#41 - Yes, Please

Only Limyé touched him as he wept until he had nothing left, no tears, no energy.  He looked up, in time to see the black-haired girl blow a kiss across the heart in her hands and droplets, butterflies, scarlet and black butterflies made of blood and ache fluttered out and to his out-flung hand.

He was lying on the pillows and the children were distantly playing, in the stream, everyone all around just there.  No one was quivering in fear of what he might do.  No one was crying with him.  No one looming over him shouting for him to stop. “It is not all about you in this world,” Limyé said quietly. 

Everything was edged in a rosy pink colour now and Ahrimaz felt like he floated just above the pillows.  There he was, below, looking like a skinny, ragged, bearded. version of himself.  “I would like to show you something,” the black haired girl said.

“All right.”

She didn’t touch him but they floated up through the ceiling of the salle and up through the rest of the building.  So small compared to his own House of Gold.  Then below them was all of this Inné.  Also small. Fewer streets were paved and they ran hither and thither as though someone had let a cow wander the hill and declared every meander a street.

Then he realized that all the lights he saw were people.  Not their physical selves but the light that Aeono saw.  And, he supposed, the light that Liryen saw.  Some people were dim and small, others flared like burn-metal blazing white.  It was a song of light, it was a tapestry that twinkled.  “There needs to be dark,” he said, “or you couldn’t see them.”

“Yes,” she said.  “And living hurts, until you grow up enough to realize that it needn’t.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He could see his world, a shadow to this one, both darker and brighter, higher contrast, like a backdrop to this quieter, bigger world.  Bigger?  How? There was a sense of vast distance all around as though he could not comprehend it all.  More worlds? More lives?  As the gemstone of a planet turned beneath him he could see in this world a fiery conflagration across the sea, and groups of sparks of souls in the sea itself. “But…”

The world was wrenched sideways again as it expanded into the past and the future and all the lives and deaths, all the prayers and songs and screams, all love and compassion and gratitude.  Gratitude. For life. For death. Gratitude. Love. Compassion.

It was as though all of creation was trying to climb into his chest, into his heart, into all the narrow, pinched off, burnt and scarred places and as they ripped open, as they split asunder he opened his mouth and rather than a scream a single word emerged, whispered into the vastness. “Please.”

He tumbled and fell toward the globe, toward the country, toward the House of the Hand, limbs loose, chest open, hair and lungs ripped at by the wind of life, rising, floating up to the Divine, down to the Divine, out to the Divine. There was no word for that direction.  It just was.

His whole body jolted as he opened his eyes, feeling Limyé’s hand on his shoulder

“Do you think he could bear being touched?” he heard Yolend say with his living ears.  He lunged to catch her proffered hand, and clamped down on Limyé’s, curled around them, hugging, cherishing their solid touch.

Yes, please,” he managed to say, even as he’d said to… oh.  The black-haired girl was his image of Her.  Even as he’d said to the Goddess with him.  “Please.”