FATED DESTINY

Chapter Four ; The Weight Of The

The Weight of Seventy

Elias remained before the statue for as long as he had not meant to stay.

SEVENTY

The figure lingered in his head like a wolf which would not go away. He was no longer counting down aloud. The realm already knew. The land felt it. Even the stone did.

His breathing came in slow and his palm were resting on cold marble.

Unlike this place, you would hate what it is, he said to himself.

A sound shifted behind him.

Elias didn’t turn.

There was a boy not far away who had his hands locked up in the sleeves of his sweater, and his head was raised as though he were listening to the sound of something that was not heard by other people. He was quiet, deliberate. Something that was a part of this world, but was yet to be unveiled to the world beyond this place.

Lior.

You ought not to be going out by yourself, Elias said.

Lior shrugged still looking at the stone face. “I wasn’t alone.”

Elias stared at him, in surprise. The kid smiled —not scared. Just… knowing.

Elias turned his look round upon the statue. He felt that momentarily the air was warmer there and more as though memory itself was reduced to a kind of intimacy.

“What are you thinking about?” Elias asked.

“She looks sad,” Lior said. And then after having paused, Not afeared.

This is because she had an idea of how it would turn out, Elias said.

Lior considered this. “Does that make it easier?”

“No,” Elias replied. “It makes it heavier.”

The answer was nodded to, and made the boy believe that he recognized something that he had previously guessed. He drew nearer and was standing beside Elias.

For a moment, neither spoke.

The trees flowed round with the wind. Farther on into the wood, a wolf was howling - remote, repressed, attentive.

The fingers of Lior attempted to squeeze in to the coat of Elias, although it was only a moment.

Again you are thinking too much, he said.

Elias closed his eyes. And the noise grew silent again, as it had not been before since the curse had started whistling its end to his bones.

Through the Dreaming Forest

In another world distance away Isabella ran again.

Nonetheless the wood did not lose its shape this time. The mist broke and was not drawn up, but exposed the ground to moonlight which lay down in its places. The trees were still, and gazed, no longer smouldering in the outer boundaries of her sight.

She slowed.

Someone stood ahead of her.

Not chasing.

Not hiding.

Waiting.

“Isabella.”

Her name. Clear. Certain.

She lifted her gaze.

And this time, she saw his eyes.

they were silver--not in the way that she remembered. Not cold. Not distant. Fractured, light that was in some foul thing breaking. Ancient. Tired. Intimate as though it was beyond any recall and into the earlier.

Elias.

The name appeared immediately, unannounced, unimpeached. Her chest tightened.

“You see me now,” he said.

This was his voice, his own voice, the voice she was familiar with, though covered with another. Weight. Time. A depth which was not fit to dream.

She took a step closer. Why do I feel like I have known you as long as I know I should?

His expression softened. “Because you have.”

The forest shuddered. Shadows had collected along the confines of the clearing, swamping inwards, impatient. Elias went towards her, there was a sense of urgency in his calm.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re running out of time.”

“For what?”

“For us.”

The light cracked.

Isabella, he put in again, with greater sharpness. “Wake up.”

She woke with a cry, her breath ripping out of her lungs.

Her room was dark, silent. Ordinary. But her heart refused to slow.

Elias.

She sat up and pressed her fingers on her temple, re-running the dream in bits the eyes, the voice, the manner He had said her name, the fact that it did.

What was happening to his voice out there?

Why were his eyes so far off already lived through?

She rose and walked over to the window and looked into the dim street.

This does not make sense, she mumbled.

But on the inside she was aware of the truth before she could express it:

She was not being shown a stranger in the dreams.

They were even revealing to her Elias, uninhibited, unveiled, as he is when the curse unleashes its hold.

And in some way, impossiblely, she already was a part of it.

Isabella did not resume sleeping. She sat on the edge of her bed until by the thinning down of dark closed into early morning she had repeated the dream again and again, not as images this time, but as sensations.

The woods had been absolutely silent, and the eyes of Elias were now open and not shut. He called her name, and it was a promise that was too thin. Something had shifted. The dreams did not draw her as they had been drawing her; they answered her. She flattened her forehead between her palms and asked herself why now.

Echoes of the Unseen

The solution was already set into motion across realms.

Lior took care to notice the cracks at the base of the statue. The cold was found lower than normal, the stone. Elias watched him working away, and crossing his arms, and having a stiff pose. He had not mentioned to the Council that he brought the boy here. He hadn’t told anyone.

Other facts appeared more sacred to have no name.

Lior hit a snag in a word and suddenly said to the forest, The forest is listening.

Elias stiffened. “What did you say?”

It has been a long time it has been listening, Lior answered. “It hears better when I’m near."

That’s how it always worked. Statements of which there is no explanation. Certainties without fear.

Elias moved beside him. You are not supposed to say such things.

Lior tilted his head. “Why?”

Due to the reason that people will begin to pose questions.

A pause.

“That’s the point,” Lior said.

The air shifted subtly. Not violently, but sufficiently.

A human girl is waking up somewhere far out into the destroyed kingdom--beyond smears, blood, and oaths--and her heart is racing and clarity blazing in her eyes.

Elias could feel it--a tightness in his chest, a pleasantness which he had never before experienced.

He drew a sharp breath.

Lior looked up at him. He had a silver light in his eyes which had not been there a few moments ago.

“She can see you now,” he said.

Elias’s voice roughened. “See me how?”

“As you are,” Lior replied. Not the one you proudly conceal behind.

The forest exhaled.

And in a small bedroom miles and worlds away Isabella said to the silence: Elias, Elias.