Chapter 7A: A Common Man's Cloak

Chapter Seven

Ever since she swam through the steaming sea and sailed into my sordid existence, Aeliana had set my world alight and alive. She had given purpose to a person who otherwise had none. But after hearing her admission in the place where we met for the first time, I was overwhelmed by a dismal doubt driven by despair. How could I forge an eternity with the woman who had killed Alyssa? I wondered if perhaps I had forced myself into seeing something I wanted to see but wasn’t actually there. Perhaps it was all a pareidolia portended by a perishing mind left to paltrily persist in the wreckage of love and loss. Perhaps I had invented our ethereal meeting in that forest as a last-ditch survival effort by my brain so it could trick my heart into living on. Perhaps we were not destined to eternally dance as a spiral of twin flames. Perhaps when the stars had crossed us, the stars had killed us.

Though this agonizing doubt engulfed my breaking heart, my brain drove my legs to dash across that quiet beach and into the city. Just as it had possibly deceived my heart in the past, it now directed my body to escape the source of my anguish. It was driven by its innate intent to survive, even though it had no future for which to strive – even though it had no reason but biology to bother living on. Perhaps it knew all along that I was always its greatest threat. I convinced myself that my muddled mind was a battleground between indulgence and delusion, replacing a failed lifetime with a rewritten reality. But even when these chaotic conclusions came to a crescendo, I couldn’t help but feel the heat of love still burning on around me. I passed slowly and silently through the streets of the city like a sunken specter, covetously watching couples cling to each other. I wondered if perhaps their lives were easier without the knowledge of destined encounters or the echoes of lost love in their last lives.

Just by a fortunate roll of the cosmic die, I stumbled upon Donovan and Anna from a short distance away. I saw him purchase a small pastry from a booth when she wasn’t watching, and then he set it close to the side of her face. The pastry’s aroma attracted her attention, but she jolted with a quiet yelp when she turned and saw it. She gasped at first, almost as if she were playfully offended that he would startle her in the first place, but then she thanked him and sank her teeth into the glazed bread. I could tell by the glimmer in her bright blue eyes that this thin pastry was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. I could tell by the glimmer in his dark green eyes that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of envy at the simplicity of their love. Though I hardly knew her, Anna seemed to me like an angel that epitomized everything pure in life, and yet she passionately loved Donovan despite that he stood knee-deep in the darkness.

It was in that moment I realized that I had been a fool overreacting to some impulse emotion. I imagine it was one of the worst choices I had ever made. Aeliana had literally swum across an ocean away from the only life she ever knew, following nothing more than the whisper of a voice echoing in her head that we were meant to be together. That was all the proof I needed that our destiny was real. Regardless of the bloody circumstances that haunted the world from which she ran, we were still meant to dance in an infinite spiral like a whirlwind which cuts through space and time. And in my impulsive escape, I had left her alone on the shore of a city she did not know – in the place where we were destined to meet for the first time in this life. So I swerved away from the markets and left it all behind. I sprinted across melting snow in starlit streets; I pushed my way through crowded and empty streets alike.

But when I finally reached the quiet beach of Ember Bay, I realized with shock that Aeliana was already gone. I saw the silhouette of my wagon standing ajar by the edge of the ocean. The sea had smothered the wagon in a thin layer of water which shimmered in the light of the stars and distant streetlights, but Aeliana was nowhere near my disguised hearse. I wondered if perhaps she had returned to the ocean, in which case the tides would have washed away her footsteps. But as I peered across the area, I saw three sets of footprints. Two were larger and spread out, one left by my departure and the other summoned when I returned. But the third set of footsteps returned to the city in the opposite direction of my home. Without any other evidence, I initially concluded that this was her way of saying goodbye, like a farewell letter left in the sand. But when I looked closer, I realized that these footprints were even larger than my own. Just a short distance away, I saw a flurried stampede in the sand before the trail resumed. Someone had taken Aeliana, and the stampede in the sand was a sign of her struggle.

If my theory was right and someone had taken her, I knew I would drown myself in guilt because I had left her all alone on the beach in the first place. If only I had stopped myself from succumbing to an onslaught of emotion, then none of this would have ever happened. But at the same time, I knew that I could not save her if I got caught in the crosshairs of my own self-blame. When I was younger, I would sometimes have magnanimous fantasies where I was a mastermind with the whole world on strings. But these fantasies were just that; my mind was too weak to even pretend that they were real. I get overwhelmed easily. I often empower my heart over my head. So as I followed the trail of footprints in the snow-strewn sand, I dismissed my heart and focused only on hunting the person who had taken her. The trail transformed when it crossed from the sand onto the asphalt streets of the city, but I could see the faint presence of sandy footprints in the places he had stepped. I had practically memorized the print of his shoe to the extent that I could even recognize it in sloshy clumps of snow.

The day was unusually quiet, and the streets were mysteriously empty. I had always considered this section of the city empty and abandoned, but I still crossed several streets that led to bustling markets. Any time I lost the trail before an intersection, I guessed that the person who took Aeliana had chosen the quieter route. These guesses were rewarded when I invariably found his shoeprint later in a starlit sheet of snow. This tiresome trail traversed roads between abandoned shacks and storage warehouses. I knew that the kidnapper could have taken her to any one of the warehouses, but I wandered onward instead. A long-abandoned factory stood at the end of the block, left hollow by its workers and condemned by the city. Rusty gates enclosed the factory, but they merely appeared to be locked; a gentle nudge was enough to force my way through. Though I had lost the trail of footprints, I could see from the street that the factory door had recently opened. Not only was the door untouched by frost, but as I approached, I saw that its handle was unstained by the dust which clung elsewhere to the building.

Note: There are still 3 more parts to this chapter!