The one where Bel'aa - oh, just read it and see.

Long I Lay In The Ground

Quite amazingly, since this was supposed to be a one-shot - chapter 5!

I took Al-ys back to my house in the town, and pored over a map, wondering where to go next. We couldn't continue to reside in this place, though I had found it bearable enough. Bearable was as good as I expected, with my peripatetic existence, as once I had attended to half a dozen or so of the male inhabitants of anywhere I settled I needed to move on before people began to think that the aloof and mysterious newcomer was not only enigmatic, but perhaps a little suspicious.

And besides, I didn't want Al-ys subject to the small-town mentality of anyone who might draw attention to her previous abode, and question her right to be out of there. With her quick darting movements, sing-song little voice and tremulous demeanor, the ungenerous of spirit and narrow of mind might be ill-mannered enough to ask if she was on day leave, and whether her medication was up-to-date, and whether I was her nurse. I simply was not willing to let either of us endure that sort of attitude.

I'd been given pills and potions for her, of course, and some sort of redundant prescription for the same for the rest of her life. Quietly enraged at the knowledge that practitioners purportedly trained in the field of human mental illness thought that My Heart needed subduing in the form of orally administered chemicals - or indeed any subduing whatsoever - I tore up the prescription and disposed of the drugs.

And the manager's head did roll, if somewhat lop-sidedly.

I am not a sadist, but I need to eat, and I wasn't prepared to give him the sort of send-off I usually give. He was at a public house one night shortly after My Heart came with me from that dreadful place, and he wandered outside to relieve himself. Once he was quite finished and tidied up, I approached him and said I had concerns about Alice Brandon, and I just happened to be passing and had noticed him standing there. Would now be a suitable time for he and I to have a short chat? Of course, I could always come by the hospital in the morning...

My attractiveness to human men is not something they really stop and think about. He spent half a second considering whether to speak to me now, alone in the dark, or to wait until the next day when we would be surrounded by staff and distracted by crashes and moans as the imprisoned souls in the captivity of the institution over which he presided dashed themselves against walls and bars and expressed their pain.

"Of course, Dr Pavirem," he agreed with a leer. "What would you like to discuss?"

It was a small town, and the drinking establishment he was visiting was on the outskirts.

"Perhaps we could walk a little? I don't wish to be overheard," I murmured, and he followed me eagerly. There was a small copse of trees nearby with freshly dug earth beneath, and I could smell that an animal was buried under there - a dog. Somebody's pet, as evidenced by the little cross erected to one side, upon which was written in a childish hand "RIP, Fido. I love You"

The revolting man was more sick and deluded than any of the inmates confined in his asylum. He actually thought I had lured him out to this dark spot because I found him irresistible and wished to act on my carnal desires. This was written plainly on his face, and in the posture of his body as he leaned towards me.

Before he could get an inch closer I had felled him with a jab to the pharynx and as he lay unconscious I opened his subclavian vein and took a deep draught. The advantage of drinking from veins is the steady pressure due to their valves, unlike arterial flow which pulses. This wasn't a way of feeding particularly to my liking, but I would be replete for a couple of weeks, which would give Al-ys and I a chance to get acquainted. At some stage I would have to reveal the truth about myself to her, but I wanted to anticipate that she would have grown to like me by then, and perhaps even to be fond of me. For so many ages I had been solitary, and would doubtless have remained so if not for the thrilling call of her heart.

Even now I could feel its tug as she lay sleeping several streets away in the small house I rented. She was exhausted, my brave angel, finally liberated from the tribulations of the madhouse, all suffered at the whim of this nasty charlatan in my hands who masqueraded as a sympathetic guardian to the so-called insane, yet failed to recognize their traumas were exacerbated by their incarceration. I wasn't really thinking as I wrenched his head away from me, and by accident I pulled it right off his body, all the parts rending with a slurp but for the spinal column, which made more of a snapping sound. It had not been my intention to behead him. I set both segments down carefully while I began to dig the fragrant, recently-turned soil where beloved Fido had been interred.

It took but a matter of minutes to bypass the collie and create a grave no-one would think to look for, but I hadn't taken into account that the clump of trees over-seeing Fido's rest were on a small incline. The head of Al-ys's erstwhile warden had began a bumpy descent while I was occupied, and to my annoyance, once I had flung the body into its burial plot, I had to go looking for its ugly visage. Clear vision at night is no problem for me, and my sense of smell is enhanced and accurate. Locating the nasty item by both sight and scent, I tossed it in atop the rest of the remains and covered the whole grisly mess, leaving the grave exactly as I had found it. More or less exactly, that is.

My Heart slumbered still as I let myself into our shared accommodation and I washed myself and changed my clothes, sitting eventually in an armchair near to her bed, gazing in wonder and awe at her perfection. I had no need of sleep myself, but sitting for hours in repose relaxed me and granted me alertness anew at the same time. I knew I would spend hours and days and weeks, and years, in the company of this unexpected and gorgeous creature. I had never killed for anyone before. I hadn't longed for anyone before. I hadn't been engulfed by a blind haze, and needed anyone.

In times long past, I had never wanted for company, or conversation, or entertainment. I had lived in a mad tumult of continuous delight - pretty, pretty boys vied for me as the greatest poets of the day composed paeans to my beauty and my glory and my majesty. Artists created portraits, both fantastical and realistic, showing the Goddess Bel'aa, Gracious Awarder of Exultation. Queen Bel'aa, who gifts Honor. The Lady Bel'aa, Bringer of Divinity.

It had been hollow. I lived and lived, and I read the poems and I examined the artworks, and there was something spoken of with reverence and longing that could bind people together unbreakably. It appeared in more than one form, and could be experienced in more than one way. It was elusive and sought-after and powerful, and people lived and breathed for it, and suffered and died for it. Love. What is love?

Men in their hundreds lined up for my attentions, women too. I understood that their infatuation occurred because I had a power which drew people to me. I came to regard it as a curse when I was inundated, always inundated, with those who wanted to speak to me, or touch me, or watch me, or even simply be in my presence. Sometimes they could be satisfied, even rendered insensible, by being in the same building as me, or by seeing or touching something I had seen or touched. It was all one-way, it was all unjustified, and it left me aching. The poets spoke of Love, and though I saw it exemplified thousands of times over in the way I saw mothers regard children, and husbands and wives regard one another, and the way friends touched easily and confidently, I never caught a glimpse of it for myself. The ache was present for centuries.

But the parties, the drunkenness, the dancing, the endless days and endless nights of meaningless gratification did in fact end, in a way soothsayers had predicted.

The earth heaved, and water rose and took my home, and took my people.

As it happened, I had become sorrowful and morose long before arbitrary forces arrested the advancement of the civilization that had been my domain. Always unchanging, I had observed as the inexorable behemoth of temporality saw babies grow into children, then into adults who made babies of their own, and then into old people who died. Always, I was left behind. I couldn't go with the idealistic and shining young men and women who gave themselves to me, and although it took me many, many years to understand, my status and condition was a handicap to finding love with any of those whose lives I didn't take. They aged, and I didn't.

One day lost in a fugue of despair I covered my face so as to prevent recognition, and took a boat to the mainland. I strode up a hill overlooking the impossibly blue ocean. It was as good a place as any to rest, and rest I did, burrowing deeply into the dry, ancient ground. I lay contemplating and remembering, willing oblivion to take me.

Unable to recall anything before I came to be as I was, I could remember only that I woke one morning in the distant, faraway past with a dark and pale black-eyed man sitting next to where I slept on the floor.

"Beautiful," he had sighed to me. "You will always be beautiful. I had to preserve you as you are now - because you are magnificent, and you will be even more so. You will never sleep again. You will be stronger than a bull. You will never grow old."

He spent a year of changing seasons with me, and taught me use of inexplicable powers I had somehow gained. When first he explained how I would feed from then on I was violently sick. I doubted his words, but time proved him to be right. Centuries gave further credence to everything he had told me.

And centuries is a measure of the time I have been alone, self-sufficient and self-contained, yet incomplete. Centuries is how long I wanted an Other.

And finally - finally! Miraculous and ethereal, here she was.

In modern written English her name was Alice. I understood this. However, when I first heard her name spoken, I heard it as Al-ys. That night, after I had ensured that her tormentor would never disrespect another woman, I knew myself to be Pandora. There were evils aplenty in the world - poverty, malice, hunger, cruelty - all of which had been visited upon My Heart.

But as I looked upon her alabaster cheek and the dark elegance of her brows, the birds-wing curve of her eyelashes, and the tiny blue beat in her throat, I felt the stirrings within me of something new and bold and constant and joyful. I was in the very presence of Hope.

And watching with total absorption the fragile, perfect little being who was entrusting herself to my care, I knew things were really the other way around. I was entrusting myself to her - my heart was hers entirely. Al-ys was my first and only.

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