[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,530,true][atrb=background,http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/3238/ursulafull.png] COMPLETE, I remember nights by the ocean, watching the stars cut through the still-warm black of the east like the flash of dull scissors in thick cloth – you used to name them for me with your soft, lilting accent, tacking on new meaning to figures and lights that had lost their significance long ago, before the world could be called young, before it could even be called new. That must have been what I liked most about you, that you could breathe life into the dead; in Gervasov, permanence is the solution to every equation, and to hear you tearing down the philosophy I had built my life around for eternities was like seeing a bird fly for the first time. At first, so beautiful that it couldn’t be anything but a fabrication, a secret stumbled upon that should not have been. At second, so perfect that all you can feel is a rage beginning at the base of your spine and curling up, up through the vertebra, a long, hard tremble that threatens your very foundations. And at third, so painful (the moment it occurs to you that it is not a dream, coupled with the recoil of that long, hard tremble) that it sends you to your knees with tears in your eyes, because you thought there was nothing left to live for, that, that was you to me. But the key word is ‘was,’ and ‘were,’ serdtse moi, serdtse moi, moi serdtse; you’ve gone; I’ve been living in (the past-tense of) those nights by the ocean for years; and when the sun finally comes up, it comes up cold. I think you would ask me why I am still looking for you, especially here in the danger of this tunnel, where the air is still and tauntingly sweet like a trap for ants. I think I would reply that I do not know why, only that I must see you with my own eyes before I can be made to believe that you are dead. You had always told me that death was nothing, you know – it had complicated the natural cycle of closure and coming to terms that had been bred into me, and there was nowhere for me now but to search. Could I return to the cold wastes and neverending wars of the Gervasii? Could I go your mother and your father and look them in their quaking eyes, and expect to call that shaking, shambled place home? Alejandro. No matter where I go, I will be a stranger in a strange, strange land, and so better to immerse myself in my fate than fight it like a fool; you always told me I was clever, and I will not fail you now, struck dumb by your own tightly-clenched fist. That is why I persevere through the darkness, one long, spider’s leg after another, watching the uniform dust spiral through the air before my eyes, watching as the light in the distance grows slowly larger, brighter, more terrifying than ever before, and that is why I do not shrink back to see him standing at the other end. He might know, solnyshko moyo; he might know where you are, where I might find you. Even the minotaur has a price.

[atrb=border,1,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][atrb=bgcolor,EEEEEE,true] Death. The taste and texture was like tar -- it clung to the roof of his mouth and the back of his teeth, and when he breathed the flow of air down into his lungs was stifled like the skin of a balloon against tree bark. It was a friction that made him itch in the places he could not reach -- the back of his throat, the curve of his spine -- despite how adamantly he tried. Even the smell of decay, so smoky and rustic to his senses, was irritating; nothing could be done to rid himself of its presence, its aromatic and intoxicating stain. Omnipotent, omnipresent, Death, it would seem, was everywhere, and he, he was its thrall. Ever since the the night of the wolf the scavenger had seen the world through bloodshot, blood-drunk eyes; and memories long suppressed, some long hoped to be forgotten, clawed their way back into his thoughts. Carrion and gore-flecked carcasses, and high-pitched screams that curdled the blood -- it all clustered in his head, echoed off the sheathe while ghostly and gnarled fingers sank into his mind and tore it apart with a shriek familiar to that of ripping iron. Memories of those he had slaughtered unmercifully, they fed off the bruised remnants of his dissipating soul -- he had to shut his eyes to deafen the cacophony of wails. And then She manifested in the black of his eyelids; an outline at first, a faint scrawl of ebony ink in a shadowed labyrinth, but an outline that thickened, became a portrait of skinny legs and a swan's white neck. Eyes of almond crystalized by perpetual tears. Tears, he remembered, that she had shed for him. Wuuthrex opened his eyes. There was the promise of anger tinting his lips, the furrow of his brow; but there was also something else, something less definable than his favorite flavor of sin. He did not pursue it, but set to abandon the thought as he had abandoned everything else that had once been. He had never been one for desolation or its friends, misery and pity, and had little intentions of starting now. Memories were memories: fragments of captured motion and energy that diminished in quality as time ebbed at the edges, fraying seam after seam of detail and sentiment. One day, he would digest completely the prologue of his existence and, one day, he would no longer know the likes of haunting specters, or her, the everlasting dawn. One day. Until then, Wuuthrex honed in on reality, his keen gaze suffering the shifting darkness of the elongated chasm to drift as beams of light streamed through gaps in the ceiling. His hefty footfalls were remotely silent out of habit, and as he navigated along it proved reasonable that they were so: around the crook and the bend stood a lone mare. Her frostfall of silk fell about a thin, thin neck, framed an elegant face with marble contours; and legs as slim as a whisper, as long as a spider's. At first he imagined she was the aftermath of delirium -- cloaked in black and porcelain, she seemed too ghostly to be real. Yet, there she smoldered, a sharp contrast of eloquence and beauty that he continued to ambivalently approach. "Hello..." Ambivalent, but still a king, it did not slip past the stallion that she, whoever she might be -- lost or found or no one at all --, was trespassing. "How can I help you?" And he was not in a forgiving mood. ( Fini. )

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