifetimes are brief. He didn't even get living until death, as some rumored few might. But his brief life touched my own, for whatever that might be worth. Rather little, I should think. But this is the folly of mortals, is it not? We never know just how much and how little we are worth.
Death was right in what she said, though I don't think that was ever in question. All knowledge, even the knowledge that knowledge does not know, is in all of us. But sometimes the only way to go on is not to let yourself know that it's there. That is why I'll never be sure of all the ways he touched me. I am better and worse for his place in my life, a little wiser and a little less sane and if that were to be his only legacy, I do not think it would be altogether a sad thing.
I love him, I think, this ghost of an idea that made ripples long ago. It was a mortal love, yes, equal parts starry eyed romance and Desire, but I am a mortal, after all, and I find no shame in that. I doubt it would have made him blink. Still, the difference between Man and Gods is not so much as we would think and there is no way to know the ending to that tale. Nor would I want to. The beauty of a story is in the space between fact and fancy. Given choice…I'll take the fancy anytime.
He's gone now, to wherever it is they go when their sister comes for them. And someday, yes, life or death will take him from me. And that is as it should be. But I'll carry the echo forever.
The Lord of my Dreaming is dead. And now I will go on, to laugh and dance and suffer and bleed. But sometimes, when I am old and fate's blade nears my own frail string, I will cry for him without quite knowing what it is I weep for. And that too is as it should be. None of us can carry such burdens forever and mercifully we are not expected to. But some things go deeper than memory, deeper than dreams, deeper than despair. And these things we do not forget, only forget that we remember. Until we wake gasping, ripped free from dreams by the passing of a world storm fading or stand stricken by ghost lightening in the middle of a crowded street. We may not truly remember then, not really, but we know enough to know that something has touched us. And being touched is sometimes enough. Sometimes it is everything.
I do love you, my Morphious, and I pay homage to your mysteries, great and small, and the mysteries of your kin. The cat is a god and somewhere a coyote headed man dances in a glade to Pan's pipes. I love them too, if that is enough.
The Lord of my Dreaming is dead. Brief lives.