{hiraeth} {wwc}

I normally don’t put these, but I’m putting a heavy warning here for some really, really dark stuff. There’s also extensive, and probably controversial, mentions of suicide.

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hiraeth​

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{Gently, little one,} you whisper quietly, bobbing in the breeze—up and down, up and down, up and down—as the life bleeds out of those gorgeous little blue eyes of hers, clear like the river right after a storm, vibrant and visible even through the plastic bag twined around her face.

You will never be able to process the scene in anything more than pictures, still-glimpses of a still-growing child. The way her body slowly consumes itself, lungs struggling for oxygen that the grocery bag over her head starves her of; the way her arms twitch feebly to try to free herself, before her struggles exhaust her and she begins to sag; the way she slips, ever-so-slightly, into a faint smile even as she collapses completely limp into you. You cradle her, all softness and yellow and purple ribbons, for a moment longer.

The secret is always in their eyes, you think. It’s what lets you keep going. You can see an entire future in their eyes, the years playing on ahead of them like a dark and narrow road that sinks into oblivion, and you watch it all fade away, snuffed out like a candle met by a flickering breath of wind. You appreciate the beauty in it all—the beauty in her eyes, in that story whose fire has gone dark and whose ending is never told.

The moment passes, and you lower her to the floor. She feels lighter than she did before, her body barely making a sound as you place her on the linoleum. You bob a little higher, and from this angle, she might almost be sleeping, cliché as it sounds. She seems so tiny on the vast expanse of stained plastic, mahogany curls all tucked up in a single plastic bag that served as her release.

You fixate on her shoe. It is a tiny little thing, like the rest of her, a white sandal with delicate flowers inked in green and pink around the edges. The soles are worn down, traction almost forgotten, and the metal buckle has been rubbed shiny with use. You pick it up in one of your ribbon-like hands, bobbing, studying it, turning the artifact of a life over and over as you try to get a bearing on the situation. Here is her life captured in a single object, perhaps. Did she spend the years playing, long enough to wear away at the leather until it cracked? Did she only ever have one pair of sandals, from a family that could not afford any more? Did she wear them as hand-me-downs from her sister, whose room you both passed upstairs?

You don’t know. You talked with her, a little, enough to know her name—Sophia Hernandez—and to appreciate the beauty of her life, but there is so much more between appreciation and knowing.

All you really know is that the shoe must’ve fallen off as she suffocated.

She looks peaceful here, at rest, and this is how you intend to leave her. Quietly, quietly, quietly.

{Gently, little one,} you whisper, and then you bob away, the shoe that was her life clutched close.

[hr][/hr]

Time runs funny for you; it’s almost part of your job description to be apart and floating around like a wisp lost on the breeze, so your anchorless passage through the river of time is really no difference. The fact that you can see tortured futures in the eyes of innocent children only lends to that fact.

You’re outside of the windmill when they find you.

And now, time seems to be going far too fast, and you can hardly keep up with what’s going on, even though you’ve lived for centuries longer than you should’ve.

“That’s the one!” a tall, dark-haired woman shouts, pointing a heavy, accusatory finger at you, and you back off as the crowd of angry faces turns toward you. “That’s the drifblim!”

You turn to flee.

[hr][/hr]

“Are you sure this is the best way, Wanderer?” the little boy asks you, and you are honestly torn for an answer.

No, you want to say, and you want to shake your head so he will mimic you and shake his head so hard it falls off his shoulders from the strength of his desire, but you can’t make yourself do it. You know. You know.

So instead, you give a slight nod, just a gentle inclination of the mass of essence that marks your head, and nothing more. You don’t think this is best way, but you know there is no better. Perhaps there is no good way at all.

A car rushes by the two of you, the breeze travelling in your wake sending his shocks of blonde hair flying back a little and buffeting you back half an inch before you manage to right yourself. Perhaps it was fitting, really, that you are made to be so soft and easily moved and indecisive, consumed with self-loathing and uncertainty as you are.

“Wanderer?” he asks again, and you realize your nod was far too slight.

He calls you wanderer. You have many names, and none at all. To some, you are nothing more than a dark spirit, a figment of the imagination that lurks beneath the bed and comes out at night only to destroy. To others, you are merely a myth. You have an inkling of a name, one given to you by The Dialga, who gave you your meaning and your purpose, and he called you drifblim.

But before that, decades before that and centuries before now, you had another name, one whispered to you as a child, a life half-lived and left behind for the shadow of your existence now. You’ve just forgotten it—the name, the life, the existence.

You don’t know which child was the first to call you Wanderer, nor do you know which will be the last, but you find it fitting. That is what you do, of course. You wander.

{Yes,} you reply at last, although it hurts a little to do so. {Yes, little one.}

The boy pauses for a moment.

Another car blows past you, and you wonder if the humans inside, caught up in their busy little short lives of intersections and gridlock and long roads that stretch on to nowhere, are curious at the sight. A little boy standing by the side of a busy street two blocks from his house, tucked almost out of sight between a pair of parked cars, one hand wrapped around your frayed ribbon. If you could feel pain, his grip might have hurt you for how tightly he holds it, but this is nothing. His other hand dangles, a little limp, clutching a smooth river pebble.

You wonder about the pebble. Where it came from, what it means to him, how it shapes his life and why he holds it so tightly even now, when he has already made up his mind. He turns it over in his hand, smoothing it with every touch of his fingertips, and you wonder if the pebble was worn away by the rivers of time or by the sweaty palms of an eight year-old boy.

He looks at you, his eyes the same sort of muddy brown as his pebble, and you see his story there too. A road stretches ahead of him, like the one that stretches beside him now, and he will walk that path lonely and afraid.

He loosens his grip on your hand.

His name is Nico Couvorubian.

“Whenever I’m ready?” he asks again, voice a little uncertain.

{Whenever you’re ready,} you whisper back. He will never be ready. This is always the hardest part, and yet—

A road stretches ahead of him, like the one that stretches beside him now, and you see it twisting and turning in those muddy brown eyes, so clear and so bright and so shiny. He will walk that path, lonely and afraid, unless—

He loosens his death-grip on your ribbons and runs between the two cars as fast as his legs will carry him, darting out into the center of the road. He doesn’t even have time to turn to see.

You can’t make yourself watch. You can’t. You’ve seen this play out too many times before, and you know how it will end.

But you owe it to little Nico Couborubian to be there with him until the end, because that is your duty as Wanderer.

In mid-stride, he crumples like an aluminum can and the car sends him flying through the air, the arc of his flight like a perfect trajectory—start low, go high, low again, with a smooth curve and a flourish to finish. He sails, already limp and glassy, and you see that twisted road in his eyes extinguished in an instant, smeared the way he smears the road until the real road is stained and the road in his eyes is nothing more than a memory.

You are by his side in an instant, wrapping your ribbons around him and cradling him softly, gently. As his hands are entwined back within yours, you feel the flood of his pain and fear washing between you, and you take it all in. This is when the warmth of his hands wrapped around you really hurts, burns like fire, as you feel your legs breaking and your lungs screaming for breath even though they were punctured and the air just hisses out, gurgling as it mixes with your blood, which pools around your blonde hair and drains the life out of your muddy brown eyes.

{Gently, little one,} you whisper, knowing that he will at least not die alone.

You float there until his hand grows limp and sinks to the asphalt, and you lower him down just as the pavement turns awash with blue and red. You hear the sirens approaching behind you, but they’re too late.

The river pebble lies beside him. He must have clutched it until the end.

You take it with you as you float away, the ambulance peeling up behind you, two minutes too late to stop the candle of a little boy from being extinguished. You carry with you a river pebble as brown and dull as lifeless as the two in the little boy’s eyes that feels like it weighs as much as the world.

[hr][/hr]

The grass blurs into a mess of dried green and grey beneath you, and the wind generated by your passing flattens it a little as you rush by. You don’t really know why they’re chasing you, although you can probably guess. Your job isn’t exactly one that lends itself to the best reception from people, and you’ve been chased out before. The legends of the ghosts in the shadows were never kind ones.

“Stop, Wanderer!”

At her words, you pull up short. It’s not just that her voice is painfully familiar; she knows your name, or at least the name that you’ve taken to using recently. You turn around, hardly daring to look into her eyes to see that road you’ve seen before winding around, except it’s shorter than when you’ve last seen it. She’s grown.

And she uses that growth and that time that she’s borrowing to lead the crowd of people chasing you. One of them even has a torch; your eyes are drawn to the flickering of the fire as it smears behind them as they run.

You’ve considered it, and you aren’t actually sure if you can die.

“Yamask, Shadow Ball!” the woman shouts, and you’re still staring at her eyes when the gold and black creature by her side produces a blast of dark energy that clips your side and sends you smashing to the ground.

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Her name is Noelle Lin. You hold onto that as you continue, because they start to blend together the more you wander. The lives you have aided begin to run together like smears in still-wet paint, and although you can still peer closely and pick out the individual colors, if you look at them from afar, it’s just another smudge in the universe.

You can see her sitting on the swings alone, pondering, and you wonder if perhaps it’s too late. The park is mostly empty at this time in the afternoon, and dying sunlight filters through the green leaves of the poplar trees around. It’s summer, you realize, and the air is a little warm, although you stopped noticing that long ago. As you pause a moment longer, hovering in the trees and trying to discern if perhaps you’ve grown too old for this at last, she takes notice of you and tilts her head to one side, frowning.

“Who are you?” she calls out to you, the ghost in the breeze, and she doesn’t even sound afraid. None of them do. “Are you the Wanderer?”

She already knows who you are. You bob out a little, purple body phasing effortlessly through the remaining fragments of the park that separate you, and you come to a halt over the swingsets. The ground beneath you is dark; they’ve just redone the mulch here, and if you paid more attention, you might’ve noticed that the air hung thick with the heavy smell.

Her fingers tighten a little on the chains of the swing, as if she’s afraid, but when she speaks, it’s still in that same, even tone, except pitched a little higher. “You’re here to snatch me away, aren’t you? That’s what the stories say. That you come in and carry off children.”

{I just want to talk, little one,} you say. Noelle, you have to remind herself. Her name is Noelle, not just another lost soul that you will soon be guiding away.

She looks you dead on. Her eyes are dark brown, so dark they’re almost black, like her hair, which is a little sweaty. But you’re fixated back on her eyes, where you can see the dark and winding path ahead of her. “About what?”

{Nothing in particular,} you lie, and then you bob a little closer. {Do you mind if I stay for a while?}

She shrugs. “Sure.”

She begins kicking her legs as she speaks, sending her drifting back and forth on a low arc in the swing. And you bob up and down as you speak, so it’s the two of you sweeping around, one from side to side and one up and down.

This is always the hardest part. This is the part that leaves you haunted, haunted by their eyes, as you look at her face and speak and make those paths erase themselves. {Noelle, are you happy right now?}

She nods, so hard that you think her head will fall off of her shoulders, like you wish they could all nod and like you wish they all would, except you know better by now.

Of course she is happy. Happiness is all they ever know, until—

{It won’t last, little one,} you force yourself to say. And then you must pause and ponder, because you’re never quite certain how to say it next. {I can see the future in your eyes. Your days of happiness will end.} Tomorrow, to be specific, but you can’t bring yourself to tell her that. You can’t bring yourself to acknowledge that.

“What do you mean?”

{Very soon, a man will visit you,} you begin, coaxing the end of the story out from what you can see in your eyes, even though it pains you so much already. {And—}

“My father comes to visit once a month,” she responds immediately. “I know he’s coming next week. Is that what you mean, Wanderer?”

Another pause. Your body is ephemeral; you don’t really do the typical reactions, like gasping or swallowing hard or tearing up like you’ve seen the children do. You’re just a big balloon filled with hot air and dread, built only to lessen the scars on the world. You don’t even get a voice. {No,} you say at last, the telepathic echo of your words ringing in her mind. {I don’t mean that.}

“What, then?”

It’s so hard to voice the words, and you hardly can make yourself do it. But you tell her of these horrible, horrible things that are to befall her, how this man will visit her when her mommy isn’t home, and how he’ll keep visiting her when her mommy isn’t home, and he’ll fill her up with hatred and lies and make her life a living hell. Noelle stares at you, her hand growing slack on the chain of the swingset as her eyes begin to brim with tears, clouding up that road ahead of her. Her face crunches and you see her eyebrows crumple, and when she speaks, her voice still is filled with fear for the first time. “No.”

{You’ll make it through that,} you whisper, coaxing that story out of her eyes, that little kink in her road. {You’ll survive it, Noelle.}

“Why are you telling me this?” Her feet are poised for her to slip off of the swing and run away, and you bob back a few feet. You want to let her run from this, except—

{You’ll make it through that, and get through all of that and come back…} you say, and you search for the word. Stronger? No, she isn’t weak now, and she isn’t weak for what will happen. Better? No, she isn’t worse now, either. You don’t know. {You’ll get through all of that and come back,} you repeat, because that’s what matters. The ending. She’ll come back.

She stands up now, but she doesn’t run. She puts her hands on her hips and she glares at you, eyes full of that dark path and shaking with so much fury, visible even through the tears, and she repeats, this time angry instead of afraid, “Why are you telling me this?”

It doesn’t matter that they have horrible lives. Lots of people have horrible lives. Your job isn’t to go to the children to have horrible lives, it’s to go to the children who—

{Twenty-one days, six months, and fifteen days from now, Noelle, shortly after your seven year-old son drowns while skating on his own, you will walk to a run-down shed by the river, say a quiet prayer for your dead son and your dead childhood, and then burn the shed to the ground with yourself in it.}

“No.” The words feel like they’re torn from her throat and studded with thorns. “You’re lying, Wanderer.”

You don’t know how else to say it. Most of the children deny it at first—their worlds are so perfect that it’s both impossible and heartbreaking to even imagine that it’ll become anything but.

And your job is equally impossible and heartbreaking to even imagine, and there are some days when you wish you could just stop. Stop talking to them, stop being drawn to them, stop looking into their eyes to see dark and twisting roads ahead of them that will end in quiet, lonesome, self-induced deaths after so much pain and suffering.

{I’m not lying, Noelle,} you whisper sadly, and you wish you were. You so desperately wish that this cheerful little girl to whom you’re talking won’t grow up under the crushing weight of a cruel world that seems intent and driving her into the ground, swallowing her up whole and devouring her, shredding her hopes and dreams until she exercises what control she has left and does something unspeakable. {I’m not lying.}

She draws herself up, folding her hands in front of her chest and casting as large of a shadow over your life as you will ever see, even though she’s not yet four feet tall (and she maybe never will be.) “I will never do that,” she whispers to you with enough venom in her throat to make you almost believe her, but then you look into her eyes and see that path is still there, that candle still burning in her eyes like the flames that she’ll use one day to end her life.

{Noelle, please,} you begin, but you don’t really know what to say. That you’ve found the place where the tree branches get thin and they’ll snap and make it look like an accident and no one will ever suspect a thing. That you’ll take all the pain away, both now and forever, if she chooses to let you. That sometimes life is horrible, and maybe—

You really don’t know what to say.

It’s their choice in the end. It’s their choice no matter which way they decide to make it end, and you’re just offering it to them a little sooner, before all of the pain and suffering and sorrow drives them off a cliff or into traffic or into whatever horrible ending they can get their hands on. You can at least be there for them when they’re young, wrap them up and give them something safe and soft and warm that they can hold so they at least won’t go alone.

It’s their choice in the end.

That’s what you tell yourself as, crying, Noelle stamps her foot in the ground and shakes her head as hard as you always wished they would and screams at you, “But you’re lying, Wanderer! I will never be that sad. I will always be happy.” And then she storms off.

You always wish that they’ll run away from you, and you’re glad that she is, so very glad, so very grateful. And then you return to the park the next day, wondering if she’ll hate you now and then and forever, but Noelle Lin isn’t there, and she’s home but her mommy isn’t, and you know that she was lying when she swore that she would always be happy because her road has just begun.

[hr][/hr]

{Are you still happy, Noelle?} you ask the dark-haired woman and her floating golden companion as the image solidifies back in front of you.

They’ve locked you up somewhere. You aren’t really sure what’s happened; the events blurred and you must’ve passed out.

Is she mad at you? Does she hate you for what you tried to do? Was it because you didn’t try hard enough to save her, or because you tried too hard?

She doesn’t look at you, which is a blessing. She doesn’t force you to look into those eyes and see the path that is still careening on ahead of her. Noelle Lin hasn’t avoided anything, not by a long-shot.

“How did you know?” she asks, still not turning to look at you. By her side, the little black ghost bobs up and down, hovering, hovering like you.

{Were you never sad, Noelle?}

And now she turns to glare at you with the full fire in her eyes, and you shrink away, not from the wrath contained in her gaze, but because you can see both ends of the road she’s walked—the sadness in her past, and the horror in her future, and you’re helpless to prevent it. “You weren’t lying, Wanderer,” she tells you in a voice that burns like formaldehyde and lye. “You weren’t lying.”

[hr][/hr]

His name is Brandon, and you find him while he’s skating around on the frozen river by a quiet windmill. The sky is grey and bleak, almost a perfect mirror to the ice keeping him up, and the reeds hardly rustle as you push through them.

He stops short when he sees you.

{Do you mind if I stay a while?} you ask, and it all begins again.

It is a horrible cycle. You don’t even know how many times it’s happened, how many children, how many lives. Sometimes, they listen to you, like Brandon does, and you take them by the hand and walk a little. With Brandon, you don’t have to go far; there’s a dangerously thin patch of ice only a little upstream where he’s skating alone, and it only takes him a gentle, teetering step before everything snaps beneath him and the river reclaims its own. You hold his hand and take away his fears, but he doesn’t even feel a thing. The cold rushes up to meet him, envelops him in its icy embrace, and lulls him gently to sleep, like it’s not even there. It’s like falling asleep.

When you’re successful at your job, like you were with Brandon, you lure a child to his death and hold his hand so that he doesn’t have to die alone, either now or in some later, darker time, when the will to live has been stolen from him.

And when you’re not successful at your job, you let a child run away from her death only to run toward it anew, rushing headlong happily into the gaping maw of life, that will swallow her up and devour her and spit her out over and over again until it steals her will to live and leaves her facing a gallon of kerosene and a matchstick.

He stops breathing and sinks, gently, until the tips of his black hair vanish into the icy water, and it’s over.

You pick up his glove, which is torn across the palm from where he fell and snagged it on the ice as it shattered. You know by now that you can’t possibly understand the entirety of his beautiful, too-short life in the palm of this glove, which looks brand new except for the fraying and weeping threads from the slash across the top. He is too complex, too amazing to be contained in a single object, a single story, for he is a living, breathing human being who had a wonderful life and who has a terrible future, at least until you arrive.

You take the glove with you anyway, back into the windmill, and you deposit it gently there, where it will remind you time and time again that every story untold, no matter how horrible, is still a story cut short.

[hr][/hr]

You look around for the first time. You feel sluggish, heavy, like you’ve been frozen in time and space and can’t quite escape, and you aren’t sure why.

“Kaiho is using Imprison on you,” Noelle says, pointing to the little black ghost that floats by her side. It’s funny, really; she only really replaced you with another bobbing ghost in her life. Will he stay with her until her death? The golden mask that it bears looks peaceful, like a little boy slipping gently into sleep, and you can’t discern any past or future in those icy red eyes.

You struggle to process the information. {Why?}

“Were you there for my son, Wanderer?” Noelle asks instead of answering the question.

You don’t know for sure.

You just know what you’ve seen, and you’ve seen is this: it is horrible for parents to bury their children. It is a terrible thing, and you’ve watched them, and you’ve tried to take the pain away but you only work on physical pain, on aches and cuts and bruises and slashed throats and strangled little girls and boys who were dashed to pieces by cars of their own choosing. You watch those somber little gatherings and feel yourself shattering a little each time, as if you could deflate one drop for every tear shed, because all lives are so incredibly precious, no matter how small and crumpled and quiet.

It is horrible for parents to bury their children. That reason alone is enough for you to despise your job, and factoring in the other things makes you want to shred yourself or stop or float away or just anything, anything besides this, but—

It is even more horrible for parents to bury their children who have grown up and seen how absolutely horrible life can be and have taken measures to end it. You’ve seen it both ways, and you know, even though it hurts, that it’s much safer to swallow an ending that is a lie, even if that lie is still as bitter as the truth.

Maybe.

At least, that’s how you force yourself to keep going.

{I don’t know, Noelle,} you say at last.

You don’t know, either, how you were expecting her to react. Her face crumples the same way it did so many years ago, and she has to put her hand over her mouth to cover up the strangled sound that comes out. The ghost beside her coos mournfully, trying in vain to comfort her.

You do know something, though. You’ve pieced it together. The angry crowd of people, the ghost trapping you here, the muffled shouts you can hear.

They’ve caught you, Wanderer. They’ve trapped you here and now they are going to destroy you, end you, erase you, the same way you did to their children.

And you might just accept it. You’ve been working for so long, and you’re so weary, and you can’t help but wonder if it may be your time to move on.

{Are you here to kill me?} you whisper.

“I’m here to avenge my son, Wanderer.”

{Thank you.}

[hr][/hr]

Before they light you up, before they burn you alive and set free the gases and spirit trapped within you that have kept you bobbing all these years, you pause for a moment and wonder. There has, you’ve always known, been such a large gap between appreciation and knowing. You’ve appreciated the beauty and grief in release, but now you must know it, and that chasm may be far, far too deep for you to cross and return in a single leap, or even to float over.

You don’t try to run away, though. The walls are too thick and the sobs in your head too loud for that. But instead, even as you see the flames start to spread and the torches come nearer and nearer to you, you pause for a moment, and let yourself pretend.

And time begins to run slowly, for what may well will be the very last time. The scene drips around you like molasses, globs of the ceiling falling around in droves even as the fire catches onto the first of your tendrils, but even the searing burn of the fire takes too long to reach your body.

You look up, and you see Noelle for the last time, the way her story unfolds in her eyes, how she knows your secret. How she’ll turn away from this after they’re done with you, after you’re nothing more than a smear of ash on the ground, nothing more than a snuffed-out candle like the thousands of fires you watched die in those eyes, still smoking but still, and still dead. And then she’ll go and cast the same fate upon your life’s work, in that little lonely windmill by that little lonely river, where the little lonely artifacts of a little lonely spirit will wait, quite lonely, to go up in flames. Your life’s work, all those lives saved, gone like a ragged breath goodbye, lost in the wind and drifting away forever. All that those wretched little lives that were never lived amounted to, their stories that were never told, will be forgotten in ash.

She’s seen the windmill; she must have. You can see that in her eyes, how she’s passed by that abandoned windmill for years. That’s where she found you, that’s where she lost her son, and that’s where it all leads back. And you can see through the fires in her eyes that that’s the shack where she’ll choose to end her life, taking your life’s work with her. All of those reminders of all of the quiet lives lived and died, the sadnesses that you tried to prevent and the happinesses that you tried to preserve, all gone up in smoke like you will, too.

They’ll never thank you. Not the ones you saved, or the ones you robbed, or any of them. And maybe they’ll be right not to.

And when you open your eyes, you pretend, at least, that you’d look around to see a faraway time in a faraway place, by a quiet little river with a quiet little windmill that would be years and years too young to be filled with mementos and regret. You’d hover for a moment, bobbing up and down, up and down, up and down.

And you would go and hover by that windmill, which wouldn’t yet be run down and dying with age, wheezily churning through cycle after cycle because that’s the only thing it ever learned to do, even when the will to continue had flickered away long ago. You would feel the dying breeze rushing through you and the windmill both, forcing you away to bow beneath some invisible power, the weight of the world crushing, but it would be peaceful, nonetheless, and so very quiet.

And you would wait a little longer, until you would hear voices, and an excited shriek of happiness, and another child unknowingly destined to live a long and cruel and terrible life would enter the picture, life story at the ready to be erased by the two of you, together. But you would wait, you and the river and the windmill, because all three of you are old beyond your time, and there will be time enough for this child to grow disillusioned enough to be as old as you three.

{Who are you?} an inquisitive voice would ask, and you would turn around slowly, bobbing on the wind, looking to see—

A tiny little wisp of a thing, mostly purple and white with little wisps of gas floating around. And you’ll look into those eyes, the ones with a lifetime stretching on within them, and you’ll wonder why you never saw it before. The pain and the suffering and the sadness had been in your eyes all along, even years and years ago when you and the river and the windmill were still young and full of youth.

You never knew until then, and yet you wouldn’t then. You wouldn’t say anything for a moment, and then you’d reply, {A wanderer.}

{That’s nice. I’m Hiraeth,} the little drifloon would say, and you’d remember your name at last.

{Mind if I stay here a while?} you’d ask. You’d offer a choice. You always offer a choice; that’s what you do; that’s how you allow yourself to keep going. It’s always their choice.

{Sure,} Hiraeth would reply, and you would both sit by the river for a moment longer, bobbing up and down in the gentle breeze by the river, enjoying the updraft of the windmill. Perhaps you’d play together—hide-and-seek, or tag, or those long-forgotten games of a long-forgotten time. There would be something a little ironic in chasing after a little drifloon from a lost time before that little drifloon grows up to destroy so much.

And you would sit there, content for a moment longer, before you would finally say, {Hiraeth, are you happy right now?}

And Hiraeth would stop bobbing, and you could almost see the happiness deflating, pierced out of the little drifloon from the tone of your voice. Even then, the little drifloon could sense the agony and dread that fills the world around you both. {I think so. Why?}

{I’m sorry,} you whisper, and you’d steel yourself to do one last job. You would whisper to that little drifloon about all of the horrors and sadness that you would see mapped out in those little dark eyes, all of the drifting and loneliness and paradox. And the drifloon would wait, silent, while you finished the story.

It would be the first and last story you would actually finish.

{But if I die here and now, you won’t exist anymore?} the little drifloon would ask, hovering up and down, up and down. You’d wonder if it had already begun, that process of staying in one place and trying to leave, but drawn back by some inescapable power.

{That would almost be the point, yes,} you’d reply. Gently, gently.

And Hiraeth would wonder for a moment, tilting that massive purple sphere of a head to one side, weighing the options without knowing just how much that choice will matter. {But if you don’t exist anymore, who will save all of the children you did?}

{No one.}

And you’d finally realize why it’s torn you up inside to do your job, which is really just a re-adjustment of the time from when an adult kills themselves to helping a child do the same. Because all of those achievements between the little kid who is okay dying and the world-weary adult who has decided the same will be erased from time. All of those moments, the good and the bad, will be burned away, like they never even existed.

Is it selfish to let them live long enough to continue touching the world, or is it even more selfish to help them end the pain before it even begins?

{Then I can’t do it,} Hiraeth would say, and you don’t try again.

And the little spirit would grow up again, grow old, hear all of those screams and sobs of thousands of little children as they lived or died, for it made no difference. The little spirit would tread through all of that time, weary and completely alone, until the little spirit grew up and reached the point where the world hated you and the people hated you and you hated you so much that you would find yourself in that cruel little circle, voices raised in outcry, calling for your execution. And you would burn away into a tiny wisp of nothingness, your life’s work forever unfinished, and Noelle would quietly excuse herself and retrace her footsteps back to the windmill to burn away all of the remnants of your life’s work, and herself with it.

And that, you decide, would be the truly poetic and fashionably depressing ending to the story that you wrote, even though you were never any good at ending stories well anyway. You always cut them off too short.

The fire catches up to you at last, and you burn.

[hr][/hr]

You’ll never know it, because you were burned to a cinder before you could finish, but the story didn’t quite end in such a fashionably depressing way as you had envisioned.

Noelle pushed open the creaking door to the windmill, whose sorry blades had long ago fallen silent. She walked inside, yamask bobbing at her side, half out of balance because of the can of kerosene she carried with her. Perhaps she thought of your words to her back on the swings when she was eight, about how you knew all along that this would happen and you still tried to save her anyway. Perhaps she regretted what she had done then and now and forever.

Perhaps she said a quiet prayer for her dead son and her equally dead childhood as she turned around and looked at the gallery of memories that you kept in that windmill, of all of the facets of lives told in the tiny curve of a toy dinosaur or a particular dent in a tin soldier. The black ghost with his golden mask followed her, making mournful cooing sounds, and her hand slipped upward to comfort him.

Perhaps she thought those things and said those prayers. She also said, in a voice so quiet that it was almost another perhaps, “I like to think that you were there for him, Wanderer.” Pause. “I like to think he wasn’t alone.”

Noelle ran her hand across the shelves, where a thin layer of dust was already starting to accumulate from your absence. In slow, quiet circles, she walked around and prepared to destroy your life’s work and herself with it, because you and she and everyone in the world were monsters, everyone else except for the innocent lives you’ve kept enshrined in the windmill.

Her fingers caught on the ripped fabric of the little boy’s glove from the river, the boy who drowned while skating on his own, and she stopped short. She stared. She picked it up and clutched it to her, as if that would bring it from the outside world and into her heart, where that little piece of him belonged.

Quietly, almost invisibly, the little ghost by her side paused to look at his mask and began to cry.

Her free hand strayed into her pocket, almost idly, and returned with a mirror image of the glove clutched to her heart, identical but unripped. The fingers were too small to be for her; there was no logical reason for her to carry it with her, but some things eluded reason.

She cradled both of them close to her, swallowed, and made a decision that would thoroughly ruin your truly poetic and fashionably depressing ending, and maybe it was better that way. You were never any good at ending stories well anyway. You always cut them off too short, but this time, you may have let it go on for too long.

Because, for reasons known only to herself, she stopped. She carefully screwed the lid back onto her gallon of kerosene and turned away, to leave the windmill and the river as an untouched and sagging memento, a lopsided tombstone to a quiet soul that had ferried away so many.

The yamask paused a moment longer to weep beside a little boy’s undug grave.

Gently, little one.

[hr][/hr]

Spoiler

attempted capture: drifloon (complex)
character count: around thirty-six thousand

 

I shall grade it

 

Grade deleted cuz WWC and stuff.