"Hey, do you know where you're going?"
An old question, better rendered in past tense, but memory is not so malleable. Instead, you recall the words in the present, trudging beside you through the forest, heading in pursuit of a star. So many miles walked, so much humanity sacrificed in a single letter sent to your sister.
Sister in another world. Sister in the past tense. Sister gazing upon other stars.
Now, under a sky not your own, you stare out a window. Alien constellations turn in written format, created things. A cross visible that you've never seen before, perhaps a warning or perhaps a joke. Either way, poor taste to include so many in a private conversation.
Stretched along the bed, your awkward monkey limbs brushing the form beside you, pushing aside the covers.
Warmth, her body is warm. The fur pressed against your bare skin, and the body beneath it moving slowly in unfathomable anatomy. These alien beings, so small and so strange. Not your own species, certainly, nor any that you could understand, molded in curving lines and impossible smoothness.
You pull away from the warmth and stand, leaving her delicate and demure. It cannot be right to share a bed with something so small, so easily broken. It is better to walk away, it has always been better to walk away. Sometimes with a letter, sometimes simply by absence in the dead of night.
She whimpers slightly. Kicks her hooves. They cannot stand to be alone, even the most apparently introverted of them feeling the demand. The demand to sleep in a pile, to hear others voices. Others laughing. Oversocialized and undersexed. Alien perfection.
Without words for the force that drives you, you pass out the door and into the cold air. Your moon is almost full. Your belly is almost empty. You can't think beyond that.
There are others, even now, others walking along in the streets. No brigands to chase them indoors, no fears of the looming shadow. Laughing they shine their lights about them, destroying their night vision and aborting the soft lunar light.
In your agitation, you can understand the urge to punish them, to rip their eyelids wide by force and plunge them into darkness. The urge to control their senses and refuse them the privilege of denying this silent beauty.
Or perhaps you can't really understand. This violent impulse is never echoed back here. In the entire library, there are no books or words for your sentiment. Language was feeble enough metaphor back home. Here it is sparser.
You turn and head in darker directions. Seeking paths untravelled at this hour and the hollow spaces beyond them. The wind passes over your skin smooth as water. The cold is never piercing, never more than a silken caress. Even the fiercest winter could never sink into their bones.
It would be so easy, you think, so easy but so pointless. Instead, you let your breath curl cold and idle across the air.
You stand, the lone human on the equine shore, overlooking the spread of the currents. Bare feet in the sand, awaiting the passing moments. Not so far from you, the crimson moon stands. A droplet of blood in the sea of velvet. An aberration, just like you.
Not like you. This is not your moon. These are not your stars. They never could be.
"Have you made your decision?"
She has followed you, of course. Of course, she would follow you. Like a dog, the shame of it must outlive both of you, the bitter aftertaste of something unwanted in your drink.
"I don't have much of a decision to make." Simple words from you. Simple truths you author and accept as they emerge from your mouth.
"I think I know a way to get you back, we could find the gateway-"
"It wasn't a gate."
"But-"
Your brain slips away from the conversation, leaving your body there for her to speak at. Your ears idle and forever open. A strange species, they cannot read your facial language, but you can interpret theirs too well. A silent man in a room full of screamers. You hear her and know she is afraid.
You know because unlike her, your ears cannot droop. The holes are always open. Your eyes are always open. You cannot help but witness. Judgment, the sole domain of humanity.
Of course, you've known how to get back since the beginning. No Dorothy with her strange revelation, your red pathways were self-explanatory. It would take less than an hour, and you could be back in your past.
Back in your past, as if such reverse progress were possible. As if the road here were not littered with more than past. Ashes and discarded pieces and unforgotten promises.
She cannot understand that, as she continues to prattle on. Their time here is cyclical, primitive. Renewal. Recurrence. A cycle based upon the sun and the summer solstice, with no history built over time. Unlike you, they cannot accumulate debt or guilt.
But you are not from here. For you, there is no blessed Shmita or watering hole littered with waiting souls, only the curse of history.
No, there is no going back.
"I don't think I'll do that," you interrupt her speech.
"So," for a moment, her eyes light up, easily optimistic, "you'll change then?"
Change? It is a ridiculous thought. The offer is there, of course, and by some account it has been taken before. Shifting out of your own skin, casting aside everything and becoming one of these pitiful beasts. Not pitiable, too perfect and perfectly alien to accept your pity, but so riddled with softness that they cannot help but feel pity. That they might apologize even as they die. Strange creatures, stranger world.
"I don't think I'll do that," you can barely resist the urge--cruel as it is--to laugh directly in her face.
"You don't have a choice, you were given one month to decide, and this is the last night. Do you think they won't do it? Do you think we're that-"
"No."
She pauses at your interruption, looking up. She expects an explanation, something. Her lack of understanding confuses you in turn, and for a moment you both puzzle at the mystery presented.
"You're going to die," she says.
"Probably."
An hour sinks by and you both wait, now sitting. These stars are not your own, this world is not your own. It would not be right ...
That is not the proper word.
It would not be possible ...
No, still, no. There are no words for how this action cannot happen, it lays waste to language in its simple barrier. Any word implies the possibility of negation, and there is no negation here. There is nothing but this, the final wall rushing up ahead.
It does not stop her, though. Nothing could stop her. "You cannot remain here as a human."
You stare at her, and resist the urge to stroke her mane in consolation. Touching would do no good now. She is gradually peeling back the layers she had applied onto your skin over the past weeks. Even though she has seen you naked, she has never seen you bare. Not yet, and maybe never. Will she see what it is when you're pinned up like a bug, slowly expiring, staring mutely in that face of offered salvation and turning it down still?
She won’t be there of course. No one will be. No need for the public shame of flesh in this land.
"I cannot leave, or remain, or change, or be. I simply cannot."
It is not quite suicide, suicide requires some degree of choice and action, this is simply the release, sweet release, of apathy. A complete relinquishing of responsibility, they can let you die or let you live, but you will not let them force your hand. It is a selfish attitude. Selfishness is your only attitude.
You feel another trickling of rage at the sight of a glowing horn traipsing not far from here, it is so rude of others to exist. Their presence can never be good enough to make them worth the distraction they present. The distraction of reality against this sweet dream of sadness that covers your lips and fills your mouth and suffocates your tongue and thrusts past your tonsils, filling your cannibal heart. This feeling, purer than reality, that is too easily washed away by reality. Of fatality and sickness and love and sorrow.
You could snap their necks, you're certain of it, destroy at least a few of them before they took you down.
You've nothing to lose now, do you? Imminent death has made you completely free, free to burn everything down and piss on the ashes.
"I'm free," you whisper into the night.
Free except for the chains extended from her large, staring eyes to your skin.
Hateful binds, these, that don't allow us our heart's desire. Or perhaps, she's corrupted your desires. It wouldn't be the first time, the nature of woman is to lead astray.
"Why did you come here, then? Did you just want to die?"
Why indeed. Why walk out all this way only to die on a different doorstep than your own. Why forestall so much inevitability?
The first glowing of sunrise is coming. Your window is closing, and as soon as the sun is fully above the horizon, it will have shut. Completely walling off the chance to be or have anything else in the world.
"Why?" Twilight, insistent as the sun rises. "Why?"
She would demand explanations of the sun. Such a peculiar mode of thought, to believe she has any right to an answer other than the one she can produce. Such strangeness, undesired and unwanted.
In the light of day, scars stretch insalaborous across your arms and back. Some earned, some stolen, a few self-bestowed. Another layer, as a hoof traced the constellation of misery across your flesh. Another meaning built where none provided.
But that is all gone now as two forces appear before the sun. Their features set and willing, ready to destroy you. You look back, easy and accepting. It is all so easy now. So easy to let go.
"What are you planning?" The first one's voice denies the question, she knows and she has planned and she does not care to waste any more effort than necessary on members of the misbegotten race. Harsh, burning light of the day, ready to burn you away.
"Nothing."
The second one, darker, says nothing with her voice. Her eyes speak, promising, I am old. Yes, I am old. Older than you can conceive, before history even began, I was, and so have remained. I have followed after always and devoured, and if you were to crawl past my teeth, chipped and jagged, and over my noble, liar's tongue, you would discover not only the bones of your fathers and their fathers, but also the bones of their cities. The ruins of your transient ambitions lay scattered through my gullet. The torso of Ozymandias is stuck in my sinuses, and it agitates me so. Soon, I shall sneeze it out, and sweep it away--covered with snot--sweep it away into the garbage with a few scraps of English waste paper and dispose of them both.
"Then you will come with us?"
You respond with action rather than words. Coming to your feet, you walk behind them. The execution will not be public, they have no need of such cruelty. There is no original sin to expunge, no human frailty to entertain.
It isn't until almost an hour later you realize you never properly said goodbye.
Ah well, it is for the best.