A Thousand Beautiful Things
by
Resmiranda

Each year I lived I watched the fissure
Between what was and what I wished for
Widen, until there was nothing left
But the gulf of emptiness.
Most men have not seen the world divide,
Or seen, it did not open wide,
Or wide, they clung to the safer side.
But I have felt the sundering like a blade.
Galway Kinnell, "Conversation at Tea"

VII. Who Clipped the Lion's Wings?

High above, lightning skitters and cowers in the clouds, afraid of the wild world beneath it, of what might happen should it descend from the heights, kiss the earth, and vanish.

Just like all storms.

Behind her there are huts and people and children and a life worth living under her own command, but she won't go back there. Instead she smiles and looks to the sky, and awaits the rain and the thunder and the sudden breath that pulls away like the ground from the bird that lifts its wings -

He is out there.

Rin wonders if he knows she can feel him, if he knows how his presence has tugged her gently back and back again, like a tide, like the wind, like his ever-longing hidden heart. It has been three years, but she knows he has not left her side yet, and he never will.

If she stays here any longer, then they will both be crushed. The time has come to pay her debts.

She said goodbye to no one, not even the old woman who took her in, but she must have known anyway. There is a bundle of food, wrapped with care, on her back now, and Rin does not let herself think about the hands that made it. She is ready.

She is ready.

Her kimono is clean and well-mended and her hair is combed and styled simply. Her feet are bare, poised to follow his invisible footsteps once more, as if she had never left.

She is not the same, though. Little things - hands hard from mending garments torn, limbs long and strong from toil in the fields, a body full and fallow - weigh oddly.

For the briefest of moments, she wonders if he will remember her, if he will still see the budding young woman who tried to tame herself, if he will recall the girl who thought she could take her life and make it her own with a new caregiver and a useful trade and a little hut and simple clothes and fresh water from the well on cold spring mornings as the golden light of the dawn spills down through the trees to catch the rising mist -

- if he will still know the child who did not know her eyes would always be wide and waiting -

- and he comes down from the night.

The wind whips his lightning hair, his clothes swell and fall like clouds.

He doesn't speak.

Gently, he lands, his feet making no sound. The moon on his brow is dark against the paleness of his skin, and beneath it his eyes hold hers.

And even now she can still see that barest of movements, that slight tilt of the head when he seeks her scent, the scent of her - of the young woman, of the girl, of the child - who never meant to leash the sky.

So.

This is the lie: once, he brought her out of the land of the dead. Her life was what he gave to her. The debt she owes him is his life in return.

That is what she will tell him, when he asks, which he never will.

And this is the truth: because really, it is the other way around. Really, his life is hers, and her life is his.

A life so vast, for a life so brief.

Such an achingly unfair trade.

He is waiting.

Rin smiles.

Then she steps into the night beyond the village, and he turns and walks away.

And perhaps in her heart there is just a touch of selfishness, too, knowing now what she could have had there, behind her, in warm domesticity: a life carved into warm wood, a life close and crowded with family and friendship, a life tinged yellow and orange with hearthfire. A whole life, lived in a tiny circle of light, so small, so bright -

She follows, all her love and pity on her tongue, all her happy debt before her. A life for a life for a lifetime.

- while outside in the night, his thunder rattles her cowardly heart.