Waking
Dreams filled with faces.
Recriminations and accusations. Disappointment, anger, grief. Each emotion there for the viewing, but the worst of them express not doubt but faith in him.
Love.
Trust.
Young eyes. Those most of all.
Young eyes set within trusting faces, and then the blood. The question.
Why? Why are you doing this?
Bastien Arx gasps himself awake in his room, eyes snapping open to stare sightlessly at the moonlit ceiling, streaked with moving rivulets of living, luminous water as the rain batters the glass panes of his single window. His exhale deflates him, eyes rolling back as they close beneath large, strong hands, rough in their rubbing of his stubbled face. With consciousness comes a creeping awareness of an oppressive heat, the brazier that keeps his room warm in the winter -- and the threat of pain in his joints at bay -- having burned steadily long after he drifted off, until the air is almost too thick to breathe and he's soaked his sheets and mattress with sweat.
This is not the first night since the Schism that he has revisited the horrors of his own regrets, as though the buckling of history and tradition -- the evident elimination of one infernal gateway -- had been enough to fracture the vault of his self-loathing and allow a lifetime of personal demons to escape, taking the place of what was lost.
Curling to sit upright as the clawed fingers of nightmare gradually ease their grip on him, the etiolating light of the moon's wash picks out the ugly snarls of scarring that now parade across a powerful back, each raised seam of welded tissue still a livid, fragile red, the small dots that remember the thread used to sew him closed still angry and visible along the pathway of each. They itch. Softened by night sweats, they threaten to stretch and split as he leans forward and hauls himself from his bed to do something about the atmosphere.
After pulling himself into a pair of shirts to guard against the worst bite of frozen outside air, he throws his window open, bracing his hands on the sill and leaning into the spill of silver light to look out over what slice of Gateway is visible to him, a billowing of dove-white breath pouring out of him. Below, the winding byways of the capitol slumber, droplets of warm light glistening within a setting of silver, sapphire and ebony. From this height, at this hour, it is almost possible for him to temporarily convince himself that the nightmare events of the last month have been little more than part of the series of nightmares that continue to drive him from the depths of sleep with alarming regularity.
Brandivere had gone out of her way to secure him one of the few rooms with a window and a view in the Court Wing without being asked for any such luxury, and with time he was growing more and more grateful for that small but exceedingly thoughtful detail. It was becoming a means to escape the feeling of being caged within the modest single room with so many noisy ghosts and phantoms, all of the shambling dead of his past, resurrected by an overactive subconscious and anxiety for the future.
At rest, the city -- like the man -- exudes a peace it does not in actuality contain. Rumors and restlessness tell him that, whatever the state of the gateway -- here, gone, closed, open, banished, sleeping -- it yet remains the keystone of the Empire. Now more than ever, perhaps.
Years of loss have honed in him a fine understanding of the notion that endings must also be beginnings, but the past is like a living thing that deprives a man of the ability to begin wholly anew. It is a poltergeist that chases you, demanding that you remember, forcing you to carry with you traces of what you once were, until your life is full of small habits and impulses long since disconnected from any meaningful context. Some of them are forlornly beautiful, like a light-house with a lit torch spinning round and round long after the ocean has receeded to the horizon, no longer serving any purpose, the queer refuse of a lifetime shining in one's gutters like broken glass, bottlecaps, and dust.
Some of them are horrors, the scarring of the soul, phantom limbs that ache in the small hours. Some of them are sufficient to drive a man from his bed.
He has himself been in the process of restarting for some time, and so the tumult and the unrest have a certain familiarity for him, which would be worthy of self-pity were he not so grateful.
How many of you, he wonders -- droplets of water and vaprous mist from his still-feverish brow glistening on the pane of glass against which he sets his crown -- how many of you find yourselves beginning again, battling the past as you try to make sense of what will become of your future?
How many of us are haunted now by the ghosts of what used to be, and what will we become? What will we be saddled by, as time passes? What will we not escape?
Never before has this mattered as much as it matters now.
Are we saved?
The evening has no answers for him...but like the battered Empire beyond his window's modest frame, for him it is enough -- eventually, as sheets dry and sleep steals once more in, for now -- to rest.
