Realms of Shadow

11

When he came to-when the white dimmed to the colors of earth-the man lay curled up in swamp mud. The first thing he saw was the rose-a hallucination. An illusion.

He reached out, palm up. The illusion's head rested softly upon his fingers. He wept.

When the tears ceased, the rose was still there.

He felt something hard beneath his ribs, lodged in the mud, and shifted to push it aside. A rock. A light touch brushed his cheek. When he had shifted, he had come nearer to the rose, and now it touched its face to his.

He pushed himself to a sitting position and cupped the bloom between his palms. It had taken root at a slant; it had fallen on its side when he had thrust it from himself in a time that seemed so long ago. Its stem had curved to enable it to capture what rays of sun it could through the swamp's mossy ceiling.

He gradually became aware of his hands; something about them had nagged at the back of his mind ever since he had awakened.

There: they had begun to rot. He felt no pain, and yet the skin hung from them in tatters. He thought he could see the bone of one of his knuckles.

So this was it. The woman had given him a disease as her parting gift, and he would die soon.

It had been worth it.

Now he would remain here. He would not leave his rose again.

Time passed. He did not count cycles of light and dark. Sometimes he lay on his back and stared through the moss and branches at the sky. At night, he saw the stars and thought of his love on their last night together. During the day, he imagined that certain strands of the whitish green moss overhead might be the remnants of Chever's notes, caught and molded to the trees in the rain. But no-the woman had brought them back after he had tossed them away.

Why had she done it? Why had she come to his house, lied, stolen his heart, brought him to the sewers, infected him with rot?

His only regret was that he had never reached an epiphany over Chever's notes. He thought longingly of the table in the sewers where he kept them, where they doubtless rested even now. Or… did they?

He strained to see into the blur of days between her disappearance and the present. And… yes, the image came: himself, standing over a table empty of all but a stump of a candle, frowning slightly, thinking vaguely that something was missing but not caring enough to think on it further.

An empty table. No notes.

She had taken them.

Of course. It made sense. What else of value had he to offer her? He had nothing special, no powers or insights. His rose was valuable only to him, but Chever's notes…

He could imagine those would be valuable to many of the woman's kind. He had been so caught up in his little world of garden, studies, and mountain cabin that he had failed to think beyond it. This was the price of that failure. To ensure he would not come after his treasure… a poison kiss.

But why had she not taken the notes sooner? He would never know. Perhaps he had been the one brief flash of light in her otherwise dark existence, her chance to know love before losing her life to whatever pit dark wizards swarmed in. Perhaps, having known love, someday she might also know remorse, penance… and, somewhere beyond that, peace.

Yes… that's what he would believe.

He had propped himself up on one elbow, and now he let his head fall back to his pillow of mud. Leeches clung to his face, and he smiled. Now the end would come.