The Waves

Through the carriage window, a single streak of sunlight shone upon Ethans mask and pierced his eye. Through the window, within the grey cotton blanket of clouds, a single slit of sky opened like a mouth and carried that pure unfiltered streak to earth, or so he imagindd. His mask became hot, abd he felt his cheekbone benesth moisten. The amber in his iris's lit up with the heat, enhancing his dark view to a thousand acres of storm drenched land outside. In that single momentary stroke of sunlight, hundreds of years of memory glimmered before him with it. Then the dark blanket of clouds crunched deep, heavy, enveloping his soul and aligning him once again with the weight of the dark side of the coin.

Ethan rarely wondered; thought was dangerous, but the rolling carpet of thick grey cloud that had been split open for this sunlight to fall through reminded him of the White Wave Rebellion. Garenduel, Purewater, and all the other pieces of the game.

Ethan stroked his hair with three fingers. His hair may be silver now, or white. Colour had long left his mind, only shades remained. He then ran the back of his hand down the carriages wooden pallets where the dusky curtains hung. Wood, dust, old drapes, such familiar scents and touches, clear as sunlight.

He sensed the driver in front of him, watching as he felt that same sun light graze the surface of the skin of his neck where blood pumped furiously just beneath.

Elgryd remained silent at his side, her head leant back, staring into the mirror that the driver kept glancing at by his side. Ethan touched her finger with his upon the seats where they sat, attempting a bid for comfort, or invitation to share the sweetness of the pending quench. He did not want to go where he was going. He did not want to see his captives hatred through his minds eye.

The driver smelled young. He kept tightening the horses reigns, stirring irritation in Ethan.

The carriage was built for new roads, and struggled awkwardly on this neglected, forgotten path, unrepaired of the damage caused by centuries of flooding. The wheels caught on multiple rocks, and shuddered horribly in the rain.

Ethan averted his attention to a bird in the field circling a dying, brittle tree. The bird hovered in the air a moment before swooping below to capture something in the grass.

It was at this point, the driver broke silence. 'Beg your pardon?'

He twitched his head round from side to side. He had a long, slightly hooked nose, a stretched forehead..

Ethan ignored him, but he repeated his question.

'I did not speak.' Ethan coldly answered.

The driver ignored Ethans clear reluctance to further their words.

'I expect you have some prospects, some education? You will experience the wroth of the snake pit in this country. I dont envy you, starting at the bottom as a young man. The .'

Ethan had regretfully become familiar with the common conversation of men. He might have once found it necessary, many years ago, when he was human too. Needless to say he did not need people skills now.

'I'm from this country.'

'Really? You don't look or sound at all Junish. Plus I've just picked you up from the shipping Dock, didn't you say you'd just landed?'

'I did.' Ethan replied, his teeth ground. 'Yet not necessarily by boat.'

'Your very young, aren't you.' The driver continued, again, without pausing for a response. 'How old are you?'

Ethan imagined he would tell him the truth. He would never see him again, and the obscenity would hinder his boredom for at least a moment. Never the less, he had expressed this revelation to many before, and it was no true marvel anymore.

'Would you like a safe answer, or a dangerous one?' Ethan asked the driver.

The man hesitated, then answered 'A dangerous one.' In a reluctant, worried voice.

'Six hundred and forty - one'

The driver stirred in tiresome discomfort. 'And what does the madman do for a living?'

Ethan lowered his eyes to the floor, but kept his face still beneath the shell of his mask. He was thirsty, his stomach empty, longing to be filled with hot thick iron bubbling live in the veins of his next prey.

'I harvest humans, traffic their blood and distribute their bodily nutrients as an energy source.'

'I suppose that means you will be harvesting me, then?'

Ethan shook his head slowly once, 'The quality of your blood is low, and of no use to my manufacturing. It will however, make do in appeasing the appetites of myself and Elgryd here, who - iv noticed you havnt spoken to once - I do not like bad manners towards women.'

Thr driver laughed, then his face turned to stone in an instant.

Ethan looked to Elgryd, who smiled eagerly for the first time on their journey, her fingers stretching out against her arm rest.

The driver dropped his reins with a shriek as the front right wheel of the carriage hit a large hole in the road. A halting crack in the wood suddenly ripped the floor apart, shredding the cart into two with a deafening rip.

Ethan reached over, clung his hands around the drivers neck and squeezed hard.

The man screamed, his face welling with blood like a popped grape, his lips oozing saliva down his chin as he stared desperately to Elgryd.

Ethans hands carried on squeezing until the mans face was pulsating red, and as round and as bloated as a freakishly swollen boil.

When at last his eyes looked ready to burst out of his skull, Ethan lunged at his neck with his lengthened jaw and chewed mercilessly at his neck. Great chunks were torn from the mans body, gouges of vain filled flesh flayed from his spine and blood sprayed from the side of the broken cart. Elgryd had climbed out, and pushing aside her wavy ice blonde hair behind her shoulders, partook in the feast that Ethan left for her, the pair of then tearing at the riders skin like vultures.

When they were done, Ethan brushed his hands, coloring himself in his prize, and sat back in the collapsed cart, twisted and saddled into a swamp nearing the edge of the road, and he laughed with Elgryd at how long it had been, and how quick it had taken.

After it had darkened, and they had laughed, rested, and even fell still in trance while looking at the stars.

'You must face her Ethan. Whatever plot she has had hatching all these years, it's destiny is awaiting dispatch.'

'She must never be free.' He murmered to her.

Elgryd stood up and slipped away to the beach, her light, sheer dress blending into the bleached sand and grass reeds as it blew behind her in the torrid wind. The clouds thickened, wiping away any remaining light, and a colossal rain ensued above their heads.

Ethan took off into the meadow after staring up at the wild, busy sky for some time.

The rain was warm, and fell over his mask and the uncovered parts of his face for some time, washing the remaining darkened blood stains off his neck and down his sternum.

He waded through the large wet lumps of field, showered in waves of wild grass. There at the foot of a hill, he came to the beginning crevice of a great split rock that towered high within the entangling contrast of tree roots and wild bushes ahead.

It was a challenging route to reach an opening large enough beneath the rocks surface to climb inside, and for those unknown to it, finding a way out once inside in its almost entirety of darkness would be far more difficult, an there was a deep drop immediately after the only opening wide enough fit a body through inside.

The passages inside were narrow and often soaked in rotten slime soaked mud water sunken from the tree roots entangled within the surface of the rock.

The furthering downward passages continued narrow and crooked, often layered with jagged sharp stone edges to climb, squeeze through and roll flat under and across.

No sunlight could catch its way here. No stone slit on the rocks was wide enough to reach a leaked drop of the outside world. Yet, light was not needed, for he knew these winded twisted holes of over a thousand times.

At last he reached a wide hallow deep inside. It was a coursely large gathering of open, space, so large, silent and the waters so still that he could feel the tremors of his own breaths echo. Without light he felt cold breathe feather out into the air, like a ripple in a pool.

'Garda.' He spoke, but his voice was little more than a splinter tousling in the shadow of the faintest gust.

She was a haggard old woman, with course hair resembling wires and splinters shooting from her peeling scalp. Her shrunken, bent body was bound by her arms and knees, embedded into to the stone wall of a forward slanting rock as though it had melted and moulded around her.

She shuffled and shook her head as though someone had called to her from the distance, but quickly lost interest. Great piles of dust fell from her head like a flurry of snow.

Ethan moved closer, studying her. She had aged poorly in their time apart. Her leathered face was buried in deep lines, her skin hung from her bones like wet paper. Her hair was almost gone. Two sunken white holes buried her eyes, and her lips had folded thinly inside the crevice that was her mouth. Her skin was so dry and papery, that had the chains not hold her up in her statuesque position she looked that she may fold and snap to dust.

The front tips of his shoes were almost touching the rock wall attached to her, by the time she payed Ethan notice. His shoes shone, fresh cleaned leather lined with porcelain trims.

She sucked the air through her nose as she rose her head. 'The boy.' She gnarled, although it sounded like the croak of brutal weather over a landscape.

Ethan knew she who she was speaking of. The Gex was never far from the alignment of her thoughts when she had been dismantled from the course of her ambition.

'Look what I have made of you.' Ethan murmered, although it sounded little more than a humble whimper or plea, as he ignored the mouldy stench of her, and traced the fine papery skin with his own cold marble finger. The woman repelled the air in her lungs and at once gasped like a triggered vaccum, spluttering and spitting the moist dust dense air, and tremoring her jaw.

'I know not.' She snarled. Her voice was like jaws that were grinding up against each other.

Ethan tugged at a dry strand of her hair, understanding that she was confused. It fell like a butterfly wing into his fingers and turned to powder in his palm, and in the sight of it his own eyes became withholding of some sorrowful regret.

'Is this what life looks like when all the elements are stripped away?' And he raised his eyes back to align hers, and they were not longer of empathy but suddenly sharp like lava tainted arrows were buried in their centre and spinning to ripeness.

'The boy lives, because of you. And over the thousands of years he outlived men, like we have. Yet you have outlived yourself only, and at a terrible cost. Death is often a blessing before one reaches a state like us. The dust from your bones should be gone by now but your anger and your hatred are the only things that keep you from death.'

There was an outstretched silence, where neither of them drew breath, for fear of decaying the stillness of the moment. She then broke the peace with a croak of laughter, of some terrible hidden secretive wit. 'Why do you believe that I let the boy live, Ethan?'

Ethan strained his lips into a smile at the sound of the ugliness breaking the pleasant pause. 'Strange to have nothing left but to admit how the years have dissolved into that same nothingness, the timeless wave that is eternal and whose circle is never intruded. Strange to imagine you are so powerless as to ask anything of me. Yet, stranger still, is that you imagine I am so unkind, after everything you are presented to in the observing eye of mortality, the renouncing circle that unfolds.

Yes, I believe you had some bargaining with the boy. You would make him yours, your creature. Only as it turns, the only entity he has become enslaved to is that of the masses.

Yes I believe you allowed him to keep his life but neither saw nor claimed on what was to become of him. You did not correctly assess your repercussions, and now you forge a great burden for the detriment you have imposed, for the mark you have left will in time become a stain on all the earth. You have bound yourself to a great debt.'

Ethan turned away, his head sank into his chest, his lower lip hung loose and shined with the rolling of his tongue. The cold air's scent had become a comfort in his distraught words.

Ethan knew there was something more she was guarding from him, for in all her ill doing, there would be bargaining, but she would never speak of it, not now, nor in another two hundred years, for she had waited far longer since the seed was planted to forfeit the price of her prize now.

'You are wrong again Ethan. And you are continually cursed with being outsmarted. When I am reborn, another will be born by my side in dual time. When the other is of age she will grant my bargain, and all will be equal with the realms as was written in the first.'

'You may do as you will with your body.' He said at last, releasing her, defeated by her stubborness. He knew the weight of her burden would not free her in other ways. There was no undoing something that had been solidified in stone so long ago.

He turned for the last time, away from the stale, ice cold tremor of air stemming from her half open mouth. With his footsteps, fell hard echo's that grew into the vast space inside the caves hidden cracks and crevices. A great rip tore through the ground from deep below the floor surface, and rain began to shimmer through a streak of daylight that peered through from outside, the first that had touched the cave in years, yet it was like the rocks walls had never been sealed once daylight touched the rocks wet surfaces. She could see for the first time her prison, and her hands and arms were free from the sealed rock that had cracked and crumbled around her with the tremors of the earth below. Had Ethan cast this avalanche with his anger, or had he simply known it to be coming, she could not say, but he was gone, and she would for the last time bestow eyes on him for this moment in which the only way he could free her was to have her prison fall to ruin, and yet, he would not know what would become of her now.

'Go and be reborn, if you could. You and I both know that you will never truly leave this life. Immortal as our father made you, to protect his realm, which you could not.'

Her arms were stiff, her legs may well not have been part of her. She felt more likened to a serpent with the will power to propel some part of her core centre to shift through space but no more agility nor recognition to sense other body parts. Her head hung from a lifeless neck as she swirled and shifted ungracefully out from rock into the wet reeds of the marshes shallow. Beyond that she sank into sludge and bog, wading through a tearing string of undergrown grass. Writhing and shifting her body through the thick water, which slowly thinned to a stream, she allowed the current to slide her through the jiggered rocks in the deepening current. The stream widened to a river, and the current grew hard and drifted her with more ease and agility, and with the heavy clouds she fell under the heavy rain then filled up the great wedge in the earth where the river was passing thin, until she was carried into the crack that followed the great bay into the first shallow of the Violet Sea.

And Ethan watched from the top of his crumbled cave, as she was taken beneath the waves, and diminished into a heap of dissolving foam.