Chapter 27

CHAPTER 27: Predestination

"To this day, I still don't understand how you put up with me, my rage and sadness never fully left and on the good days I still might've yelled and screamed at the slightest set off. Sometimes I would be wishing death on you or on myself. You never gave me a reason as to why you were so willing to put up with all of it."

"I can provide a rather obvious answer to why I stayed, despite it all." He interrupted.

"Oh yeah? It's been nearly two hundred years, and you wait until my final moments to tell me an honest answer?

'Better late than not at all." He smiled, "It was love, love for a monster with the most beautiful soul."

"Oh piss off, don't go quoting Bound by Poison, Zel's writing is mediocre at best."

They laughed until she went into another coughing fit, the wheezing of her exhales became even louder than before.

"You started growing a small garden of your own, nurturing a strange plant you called Lay Ash. Apparently it was some kind of seed that came from your homeland, a place you still refused to go into detail about.

The buds and leaves you said were given to the unruly characters to smoke. Something about how even a raging bull would calm with a few minutes worth of incense, and it kept them that way for a while."

She took the ruby red pipe off the corner table and pinched a bit of the ash between her fingers.

"It helped sedate my hate enough to the point that it wasn't always on my mind and I started enjoying the simpler life of raising a town of farmers. Unfortunately that didn't last long either."

"Did the effects of drugs no longer help stabilize your anger?" Arkyn now realised what she must have been smoking for all these centuries wasn't any sort of tobacco or sensational drug. It was a form of suppressant.

"No no, the stuff still works to this very day. It was just soon after we finished rebuilding Kreshhaven, your past caught up to you."

"You started getting sick for weeks at a time. It got to the point that you weren't even able to leave the bed."

"You had been sick for years and we never even noticed, war and childhood starvation did far more damage overtime than either of us expected. Your body was constantly fighting the urge to shut down by the time we noticed."

"That's also when I learned about what made you so strong in the face of death."

"You never told me much, but you would always tell me about the world you had already experienced. All these beautiful stories about the places you had seen, travelled to, and nicer people you met. I hoped that one day we would be able to see them together."

"It's true you saw the ugly parts of war and mankind, but you also spoke so much of everything outside of it. The beauty in the mundane as you called it.

Gods, that was the best and worst part of our time together, cause that was when I discovered the feelings I had for you.

Sadly even after I fell in love, we couldn't ever leave Kreshhaven together. Death was coming soon and I didn't know how else to stop it."

"Except you knew how to make undying machines of magic." Arkyn understood where this part of the story went.

"Precisely. I had come up with a plan, doing everything I could to research a working life-sustaining system inside a golem. If your body failed, all I needed to keep alive was your most important organ.

She lifted an arm and caressed his cheek, signifying that she meant his mind. He felt how dry and wrinkled the skin had become with his artificial sense of touch.

"I didn't want to lose all that time we were supposed to start enjoying together. While I worked, you had a merchant's artisan daughter paint this." She held up the painting with her feeble and trembling hands.

"You showed it to me the same day I told you about my plan. At first you refused, saying life has to come to an end for everybody."

"After I begged you to let me try, you said yes only under one condition; move on if it failed. No matter the outcome, I was to go see the world and experience all that I could on my own."

She let the words sink in, Arkyn understanding that this wasn't the desired outcome. She had mentioned before that he wasn't the first variation, and even as a final result there wasn't much left of the original.

"If I am not the Arkyn you wanted, then that means you failed to meet the condition that was asked."

"Arkyn . . When you feel this way all the time; you discover a new type of pain. A burning ache for the rest of the pain to stop; then you realise you can't wait for just everything to be done. A clean slate into the unknown that is death."

"That is what you taught me, you said you weren't afraid of death because you knew that nothing could be worse than what has been done in this world. Why fight the flow of the river just because you don't know where it leads."

"Madam, you're trying to justify suicide."

"Suicide implies I am ending my life early, mine ended when I was eight summers old. The day I saw my father torn to pieces by hounds. This is finally letting nature take back what it is owed."

Arkyn had no response or defence to her statement. Her life was sustained by chemicals previously and now it was too late to do anything else.

"So now I give you one final command." She said, shutting her eyes to stop squinting at the lights on the ceiling. To her, they were just growing too bright in her cloudy vision.

"Take your own advice; go live your own life and experience the world. Make friends, learn new magic, and don't let the world try to take control of you.

You are full of centuries of knowledge and can bring about a greater world. One that you and I thought impossible. Even if you're only a fragment of the original, you still are a semblance of Arkyn." Her speech grew dimmer at the end.

Kresha's breathing started to grow quieter as she fell asleep. The medicine in her tea helped dealing with the pains of old age. Arkyn watched for a while, occasionally catching her waking up for the occasional moments of lucid words or dreary statements.

She slept like that for two days, waking up less frequently and only managing to mumble a phrase or gibberish.

Arkyn eventually went to pick up more herbs for when she might wake up thirsty, but when he came back, her quiet breathing had stopped altogether.