For all the beautiful damage, he was still immobilized in an infantile struggle that had its origins in the abyss. When he saw her standing forlornly in the window, he understood immediately that she had traversed time and space simply to love him and he was overcome by an unbearable burden of hate. When he found her by the sink trying to plug interminable wounds with wet towels he shouted with his paltry spirit: "You go to hell! Do you think I can't get rid of you again?"
His place had suddenly become alive again, alive with death, for its halls and rooms were infested with phantoms. He could hear the footsteps of Monev, heavy with unfulfilled vengeance. He could hear the pathetic wheezing of Caine who seemed to age even in the grave. Midvalley's silly horn drifted through the hallways like a sacred mantra. He would awake at night to see the priest levitating by his bedside, apparently out of boredom. Sometimes when he turned too quickly it was as if he cut off the giggling and chattering of young women, one who would always add hastily: "it's full of mercy." Eventually, he could not go near the sink because the aroma of geraniums would smother him—so he simply left piles of towels all over the bathroom.
He frequently mumbled to himself that he could just as well abandon this house of spirits, but the truth was he never made any effort to do so. He rehearsed the daily habits of his life among the wheezing, the stomping, the chanting, the music, and the twisting of forgotten and long accepted solitude. All the while, his immortality worked through his brain like a termite. What Knives did not know (could not know in his final stages) was that his twin was dying of the same parasite in a pen in some forgotten village on the edge of the world. On that very morning he tried to get to the sink again, just for something to toy with, and she reached to hand him a white feather. Unable to believe something substantial could be taken from the dead, he only stared down at it. It remained matted to the curve inside the sink by a smudge of blood . When he picked it up and turned it between his fingers, his last expression was: "Aren't you the clever one?"
Knives was so lighthearted about letting it all go that he actually waved goodbye at his decaying wormhole and the ghosts that were nearly decimated by decrepitude—as he rose among the showering red geraniums to succumb to his ultimate fate in the spinning galaxies and twirling suns of forever. Maybe the exequies of two angels went unnoticed among man, but that was because races condemned for squandering their graces did not get a second chance.